He starts walking. I follow.
The forest shrieks.
Not the distantrumble I felt before. Not the gradual building of pressure in my skull. This is immediate, overwhelming—a wave of pain and rage that drops me to my knees.
Tharos catches me before I hit the ground. His hands are under my arms, holding me up, and the contact burns where it shouldn’t—not pain, something else.
“The Heartgrove.” His voice is barely recognizable, scraped raw. “The siege engine has reached the outer boundary. The runes are active.”
Blood wells dark from the wound in his shoulder. He presses his palm against the puncture, and I watch the skin begin to knit. Not fast, but faster than any wound I’ve ever seen heal.
“The forest,” I say. “It’s healing you.”
“One of the benefits of the binding.” His voice is dry. Almost amused. “The forest keeps me alive. Needs me alive. As long as I’m bound to Briargrave, I can survive injuries that would kill anyone else.”
“And if you weren’t bound?”
The almost-amusement fades. “Then I’d be one more body on the forest floor.”
I shouldn’t care. He’s still my target. The contract is still valid—more valid, now that the Consortium has made their intentions clear. If I kill him, I can still collect. Still disappear. Still become someone who isn’t standing in a forest that eats people, holding up an orc who should be my enemy.
Instead I’m cataloguing the way his breathing has steadied. Noting the point where his weight shifts from mine back to his own. Taking up exactly as much of my attention as the siege engine moving toward the Heartgrove.
“Accelerate,” he says. “The fire weapons are clearing a path faster than I expected. And now that the scouts are dead...”
“The main force will know we’ve hit their scouts. They’ll accelerate.”
“Yes.”
We should move. He knows it. I know it. Neither of us moves yet.
“The Consortium,” he says finally. “We can stand here, or we can figure out how to stop them. Your choice.”
A flicker crosses his expression. Almost a smile, though it doesn’t quite form.
We turn toward the distant glow of fire. The siege engine is closer now—I can hear its runes crying out, can feel the wrongness of its magic pressing against my skin.
“There’s a path,” Tharos says. “Through the bone hollows. It’ll bring us up behind their main force.”
“Then let’s go.”
He leads. I follow.
ELEVEN
THAROS
They know what sleeps here.
The dying hunter’s words circle through my skull like carrion birds, refusing to settle. The Consortium doesn’t just want me dead—they want what I’ve been containing. They want the Thorn King. They’ve been planning this for years, building toward this moment, and I didn’t see it coming.
A lifetime of vigilance, and I missed the blade aimed at my throat.
The bone hollows open before us, a descent into the earth that smells of old death and older memories. I move through the entrance without slowing, trusting the woman to follow. She does. I can feel her heartbeat through the forest’s awareness—steady, controlled, faster than it should be given what she just witnessed.
She watched me lose control. Watched the King wear my body like a puppet. And instead of running, she put a blade to my throat and talked me back.
The knowledge sits strangely in my mind, refusing to settle into any category I understand.
