Irongate loomed before us under the grey light of a waning moon, its spires dark against the storm-choked sky, black needles stitched into the night. The outer walls curved sharp against the hills, like the spine of a long-sleeping beast. No torches lined the battlements, but I could feel the eyes behind them—watchful and waiting. We kept to the treeline until the last bend, the horses moving slow beneath us, their breath steaming in short, soundless bursts. When we finally halted at the base of the ridge, the hush of the night pressed close – it, too, heavy with the dread of what came next.
We dismounted without a word, as if we were afraid our voices would wake the beast before we intended to. The last time we stood shoulder to shoulder like this, it had been a different kind of battle – one measured in blades and banners. This, however, felt like we were stepping into something that had been waiting far longer than we had for this night.
Astrid pulled me into a rough embrace, all tight arms and clattering buckles. Then, she spoke with a softness strangely at odds with herfirm grasp: “You come back to us, you hear?”
Her hand lingered at my back a moment longer before she stepped aside to let Daen take her place. He closed the space between us and folded his arms around me, steadfast and sturdy, his chin resting for a breath against my shoulder like he was anchoring us both before the storm. Then he turned to Mathias and clapped a palm against his shoulder hard enough to jolt the poor man back a step.
“Keep her standing, twig,” he said gruffly. Mathias winced, but there was a smile tugging at his mouth as he reached out and clasped Daen’s forearm in a soldier’s grip.
Astrid mounted again with a fluid ease before turning in the saddle just enough to find my gaze and hold it. She tapped two fingers against her chest, right above the heart, and held them there as she nodded once. “Luck be at your back, my friend.”
Then, without waiting for an answer, she wheeled her horse toward the path ahead. Daen was already following behind her, their backs vanishing into the dark like smoke pulled by the wind.
Mathias and I moved once their hoofbeats faded, ducking low into the brush and skirting the ridge until the treeline opened just enough to show the path I remembered. It was half-swallowed by undergrowth now, the paving slick with moss and damp. But my boots moved with certainty, tracing the same line they had followed all those years ago: over the root that split the ancient masonry, through the shallow dip before the wall, past the notch where the mortar had crumbled. We moved together, each step shaped by the lay of the ground and the hollow steadiness of our breath.
The entrance to the old passage was still there, a narrow slit of shadow carved between stone and soil, tucked behind the ruined husk of the watchpost. I brushed aside the overgrown vines, fingers dragging over the cold surface until they found the latch – rusted now, but intact. Exhaling slowly, I pressed it down. The wall gave justenough for us to slip through, and we entered the hidden passages, careful as thieves and twice as determined. The Keep closed around us all at once – damp air, gravel underfoot, and I could feel its weight above us with every step. The tunnels were narrow, once built for fleeing nobles or maybe hidden guards, and the walls curved in strange ways – too close, too deliberate, all by design to turn strangers like us in circles until we were lost, unable to reach the Keep or escape it.
The stairs emerged from the dark ahead – carved from the same dark masonry as the walls, slick with moss and old water that trickled down the inner curve like the remnants of a long-forgotten spring. I led us up the spiralling steps, one hand balancing on the wall, the other near my hilt. Mathias followed close, his movements cautious, his hand fumbling for balance by his side. Then came the sound – a scuff, quick and sharp – as his weight shifted wrong on a slick stair. I turned as he faltered, catching his forearm just as his boot slid out from under him, and hauled him toward me before the fall could take him.
A few loose pebbles clattered into the dark below, the sound too small to matter, and yet it echoed like a drumbeat in the deep. We froze, hearts beating loud and fast behind our ribs, my grip locked around his elbow, his breath warm where it met the side of my neck. For a long moment, we stood like that – pressed together, listening. When we moved again, our footing was slower, more careful now, as the space between us narrowed.
The stair curved tighter near the top, the walls pressing in closer, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and rusted iron. I counted the steps without meaning to – thirty-two, thirty-three. The old number was still tucked somewhere in the back of my mind from a time when I used to slip out this way in the dark, escaping the bone-crushing weight of expectation placed on the shoulders of the disappointing Heir Apparent. At thirty-nine, the passage flattened, spilling us ontoa narrow landing no wider than a soldier’s bedroll.
Ahead, a door; its outline barely discernible in the gloom, as if the very Keep had tried to swallow it. The wood held firm, untouched by draught or disturbance, and beneath it a thin seam of light stretched outward – soft and lingering. I raised a hand to hold Mathias back, and we listened for any shift in the hush that pressed around us. But there was no movement, no voices. Only the faint rhythm of water behind us, echoing a heartbeat too stubborn to stop.
I leaned against the door and pressed my ear to the frame but heard nothing on the other side that would have given me pause. With one slow breath, I shifted my weight and eased the door open; the hinges groaned as it gave way – not loud, but enough to tell how long it had been since anyone passed through. The door swung inward to reveal the familiar shape of one of the stockrooms on the northern side of the keep.
Barrels lined the walls in neat rows, their tops chalk-marked with the Queen’s initials. Racks of bottles caught the faint light in their iron cages, and high on the far side, a narrow window had been left open – likely for air, or perhaps propped that way to keep the damp from turning the contents of the barrels. Through it, I caught the sky: stars bright above the walls, the moon risen clean over the gates. Its light slanted across the masonry in a pale ribbon, softening the hard lines of the room.
