So I don’t say anything.
Instead, I lean sideways until my shoulder rests against his. Not seeking anything—offering presence.
He doesn’t pull away.
His fingers seek mine in the dark, intertwining without comment. “Let me do this. Let me keep watch over what’s mine.”
The objection forms automatically—equality, shared burden, refusing to become a weakness he has to compensate for.
It dissolves before it reaches my mouth. I’m too tired. Too hollowed out by horror. Too grateful for the solid weight beside me and the hand holding mine in the flickering firelight.
I sleep.
And if I dream of yellow flowers and queens who thanked their killers and young men who waited four hundred years for peace?—
His hand never leaves mine.
THIRTEEN
TYR
The fire died two hours ago. I let it. Smoke draws attention, and whatever hunts us through this frozen wasteland doesn’t need additional guidance.
The faces haunt the space behind my eyes. Not the killing itself—I’ve done enough that individual deaths blur into abstraction—but their relief. The gratitude of those the gods had punished beyond any crime they committed, when my blade finally gave them what centuries of suffering hadn’t: an ending.
I’ve been doing this for longer than most civilizations have existed.
Zephyra’s hand is still in mine. She hasn’t let go all night.
Dawn arrives as a gray suggestion rather than actual light—the perpetual overcast that hangs over territories under divine observation. I track the slow brightening through the waystation’s cracked shutters, calculating travel times, threat assessments, and potential routes.
We can’t stay here.
The Arbiter will have tracked us through the storm. Its creatures will be closing the distance, narrowing the net, herding us toward whatever execution zone it’s prepared. Staying still is dying slowly.
Unless we go where it doesn’t expect.
The Frozen Observatory sits three miles northwest. Abandoned divine watch post. The kind of place the Arbiter might use to observe, but wouldn’t expect prey to approach voluntarily. Concentrated divine energy. Dangerous. But the observation platforms would give us visibility across the entire frozen plateau—and the tower structure is defensible in ways this crumbling waystation isn’t.
Risk against risk. The calculation favors movement.
Zephyra wakes gradually. I feel the shift—the subtle change in her breathing, the way her body stiffens before she remembers where she is. Who she’s pressed against.
“You should have woken me.”
“You needed rest.”
“So do you.”
“Dragons don’t dream the same way witches do.” Not entirely true. But the dreams I have aren’t ones I’d inflict on anyone.
She studies me with the same attention she gives divine magic. I wait for her to push. To argue. To insist on the equality she’s been demanding since Caelreth.
Instead, she squeezes my hand once and releases it.
The absence registers with disproportionate intensity.
“What’s the plan?” She’s already standing, already moving to check the waystation’s perimeter, already shifting into the practical mode that’s kept her alive through years of witnessing truths that destroy lesser witches.
