At the bottom of an old drawer, beneath folded scraps of old decrees and unfinished letters, lay a silver hairpin in the shape of a crescent. She lifted it once more – not out of sentiment, but recognition. Eleonora had worn it in the days before the betrayal, a quiet thing, barely visible beneath the coils of her braid. Mowgara turned it over between her fingers. It had not dulled. Neither had the memory.
Their betrayal had worn many faces: prayer, prophecy, belief. But it was Eleonora’s that stayed with her, even now. Eleonora, who had once stood at her side in battle, who had once kissed the wounds beneath her brows and called the two the closest of all the Sisters. Eleonora, who had grown to believe the fire should be returned – all because some man claimed the old gods had told him so.
Mowgara had killed her last. Not because it was the order of things, but because it was the hardest. And by then she had already begun to understand what the others had left behind – the strange fullness that came after, the swell beneath the skin when a Sister’s flame was taken into her own.
At first, she mistook it for coincidence. Then came the revelation. Their power had not vanished with their deaths – it had poured intoher, unspent. And Mowgara, who had always known how to wield power, began at last to understand the cost of it.
And yet, for all the ruin she had sown to erase the past – for all the blood spilled, tongues silenced, and fear sown – the old ways had begun to surface again. Whispers carried on the backs of traders and spies, of shrines dressed in red ribbons where none should remain, of strange customs, ominous dreams, strange men standing on hilltops preaching the return of voices long since fallen quiet.
Priest. Prophet. Speaker. They called him many things. But Mowgara knew the source of that poison: Alaric. The same venom-tongued cur who had seduced Eleonora into doubt, who had filled the Sisterhood with questions until their oaths began to splinter. Whose bastard daughter now called Mowgara mother.
She had seen his hand in every uprising that claimed faith as its banner. Had felt his shadow behind every whispered prayer that slipped past the tongues of children. He had not died in the purifying fires started long ago, as she had once believed. He had endured. And worse – he had grown loud.
So she began to summon the Seers. Quietly at first - lone mystics drawn from the outlands with promises of coin and favour, housed in the western wing of Irongate and given space enough to speak. Most were half-mad, and the rest long gone – the price of carrying the old gods’ gifts, whether they wanted them or not.
She passed the small alcove where the last Seer she housed had once scrawled her visions onto stone – wild spirals and fire-etched script that no scholar had ever been able to fully decipher. One symbol had been clear, though: a crowned woman split in two from her middle, surrounded by fire and blood. Mowgara had once believed it had meant her. She wasn’t so certain anymore. Deciphering the seers’ visions into anything understandable was hard work, but Mowgara was not cursed with the Sight and would not be able to glimpse into the unknownwithout these lunatics.
Of course, when garbled riddles replaced answers, and the visions came tangled in dreams she could not parse, she turned to harsher measures. Flame-pricks beneath the nail. Boiling their blood in their very veins. A slow choking fog that forced the Sight to surface whether they wished it or not. One by one, they gave her the answers she sought – about a shape stirring beneath the bones of the world, a breath held too long, a fire not hers. The old gods were indeed waking. Not in thunder, not in form – but in faith. In ribbons knotted to broken altars. In names whispered like charms. In belief taking root again where she had salted the earth. Every prayer was a calling. Every calling a doorway. And Alaric, damn him, was holding them wide.
So she raised the banners – not for what truly drove her; that would have been suicide – but for plague, rebellion, treason, tax. Charges that could be spoken aloud, punished in full, and buried without question. Her armies marched where the prayers grew loudest, tore down shrines stone by stone, burned groves, buried altars, silenced tongues. Whole towns vanished in smoke for harbouring a prophet’s echo. She hunted faith like a sickness, striking it down before it could seed.
And yet it spread – in fragments, in whispers, in blood. For every fire she lit, another ribbon fluttered free.
She believed in order. In control. In the sacred cost of survival. Let the people call it tyranny if they wished - they had no understanding of the balance she kept, the weight she bore to keep the world from tipping back into chaos. The Sisterhood had grown weak with doubt. The Seers drowned in visions and their own madness. Even the gods, in their slumber, could not be trusted to wield what they had once forsaken. The Flame had been stolen once, wrested from the throats of dragons by cunning and sacrifice – and Mowgara would not see it handed back on the breath of a prayer. What others called cruelty was simply the weight of what must be done.
The world did not needgods. It needed a hand strong enough to hold the line. And she would be that hand, for as long as it took – until every altar was buried, every whisper silenced, and every last ember of faith stamped out.
But even hands that held the line could falter if others reached for them. And Mowgara had learned that rebellion rarely announced itself at the door – it slipped in quietly, through bonds left unchecked. Control demanded distance. And Frejara – for all her use – had once looked at her with the kind of eyes that asked too many questions. So Mowgara drew the line as she always did: with strategy and finality.
She had placed the girl in the barracks for a reason – close enough to watch, far enough to discard. A soldier’s life was useful and brief, and if Frejara broke under it, so be it. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d held: stubborn, competent, tireless. Like her treacherous birth mother.
