“Thalorin’s apprentices?” Eliza asked without looking up.
“They ran west,” said the second defector, hardly more than a boy. His eyes never settled on anyone’s face. “Toward themarsh ruins. Took what they could carry. Books. Instruments. A woman in red had a cage with no animal inside.”
Shazi’s gaze hardened. “Then we send scouts to the marsh.”
“We send shadows,” Rakhal corrected. “Men who can walk a mile without being seen by their own feet.” Not an insult—a category.
Eliza marked three small crosses in the marsh’s black patches. “We split our attention three ways,” she said. “Docks, gate, marsh.” She took a breath. “And under the walls.”
Heads turned. She felt their gaze like the first weight of a pack.
“The old drains,” she said. “My father knew every grate. So did half the street children of my cousin’s reign. The Ketheri king will fill them with stones, but stones don’t stop water. It finds a way. So will we.”
Shazi allowed a small nod of approval. “We will need eyes inside,” she said. “Not just sewers. Doors.” She glanced at Rakhal. “People who can open them without alerting the guards.”
Eliza looked up from the map to the window where the wind had gone. “We have them,” she said. “The Archivists’ Guild. They guarded Thalorin’s restricted stacks because they had to. They won’t give the crown the keys he thinks he bought. The Forgesmiths in the south quarter—they were soldiers in all but name during the siege. They remember who fed their children with the last rations. And the orphans who survive on cathedral bread—they move messages faster than any horse.”
She marked each group on the map—a square, an anchor, and a tiny star only she would recognize.
“Sending envoys into a city under foreign rule is dangerous,” Shazi said, marking the cost, not objecting.
“Then send people who don’t look like envoys,” Eliza said. “Women with bread. Men with nothing to sell. A boy with abroken shoe and a closed fist.” She looked from face to face, reading each like her father’s ledgers—not the numbers but the handwriting around them. “If any of you fear compassion will be mistaken for weakness, you haven’t been hungry long enough.”
“And the press-gangs?” asked the gray defector. “If we steal workers from under his nose, he’ll answer with rope.”
“Then we don’t steal,” Eliza said. “We bargain. We make him pay more men to watch fewer throats. We make him guard bread and write lists while we move where he isn’t looking.”
Rakhal had said little. His silence wasn’t distance but devotion—a space he created deliberately for her to fill. He stood just behind her right shoulder, close enough that the sleeve of his cloak occasionally brushed hers. Each time she spoke, his eyes never left her face, as though memorizing how power looked when she wielded it. The Shadow moved differently around him when she commanded the room—calmer, more aligned to her rhythm than its own.
When she finished, he said only, “No torches on the march. No banners until we see the walls.” He looked to the captains. “You travel as ghosts. If the wind hears you, you’ve failed.”
They broke before moonrise, orders carried out like heat. Eliza stayed with the map. Tallow ran down the candle and pooled at its base. She pressed her finger into it and smudged the ink on the river road—an old habit to remind herself that paths change, that no line stays the same.
She whispered district names like prayers: Lirion Hill, where old men played cards and boys learned their first marks. Silver Gate, black for four sieges but never forever. Orvane Ward, with its thieves’ kitchens and honest stoves—where her mother once bought flowers from a woman who needed no names. Each syllable was a person and a history and a promise.
When she straightened, the candle had burned to a stub. Rakhal’s shadow crossed the table, and then he stood at hershoulder, close enough that she felt his heat and the cooler gravity of Shadow moving around him. She didn’t turn. He didn’t ask.
“Don’t rue the past,” he said. “You called the Ketheri because you believed corruption could still be bargained with. You were wrong—but so was I. It’s gone too deep to cleanse now. There’s only the cutting out.”
Eliza looked up at him, the map’s red-tinged light painting her eyes like embers.
“This is what I swore to when I took you from the city,” he continued. “To end it. To see it through, no matter the cost.”
Her voice was quieter than she meant it to be. “And now?”
“Now I have what I didn’t then.”
He stepped closer, slow and deliberate, until his shadow merged with hers on the canvas. “You have me, Eliza—my Shadow, my armies, my crown, every blade that still remembers my name. Whatever stands against you stands against me.”
His voice dropped, rough with conviction. “I’ll end this war—with you beside me, or not at all.”
The air between them changed—heat rising where their shadows met, as if even the candlelight bent toward them. She could feel him without touch, the vow thrumming through her bones like a second heartbeat. The hum of the Shadow brushed her skin, cool and electric, answering something that had lived in her since the day she met him.
Eliza held his gaze. “Then let it end with us both.”
He bowed his head, deliberate, candlelight carving the edge of his jaw. When he straightened, his breath grazed her hair—warm, fleeting, undeniable.
For a moment, neither moved—the vow, the heat, the war itself suspended between them.
