She pushed herself up from the bench. The stone felt steadier under her feet than any promise Thalorin offered. Brenna—Brenna would be her line, her sliver of agency inside these walls.Find him. Keep him alive. Tell him I’m coming.The list fitted itself into a single hard point at the centre of her will.
Outside, beyond the tower and the city and the wards, the plains would soon run black with riders. In the middle of that storm lay Rakhal—wounded, stubborn, human in ways he would never admit. She swallowed the ache and squared her shoulders. If Thalorin wanted a spectacle, she would give one: not of a queen helpless and watching, but of one who moved the board while others cried checkmate.
Eliza crossed to the narrow window, pressed her forehead to the cool glass, and watched the eastern sky bristle with a thin, frightened light.I will reach him,she told the dawn.I will reach him, or I will burn what stands between us.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
They had bound him in iron meant for men who could not call shadows to their aid. The manacles bit into his wrists, cold and absolute, a metal sentence meant to drown the anakara’s whisper. Even so, the shadows crawled beneath his skin, andhe drew them, thin as a line, and fed that thread into the wound along his ribs. It was poor compared to what he could do in full, a fraction of the tide he had once summoned, but it would have to suffice.
The healing hummed as a low hunger. The blade’s edge of pain eased, scab knitting into something less fatal. Each small stitch of the shadow cost him — part of the leash frayed with every lump of power he gave the body. The wards in the castle held him, clever human runes burning amber at the edge of his sight, but they didn’t drown the dead that lived in these stones. Where blood had been spilled for centuries, where men had died in anger and prayer and fear, the castle held a hungry memory. Those echoes gave the anakara something to feed on; they strengthened him and they tempted him at once.
Azfar’s lessons rose like a taught rope in his mind. Build walls, the old shaman had said. Make rooms inside your head where shadow could not reach. Keep the voices at bay. Rakhalhad been an outcast to learn such things — years apart from his warband, a controlled exile until the leash took. He had learned not because he wanted to be tamed but because his hands could not be left loose over a sleeping world. When the shadows took a leader, they ate the land and the leader with equal hunger. He had watched it happen. He had sworn it would not be him.
There had been another teacher too — a blood that thrummed in his veins. His mother had gone to the other side and back, a woman who spoke soft to the dead and knew how to bargain with what would not be bargained with. He had her gifts, a current that made his anakara sharp and deep. It made him dangerous in ways his brothers did not understand. It made the shadows answer him differently, as if they recognized a familiar tongue.
This dungeon recognized such tongues. The air tasted of old iron and the sick-sweet tang of dried blood. A thousand small voices lined the stone: regrets, curses, the thin keening of those who had been left unburied. They curled around the hems of his thoughts and wanted in. They whispered of slaughter and of taking without consent; they were always hungry for a vessel. He had felt himself slip on the field before, tasted madness like bitter wine on his tongue. He feared it. He feared what he might become if he let the voices have him.
For now, the human wards kept a lid on it. They didn’t comprehend the things that watched from the walls; they called them spirits and named them superstition and drew diagrams that shivered and held. That ignorance was a kind of mercy. Not forever. But for now, it kept his worst edges from cutting loose.
A boot scuffed the stone. A soldier appeared in the doorway like a smear against the light — a young thing with the oil-swept hair of men who had never seen a real battlefield beyond hunting parties. He carried a tray and something in his eyes made Rakhal know how little the human cared for honor. He did not look atthe man beneath the manacles; he looked only at the prize of spectacle.
“Look at you,” the soldier said, voice thin, the tone of a boy trying on cruelty. “A prince brought in like a dog. The Varak thought themselves clever. Thought they could slip into our city like thieves. Ha.” He crouched and set the tray down with a careless shove. The stew slopped twice, hot broth staining the floor, glistening like dirty gold.
“Lick that if you want to eat it,” the soldier said, a smile pulling his lips taut. He jabbed a callused finger against Rakhal’s chest. His hand found the tender place where bone met old wound. The punch landed with a wet, satisfied thud; pain flared and Rakhal’s breath came out in a short, sharp sound.
He did not beg. He did not give them the show. He forced the noise of breath into order and let the healing threads knit another inch of flesh. The soldier laughed at seeing him flinch. “You smell like shadow and smoke. Like something that should be burned. The queen’s lot did us well, eh?” The words were meant to sting beyond the bruise.
Vengeance kindled like a coal in his gut. Death for this man, death for the ones who had set the trap, death for any who would break oaths and call it strategy. He whispered the promises to himself, each vow a cold iron spoke around the wheel of his patience. He would not rush to slaughter; the shadows taught him that fury without focus ate the hand that carried it. But he would remember. He would keep a ledger.
And Eliza — the thought of her arrived unbidden with the same ferocity as flame. He felt the ghost of her scent: lavender and the iron of blood and the warmth that had shocked him in the confines of his cloak. He tasted memory — the way her skin had pressed beneath his palm, the way the line of her neck had looked when she turned, the raw temptation that had threatenedto undo him when she had slept in his chamber. That memory flicked at the nearest coil of shadow like a moth to a lantern.
Anger flared first: had she set this? Had she used him to swing the war into her favour? If she had plotted to turn his people into fodder, he would not forgive. Strategically, he could understand the calculus of a queen. As an orc and as a man, worn thin and still marked by her nearness, he felt the old, animal claim rise — a desire to possess, to hold, to make her his in defiance of the world.
He clenched his jaw until the taste of copper filled his mouth. He would not let anger make him a butcher. He would not trade one tyranny for another. If there were a path to reach her, he would take it; but not like a mad thing tearing at flesh. He would be clever. He would be patient. He would be the instrument of his own fate, not the rage of ghosts.
The soldier spat, disgust and bravado washing the little room of air. “You will die with the Varak,” he said. Then he turned and left, boots echoing, the door clanging shut behind him like a gaoler’s laugh.
Left alone, Rakhal listened to the castle. It rumoured around him, the dead folding into the stone, the wards steadying like a hand on a leash. He let a shadow curl small and secret around the iron, not to break it but to warm the metal so the bite would be less savage. He fed himself a little of the darkness for courage and for thinking, not for war.
When the night pressed close, he shaped a map in his head — routes out, allies to be found, what to do with a queen who might have chosen him and then chosen against him. He counted the debts they had sown. He promised himself a return, not in the burst of a butcher’s fury but as the slow, inexorable slide of a blade into a soft underbelly. He would reach her. He would survive.
And when he could, when the shadows would answer him clean and not ravenous, he would take what belonged to him — not by force of a brutal lust, but by the pledge of two people who had crossed a line and could not uncross it. Until then, he tended the wound and waited, a beast with a chain, patient and very dangerous.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
Time passed. Slow. Steady. Excruciating.
But the silence was welcome.
Each hour without another soldier’s taunts, without another gaoler’s sneer, gave him the stillness to work. His body knit itself together with painstaking slowness, the shadows feeding his flesh as he directed them, stitch by stitch.
He ate what they gave him—thin stew, stale bread, a cup of water that tasted faintly of rust. Not enough for an orc’s needs, nowhere near what his frame required to mend. Still, he forced it down. Every mouthful was strength. Every swallow, a fragment he could hoard for the reckoning to come.
And always, the shadows whispered.