And worse, she’d drawn affection. Mowgara saw it in the boy’s gaze first – Benjadir, General Falkar’s son – and then in the way Frejara’s guard slipped when he was near, in the way her voice softened whenever she said his name. It was weakness, plain and simple. And weakness begged correction. So Mowgara gave her one: a single, well-placed lie, spun with just enough truth to hold.
She hadn’t needed to say it outright. Just a pause, measured and careful, with space enough for the doubt to fester. A single suggestion – that Falkar, the boy’s father, might also be hers. No accusation. No cruelty. Only the faintest trace of pain in her voice, as if the very thought wounded her too.
And that had been enough. Mowgara knew the timing of such things, knew how shame could be harvested like fruit if left long enough to ripen. There had been one night, years ago – after the General’s wife’s funeral, after too many cups shared in ceremonial grief – when she had leaned close, and he had let her take what she wanted and let her discard him like a used rag afterwards. He had never spoken of it again.The guilt of it lived in his spine, stiffening his back whenever her name passed his lips. She had known it would keep him silent, that their dalliance would remain secret – and in that way might one day become something useful.
A single glass sat on the sideboard by the hearth – dusty, untouched, but still faintly stained with the red of a spiced blend Falkar had once favoured. He’d left the bottle behind after a strategy meeting years ago, too eager to flee her presence to notice. She never drank it. Not then, not after. But she’d kept it. Perhaps as a reminder of what even loyalty could be bent toward, if one applied enough pressure to guilt and grief.
She’d never imagined that their one night of barely satisfying romping would one day serve to convince her ward she’d bedded her own half-brother. But there was a deliciousness to the obscenity of it that Mowgara treasured. And Frejara, horrified by herself, had done the rest. She’d stepped back from the boy without a word, clipped the bond before it could grow roots, and never once looked behind her. That was the elegance of it – no mess, no noise. Just a wound that would never fully close.
That wound had served its purpose. Isolation bred obedience more surely than chains, and love left untended rarely grew back. Mowgara had kept the girl close, raised her to war like a hound to scent, and sealed the leash each year with fire and blood. Alaric’s sacrifice should had been the final tether – offered not to free the child he’d once fathered, but to fasten her more tightly to the Queen who claimed her. She had thought Alaric would be the final piece. That when he burned, the binding would lock so deep it could never be undone. His death had been timed with precision – the chants still echoing through the square, the pyre fed with sacred oils, every sigil drawn, every incantation pressed against the skin of the world until it yielded. And yield it had.
She had known Frejara left the city the next morning. Her birds had followed the pale figure down through the Northern pass, watching her ride without pause toward Harbour’s Bane. Mowgara hadn’t summoned her back – there’d been no need. The spell had taken. The binding was complete.
Days later, the thought occurred that the scrying glass in the barracks might need replacing – its enchantments old and likely fading. But those infuriating lieutenants, Astrid and Daen, were already gone, having disappeared into the half-light of logistical duty as soon as the ashes of the Feast had cooled. So she handed the task to the Acolytes, who undertook it with their usual trembling reverence. The glass would need delicate handling: wrapped in layers of silk, carried with utmost care. It would take time. The Acolytes were useless with logistics, and the soldiers they enlisted barely more competent, but she had believed her victory all but sealed. And in any case, ravens still came – clipped little missives confirming that the advance on the Twin Cities moved as planned.
The glass had remained dark. And she had taken it for proof of obedience. Of containment. Of fire, bound at last.She had been so certain.
She had felt the spell take – taut and gleaming, like a blade set perfectly into place. There had been no tremor of resistance, no echo of flaw. But now, in the hollow aftermath, she saw it for what it was: a hinge disguised as a lock. The spell had not bound – it had bridged. And the fire she had thought made hers alone now surged wild in two bodies. One disciplined and set to purpose. The other – unleashed and dangerous.
And now she could feel it – Frejara cutting through the world with a force that had once answered the Queen’s call, burning bright and uncaged, no longer answering to any hand but her own. The tether was gone, torn free in a flare that still echoed through Mowgara’s verybones, and with it the General’s footsteps no longer rang of duty but of claim. The Queen moved through her chambers with deliberate calm, summoning flame to her fingers, testing the wards she had once set like threads across the thresholds.
Reckoning came in many forms, and this one wore her daughter’s face. The fire would come for what it was owed. And Mowgara, for all her power, for all her foresight and fury, knew this truth down to the last breath: she had no spells left that could keep it from the door.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Frejara
We had left the Mirefen marshes behind by midday, the soft wet earth giving way to the long-bent grasses of the Weaver’s Downs, where the land opened wide and unbroken beneath the sky. The horses moved easily now, their hooves finding firmer ground, and with every mile we put between us and Tirn’Vahl, the breath in my chest came easier—though I could not say whether it was relief or just distance. The sun was climbing toward its height, unshaded by cloud, and I kept my gaze on the sweep of blue above us more often than the path ahead. By now, I had expected wings – not sparrows or stormbirds, but darker shapes, moving with intent. The Queen’s birds were never just birds.
