He nodded. The clans were kneeling in uneven waves now, not a pageant, not a commanded gesture, but the body’s acknowledgement when it has seen something it did not know was possible and wants to belong to the world where it is. It was not all of them. It was enough.
Rakhal lifted his face to the night. The Shadow hummed low, old and satisfied, a beast lying down finally after a long, hard chase. Mercy had cut; he could feel the wound’s clean edges inside him. He could live with that. Better a king cut open where he could see the blood than a king chained from the throat inward.
“Bring him to the ironless house,” he said to Shazi. “Set watchers who can hear the Shadow move. Feed him. Keep him breathing. Don’t make a spectacle of it.”
Shazi’s eyes gleamed. “And if he speaks poison?”
“Let him,” Rakhal said. “He can’t do anything now.”
At his side, Eliza let out a soft sigh; she had been carrying the weight of the world for him and was now releasing it in relief.
In the heart of the Pit, a brother still breathed under the weight of mercy he had never believed in. The cycle that had raised them both—violence, blood, succession—had turned one final notch and refused to close.
Rakhal’s choice.
The Shadow listened a long time and said nothing. It didn’t need to. The law had already been spoken in blood and sealed with restraint.
By dawn, the smoke would climb straight up, the way it did when the air was still. The banners would lift. The captains would make their lists. Children would wake to the story their elders had carried home. And somewhere in the ironless house,Kardoc would turn in his sleep, feel the bindings tighten, and understand—slowly, with the fury of a storm that has met a mountain—that the world had changed shape around him.
Not through slaughter, but through someone choosingnotto throw him onto the bone wall.
Changing the order.
Calling it.
Rakhal stood on the rim until the last torch guttered to an ember. The Shadow hummed deep in his blood, content and watchful, and Eliza’s warmth lingered beside him, vindicating his decision.
He looked out across the plain where the night thinned toward dawn.
Then he went to write mercy into law.
Chapter
Sixty-One
When dawn finally came after the Binding, it brought grey light and silence instead of triumph. Smoke drifted up from the Pit of Ancients, now a half-day’s ride away, where Kardoc lay bound beneath ancient runes. The war camp moved in the hush that follows thunder, the orcs walking carefully as if the very ground might still be listening.
Eliza stood on the rise above the tents and watched Rakhal among his captains. The orcs around him gave him space. They didn’t know what to make of it—mercy instead of triumph from the most dangerous among them—and she saw uncertainty ripple through the ranks. It would settle, she thought, once he gave them something new to believe in.
She had something of her own to believe in. Beyond the hills lay Maidan—her city, the citadel turned laboratory where Thalorin’s mages still carved runes into flesh and called it progress. Her people were starving under those towers. The soldiers who had survived the siege now knelt to sorcerers. If she were ever to reach them again, she needed more than humanarmies. She needed what stood before her: a warlord the Shadow itself obeyed.
It seemed a lifetime since those quiet moments by the river, yet the connection forged there had only strengthened with each trial.
Shazi found her on the slope, cloak fur-trimmed, eyes bright from too little sleep. “He calls the clans again tonight,” she said. “Mercy must be answered with life. The Shadow demands balance.”
“A ritual?” Eliza asked.
“A naming,” Shazi said. “He will name you formally before the clans. What began between you in the forest, what the Shadow already recognizes, must now be sealed in the sight of all.”
By dusk, the plains had changed. In the forest, light had pressed against him like a blade; here, under open sky, darkness welcomed him. Torches burned steady across the valley until it seemed the stars had fallen to earth.
The altar at the center of the gathering ground had been rebuilt of bone and obsidian, veins of Shadow gleaming through its surface like trapped lightning. Shamans came to Eliza at twilight, their hands smelling of smoke and resin. They wrapped her in robes the color of stormlight, shot through with silver threads that shifted when she breathed. One of the women painted her palms with fine ash that shimmered faintly in the torchlight. The ash was cool—balance to the heat that once seared Rakhal’s flesh in sunlight. Something had changed since their night by the river: a symmetry forming between them that neither fully understood.
“You will be seen,” the woman said.
Eliza let them work. The ceremony felt strange, foreign, but she reminded herself it was strategy written in blood and ritual. If he named her before the clans and the Shadow accepted, everywarrior who had knelt to him would be bound to her cause. When she turned that cause toward Maidan, none could call it rebellion.
When the moon rose, veiled in thin cloud, the clans filled the valley. Drums rolled low, heartbeats echoing off the stones. Orc banners rose beside repaired Maidan standards—the work of soldiers who had cleaned and stitched them as if history could be mended by hand.
