Outside, I could hear Mathias calling my name, and I suddenly understood that the flames were not just licking the ceiling anymore; they had broken through it, reaching for the morning sky like greedy fingers. I felt the cloth on me turn to ash as the flames danced over every inch of my body… but I also noticed that it did not hurt me.
Inside my veins, behind my eyes, at the back of my throat, yes—the pressure and the pulse were so painful I feared I might just collapse underneath it. But on my skin, the flames did not harm me; they more caressed me softly like a lover.
I could hear the beams overhead groaning, the timber cracking. Sparks rained down in bursts, catching the walls, the floor, and the empty packs left piled near the door.
The shouts outside had risen to panic now – voices calling my name, others shouting for help, for water that wouldn’t come fast enough.
But the heat wasn’t chasing me. It moved with me, curled along the edges of my skin like something that had no interest in harming me.My breath came shallow from the smoke, but I wasn’t choking. My hands were still glowing, streaked with gold that pulsed and dimmed and surged again with each beat of my heart. And I realised that the heat still roared inside me—beneath the skin, behind the eyes, pulsing along every inch of bone. My clothes were gone, burnt away, but my body stood untouched without a single wound or blister.
I heard the door from the entrance fall on the ground, the flames making quick work of its wood – and beyond where it had stood, I saw the faint light of the morning and the panicked frames of the men who had come to see us off… but also Mathias. I heard him call me again, his voice strained – maybe because of the hum in my ears and the constant drumming in my veins – and I stepped towards the doorway. One, two, three careful steps into the flames, but they just run up my thighs to meet my hips, like water rises to meet you the deeper you go.
I moved toward the doorway, the soft smoke trailing at my heels. When I crossed the threshold, the wind caught me first – sharp, salt-slick, alive with the scent of scorched wood and sea brine. The light followed a moment later, fierce and full across my face.
At first, no one moved. The flames were still at my back, roaring through the rafters, sending up sparks that scattered like stars behind me. Smoke curled around my legs, my shoulders, my hair, my skin, but none of them bore a single mark. I stood at the edge of the wreckage with the fire still clinging to me – not to consume, only to crown.
Mathias was the first to see me. He had been mid-step, his hand reaching toward the blaze as if he might tear it apart with fingers alone. But now his arm dropped, slack at his side, his face frozen in something that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite awe either – but something caught between them.
Behind him, the others drew back. One of the Elders made a sign against his chest. A younger man turned his face away entirely. Even the horses shied, their hooves stamping the ground in restless warning.
It was Mathias who moved first. One stride, then another – the crowd parting without needing to be asked. He reached for the nearest cloak, yanked it from where it hung across a saddle horn, and crossed the space between us as though nothing else existed. Not the fire still blazing. Not the eyes that watched. Not even the wind that pulled at the scorched remnants of what had once been the temple.
He said nothing, just drew the cloak up and over my shoulders in one smooth motion, gathering it closed around me with both hands. The wool was coarse, the lining still warm from the morning sun, and his grip held none of the trembling I felt in my own limbs.
I looked up at him then – searching his face because some part of me desperately feared what I might find there. Fear, maybe. Or worse – that he saw me now the way the others did. A monster dressed in flesh.
But all I found was Mathias. Steady. Certain. The line of his mouth drawn taut, his eyes bright with relief so sharp it almost looked like pain. His forehead touched mine, just for a breath, and I felt the exhale ripple through him as if he hadn’t breathed in minutes.
Then he kissed me – not with fire, but with the piercing force of someone who had waited too long, afraid it might already be too late.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Mowgara
Dawn came like a blade, sliding between the Sorcerer Queen’s ribs before her eyes had even opened – something deeper than the ache of age or disturbed sleep; a sudden, absolute rending, as if a cord woven through her marrow had been pulled too tight, then snapped. Her breath caught sharp in her throat, and the room around her blurred – not from light, but from the rush of power breaking loose where once it had been bound. She reached for the edge of the bedding, fingers digging into velvet folds, trying to anchor herself to a world that was suddenly unravelling.
Mowgara rose with the force of the blow still rippling down her spine, every movement sharpened by fury and disbelief. Her feet found the floor without thought, the tiles cool against her soles, though her blood ran molten. The spell was gone, not diminished, not strained at the edges – undone – obliterated with such violence that the echo of it still rang through her bones.
The Queen had laid the first thread of it before the child’s tenth year, when the flicker beneath the skin first stirred, when the air around herbegan to taste faintly of brimstone. The mark on her back, a blessing or a curse from the old gods, had become a conduit for the spell, refined and repurposed with her own flame until it tethered the girl’s magic to her will alone. Layer by layer, she had sealed it shut – a slow unmaking of inheritance, woven so carefully into the girl’s very being that she never felt its weight. And each year, as the Feast drew near, Mowgara had tightened the cords anew. For years it had held – shifting as needed, folding around each surge like a tightening noose – and now there was nothing. No pull. No resistance. No trace.
