But the sky stayed empty. The light held. The grasses moved in long ribbons around us, the wind teasing the hems of my cloak and tugging strands of hair loose from beneath my hood. I glanced back once – not toward the temple, far behind us by now, but toward the shape of the land that had held it – half-expecting to see smoke rising again, or the silver gleam of wings catching the sun. There was nothing. Onlythe Downs, wide and swaying, as if all it had ever known was wind and grass.
The further we rode from Tirn’Vahl, the more my mind drifted back to the chaos we had left in our wake. I could still feel the phantom heat of the temple’s fire, and deeper still the burn of the townsfolk’s gaze, fixed upon me as I stepped from the wreckage. They had drawn back, a single ripple of fear and awe passing through them as Mathias had moved to cloak me.
And among them, at the field’s edge, where the grasses gave way to scorched earth, stood a boy. His basket lay overturned beside him, its contents forgotten, as he watched the furious flames claw at the morning sky. For a long moment, he had simply stared, his small frame rigid – until a primal scream tore from his throat, and he turned, a wild, desperate blur, fleeing back towards the town, shouting of fire and the woman who walked through it.
In that strange lull before we departed, when the embers still breathed their last and the residents lingered behind to make sure we left, keeping their wary distance, Maeve arrived, the hem of her cloak damp with dew and trailing threads of scorched grass. Her hands were folded around a long bundle of pale linen, the cloth finer than anything I had ever seen her wear. She reached me slowly, eyes scanning my face as if to take full measure of whatever I had become, then offered the bundle forward with both hands. I took it. It was not heavy, but it carried a weight that pulled somewhere deeper than the arms.
I undid the ties and peeled back the layers. Inside, side by side and cushioned in folds of cream, lay the three pearl-hilted daggers. Mine – the one I had carried since I was a child, though I had never understood why it was given to me. The other – scorched where the pyre had burned hottest, yet untouched in its core. And the third, the one Maeve had given me—the one my mother had held—immaculate as the day it was forged.
I looked up, the cloth still gathered in my fingers, and Maeve was already stepping closer. She raised her hands to either side of my face and held me there, her thumbs warm and gentle against my cheeks. When she let go, she gave a short nod, sharp and final, as though we both knew there would be no turning back.
Mathias stepped forward then; without a word, he drew Maeve into his arms. She went to him without resistance, her forehead resting briefly against his collar as his arms folded around her with the care of someone who had known her strength all his life but had never taken it for granted.
“It’s time, isn’t it?” she said, her voice low and fraying at the edges. He held her a moment longer, just long enough to steady whatever threatened to shift beneath them, then gave a single nod.
“It is.”
When they parted, she wiped the edge of her sleeve across her cheek with the same briskness she used for chopping herbs or brushing dirt from her apron. She then turned to me with a faint, steady smile that did not quite reach her eyes. I returned it with a nod, and we mounted up. The first few paces away from the temple were slow, not because we had to be, but because we knew what we were leaving behind, and it wasn’t until the trees began to thin and the ground began to soften in anticipation of the marshes that I turned to Mathias.
“What was that?” I asked. He didn’t answer straight away – he only reached across the narrowing space between our horses, his fingers brushing the back of my hand as he said, “Just keeping a promise.”
I didn’t press him on it.
And I didn’t press him on the kiss either. Not as the marshlands rose to meet us, nor as the light slanted gold across the Downs. But he rode close, his eyes catching mine often – not searching, just warm and sure. Now and then, he would steady my reins where the ground dipped unevenly or brush a loose strand of hair from my shoulder withthe back of his fingers – gestures that carried no weight on their own, yet built a quiet rhythm between us all the same. I didn’t pull away – if anything, I leaned in. Each time his hand found mine, I let it linger until the space between us no longer felt like distance at all.
“So,” Mathias said at last, his voice light against the muffled sound of hooves in grass, “when we reach Irongate, do we walk through the front gates or scale the walls?”
I didn’t answer straight away. The wind had picked up again, brushing the scent of sun-warmed fields against our faces, and I let it fill the silence for a moment longer. “I haven’t decided yet,” I said. “But there are ways in that don’t involve walls. There are passages I used to slip through as a girl – old ones, tucked behind the outer barracks or buried beneath the armoury steps. I don’t think the guards ever paid them much mind. Maybe not even the Queen.”
He glanced at me sidelong, a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth. “Convenient.”
“Useful,” I corrected. “Convenient would be not going back at all.”
His smile lingered but didn’t deepen. For a while we rode without words, the Downs stretching on before us, long and golden in the lowering light.
We crested a rise near dusk and came upon a stream winding slow between the hills. An old oak stood close to the bank, its trunk split where lightning had once found it, one long limb broken and reaching toward the water like a toppled sentinel. The place had the feel of something familiar, something I had once known, though I couldn’t say why. The roots curled in strange patterns along the bank, and the ground underfoot bore the imprint of horseshoes, softened now by rain and time.
I drew my horse to a halt, staring at the shape of the tree, the way its branches had bowed and twisted, as if in the middle of a movement left unfinished. Something stirred – not quite a memory, more a sensation,the kind that lived in the body before it reached the mind.
Mathias drew up beside me, his brow furrowing as his gaze followed mine. Then something shifted in his face – as if he too recognised the old oak and the hoofmarks beneath it. He dismounted in one smooth movement, crossed to the oak, and laid his hand against its scarred bark.
“This is where I found you,” he said at last. “You were here. Just there”—he nodded towards the patch of flat earth beneath the broken bough—“I didn’t think you were alive.”
The wind moved through the grass around us, and across the stream the last light caught in the broken water.
“I remember the cold,” I said, after a while. “And the way the sky looked. I thought it would be the last thing I saw.”
“It nearly was.”
We made camp there by the stream, where it was just low enough to keep the smoke from the fire hidden. Mathias moved with quiet precision, gathering fallen branches, while I loosened the saddle straps and rubbed the sweat-damp flanks of the horses. The light had thinned to a copper wash over the Downs, and when we sat by the fire at last, it was with the kind of weariness that settled in the soul as well as the limbs. I glanced again toward the oak. It stood dark now, the hollow of its broken limb half-swallowed by dusk.
“You never told me,” I said, watching the sparks climb. “Why you didn’t ride on when you saw me in the mud.”
I saw his eyes glaze over with something, like a part of him was somewhere far away, his shoulder ghosting mine. I reached for him, pushing some of the stubborn curls from his forehead to his temple, beckoning him back to the moment. He blinked his eyes a few times as if chasing away whatever had held his gaze and allowed a small shudder to wriggle down his spine. “It wasn’t a choice that needed weighing.” He looked at me then. “I guess… the threads were already woven that way.”
I studied him, the way the firelight carved lines into his face that hadn’t been there in Tirn’Vahl, in the old temple, or by the sea. “So, you’re here because of some mystical threads?”
His eyes met mine fully. There was no shift in them this time. No pause.
