When he was certain no ears could hear, no eyes could see, he slowed. His stride steadied, then ceased altogether.
In one smooth motion, he lowered her from his shoulder and set her on her feet.
He only watched her.
She swayed as he set her down, knees buckling beneath her, the bindings at her ankles forcing her into a clumsy stagger. Her arms jerked uselessly against the ropes at her back, balance nearly lost to the cold stone beneath her bare feet.
But she did not fall.
Eventually, she steadied herself. Straightened. And in spite of the night air cutting through her thin gown, in spite of the wind whipping her hair wild, in spite of her silence and helplessness, she lifted her chin and glared at him. Fierce. Unyielding.
Rakhal held her gaze, letting the moment stretch. Then he exhaled, long and low, and finally allowed the shadows to recede.
They slithered back into the dark, leaving him bare to the cold. His anakara was drained, his limbs heavy, weariness settling deep in his bones. That veil of silence he had held—longer than ever before, long enough to smother not just himself but her as well—had cost him dearly.
He couldn't remember a time he had carried the shadows that far, that long.
And he was spent.
Not that she would know.
He studied her.
The night pressed around them, sharp and cold, yet she stood before him as though the wind were nothing. Her arms were bound, her ankles lashed tight, her mouth gagged—yet her spine was straight, her chin high. Defiance clung to her like armor.
Her eyes caught his first. Blue. He had noticed it before, in the chamber, but now the hue struck him again. A strange color. A human color. Clear and cutting, like ice lit by flame.
Her hair whipped about her face in the wind, dark as midnight, loose and wild. The strands lashed across her cheeks, but she didn't flinch, didn't bow her head. She stared at him, unblinking, waiting. Expectant.
She knew.
She had known from the moment she risked speaking of the Ketheri what she had given herself up to. Known what she was doing when she played her one card. And still she had chosen to gamble.
Even here, with ropes at her wrists and shadows at her throat, she met him with that same strange certainty.
He was the one in control. His hand, his strength, his shadows had bound her, silenced her, carried her from her kingdom. And yet?—
There was something in her bearing, in the fire behind those human eyes, that gave the illusion she had not lost everything.
As though she, too, still held a measure of control.
He moved toward her slowly, each step deliberate, heavy against the earth.
She didn't flinch. Didn't cower. She stood motionless, bound and gagged, but her gaze never wavered. Her eyes followed him, clear and sharp, as if daring him to come closer.
When he reached her, he looked down and realized just how small she truly was. Smaller than he'd imagined from the battlefield, from the throne. The top of her head barely reached his chest. Fragile bones. Slender limbs. So easily broken.
But no less defiant. No less brave.
He should have despised her for it. Should have wanted to grind her beneath his boots, to crush the life from her as payment for the countless orcish dead that had bled into the earth because of her. The fire her mages had rained. The sons his clan had buried.
Yet… he couldn't.
Not now. Not in this moment, when she stood so weak before him, shivering in the night wind yet still meeting his gaze without fear.
And then—unexpected, unbidden—something stirred in him.
A thought he hadn't invited, a word he had never imagined attaching to a human.
