Eliza did not blink. “Then may it drown you,” she said to the king, and she meant the river, and the Shadow, and the law of witness, and every god the Ketheri had bought with enamel.
Thunder shook the tower.
There was no lightning crack or rain hammer; there was the deep, grinding sound of the world’s teeth deciding to meet. The stained cloth bucked in its frame. Dust fell from the beams in a soft brown snow. Men looked up, not soldiers now but animals hearing something very old remember how to wake.
The king froze with his hand raised. Somewhere far below, the first chant rose—not from a human throat, not exactly; a subterranean hum that made bone acknowledge it belonged to something larger than its body. The captain on the balcony lowered his baton without being ordered to, and then made a liar of his body by lifting it again and holding it in the air, suspended, while he waited for a second command that did not come.
Eliza kept her hands open. She felt the ring at her throat flash—once, quickly, a vein of cold light through dull iron—and go still, as if answering a question from far away and deciding it had already told the truth.
“You have no court,” the king said, but the line fell flat, spoken into a room that was listening elsewhere.
“I have witnesses,” Eliza said. She stepped down from the dais. “They are worth more.”
He spat. “You have ghosts.”
“Better than lions,” she said.
He lunged for his sword—anger as tactic; rage as substitute for plan—and Liron was there, and Maera, and the twins, and the dockwrights with their knotty hands, and the officers on the right flinched from the ferocity of poor men when givenpermission to strike with a name in their mouths. The king’s blade cleared the scabbard. It met Liron’s. It sparked. The noise in the tower grew deeper, as if the sound of the sword forgot it was meant to be heard and learned, all at once, how to be felt.
Eliza did not draw. She turned her back on him and walked toward the balcony.
The captain’s hand trembled in the air where it held the baton. He glanced at her and then away, the way men do when private decency must pretend to be professional certainty. She put her hand on the rope and felt the old fiber remember other mornings. “Cut them down,” she said.
He swallowed. “My orders?—”
“Just this once,” she said, and he moved without knowing he would.
Knives came out of nowhere; a dozen hands cut a dozen knots. Prisoners fell into the arms of men who lifted differently when the lifting felt like something that would enter a ledger for the city, not just one for their own souls. The child looked at Eliza as if she were a door and he were very tired of walls. She looked back and let him see that she was smaller than the story and larger than the man who wrote it.
Behind her, the king roared, furious that thunder had not waited for his cue. Liron’s blade caught his, not in heroism but in physics. Maera’s boot caught an officer’s knee. The twins did work that would be remembered by the wrong mouths.
The shock underfoot began to roll.
Waves through stone, a sea in rock, a river’s old complaint pounding on new order. The patched window tore; light slammed the hall; the map slid from the table and lay face down. Out beyond the keep, a cry rose from many throats—fright and awe and the kind of joy people feel when their fear stands up and realizes it has legs for running toward something besides a hole.
Eliza put her hand to the chain again. She didn’t need to. Habit, prayer; a way to name her breath. The ring was cold now. Content. It had done its work and would not make a habit of miracles.
She turned back toward the dais once, for the last look this room would ever force her to take. The king struggled against men who had stopped being his. He saw her seeing him. He bared his teeth, not in grace, not in humor. “You’ve built your mercy on sand,” he hissed.
“Then may it drown you,” she said again, and this time the tower answered with a groan like a door large enough to let history through at last.
The ring at her throat flashed once more, quick as a thought that finds its ending, and went still.
Chapter
Sixty-Nine
The gate gave way like a thought changing its mind.
Iron screamed once, then forgot what sound was for.
Rakhal stepped through the smoke and into the inner court of Istrial. Rain slicked the stones; torches leaned in the wind, their flames thin and uncertain. The city’s heart lay open before him—arches cracked, banners drowned, the air thick with what battle leaves behind when it no longer knows where to go.
He moved without haste. Every stride left the Shadow one step behind, obedient now, its hunger folded small. Maidaners followed at a distance, half in awe, half afraid they would break whatever spell kept him walking instead of burning.
A fallen standard caught at his leg; he kicked it aside and crossed the square. The last defenders had abandoned their posts, leaving weapons propped against walls like excuses no one would hear again.
The keep’s doors loomed ahead, oak and iron scored with age. They had seen a hundred sieges and were tired of deciding who belonged inside. Rakhal set his palm against the metal. The mark under his ribs thrummed once, sharp as a struck bell.Walk, not burn.
