Eliza stayed beside him, their hands still faintly bound with Shadow light. It pulsed once before fading into warmth. She looked across the valley—orc and human faces lit by the same flame—and felt the weight of it settle inside her: the fragile, terrible power of being seen and chosen.
Azfar waited beyond the torchlight. He approached when the crowds had dispersed, eyes measuring what others couldn’t see.
“The dungeons left a stain on your Shadow,” he said quietly. “I watched it spread since your escape. No training of mine could purge it. But she…” His gaze shifted to Eliza. “She burns it away. Not with light that rejects, but with balance that heals. Her blood carries something the Shadow recognizes as kin, yet different.”
Eliza understood then why the Shadow had looked at her during the Moot—it had recognized in her something it needed.
Rakhal’s hand tightened around hers. “We begin as we should have,” he said. “Together.”
She met his eyes and felt the steady drumbeat pick up again—the rhythm of heart and march. For the first time in years, the wordtogetherdidn’t sound like surrender. It sounded like survival.
As dawn broke over the ridge, Rakhal stood unprotected beneath the first rays of sun. Where once the light had scraped his skin raw, now it merely warmed him. Not comfort, not yet, but possibility.
Eliza joined him at the edge of camp. “The binding has changed you.”
“It has changed us both,” he said. “What began by the river is complete. The Shadow remembers you,” he added, “and so it remembers mercy.”
The wind carried the murmur of distant water. He listened, and for the first time in a long while, it sounded like peace.
Chapter
Sixty-Two
Days after the naming, Rakhal returned to the Pit of Ancients.
The stairs dropped steeply beneath him. The stone walls swallowed the torchlight and sent it back in dull red flickers. The air smelled of rain on stone and of rites that did not ask permission. Rakhal went first, Azfar behind him with the staff that had measured more winters than most bloodlines. The sound of the war camp—drums, voices, the steady work of a host preparing to move—faded above. Below, there was only the scrape of boots, the whisper of Shadow along the walls, and Kardoc’s breath—slow, bound, stubbornly alive.
The vault opened without ceremony, a round chamber cut from black rock and lined with slabs of bone-stone veined in gray. Salt was packed in every seam, glimmering like frost. The floor was marked by a circle of runes Azfar had laid by hand, each sigil a dark mouth drinking firelight.
Kardoc hung at the center, caught in the web of the binding—old words braided with new. Living darkness coiled around his wrists and ankles, his chest, his neck. It tightened when he stirred and slackened when he lay still. Someone had washed the blood from his throat. The cut Rakhal had given him during theBinding left a neat line across his skin—a reminder that a blade can stop where a man chooses.
Azfar’s staff tapped once against stone. The coils tightened, then smoothed. “He dreams of fire,” the old shaman said, more to the room than to Rakhal. “Let him.”
Rakhal stepped to the edge of the circle and did not cross. The Shadow here was different—older, slower, calm instead of hungry. It watched from deep water. It remembered his hand from the Pit and had decided not to bite it… yet.
“If I were another man,” Azfar murmured, “I would tell you the old lie that mercy costs nothing.”
Rakhal didn’t look away from Kardoc. “Tell me something you believe instead.”
Azfar moved into the circle, his old knees steady with the steps of ritual. He traced the outer ring with the ferrule of his staff. Where it passed, the sigils brightened, then sank back like embers under ash. “Mercy costs twice. Once now, and once later. If you’re fortunate, you pay both. If not, those who follow you pay the second price for you.”
Rakhal said nothing. The man in the bindings breathed. On each exhale, a faint heat drifted from him; the web drank it and cooled.
“You’ve made a law,” Azfar said. “The clans saw it spoken and sealed. They felt the Shadow hold its breath and listen. They’ll carry that moment like a coal in the mouth. If you fall, they’ll burn themselves proving the dark does not lie.”
“Then I won’t fall,” Rakhal said. The words came out evenly, a blade laid along a block. He didn’t put weight on it.
Azfar’s mouth bent, almost kind. “All kings say that before the dark remembers their names.” He lifted his staff, turning it so the bone rings clicked softly, a chime like teeth. “One more circle.”
They set it together. Azfar murmured and Rakhal breathed with him, not as a supplicant but as a second note. The staff’s bone tip traced the salt line, marking symbols for silence, sleep, and the pact between hunter and prey. Rakhal felt the runes through the soles of his boots as if the floor were a drum. On the last mark, the air pulled tight and released. The bindings sighed. Kardoc’s head jerked once, then went still.
Azfar lowered the staff. For a time they let the quiet stand, both men listening with different senses. Rakhal heard the pulse of contained heat, the faint movements of Shadow through the knots. Azfar heard more—he always had.
“He hates you cleanly,” Azfar said at last. “It’s better than loving you wrong.”
Rakhal looked over. The old man’s face was as impassive as bone. The torchlight made rivers of his wrinkles, shadow pooling in old cuts and corners.
“You speak of costs and hate,” Rakhal said, meeting his gaze. “What do you want of me?”