Then came the noise – sharp voices, carried on by the wind, but too distant to make out the words at first. Mathias turned toward the window, but I was already moving, crossing to it in a few quick strides. I knew that tone. Astrid, loud and unbothered, her voice booming across the courtyard with the ease of someone who knew exactly how much space they were taking and enjoyed every inch of it. Daen’s voice followed, lower but no less firm – the kind of tone saved for moments that tested patience.
“The Queen said no one’s to enter the keep,” someone tried to reason with them.
“Well, good news for you,” Astrid replied, utterly unwilling to be reasoned with. “We’re not ‘no one’. Don’t make me pull rank with you, grunt.”
“Agreed, please don’t make her pull rank. Or anything else for that matter.” Daen’s ever-suffering voice echoed. “I hate having to clean up after her.”
I didn’t need to see her face to know the expression on it – that sharp-boned grin she wore when things got messy, when the stakes rose and the stage widened. She liked the weight of a moment, and she never stepped lightly through one.
I turned from the window and tilted my head toward the door on the opposite wall. Mathias nodded and followed me after glancing out one more time. Astrid’s voice reverberated behind us as we slipped out – sharper now, more insistent – cutting enough to turn heads even through the Keep’s walls. The stockroom opened into one of the smaller north halls, narrow and tiled in dull blue slabs that hadn’t been polished in years. At the far end, light flared suddenly as a door opened wide and a handful of servants hurried through, drawn by the commotion. Their slippers slapped lightly against the floor as they made for the landing above the outer gate, jostling each other for a better view of the argument below.
We let them pass, stepping back into the archway’s shadow until their footsteps faded. Then we moved, weaving deeper into the spine of the keep – the back routes and narrow ways I had once used to escape dinners, meetings, expectations. My feet, though now far removed from those days, still knew where to turn. Down two steps and left, past the alcove with the window offering a terrible view of the adjacent tower. Beneath the archway where the draught turned sharp. Through the narrow door with the warped handle no one ever fixed. The Queen’shalls were always guarded, but the servants’ corridors were made for slipping unseen. They had changed in small ways over time – new doors, old marks scrubbed clean – but the bones of the place were the same. I still knew how to move through them.
As we passed beneath the low arch that marked the outer ring of the throne hall’s lower vaults, I saw movement ahead—three figures just beyond the lantern glow, standing at the foot of the stair, their familiar armour dim in the halflight. Their heads turned as we approached, hands falling to the hilts at their sides with the reflex of habit more than alarm. One of them stepped forward, broad-shouldered and weatherworn, his helm tucked beneath his arm, his eyes narrowing beneath a furrow of disbelief. I knew him. Marric, once of the Western Reach – he had taken a crossbow bolt through the thigh at Drymere and kept fighting long after his leg had gone numb. He looked older now, the lines deeper, the jaw set harder – but it was him. And when his gaze landed on mine, something shifted. There was no fear in his eyes, no defiance either – only the slow, deliberate weight of recognition settling between us. And beneath it, loyalty – not demanded, not declared, but present and tangible all the same.
He shifted aside with careful precision, clearing the stair with a movement so measured it felt like an invitation. He turned his head just enough for his companions to see the look in his eyes, and the others followed – one casting a glance toward Mathias, the other toward the door we’d slipped through – but neither said anything, and none drew their blades. Just three soldiers in a corridor, still as carved figures, with nothing in their posture to give away that anything untoward at all was happening. But as I passed, Marric’s voice reached me – low, even, meant only for me.
“Good to see you, General.”
“And you, Marric.” I nodded to him slowly as he and his comrades raised two fingers to their temples in a quiet salute. Then, in unisonand with purpose, they turned away from us and resumed watching the stairs and the corridor, as if they’d never seen us at all.
The stair curved downward in a wide sweep now, broader than before, its centre worn to a shallow dip by centuries of passing feet. The air thickened as we climbed – not from dust or damp, but from something heavier, more hostile. A hum, low and constant, like a pressure held barely in check. The scent changed too – acrid folded into the cloying air, so sharp it clung to the back of the throat. I could feel it rising through the soles of my boots, coiling along my spine, threading through the hollows of my ribs with every step we took. It was magic, yes, but not the kind I had known by firelight or felt surging in my blood. This was older, knotted, heavy with intent.
By the time we reached the landing, the structure itself seemed altered – darker, somehow, though small torches burned along the walls. The air muffled sound, even the soft shift of fabric or the brush of boot against the floor, as though the very walls were bracing for what came next. Ahead, the corridor straightened and stretched – a long throat of carved stone that would open, at its end, to the antechamber and, behind it, the Queen’s Hall. I had walked this path before. In full armour, flanked by banners and horns. But never like this.
At the final bend, where the corridor narrowed toward the antechamber, Mathias slowed beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. His hand lifted—slowly, carefully—and brushed a piece of hair back from my cheek, his fingers grazing the curve of my jaw before resting, just for a moment, at the base of my neck. I let my forehead rest against his, briefly, just long enough to feel the warmth of him. His fingers curled lightly around mine, grounding us in that breath, that heartbeat, that fraction of time that hadn’t yet been taken. When I opened my eyes again to meet his, he smiled – a sad, hollow little thing – and nodded towards the chamber ahead. It was time, I understood, and I returned the nod, slowly and with my pulse thumping in my throat.
We stepped into the antechamber, and the air changed again—denser now, shot through with the raw sting of sulphur. Torchlight flickered low along the walls, casting long shadows that stretched across the floor in uneven ribbons. The stone beneath us was black and veined; the surface worn smooth in the centre where footfall had favoured the same path again and again. There were marks carved into it – shallow, deliberate – not decorative, not script, but the kind left when repetition alone grounds meaning into a place.
