But this feels different. The forest’s reaction is different. Not the coiled violence of anticipated battle, but unease. Dread. A sensation I haven’t felt in?—
The forest flinches.
It’s subtle. A ripple of unease passing through the root network, a tension in branches that have never known fear. The trees don’t flee—can’t flee—but they’re reacting to a presence. A threat that makes the ancient, violent, hungry forest of Briargrave shrink from something for the first time in centuries.
What have they brought?
I ease Xela off my shoulder, laying her gently against the bone-studded wall. She stirs but doesn’t wake—exhaustion has claimed her too completely. Good. She needs the rest.
I need answers.
Pressing my palm flat against the hollow’s floor, I reach through the roots. The bond is muted here, weakened by whatever quality makes this space resistant to the King’s influence, but it’s enough. I can feel the shape of what’s coming. Fifty soldiers, maybe more. Fire weapons. Silver-edged blades. The standard Consortium armament for dealing with orc-kind.
And a device.
At the center of their formation, carried on a wagon reinforced with runes that burn against my awareness—a device. Old. Wrong. The kind of wrongness that makes even the Thorn King stir uneasily in its throne of corpse-wood and root.
Another Binding Breaker? No. The first one was destroyed, and these things aren’t easy to make. This is different. Smaller. More focused.
Not designed to break the binding between warden and forest.
Designed to break the binding between warden and self.
They built two. The Engine and the Breaker—twin attempts at the same problem from researchers who couldn’t agree on which binding mattered more. We destroyed the cheaper one. They were never going to leave the second one in storage.
I pull my awareness back, my hand lifting from the floor. My heart is pounding—when did that start?—and my mouth has gone dry.
“Tharos?” Xela’s voice, sleep-rough but alert. She’s watching me with those sharp gray eyes, her hand already moving toward her blades. “What’s wrong?”
“The Consortium.” I force my voice steady. “They’re coming back. With reinforcements.”
“How many?”
“Fifty. Maybe more.” I push myself to my feet, start gathering my discarded armor. “And they’ve brought a device. Something that burns against my awareness the way poison burns skin. Something the roots pull back from.”
Xela is up now too, wincing as the motion pulls at her wounds. She reads my face.
“That bad?”
“I’ve never felt the forest shrink from anything before.”
We dress in silence. The hollow feels different now—not a shelter but a trap. If the Consortium finds us here, we’ll have nowhere to run.
“How long until they reach us?”
“Hours. Maybe less, if they know where to look.” I clasp the last of my armor into place, flex my hands in their vine-wrapped bracers. The binding pulses through me, weaker than usual but still present. Still mine. “We need to move.”
“To where?”
Good question. The Heartgrove is the obvious answer—my hold on the binding is strongest there, and the King’s power could help us fight. But the Heartgrove is also what theConsortium wants. Leading them directly to it would be playing into their hands.
“There’s a place. Near the boundary, where the old paths cross. If I can get there before they do, I can control the approach. Force them through the thornpaths I choose.”
“And if you can’t?”
“Then we improvise.” I look at her—at the woman who kissed me in a bone pit, who fought for me when the world said she should run, who’s standing here with her wounds barely closed asking how we’re going to survive instead of whether we’re going to survive.
She was never going to leave. We both knew that.
