“He must have believed his death would be the one thing she couldn’t twist,” Maeve said, the words slowing as if weighed down by what they carried. “That you would see it, feel it, that it would break something loose inside you and you would begin to question what had always been just out of reach. Or maybe he just hoped. I can’t say for certain. We never spoke of endings.”
Something in me turned over, no softer for the change – harder now, sharper, and full of heat that had not been there before. I thought of Irongate. Of the crowd. Of the moment his eyes met mine before the pyre was lit – and the recognition that flared between us like a match struck in the dark.
“He died for me?” The question slipped out before I could bury it, raw at the edges. “He didn’t even know me.”
Maeve’s voice had a gentleness to it now, as if she heard what I hadn’t said. “He died for the gods. For Eleonora. For the Sisterhood. For all of it. But aye. For you most of all. I believe that.”
And maybe that was enough. Belief, even borrowed, could be its own kind of truth – not carved in stone, but held in open hands.
I looked down at the dagger and kept my grip firm. The hilt warmed beneath my fingers, not with the fleeting heat of the brazier, but with a slow glow that seemed to rise through my hand and into the hollowbeneath my throat. A shiver followed, and with it a memory I had never buried: the pyre in Irongate, white flames roaring skyward, the sting of smoke in my lungs, and the sudden, blistering flash that tore through my birthmark as the fire took his robes. I had called it pain then – shock, perhaps outrage – but now, as the same molten hum gathered under my skin, I knew it had been older, deeper, and deliberate.
“I felt that heat when he burned,” I said, the words drawn out like thread from a spool, fragile and fraying. “It wasn’t just in my shoulder. It spread – across my chest, down my arms. White-hot. Alive. I thought it was overwhelm or maybe even a hangover from the night before. But it was her, wasn’t it? It was the spell.”
Maeve nodded, slow and heavy, as though the truth itself carried weight. “Every year, she renewed the binding. Every Feast of the Black Flame, another soul fed the fire.”
The air clung to my lungs and for a moment refused to let them go. I had always believed the Feast was meant to terrify – a public reckoning, a lesson in flame. The condemned were paraded through the streets, their faces masked, their names shouted once and then never spoken again. Traitors, I’d been told. Enemies of the realm. I, like everyone else in Irongate, had stood in the square and watched them burn.
But now Maeve’s words curled inward, scraping at something I had never dared to examine. What if it had never been about justice? What if those chosen were not criminals but vessels of their own?
“She never could make the spell hold – never completely. So she kept feeding it. Stoking it. Trying to seal the power she’d stolen into herself by force of sacrifice.” Her gaze lingered on the blade in my lap, then lifted to meet mine. “But with Alaric, I suppose she thought she’d finally found the missing piece. Your blood. Her spell. His soul. She probably believed that would be enough to hold the binding – forever.”
The words hung there, trembling between us, and I could feel theshape of what they meant begin to settle into something jagged and final in my chest. The Feast had never been about spectacle, or justice, or fear. It had been about betrayal.
“She used him,” I whispered. “Not even to hurt me. But to seal me. To shackle me.”
Maeve’s voice thinned to a hush, but the firelight caught the tightness in her jaw. “And yet it was his death that undid her. Dragon Fire will answer to blood – but it will not be caged. A Speaker’s soul is not fuel. It is flame. And when she tried to consume it, it must have called to what still lived in you.”
Something had begun to stir in me, slow and steady, like heat rising behind my eyes and travelling down my spine, a warmth that was not mine yet lived within me, patient and ancient. Each breath seemed to carry it further, threading through me without violence, only certainty – as though reclaiming a home long denied.
The air thickened. My skin prickled. Deep within, it stretched – tentative at first, then bolder – testing the space it had been shut away from. There was no fear. Only the steady thrum of something rising, awake now, and unwilling to fade.
I turned to Mathias, perhaps to steady myself in the shift of it all, or perhaps to see if he felt it too. His brow was furrowed, his gaze sharp and searching, and in the flicker of firelight, I saw his breath catch at the sight of me. He reached for me then, the gesture deliberate, as if drawn not by habit but by something unfolding between us for the first time.
His fingers brushed my cheek, gentle in a way that held the moment still – as if marking that I was here, and so was he. As his touch lingered, the heat behind my eyes intensified, a vivid, spreading warmth that felt ancient and alive within me.
