Azfar’s fingers shifted on his staff. “Nothing,” he said—the day’s first lie. “A thing wants something. I…” A pause. “I’m old enough to have hands full of ghosts instead.” He studied Rakhal carefully. “You were a blade once. The shamans beat the tremor out of your hand until you could cut where a breath told you. Now you’re a banner. Do you understand? Blades owe nothing after they bite. Banners owe every man who lifts his eyes. The wind is both blessing and knife.”
“Then let me be wind.” The words surprised him; they felt borrowed from someone else—Eliza, perhaps, or the man he’d been before the blade. “I’ve learned to stand against it.”
“For now,” Azfar said gently, and Rakhal felt the truth in his teeth.
He looked back at Kardoc. A line of sweat ran from his brother’s temple into his hair. The bindings took that too,folding it into their slow breath.Mercy is a door left ajar. Mercy is a wolf fed under the table because you can’t bear its scratching at the door. Mercy is what you owe to the boy you were before you learned to love the straight road.
“When I cut him,” Rakhal said, “a path opened in front of me. Straight and clean. It ended in a chair made of skulls and a crown that choked.”
Azfar didn’t nod; he didn’t need to. “The Shadow loves a straight road. It eats less if you feed it that way. Turns are where men trip and drop what they hold. You’ve chosen a road with turns.”
“Because she asked me for it.” There was no shame in that, only relief.
“Because you asked yourself for it,” Azfar said, his voice worn down to truth. “But yes. She remembers your name when you’re not speaking it. That helps.” He looked toward Rakhal’s throat. “And it binds.”
“What do you see?” Rakhal asked lightly, as if asking about the weather. He’d learned long ago that if he gave a seer the taste of his fear, that was the taste the vision would return with.
“Veins like lightning under ice,” Azfar said. “Not yet a storm. Yet.”
Rakhal stepped back from the circle and leaned against the cool, salt-packed wall. His head touched stone. The fatigue ran deeper than muscle; it lived where vows live, behind the ribs where men keep their hungers and their words. He felt the Shadow settle inside him: not pressing, just present, like an animal choosing warmth.
“Eliza’s voice moved in it when you spoke the night of the duel,” Azfar said softly. “Two notes where there’s usually one. The dark listens differently now.” He didn’t addbe careful what you make it listen to.That warning was already in the air, vibrating among the bones.
Rakhal opened his eyes. “When we leave this hole, I’ll stand before men who’ve never believed in anything but their hands and their knives, and I’ll have to make them believe in the space between two thrones.” He pushed off the wall. “If you have a blessing, give it. If you have another warning, say it. I’m tired of receiving ghosts by inches.”
Azfar’s laugh was more breath than sound. “Blessings are just well-trained warnings.” He tapped the floor twice, left, right. The echo came back even; the circle held. “Very well. The warning is this: by sparing him, you’ve shortened your own leash. The clans will take their measure from your restraint. If you falter, they won’t slow—they’ll run straight into whatever opens. And the Shadow is very good at opening.”
Rakhal tasted that—salt, iron, and the knowledge a man carries when he puts his neck under a yoke and calls it harness. “Then I won’t falter,” he said, half promise, half prayer.
Azfar’s eyes softened with the fond exasperation teachers reserve for students promising not to drown while already wading into floodwater. “For now,” he said again, gentle enough that it didn’t sound like a curse.
They climbed the first stair together and paused beneath the lintel, two shadows cut out of red light. Rakhal looked back once. Kardoc hung in the web like an insect in amber—preserved in every way but motion.Mercy is a door left ajar. Mercy is a wolf fed under the table because you can’t bear its scratching at the door. Mercy is what you owe to the boy you were before you learned to love the straight road.
“Is he secure?” Rakhal asked, testing the edge of assurance the way he always had.
Azfar met his eyes. “As long as you are,” he said, his voice soft but unyielding as old iron.
Rakhal let it stand. Above, the noise of the world returned—work, breath, the restless movement of ten thousand livespreparing to move as one. They climbed in silence until the light above widened into a square of sky.
At the mouth of the tunnel, cold air struck his face like a hand. The valley spread wide—bruised and beautiful. Standard poles threw long black flags across the frost. He smelled smoke, stew, and under both, the metallic tang of iron being filed to an edge. Eliza stood across the slope, speaking with a rider; even at distance he felt the shift in himself that was not hunger or Shadow—only relief, a compass finding north again.
“She wears the binding well,” Azfar said beside him. “The Shadow recognizes her.”
“The Shadow didn’t choose her,” Rakhal said quietly. “I did.”
Azfar planted his staff in the frost. “You’ll go to them now,” he said. “You’ll speak, and they’ll believe just enough. It will be enough.”
“For now,” Rakhal said, without mockery.
Azfar’s eyes creased. “For now is all any of us have ever ruled.”
Something moved behind the words like a fish beneath dark water. Azfar turned away, staff clicking on stone, and the weight of his presence lifted a little from Rakhal’s skin. Rakhal exhaled and started toward the captains.
The first man he passed straightened as if pulled by an unseen cord. The second didn’t look directly at him; some men don’t, once they’ve seen you hold a blade that cuts a different way. Rakhal gave the day’s orders in a calm, practical voice and kept his hands visible. He remembered the faces of children at the Moot and the sound of a crowd when hope finally takes hold.
When the speech was done and the lists handed off, he went to the high parapet alone and looked north. The ridge there held the kind of dusk that comes before snow. The Shadow inside him was still; he could feel its edge without being cut. He rested a palm on the cold stone and said quietly, “The law holds.”
From deep underground, from the level of salt and bone, the Shadow answered—not in words but with a faint shift in the air, a confirmation like a nod.
