I won’t let him down.
The King strikes.
It’s fast—faster than something its size should be. Roots explode toward me from three directions at once, barbed and seeking. I dodge the first, parry the second, twist away from the third with inches to spare. The root that misses me slams into the ground hard enough to crack stone, sending fragments of bone flying.
I counterattack. My blade finds a gap between roots—a soft place where bark meets vine—and I drive it deep. Dark sap sprays. The King screams, a sound that’s more feeling than noise, rage and pain flooding my awareness in a wave that nearly drives me to my knees.
But I don’t stop. Can’t stop. Because stopping means dying, and dying means leaving Tharos alone in this grove with a monster that wants to consume him.
I promised him I’d finish this. I keep my promises.
FORTY-NINE
XELA
The fight is brutal.
The King doesn’t tire. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t feel pain the way living things feel pain. Every wound I inflict seems to enrage it rather than weaken it. Every cut I land just makes it angrier, makes its attacks more frantic, more desperate.
It throws everything it has at me—roots and vines and thorns erupting from its mass in endless waves. For every wound I inflict, it seems to grow three more limbs. For every opening I find, it closes two others. The grove becomes a nightmare of movement, of reaching tendrils and slashing barbs, of dark sap spraying through the air like blood.
I’m faster. More precise. My blades find weak points the King doesn’t know it has—the spaces where faces push against the bark, where the wood is thinnest, where decades of feeding have made the structure unstable. I leave gouges in its mass that weep dark sap. I sever roots that were reaching for my throat. I cut through vines that wrap around my arms and tear them away before they can tighten.
I fall into a rhythm. Duck. Slash. Roll. Strike. My body moves on instinct, responding to threats before my conscious mind canregister them. The training I received as a child, the lessons beaten into me by mercenary sergeants who had no patience for weakness—it all comes back in a flood of muscle memory and adrenaline.
But I’m also bleeding.
A thorn catches my left arm, opening a gash from elbow to wrist. The pain is distant, muted by the fury of the fight, but I feel the blood flowing. Feel my grip on my blade weakening as the muscle beneath the wound starts to fail.
Another thorn rakes across my thigh, deep enough that I feel the muscle tear. I stagger, catch myself, force my leg to keep working through sheer will.
A vine wraps around my throat before I can stop it, squeezing, cutting off air. The world starts to dim at the edges. I drive my blade through its base with my weakening left arm, feel the vine go slack, tear it free with my other hand. Gasp for breath that burns going down.
The King laughs.
YOU FIGHT WELL, LITTLE HUNTER. The voice echoes inside my skull, cold and amused despite the wounds I’ve inflicted. BUT YOU CANNOT WIN. I HAVE FED ON WARRIORS FOR CENTURIES. CHAMPIONS. HEROES. MONSTERS. YOU ARE NOTHING NEW. YOU ARE JUST ANOTHER MEAL I HAVEN’T FINISHED YET.
“Maybe not.” I duck under a root that would have taken my head, roll across bones that crack beneath me, come up slashing. My blade takes three vines in a single stroke. “But I’m still standing.”
FOR NOW. The King’s mass shifts, consolidating. I see it gathering itself for something bigger—something that will end this fight one way or another. It’s pulling in its scattered limbs, concentrating its power, preparing for a final assault. YOUR WARDEN IS DYING. I CAN FEEL HIS LIFE FADINGWITH EVERY BREATH. WHEN HE IS GONE, THERE WILL BE NOTHING TO STOP ME FROM CLAIMING YOU AS I CLAIMED HIM. AS I CLAIMED YOUR CYRILLA.
I risk a glance back. Just a moment—half a second—to see Tharos slumped against the altar, his bark-scars split and weeping, his breathing shallow and labored. He looks broken. He looks like he’s already given everything he has.
But his eyes are open. And they’re fixed on me.
“I’m not leaving you.” I don’t know if I’m talking to him or myself. “Whatever happens. I’m not leaving.”
His lips move. I can’t hear what he says—the King’s roar drowns out everything else—but I can read the shape of it.
Finish it.
I turn back to the King. And I do something I’ve never done before.
I stop calculating.
I’ve spent my whole life planning. Measuring odds. Figuring out the smart play, the safe play, the play that keeps me alive even when everything else goes wrong. It’s kept me breathing through situations that should have killed me a dozen times over. It’s the reason I’m still standing when so many others have become part of the forests and dungeons they tried to clear.
But right now, planning isn’t enough. Right now, I need something more.
