But I saw it now – saw it with a clarity that carved straight through the fog of pain and blood and smoke. This was not the end of a war. It was only the end of her war. What came next would belong to me.
I would have to find Dragna’toch before the fire turned inward and tore me apart – or worse, turned outward and took the continent with it. That path was fixed.
But there was another. One not drawn in flame, but in blood. The cities I had taken in her name would have to be unbound from Mowgara’s shadow. The governors she had designated, the laws she had twisted, the loyalties she had forged in fear – all of it would need to be broken apart and remade. I had helped build a kingdom that belonged to the Sorcerer Queen. Now I would have to tear it down with my own hands.
So I would go to Dragna’toch. I would contain the fire before it devoured me, and then surrender to it, if that was what it took to save everything I had ever loved.
But first – I would burn down everything she had built.
Chapter Thirty-Four: Benjadir
No one person should wield power like that.
The camp stirred under a sallow sky, neither bright nor brooding – just pale and hungover, a washed-out light that promised nothing. Somewhere, a forge bell rang twice, and further away, gulls circled low above the water, squabbling over scraps. Tents sagged under salt-wet canvas, lines of washing snapped like petty banners in the breeze, and the rank-and-file moved with the particular sluggishness that always came when a storm had threatened all night but refused to break.
Captain Benjadir cradled the tin mug in both hands like it might offer some kind of reprieve, then swore under his breath and held it at arm’s length. It was somehow both scalding and tasteless, bitter and thin – like someone had boiled bark in a tin, waved a coffee bean vaguely in its direction and called it done. He did not know the boy’s name – the one who had brought it – only that he had saluted too sharply and run off before Benni could send him back for a better pot. Now, there was nothing else for it but to drink or spit into the mud, and he didn’t feellike doing either.
The coffee wasn’t the only thing that had turned bitter. It had been four days since Astrid and Daen had ridden out, fed up with scouring the wine dens and roughing up passing merchants for whispers that led nowhere. At first, Benni had tried to keep their absence quiet, muttering excuses about scouting routes and securing provisions, but the lie had soured in his mouth by the second morning. He’d wanted to go himself—of course he had—but command was thinner than it looked, and someone had to stay behind to keep the damn Acolytes from sniffing around like hounds without a leash.
They drifted through the camp like smoke, their robes dragging in the mud, their limbs too long, too light, too pale to belong to anything fully alive. They moved in pairs or in threes, heads bowed, fingers twitching like they were caught in some twisted prayer. And always that faint rasp – breath or whisper, it was difficult to tell – like dead leaves being dragged under boots. He was beginning to understand why Ara had always treated them with nothing but contempt. He couldn’t walk five paces without one of them trailing at his heel, offering cryptic pleasantries or asking if the General would be joining in tonight’s devotions – as if their dull eyes hadn’t already noted her absence, as if they weren’t testing the weight of command with every breath. If they knew Ara was gone – and surely they did – they were letting him sweat through the lie a little longer, just to see what might crack first…
It began with shouting—sharp and panicked—the kind that cut clean through the usual din of the camp. Benni’s head snapped up before the second cry rang out, and a moment later, a runner came skidding round the corner of the mess tent, breath hitching, eyes wide. “It’s the old command tent,” the boy gasped, pointing toward the northern ridge. “The General’s – it’s – it looks like it’s burning.”
Benni was already moving, boots churning up the wet earth, steamrising in curls where the morning sun met the frost-hardened ground.
The tent had stood sealed since Ara vanished, undisturbed but for the day the Acolytes arrived with those gleaming new scrying glasses from the Queen, insisting they be placed in the heart of the General’s command. No one had entered since. And yet, crimson light now bled through the seams as if a furnace had been stoked inside, flickering gold and white against the taut canvas. There was no smoke, no heat in the air. But the Acolytes were writhing in the mud, clawing at their robes and wailing in that high, dry pitch that set Benni’s teeth on edge – as though something inside the tent had gripped them from within and was tearing them apart, thread by thread.
The scrape of steel and the thud of boots followed as more soldiers hurried past – half a dozen in all, blades half-drawn, shields slung, braced for ambush or something worse still. One of them shouted for water, another for the sappers, but Benni waved them off with a snapped command, pushing forward and ducking beneath the flaps before anyone could stop him.
