"Come on, little flame." He was already tugging me toward the chaos. "You can't just stand there looking broody. It's a party."
"I don't dance," I said, digging my heels in.
"Neither do I." He grinned, wide and reckless. "We'll figure it out together."
My next argument vanished as he dragged me into the mêlée.
It was less dancing and more controlled falling—his feet tangling with mine, my elbow catching his side, both of us stumbling over steps that didn't exist to music neither of us knew how to follow. He tried to spin me and nearly dislocated my shoulder. I tried to dip him as revenge and we both almost ended up in the fire.
I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. Brannick was wheezing, one hand braced on my shoulder, tears streaming down his cheeks.
"You're—" I gasped, "—a menace. An actual menace to anyone within arm's reach."
"You stepped on my foot six times," he shot back. "Six, Amaria. I counted."
"You have big feet. They're everywhere."
He threw his head back and laughed, and I laughed with him. And for one reckless, burning moment, the world was nothing but rebels and music and a warmth in my chest I refused to name.
My legs gave out before the music did. At some point I'd stopped dancing and started leaning, and then the leaningturned to sitting, and then I was on the ground with my back against a crate and my calves burning and my voice worn to a rasp.
The dancing slowed. The singing faded to humming, then to silence. One by one, rebels drifted away—some to sleep, some in pairs with tangled hands and shy smiles that made me look anywhere else.
By the time the bonfire had burned down to embers, only a handful of us remained.
We'd dragged ourselves closer to the fading heat, sprawled on bedrolls and overturned crates, passing a skin of ale between us like a peace offering. An easy silence that only happened when everyone was too tired to pretend.
Brannick was telling a story—something about a patrol gone wrong, a goat that had somehow gotten loose in the tunnels, and a very angry Dreadscale covered in mud. The details kept changing every time someone interrupted him, but it didn't matter. The point wasn't the tale. The point was the way his voice rose and fell, the way Serenya kept snorting into her cup, the way Maxx watched her, his own smile anchored entirely to hers.
It wound down eventually, dissolving into scattered chuckles and easy silence. Someone passed the skin again. The embers popped and settled.
Brannick shifted, moving from his spot across the fire to drop beside me. Close enough that our shoulders touched. The fire’s glow softened the hard edges of his face, made him look younger somehow. Less like a soldier, more like the male he might have been in a kinder world.
He held out a canteen. Didn't say anything. Just offered it, the way he had that first night in the Ruined City—when I'd refused, when I'd pulled my own from my belt like his kindness was a trap I couldn't afford to spring.
He'd never pushed. Never commented. Just kept offering, every time, like he had all the patience in the world for me to catch up.
My fingers closed around the canteen.
Brannick's eyes met mine and they sparkled in surprise. He didn't make a big deal of it. Didn't grin or nudge me or crack a joke. Just gave me a small nod, like he understood exactly what this was.
The water was cool and sweet. I drank deeply, then handed it back.
"Took you long enough, little flame," he said quietly. But he was smiling.
The Veil still drummed in my bones. It always did. But tonight, surrounded by firelight and laughter and people who felt less like strangers with every passing hour, it didn't feel quite so loud.
Chapter 29
OATH-STONE: TWO DAYS LEFT
AMARIA
I don't remember falling asleep.
One moment I was watching the embers die, Brannick's warmth solid beside me, the taste of ale still sweet on mytongue. The next, I was drifting—suspended in that fragile space between waking and dreaming where my body had forgotten to brace for the next hit.
The catacombs breathed around me. Dozens of bodies curled on bedrolls, their exhales rising in soft, overlapping rhythms—a tide of sleep rolling in and out. A child murmured in her sleep, pressed against her mother's breast. Brannick's arm was heavy across my shoulders, his breathing slow and even, his heartbeat a drum I'd started to time my own against.
