On the ridge, the plain stretched out like a dark steppe. Somewhere on that plain, Kardoc was moving pieces toward them. Somewhere out there, roads and cities and humans who had never seen a tusk up close made plans that would look verysmall when war arrived. Eliza pressed her bleeding hand against her sleeve and breathed the cold until it made sense again.
"You know they'll test it," Shazi said as she came up on her other side. "This treaty. They'll test it the way they test a rope over a drop."
"They should," Eliza said. "It has to hold."
Shazi's mouth curved slightly. "You're learning our words."
"I'm learning the only ones you listen to," Eliza said, not unkindly.
They walked down into the night that already felt different. It wasn't safer or kinder, only changed, as if some ancient gaze had shifted, as if the old hunger had decided—for now—not to eat what it was examining.
Behind them, the Bones kept their own counsel. Ahead, two thrones existed only as an idea spoken aloud, where it could not be taken back. Between the two was the long, thorny path she had just promised she would walk.
You wanted this,she told herself, firm and without pity.You chose it with your eyes open. So keep them open.
Chapter
Sixty
Rumor could eat a camp faster than fire. It bit through the ranks in the days after the Gate, gnawing at cookfires and sharpening on whetstones. He heard it in the way the sentries changed posture when he passed, in the tightening of shoulders across the training ground, in the laughter that came a fraction late. Weak, some said. Clever, others argued. A few whispered that law was a leash only the beaten wore.
Kardoc sent his answer at dusk: three obsidian runes knotted with sinew, laid at the threshold of the Gate with a smear of blood. Shazi found them before the torchmen did, teeth bared at the stink of resin and spite. She set them on the altar stone and stepped back.
“They call for a Binding,” she said.
Rakhal looked at the sigils. The Shadow pressed close behind his ribs, alert, the way a wolf comes silently awake when the wind shifts. The runes were old law, older than kings—the right to demand a duel unrestrained, not the measured scratch of first-blood, but the full bite of the Shadow. Winner takes rule. Loser takes chain.
Eliza stood across the stone, face pale in the torchglow. She did not ask him:Will you refuse?She knew the answer. There was no refusing if he meant to hold anything beyond the next sunrise.
“We accept,” he said.
Shazi’s gaze flicked to Eliza, then back. “In the Pit,” she said.
“In the Pit,” Rakhal confirmed.
The Pit of Ancients sat south of the Moot, its bowl eaten out of rock and time. Bone torches circled its rim, smoke drifting up like prayers that would not be heard. When the night came, so did the clans. They gathered in ranks upon ranks along the terraces, the Shadow-born glittering among them like coals in ash.
Rakhal descended alone.
His steps woke murmurs in the stone. Names, maybe, or nothing more than wind in broken seams. He couldn’t tell which and did not try. The Pit smelled of iron and old rain. He went down to skin and scars—no crown, no sigils, no paint. Scars mapped his chest and back in pale lines; the kind the living earned and the dead did not.
At the rim, Eliza stood with Shazi among captains and shamans. He met Eliza’s eyes once, and something eased in her shoulders—no plea, no bargain, only a clear acceptance he was grateful to receive. Shazi touched Eliza’s arm, a brief press of knuckles, then raised her hand for silence.
“Ancients witness,” Shazi said—an assertion, not a request. “The Binding is named. The Pit consents. Blood will decide rule.”
The Shadow exhaled through the crowd—a soundless, collective shift. Kardoc arrived in a ripple of heat.
He came bareheaded, armor scorched with runes that glowed like banked coals. The fire in him was wrong; it ate the air, leaving a metallic taste on the tongue. His eyes were molten bright. He stripped down as well but left the runed collar at histhroat, a blasphemy and a boast—he wore the Shadow like a brand and dared it to burn him.
“Brother,” he said when he reached the floor. The word was a smile with knives inside it. “You’ve been playing at mercy in my absence.”
Rakhal flexed his fingers. The Shadow ran along his nerves like cold water over stone.Be still.“We end it here.”
“Oh, we end it,” Kardoc said softly. “One way or the other, we end it.”
They circled. The Pit drank sound. Torches guttered, the smoke-laden light pulling long knives out of their shadows. Rakhal felt the ground through the balls of his feet, felt the slow pulse of something that had once been worshipped, or had demanded worship, and was now content to witness and to devour what was given.
Kardoc moved first, as he always had: a strike like a thrown torch. His fist cut across the space between them, trailing cinders, and Rakhal stepped inside it, catching the elbow, twisting, letting Kardoc’s momentum spend itself in the turn. Kardoc flowed with the counter, brought a knee up, and Rakhal took it half on his hip, half on his ribs, teeth clicking with the shock. The Shadow leapt in Kardoc’s wake like sparks carried on the wind; Rakhal felt heat kiss his skin and hiss away as the cold in him quenched it.