“Your eyes,” he murmured, his voice hushed with a wonder that mirrored the unfolding in my own chest. “They’re like flames.”
The warmth in me now threaded through bone and breath like it had always known the way. It didn’t surge, didn’t clamour—it simply was, unfolding beneath the surface. Mathias didn’t look away, his eyes lost in whatever he saw in mine. His hand stayed where it was, gentle and unshifting, and I let it remain – not because I had made peace with what stirred beneath my skin, but because he looked at me as if he had.
In that moment, the world narrowed to the space between us, a shared breath in the sudden, quiet roar of something new, shifting and settling into place.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Benjadir
Captain Benjadir woke to the sour bite of wine clinging to his tongue and the throb of his own pulse echoing behind his eyes. The tent around him was thick with the stale scent of last night – smoke, damp wool, and the half-empty jug he’d used to drown out the hours until exhaustion had mistaken itself for rest. Outside, the camp had already begun to stir, voices and hoofbeats threading through the thin canvas walls, but he lingered in the weight of that between-space – too awake to dream, too tired to rise. The air felt close, as though the world itself pressed against him, waiting for him to admit what he already knew: another night lost, another morning without word.
He sat up slowly, dragging a hand through his dark, tangled hair, pushing it from his eyes with a muttered curse. The movement set a dull ache through his shoulders, the familiar stiffness of a man who had spent too many days waiting and too many nights drinking. It had been weeks since they realised the General had disappeared—weeks of dispatches sent and returned empty, of scouts combing roads thatled nowhere, of the gnawing certainty that something had gone wrong and the refusal to speak it aloud. He reached for the jug, thought better of it, and instead pulled on his coat, every motion measured, as though he could force steadiness into himself by pretending it was already there.
He had exhausted every lead worth chasing, and a few that weren’t. Riders had scoured the roads between Harbour’s Bane and Irongate until the horses came back limping and hollow-eyed, their riders no better. He’d sent his best scouts along the cliffs, through the marshlands, even into the outlaw trails west of Ferrowood, where the fog swallowed men whole. Spies had been dispatched to the Twin Cities under false banners, their reports coming back weeks apart, each one thinner and more hopeless than the last. He’d bribed merchants, questioned deserters, shaken down smugglers who swore they’d seen her – all of them liars or fools or both. Every trail bled into the next until there was nothing left to follow but smoke.
Now, the maps spread across his campaign table had become little more than a record of failure, inked over with crossed-out routes and faded names. Each line he’d drawn in desperation had grown heavier with time, as though weight alone could drag her back to him. Somewhere beyond those borders, she was lost – or worse, found by someone else first. He leaned on the edge of the table, palms pressed to the parchment, and felt the tension coil beneath his skin like a wound that refused to close.
“Captain?” The voice came from the tent’s entrance – a young sergeant, breath clouding in the morning chill. “The lieutenants are gathering. Another war council’s been called. They’re asking if the General or you will attend.”
Benni straightened slowly, rolling his shoulders to chase the ache from them. “I’ll come,” he said, though his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. The sergeant hesitated, as if expecting more – anorder, perhaps, or reassurance – but Benni only gestured for him to go. The flap fell closed, and the dimness settled again.
Only three people in the camp knew the full truth. Astrid, Daen, and him. To everyone else, the General was merely delayed—caught in supply matters, tending to the Queen’s errands. Lies wrapped in just enough truth to survive a soldier’s gossip. If word reached Irongate, if Queen Mowgara learned her prized weapon had gone missing, she would raze half the continent just to make the point that nothing escaped her grasp. Not to rescue Ara. Not for love or vengeance. Only to prove she could. The image of it – fields burning, cities turned to cinders under the weight of her pride – sent a coldness crawling through him that no wine could dull. He’d watched that same pride hollow out better men than himself and knew the ruin did not end with cities; it lived in those who served. Loyalty, he thought, was a fine word until it began to taste like servitude, and by then, it was already too late to spit it out.
He splashed cold water over his face until the sting of it chased away the haze, then braced both hands against the basin and stayed there a moment, breathing through the dull churn of wine and worry in his gut. The reflection staring back from the rippling surface was older than he remembered – eyes rimmed in red, beard a few days past respectable. He straightened, tugged his collar into place, and stepped out into the pale light.
