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“Anya,” Fenrir says one day after his shift while sat at a card table surrounded by standing miners, as if they were guards. “Even if I could leave, you think I would?”

Since that day of the cave in, Anya has not left his side. He jokes she’s his second-in-command, but the joke is growing stale these days, especially now when she’s hunched before him, heads bent together as they plan out something Fenrir had never thought to consider before: escape.

Of the twenty-three men gathered, fifteen possess expired contracts.

Six have already been branded as slaves.

“They can’t get away with this.”

Except there is no way to fight back. They’re outnumbered, the amount of men willing to rise up versus those who still believe in the lie they’ve been fed are far outnumbered. But Fenrir is strong. Stronger than the rest. That’s why he must stay.

“We need to bide our time, play along until we have a chance.”

“A chance to what?” one of the men asks, dark eyes white-rimmed, fear as tangible as the dust they breathe each day.

“Rise up,” Fenrir says, like it is all that simple.

Can it be? He isn’t sure. All he is sure of is that this road leads to one place: death.

They keep their heads down and their ears open over the next several months, recruiting others carefully, using words that won’t give them away if a senior foreman overhears them. Fenrir’s mission turns from preservation to liberation and the weight of it keeps him awake at night. He doesn’t hate the work here. He enjoys the labor and the camaraderie and the large-scale operation the mine has grown into, but he can’t stand people not being treated well, or their contracts being broken. He wonders if the mine owners might have another perspective, an argument to make that could change Fenrir’s mind or mitigate the severity of their choices.

But when one of his team members whose contract has expired slips away in the middle of the night to be cut down by the mine’s security, his team reaches a breaking point.

“We need to do something,” Anya whispers to him, mask smothering her face but not her words. “What are we waiting for?”

Fenrir asks himself the same question every night, because something has stayed his hand: Rumors have spread, quiet whispers amongst the senior foreman about a queen on the rise. A warrior empress with an army of liberated slaves at her back razing the pockets of power that have cropped up over the years: other mining operations, but also the towns and villages that have sprung up to support them—and she has something Fenrir’s only ever read about.

Magic.

Chapter XXXIV

No One’s Hero

His return to his room was met with little fanfare. The guards had cleared out the hallways, nobles nowhere to be seen let alone their gossip heard. Dusk had fallen in the time it took Fenrir to emerge from the dungeons and find his way back, but the emptiness he encountered in the Gilded Palace’s corridors was not shared by his bedroom. Vera waited, sat in a chair beside the window, Fenrir’s crown in her lap—Bastion pacing at her side.

“Your majesty,” he murmured, coming to a stop, “You’re back.”

“Not for long.” Fenrir met Bastion’s eyes instead of looking at Vera. “I’m leaving. I’m going after Red and Orpheus.”

At the window, Vera’s gaze remained on the horizon, light turning her pale eyes wet and translucent but doing nothing to hide the hard press of her mouth.

He may as well get this over with.

“Mum, you can’t—”

“Show him,” she cut in, finally meeting his eyes, and Fenrir saw for the first time in all his life just what kind of grief Vera carried.

Pain, deep, and regretful. The likes of which he never would have recognized before, because he’d never gone through it himself, until now: the immeasurable loss of losing someone you loved.

Fenrir remained rooted in place, eyes on his mother while Bastion crossed the room to Fenrir’s bed. The crown was gone, replaced by a large bundle Bastion carefully unwrapped.

Fenrir’s heart nearly fell out of his chest.

“Is that…”

Atop the bed, his arm lay—or, rather, the spirit of it.

“I had to augment quite a bit to get it right, but I preserved what I could of your original. You’ll find the upgrades I’ve provided are worthwhile. Not befitting a king, perhaps, unless you consider yourself an Achilles type.”