Mowgara moved through the chamber like a storm seeking something to strike. Bottles clattered as her arm swept the edge of a shelf, glass shattering in a spray of colour and scent. The fire leapt higher in the grate, though she had not touched it, drawn higher by the current lashing about in the chamber. Power coiled beneath her skin, itching for release, for direction, for blame. She didn’t need to reach through the veil or stir the flame to know it, to feel it in her very being – the binding had broken, the tether gone, and the bastard child she had suffered for so long was now free of it.
It had taken years to perfect - not the spell itself, which she’d shaped in a single night beneath a blood-warm moon, but the precision with which it had to be maintained. Dragon Fire was volatile by nature, slippery as smoke, and the girl had carried it like smouldering coal. So Mowgara had stilled it. Not by brute force – that never lasted – but with a different kind of violence – a syphon, hidden in plain sight. And each year, when the Feast of the Black Fire returned and the chants rose from the square, she had drawn the fire back into her grasp – veiled by spectacle, anchored in ritual, sealed with the soul of the condemned.
At the door, she paused, reaching out with one hand to trace the thin shimmer of a ward etched into the frame – old and intact, but she could feel how it strained now, like skin pulled too tightly over a shifting bone. It would need recasting soon. The fire ran wild in theworld again. And it had begun with that mark.
The seared handprint on the girl’s back had always repulsed her – crude, clinging to the spine and raw even years after it should have faded. It had unsettled her from the first sight, though she’d never shown it. Divine signs were often little more than superstition, but this one had weight to it – a shape familiar from the old texts, a pattern matched to too many omens, mirrored by too many curses. It reeked of the kind of reverence that twisted into taboo, and that made it useful. She had studied it for days before daring to touch it with her flame, testing its edges, watching how it drew and held power. It had taken to enchantment like dry wood to spark. Not a flaw – a channel. Through that brand she built the syphon, thread by thread, until it no longer mattered whether the mark had ever been sacred. It was hers now. Hers to use. Hers to bind.
A faint hum still lingered in the air – a leftover tremor from the binding’s collapse, like the scent of iron after blood is drawn. She let it fill her lungs, let it settle behind her teeth. So much care. So many layers. And now – nothing.
The pretence of motherhood had not been planned. It had come in the aftermath of that first decision – when she’d chosen to keep the child alive. The mark had demanded caution, and caution required proximity. It was easier to claim her than to explain her. A stray could be questioned. A secret ward raised too many eyes. But a daughter could be kept in the halls, beneath watchful flames, without suspicion. She had never nurtured the lie with anything more than necessity—no pretence of motherly love, no tenderness, only the appearance of a bond and the access it gave her. It made the girl easier to manage, to control. Easier still when she believed the bitter broth left on her bedside table before each Feast was to ease the ache of the mark given to her at birth – and not to strengthen the tether that kept her bound. Children clung harder to what they thought was love or kindness – orat least the possibility of either.
One of the ceremonial robes still hung from its hook in the back alcove – smaller than most, stitched with the old threads. It had never fit quite right, even after alterations. The girl had worn it once for a feast, too proud to show discomfort, but the seams had pinched at her sides. She’d bled where they rubbed. Mowgara had pretended not to see. The blood, she had thought, had been the Heir Apparent’s own offering.
Simply containing the fire had never been enough. That was only the first step – the binding, the tethering, the long sleep sealed behind spell and flesh. But she had not bound the girl to bury the flame – she had bound her to use it. With each turning of the cycle, as the syphon tightened, the magic began to answer her hand more swiftly. What once had needed coaxing came willingly. What once resisted now bent beneath her will. And in time, it no longer surged only in the girl’s veins. It ran through Mowgara’s own, woven into her casting, into her strength, into the weight of her command. No Sister before her had held so much. No Sister before her had dared. But Mowgara had shaped a vessel from the body of a child and drawn from it the flame that was meant to be shared – until she alone carried what remained.
And yet that vessel had not been born by her hand, nor offered freely. It had come swaddled in treachery, blood-wet and howling, placed into her arms before the flames had even cooled. One look had been enough. The curve of the jaw, the stormlight in the eyes – Eleonora’s blood thrummed too loudly in this one, and Alaric’s legacy was written plainly across the child’s face to ignore. Mowgara had felt the fury rise then, sharp as a blade, ready to end it before it even began – until she saw the mark. Branded deep into the girl’s back, each finger of it scorched with impossible precision, as if some god had pressed its hand there and left a warning.
Mowgara had never revered the divine, but she was no fool. A curseor a blessing from a god – even one long gone – was dangerous. And if the people would believe that’s what this was? That would be worse. So she spared the child. Not for mercy, nor for sentiment, but because power wasted was power lost. Better to bind it. Better to use it. Better, above all, to keep it close.
Of course, none of it would have been necessary – not if the Sisterhood had remained true and not turned to heresy. So, Mowgara had done what was necessary. One by one, across many years, she had hunted them down – the Sisters who once stood beside her beneath the blackened vaults of Dragna’toch, whose oaths had withered as their faith shifted, whose tongues began to search for the names of gods who had not spoken in an age.
