I took the first watch without asking.
He doesn’t sleep. But he does close his eyes, and the lines around them ease slightly, and whatever communion he has with the roots beneath us seems to settle into something quieter. I watch the entrance to the hollow and try not to think about how strange it is to feel safer with him nearby.
The scouts come at mid-morning.
Eight of them, moving through the forest with the careful discipline of people who’ve been trained to treat every shadow as a threat. They’re better than the hunters I’ve encountered before—lighter armor, no fire weapons, moving in a spread formation that makes them harder to ambush.
Tharos and I watch them from the canopy, lying flat against a broad branch twenty feet up. His hand is on my shoulder—not restraining, just grounding—and the warmth of it registers at every inch of contact between us.
The scouts pass below us and don’t look up.
“They’re pathfinders,” he murmurs against my ear. “Sent to verify the target before the siege engine arrives.”
“The siege engine.” I keep my voice to a breath. “That’s what they’re calling it?”
“The Binding Breaker. That’s what my awareness of the forest calls it. A device designed to sever the bond between warden and forest.” His voice is carefully neutral. “If it works?—”
“The King breaks free.”
“Yes.”
We wait until the scouts pass, then drop from the branch in silence. The thornpaths close behind us as we move, Briargrave sealing our trail.
“They’ll reach the main force soon,” he says. “Report what they’ve seen. The main force will push harder once they know I’m aware of them.”
“How many are coming behind them?”
“More than fifty now. The forest counts seventy-three heartbeats heading toward the Heartgrove.” Something hard surfaces in his expression. “Your Consortium has been busy.”
“A larger group than the first. Reinforcements must have arrived at the boundary.”
I walked into this forest carrying their seal and their promises, and now their hunters are about to stumble into a fight they can’t win.
“The eight scouts,” I say. “Can you stop them without?—”
The forest erupts.
Not a sound—a feeling. Pressure in my chest, sudden and overwhelming, like the moment before a lightning strike. Tharos stumbles, one hand slamming against a tree trunk to keep his balance. The bark beneath his palm splits, dark sap welling up.
“The scouts.” His voice is wrong—thin, strained. “The forest just took them.”
I look back. The path we came from has sealed completely, thorns interlocked so tightly I couldn’t push through them with a blade. Somewhere in the undergrowth behind us, eight people have just died.
“Tharos.”
“I know.” He straightens, but his eyes are distant. Listening. “The King. It’s pleased. I should have?—”
“You couldn’t have stopped it from here.”
“No.”
A pause—longer than the others. “One of them was still breathing when the forest reached him. They carry their last words in the roots, sometimes, long enough for me to read.” His mouth thins to a hard line. “He knows what sleeps in the Heartgrove. They all do. This was never a bounty hunt. The Consortium wants the King—what it can offer them.”
“But I’ll need to work harder to keep it contained while the main force pushes closer.”
We move again, faster now, the thornpaths opening and closing ahead of us in a rhythm that feels almost like running.
NINE