The heat struck first – not on his skin, but curling in beneath it, the way old burns sometimes throb when the air turns close. Inside, the air shimmered with it, though nothing burned. The canvas walls were untouched. But the scrying glasses – three of them, rimmed in polished brass and mounted on iron arms like the limbs of some ornate, dead creature – pulsed with light. Not reflected, not cast, but summoned, bursting from their centres in waves of flame that gave off no smoke, no scent, only that feeling, that pull, that something ancient and wicked had stirred awake inside the glass and was trying, very slowly, to crawl out.
Someone outside cursed and moved to enter, but Benni snapped his arm out without looking, palm raised. “Stay out,” he barked. Something in the air inside the tent felt volatile, not in the way of fire that spreads, but one that stretched and hummed. The heat hadno source. The fire had no flame. Whatever this was, it wasn’t meant to be seen by more than one set of eyes at a time. And it was far from finished.
He stepped closer. The brass rims groaned softly as the glass shifted, turning toward him with slow, unnatural precision. And then the light folded inward, the glare collapsing into image. Irongate. The throne room. Familiar and ruined. Stone walls cracked with heat, columns blackened and sagging under their own weight, gold melted down the carvings like tears that blistered through. The banners had been seared away mid-fall, reduced to curling threads before they ever touched ground. And near the base of the scorched dais, half-slumped against the lowest step, lay what remained of the Sorcerer Queen – limbs twisted, hair burned to the scalp, her body stilled in a final sprawl that bore no resemblance to the power she had once commanded. A dark trail curved outward from where she had fallen, streaked across stone toward the far end of the chamber, edging towards the shattered balcony entrance – as though something, or someone, had fled the fire but done so on all fours.
At first, he thought the figure was part of the wreckage – some crumpled shadow collapsed in a smear of blood near the dais. But then it moved—slowly, steadily, dragging itself forward with the blunt insistence of someone too stubborn to stay down. When she finally pulled herself upright, steadying against something for balance—her hair scorched at the ends but unmistakably hers—his breath caught in his throat. It was Ara. Bloodied, burning, but alive.
She reached the balcony, staggered and streaked with blood, her steps uneven but driven by something fierce and rising. Whatever held her together gave way to the sudden jolt of power as flame burst from her like lightning. It tore down from the balcony in a searing arc, gold-white and blinding, splitting the air with a sound like stone wrenched apart. It struck the Dragonstone altar with shattering force, the impactso violent it made the vision shudder in the glass. The stone cracked wide beneath it, its dark veins splintering outward in jagged spirals as the fire poured down, furious and unrelenting. Chain and altar alike melted beneath the torrent until there was nothing but molten slag, glowing in the ruin it had become. Whatever that altar had once meant, whatever purpose it had served – she had erased it utterly.
Standing at the edge of the broken hall, fire still streaming down her skin, she raised her head and shouted across the ruins, proclaiming.
“The Queen is dead!”
The words rang out, crisp and sharp, and the city seemed to freeze beneath them. No answer came, no movement, just that strangled pause that follows a gasp, when the world hangs between what was and what might come next.
Then it broke. A voice – distant, ragged – rose from somewhere near the molten remains of the altar, the words torn free as if they’d been waiting beneath the tongue too long.
“Long live the Queen!”
Another followed. Then a third, a fourth, and then they came all at once—soldiers, scribes, beggars, merchants, the loyal and the lost alike—each one feeding the tide until it became a roar.
Benni stared, unable to move, the roar of the crowd muffled by the glass as though the world beyond it had slipped beneath water. Ara stood unmoving at the edge of the balcony, fire coiled at her shoulders, her skin lit from within as if the blaze had made her its vessel. She didn’t lower her arms. She didn’t bow her head. She only stood, sovereign and singular, her outline blurred by the heat that clung to her. No crown rested there. No banner rose. But somehow, in that pause between the chant and the echo, she looked more like a queen than Mowgara ever had.
And yet, what filled him wasn’t triumph. It wasn’t pride. It was a slow, hollow churn in the chest, thick with dread that left no room forbreath. Grief, maybe, or fear. Not for what she had done – but for what it had cost her to become the thing that did it.
The woman he had followed across a dozen battlefields, through frost and fire and worse, the woman he had loved for all his life, was there somewhere. But she was no longer alone in herself. Whatever else had awakened in her now had weight and purpose and no need to answer to anyone.
No one person should wield power like that.
