“My skin is not in danger if the armies come,” I pointed out. “And what do you think they’ll do to this place if they discover I’ve been harmed under your care?”
The square went dead silent then, and I realised I might have pushedthem too much, gone too far. I sighed, pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to gather myself before going on. But a heat, sharp as a blade drawn through my back, surged up my spine in a single arc that scattered thought and breath alike. From the corner of my eye, I saw Maeve give Mathias a concerned look and nodding towards me, as if she was urging him to step in somehow, but he raised his hand, palm outward, and shook his head.
“I’m not asking you to trust me,” I said at last, steadying the words as I spoke them. “Only to trust what you already know. You know the Queen’s shadow reaches further than the smoke you can see on the horizon. That her hand is already almost here and that my absence from her armies has only stilled it momentarily.”
There was a sharp, breathless sound, as if the square exhaled all at once, a ripple of realisation moving through the crowd like wind across dry wheat.
“Then what is there to do if her shadow is upon us already?” Asked the Elder woman, her hands clasped tightly on her chest. “What could possibly stop what is to come?”
“I can meet it,” I said, turning to face her fully, “but not from here. Not barefoot and empty-handed. I need a mount and enough supplies to reach Irongate before the crossings flood or the last road closes behind me. I need someone to guard the way until I’m past the ridge. There is still time – but it bleeds away with each passing moment.”
I had expected a visceral argument against what I had asked for, but instead I was met with silence that would have made a tomb sound raucous.
It was Mathias who first broke it, as he stepped to the end of the podium next to me. “I will go with her.” He said, sure and steady and resonant, and I could see the crowd in front of us pause at it, as if they had never heard him speak in such a manner.
From the corner of my eye, I caught the faintest tilt of Maeve’s head –no more than a lull, but enough to draw my attention. She hadn’t shifted her stance, but something in her face had settled. The sorrow there wasn’t sudden. It was the kind that came from knowing this was coming and bracing for it – and still finding that the breaking hurt. She looked at me, just once, long enough to make it clear she wouldn’t ask him to stay.
“She won’t ride alone.” Mathias glanced at me, not to offer reassurance, only to meet what was already understood. “If the roads turn, or the ridge floods, or the Queen’s guard catches wind of her path—” He turned back to the square then, his eyes narrowing. “—then maybe you’ll be rid of two monsters.”
Suddenly, something new crept into the square – not anger or rage, butshame. I saw people stare at their hands, their feet, anywhere but at the man on the podium. And slowly, I realised it would be their shame that offered me a chance to help them—not reason or even their desperate will to live.
“You will get your horses.” A voice from behind me said. I turned to see that it was the bearded Elder who had spoken. “And you’ll get your provisions. But you will leave at first light, and you will sleep beyond our reach. There are folk here with children. With long memories. Best not test either.”
His tone wasn’t cruel, only cold, and past the point of softening.
Mathias shifted beside me. “We’ll take to the old temple again,” he said. “It’s stood longer than most things on these shores, and it won’t mind the company for one more night.”
The path down to the temple felt shorter than it had when I had left it last night, though nothing on it had changed. Same loose shale underfoot, same low thorns catching at the hems of our cloaks, the same dip where the trees gave way to sea wind. But it was different all the same – not for where it led, but for how I came to it.
The door stuck, and Mathias braced a hand against the stone, leanedhis weight into the frame, and let it ease open with a scraping sound. I stepped inside behind him, and though he lit a lantern to light our way, I didn’t need it. I knew every seam of this place by feel – the crack on the altar, the beam overhead where the rot had spread like a wound, and the broken tile that caught at your heel if you didn’t pay attention.
Mathias set the packs given to us by the unwilling Elders down by the lantern and crouched to untie them. He moved through the supplies: flint, bread, cloth, salt, two blades wrapped in waxskin, thread and bone needles. I recognised the blade – it was mine. He paused once, just briefly, to run a hand across his jaw, then kept going. I crossed the room and settled where I had sat countless hours before – at the foot of the old altar, where the chill of the stone met the backs of my thighs and the dark came close enough to hold.
I looked up. The hole in the roof had widened since the last rain, and the stars shone through it in scattered pieces. Tomorrow I would leave this place. Not because the door had been left open or the guards had grown careless, but because I chose to. For the first time in my life, my path and purpose were clear and honest, and I would follow them to whatever end they held.
We made no fire that night. Mathias lit the lantern only long enough to sort what needed sorting, then let it gutter low beside the packs until the flame drew back into itself, casting more shadow than light. The dark that followed wasn’t heavy – just familiar, worn in at the seams. The kind of dark I had come to know as a companion over my time here.
He sat with his back to the far wall, one knee drawn up, the other stretched out, his cloak draped loose around his shoulders. The blade lay at his side but untouched, its hilt catching the last of the glow. From where I sat, I could see the rise and fall of his breath, even and measured – not asleep, but not restless either. Not searching for slumber, only letting the hours pass around him. There was a still hum of presence –his, mine, and the memory of the room itself, wrapped tight around the bones of it.
The altar stone held the chill, even through the fabric of my cloak, and I pressed my palms flat against its surface, grounding myself in the cold. But there was heat too, low and slow, rising at the base of my spine with a rhythm that didn’t belong to my veins. It pulsed through me in long arcs, spreading upward – through my back, into my chest, along the lines of my throat until it reached the crown of my skull. And there it paused. Held, as if it was waiting.
The first light found us still seated, still dressed, still awake. It slipped through the hole in the roof in a thin straight line, brushing the top of the altar before spilling across the floor in soft gold.
I heard the horses first – slow steps over damp earth, the scrape of hooves near the doorway. Then the low murmur of voices, careful and close. The townsfolk had come. Not out of kindness, but to see it done. To be certain, we left.
Mathias shifted with a grunt, rolling one shoulder, then the other. He stood slowly, the stiffness in his limbs plain, but unbothered by it.
“Well,” he murmured, eyeing the ceiling above us, “I’ll be glad enough not to spend another night beneath that.”
He crossed the room to the bags of supplies, crouched to tie them off with swift, practised fingers. One by one, he slung them over his shoulder, then paused at the threshold, hand resting against the old stone frame. He glanced back once, just long enough to find me where I still sat by the altar. His mouth lifted, not quite a smile but warm, and he tilted his head toward the door.
“No time like the present,” he said, and stepped out into the light.
The glow from the doorway reached the altar now, stretched long and thin across the floor like a path drawn only for me. I stared at it for a moment – that line of gold cutting through dust – and without warning, I felt the weight in my chest begin to shift with a deep, curlingpressure, like breath held too long in the lungs or heat pressed too long on the skin.
I reached for the edge of the altar to steady myself, but my fingers faltered in the space above the stone, held there by a tremor I couldn’t quite master. Then the heat came – sudden and absolute – surging up through my arms with a force that seemed to unmake the air around me. My hands flared with it, veins lit from within by a fierce brightness. The stone floor cracked beneath me. The old rot gave way first, but then the flame caught faster than thought – hungry, alive, spilling out from under me in a burst that turned cloth to cinder and wood to screaming light.
I stumbled back, but the fire moved with me. It leapt from the altar to the rafters, raced along the beams like a hungry beast. The ivy curled inwards before it blackened. Smoke rolled low across the stone, and for a heartbeat I stood in it – shaking, burning, alive.
