To the wind.
To Grim, if he could hear her.
To Rowenna, wrapped in silver, tucked into a new life she did not choose.
To the little girl who had once yearned to fly.
Her teeth chattered as she emerged, pulling herself back onto the frost-bit stone. Her bare skin steamed against the cold, hair sticking to her back in frozen ropes. She did not rush to dress. She stood there instead, looking out over the glade, her arms loose at her sides. She had imagined this kind of solitude so often. A life where no one waited to command her, no hand reached for her blade, no Fate whispered at her heel.
Was it a virtue to sacrifice, or simply a transgression dressed in duty?
She pulled her cloak back over her body, fingers fumbling with the cold, and tied it tightly at her throat.
The frost crunched beneath her bare feet as she walked the winding trail back toward the Sanctum. Her clothes were bundled beneath one arm, wrinkled, and speckled with pine needles. Only her heavy cloak and black veil shielded her from the cold, and even then, the wind slipped through the gaps, teasing her skin with icy fingers. Her hair hung in wet ribbons down her back, strands catching the wind like dark ribbons.
She felt flushed, alive. The kind of warmth that followed a plunge into freezing water came over her, a breathless clarity pulsing through her limbs. Her cheeks burned, and her body hummed from the inside out.
As the forest thinned, the long stone wall of the Sanctum came into view, rising gray and silent against the sky. At the edge of the road, a black carriage waited, wheels dusted with frost, the emblem of the Ebon Choir etched in gleaming silver on its door. An attendant waited beside it, tall and thin in the black cassockof the inner order. His pallid face betrayed no emotion, and he held his hands clasped with careful precision behind his back.
“Veilwalker,” he said crisply, giving her a shallow bow. “There is an execution scheduled at dusk. Death has called you to attend.”
Ilys stopped a few paces from him, shifting the bundle of clothes beneath her arm. “Not yet,” she said, voice mild.
He blinked, his brow tightening. “The order comes from Lord Veylen’s seat. It is expected.”
She tilted her head, the veil shadowing her expression. “I said, not yet.”
He paused, measuring how far he dared to press. “Veilwalker... with all reverence, I must insist.”
A grin ghosted across her lips beneath the veil.
In one swift motion, she opened her cloak. The wool parted to reveal bare, flushed skin beneath, still damp from the spring, still touched by winter’s bite. Her scars glinted like pale ink across her ribs and hips.
The attendant's breath caught audibly. He recoiled as if struck, turning his face with a sharp, sputtering sound.
Ilys barked out a laugh, low and full in her chest, wild and wicked. “You insisted,” she said.
She wrapped the cloak around herself again, tying it loosely at her throat, amusement curling a smile across her mouth. The attendant stammered indistinctly and stepped hurriedly toward the carriage, suddenly fascinated with the buckles on the side door.
She started walking again, back toward the Sanctum gates, her bare feet slapping softly against the snow-kissed path. Behind her, the attendant stood rigid and dismayed, likely reconsidering every life choice that had brought him to this unfortunate morning.
Ilys only laughed to herself, dry and brittle, a sound shaped by years and tempered by loss. Age had mottled her reverence, made her bold and unwieldy. No longer the solemn girl they once dressed in ink and blood, she had grown older, one-and-twenty now, and stranger too—looser in the bone, quicker to bite.
And cheekier, when the mood took her.
She looked back once over her shoulder, her dark veil fluttering with the motion.
“Tell them I’ll be there before the blade dulls,” she called.
And then she disappeared into the gates, humming softly, leaving behind a trail of melting footprints.
The city had grown heavier of late. Too many guards lined the streets. The rebellion that had flared in the villages had not been quenched. It was festering, smoldering. Refugees trickled through the gates with hollow eyes and bones pressing sharp against their skin, while those already within the walls fought over scraps of bread. Hunger haunted every alley. Sickness carried on the wind.
Ilys observed the crowd pressing in, their faces gray and drawn. She knew that look. Not devotion. Not reverence. A quiet, rotting hatred.
Why?The thought gnawed at her as it had for months.Why had the Bargain not held? Why, after centuries of sacrifice, did famine still rot the harvest and plague still crawl through the streets? She had bled for the Veil, killed for it, and given her hands, her heart, her very name. And yet the kingdom starved.And yet the children died coughing blood into their mother’s arms.
Ilys waited at the foot of the dais, as she had done countless times before. Snowmelt clung to her veil, and mud and slush bled into the hem of her robes.
