Chapter
Seventy-Four
They left the last cart track at noon and did not look back. The trees thickened behind them like a decision, and the light changed its mind about brightness. The deep wood held a different silence than the plains: moss drinking sound, bark speaking in slow grain, the wind practicing gentleness after a season of knives. When they stopped, it was only because a river had drawn a line across the world in silver and dared them to cross it without first learning its name.
Eliza took off her boots and let the mud claim her ankles. Rakhal stood with his hands open as if expecting shackles that did not come, then unbuckled the old straps at his wrists, the leather cracking in protest as it yielded. He stripped without ceremony—cloak, shirt, knife-belt, the thin armor plate Shazi had insisted on—and set each piece on a flat stone, not as offerings, not as abandonments, only as things that had finished their work.
“Here,” she said, and placed the dull ring in his palm—the counter-sigil that had burned a god into listening and then gone to sleep. He turned it once, twice, looking for a glimmer that did not come. “Bury it.”
He knelt at the river’s edge and pressed it into the mud under a cairn of rounded stones. The river licked the cairn’s flanks as if to taste the story and be sure it was worth carrying. He rose without dusting his knees.
They fasted—not for magic, for honesty. The first day, hunger prowled like a stray dog; by dusk, it had learned to lie at their feet and stare at the fire as if waiting for good news. The second, his hands stopped searching his hips for a sword that wasn’t there. On the third, the Shadow stopped tasting the edges of the clearing and settled into the middle of his chest like a thing that has put itself to bed.
They didn’t speak. Words would have been a way to keep war’s rhythm going. Eliza made small work into liturgy—gathering tinder, teaching a stubborn knot to be gentle, warming water in a blackened pot and setting a leaf to steep so the steam smelled of something living. Rakhal learned the trees with his feet: beech smoothness, pine needles’ opinions, the way damp leaves lie when the wind has tried to trick them.
On the fourth dusk, she led him to the river.
It bit—cold that wasn’t cruel, only principled. They stepped in up to the thighs and stopped, breath jerking in their ribs without permission. Eliza dipped her palm and poured water down his shoulders, again and again. She did not speak a blessing. He turned and did the same for her, tipping water into the hollow at her throat, along the wing of her shoulder, over the old scar at her temple where a crown had once tried to draw blood and failed.
“This is not washing,” she thought, and let the thought be enough. “It’s unwriting.”
They climbed out shaking and eased under a single cloak, the fire painting their bare forearms in amber and ash. He sat so their sides touched from shoulder to knee; she leaned until their spines learned each other’s curve. Skin-to-skin, warm withouthunger. His breath had a question in it; hers gave the same answer each time: here.
When sleep came, it was the kind that does not need to be guarded. She woke once to the sound of his teeth clack and put her palm to his ribs.
“Borders,” she said, not a command, a naming. “Here. Here. And here.”
He moved her hand an inch to the left and swallowed. “Here,” he agreed. The Shadow lifted in him to listen and lay down again without complaint.
In the mornings they walked until the river reappeared ahead from some new angle and dared them again. At noon, they sat on a log and let the sun be a coin passing between them, fair as a wage. He spoke a few words by the second day—names of trees he had decided to respect—and fell silent as if he had spent something valuable and now needed to earn it back. She didn’t hurry him. The body, she knew, is the last place a war acknowledges defeat.
On the seventh morning, he woke with his hand on her back and left it there as if he had always remembered to do so. She opened her eyes and found his face smoothed by sleep into the younger version of itself she’d seen in flashes—the man who had learned to stalk mercy before he learned it could break.
“No crown,” she whispered, forehead against his. “No command.”
“Breath,” he returned, and it felt like a treaty that required no seals.
The forest approved the way forests do—by holding still, by letting the birds’ small courage ring, by not reminding them, just then, that winter would come again. They tended their ember and did not look for omens. They had already taken off everything that could rust.
Chapter
Seventy-Five
Night brought the kind of cold that makes a fire look like a promise it intends to keep.
Rakhal built a small one with the humility of a man who had learned how much damage large fires do. The wood complained and then learned to be useful. Eliza sat with her legs tucked beneath her, cloak at her hips, hair unbraided and gathering smoke like a quiet argument.
He spoke because the silence had turned from invitation to request.
“I liked it,” he said. There. The worst first. “The power. The speed. The way the Shadow guessed what I meant before I finished meaning it. The way a line broke because I looked at it with a certain hunger. I told myself it was duty. Some of it was. Some of it wasn’t. I liked it.”
Eliza’s profile turned toward him. Firelight laid a red line along her cheekbone. He could not read judgment in her face—only attention sharpened to a blade so it would not cut by accident.
“I heard them,” he went on. The words tangled; he pulled them through. “The dead. Not their voices—those are for living mouths. I heard the shape of their lives. The weight of them.Fishermen. Apprentices. A woman with dye under her nails. A boy with nothing in his stomach but stubbornness. They came for justice, and I gave them vengeance, and I told myself it was the same weight on a scale.” He swallowed. Regret tasted metallic, like blood he had no right to complain about. “It wasn’t.”
She didn’t rescue him from the speaking. That was mercy, too.
“The worst part,” he said, “was how easy it became to sayone more.One more street kept. One more soldier frightened enough not to pick up a rope. One more man made example. One more night.One moreis a god that wakes quickly and eats clean.”
