When dawn crept grey over the horizon, the seventh day began.
Brenna entered quietly, her eyes rimmed with sleeplessness, but her hands steady. She closed the door, glanced once toward the guards beyond it, and turned to Eliza.
“They’ll drink it tonight,” she whispered.
The air seemed to change with the words—heavier, charged, alive. The candle flame wavered sideways, though no draft touched it.
Eliza rose, smoothing her gown as if preparing to attend court instead of committing treason. “Then we begin,” she said.
Outside, the wards shivered faintly in the stone, and for an instant, it seemed the castle itself was listening.
Chapter
Forty
They cut him in neat, certain lines.
Small incisions, precise and methodical, the mages' knives cutting his flesh while they scratched notes in the half-light. Each cut was a question they intended to read like scripture—how fast the blood knit, what color the healed flesh took, whether the black beneath his skin would flinch or bloom. They prodded with hooks and probes, strapped instruments to his ribs, and whispered hypotheses into lantern light.
The wounds closed. They always closed.
He had watched them lean over him with that mixture of triumph and bafflement men get when finding new prey. They suspected they drew something from him; they suspected they could store it, use it. Stones were carried into the tower rooms—pale, carved things that drank the thin air and vibrated, hands closed round them as if they might squeeze an answer. Trinkets of scrap and wire were set with runes and left to cool. Rakhal had never seen their faces look so small.
He knew why the wounds mended. He felt the dark river threading through him, always there even when shackled, always listening. The wards dulled it, narrowed it, but they could not take it wholly. The shadow-magic in his blood—his mother'sgift, ancient and dark—gave what remained to heal his flesh. It pooled around a stitch like oil around a wick and fed a cold, hungry heat that knitted tendon to tendon. Anger was fuel; so was grief, and the steady, grinding hunger for vengeance. He gave that fire willingly. It fed the shadow. The shadow kept him alive.
Beneath the castle, the dead were noisy and sharp. Not only the scattered bones of soldiers or the random graves of those forgotten: under Maidan lay whole ranks of his kin, orcs buried in battle by wolves and men, their bones arranged with the old rites, their spirits not soothed but coiled. They reached for him in the dark, wet with the taste of old blood. They wanted a voice. They wanted bones remembered. They wanted retribution for names carved into weathered stones that no living tongue spoke loud enough to wash clean.
He did not deny them. He became the conduit because he had always been part conduit and part cage. When the mages drove needles into his muscle, when their lanterns flashed prayer into his eyes and their runes hissed with borrowed light, those buried things answered. He could pull them close and make them speak for a breath, for a whisper—they pushed at his mouth and around his ribs like hands. He let them. Let them cry out through him. Let them fill his throat with the names of their killers. Let them taste the air of a city that had forgotten how much it owed. In those moments he felt enormous and terrible and right.
And with each rescue—each stitch the shadow wove into his torn flesh—something changed. The darkness that repaired him braided into his bones. It slid into the artery and rode the blood like a rider on a horse. The more it mended, the more it wanted, and the more it stretched its fingers into him until he could not tell where the child Azfar had trained ended and the thing that wanted only hunger began. He had read the stories Azfarwarned him about: men who drank too deep of shadow and woke hollow; warriors who lost their names to the night. He had seen, once in the forest where his mentor had put him to the trial, how the dark could pretend to be a path and then swallow a man whole. He had nearly been taken there. Dazed, his teeth chattering in a wind that carried the scent of rot and jasmine. That forest had frightened him; this place terrified him more.
He had told them to stop.
The words left him raw and useless. They smiled, called him stubborn, called him the thing they could not parse. The leader—she with the slate and the dry smile—pressed a rune to the iron and watched his face convulse with that soft, hot pain their bindings delivered as punishment.Tell us what you are, they said.Tell us how to make you give us what you are. He had only the silence that fit him like a cloak.
Their shackles bore runes of light: inscriptions older than the mages' careful diagrams but younger than the old orc chants. They were incantations hammered out of a faith in the sun—light-magic characters scoured into the iron to sing when a lantern's flame licked them. In day-bright or prolonged sun, they might have had teeth. Down here, where the light was constant but low and the shadows had other claim, the runes only flared and limped. Lantern light gave them brief teeth; oil and wick made them bark and forget. The mages kept the lamps burning. They didn’t understand that light in a room of old graves was only a thin crust over an ocean of night.
If the light went out?—
He pictured it: the lanterns guttering, flame hissing and dying, the runes falling mute, metal cooling. The shadow would not be nursed then; it would be free to widen, to pull and pull until the last of his restraint unstitched. He did not know what would happen if that moment came. He feared it with the rawanimal clarity of a beast backed to a cave wall. He feared what he might do with his hands unbound.
He feared what he might do toher.
That thought was jagged and honest. In the green silence of his training, rage had been a useful blade; sharpened, it made him a leader. In the dank hours beneath Maidan it was a blind and aching thing that wanted to break. If she had stood behind the mages' work—if Eliza had given him up, if she had signed this away for politics or for counsel—then the betrayal would have a taste he could not live with. He imagined holding nothing back: burning banners, ripping at flesh, making the world small with fury until his hands were the only law left. The image terrorised him, not because it was violent—because it would mean he had become the very hunger the old tales warned of. He would have lost kin and bride in one monstrous, uncompromising motion.
Even the thought of bending her to his will sat ill in his stomach: to make her yield by force, to claim her because he could—he had wanted to possess, to make her understand, once. The idea now curdled into something he barely recognised, monstrous in its entitlement. He hated himself for it.
If she had not known—if she had not been complicit, if the queen he remembered had raged against this savagery as he did—then there was hope. Hope was a fragile thing, but it fed him the way the shadow fed his wounds. If she stood against them, if she used what authority she could still command, there might yet be a path to right this wrong. If she was the one who would howl at the mages' greed, then perhaps the darkness could be bargained with, taught a different song. She would be the key.
That thought—Eliza unclawed from complicity—was what kept him from loosing the thing inside. It kept his hands from breaking the shackles with the blunt, animal force he had used in battle. It kept him from burning the cells down around him andspilling the prisoners' bones into the air. It made him patient where his nature would have made him immediate.
He lay back against the stone and closed his eyes. The voices of the dead pressed close, low and eager. He let them nuzzle at the edge of his mind and would them to hold. He steadied the thread of shadow into a thin, cautious line and fed it where it would heal but not swallow. He whispered his own vow into the dark:If she is innocent, if she is not the hand that bound me—then there will be a way. And when I am free, I will find you and burn this corrupter from its stems.
The shadows answered with a murmur, neither promise nor refusal, only hunger and patience. He listened, and in the listening, he kept his hands quiet.
Chapter
Forty-One
