“That’s what you do with witches who disturb the dead.” I manage to push myself more upright against the wall, every muscle screaming. “I’ve seen the pyres. The Judgment Pyre, where condemned practitioners are executed by fire. You’ve probably burned dozens of my sisters.”
Silence stretches between us. Long enough that I wonder if he heard me. Long enough that I wonder if he’s pretending I’m not here, already deciding how best to drag me to the flames.
Then he speaks.
“You didn’t disturb them.”
His voice is a low rumble, rough from smoke and silence. He still doesn’t turn around.
“You let them speak. There’s a difference.”
I laugh before I can stop myself. It comes out harsh, broken, nothing like humor. “Is there? You heard what they said. I gave them voice, and they used it to attack you. To accuse you. To demand your blood.”
“They attacked me because I’ve been burning them without letting them finish.”
The words come slow. Heavy. Dragged up from a place deep inside him, a place he’s spent years trying to bury.
“I’ve been silencing grief that wasn’t ready to be silenced.” A long pause. His free hand rises to press against the leather armor over his heart. “And now an ancient force has figured out how to use that silence against us.”
My exhaustion recedes, pushed back by the urgency of his words. I force my trembling legs to support me, pushing away from the wall, crossing the ash-covered floor toward him.
“What do you mean?”
He turns.
The movement is sudden, almost violent—one moment facing the window, the next facing me, and I’m close enough now to see the exhaustion carved into his features. The linesaround his eyes. The gray threading through the black hair at his temples. The set of his jaw, tight with tension that has nothing to do with the revenants we left behind.
His gaze fixes on me with an intensity that steals the breath from my lungs.
I don’t step back.
“The dead who rose tonight weren’t random.” His voice is flat, controlled—the voice of a man giving a report. “They were soldiers. All of them. War dead from the old conflicts—the Third Border War, the Siege of Thornwall, the Ashfield Massacre. The ones we’ve been cremating for generations without rites or names or anything but fire.”
I think of the corpses in the Undercroft. The rotted uniforms from wars that ended before either of us was born. The rusted armor bearing insignia I didn’t recognize. The way they moved in unison, like an army remembering its training even in death.
“You’re saying they’re organized.”
“They’re not random restless spirits.” His jaw tightens. “They’re being gathered. Shaped. Turned into a weapon.”
ELEVEN
ARADYA
The memory surfaces through my exhaustion—the moment in the Mourning Crypts when Kellan Venn’s spirit shifted. When his voice deepened and changed, becoming vast and ancient and hungry. The harmonics that resonated in my bones. The presence that felt large enough to swallow the world.
“The voice I heard during the rite.” My own voice comes out steadier than I expect. “It spoke through the Venn boy. Used him as a channel—a door it was pushing open.” I pause, remembering. “And it knew your name. It wanted me to find you.”
His nostrils flare. “And you did.”
“Which means whatever it is, it’s intelligent enough to manipulate.” I stop close enough to feel the heat of his grief radiating outward. “Smart enough to use my magic as a channel. Smart enough to?—”
He cuts me off with a sharp intake of breath.
His hand presses harder against the leather armor over his heart, fingers digging in. Pain flickers across his features—brief, intense, immediately suppressed with the discipline of a man who has trained himself to ignore his own suffering.
But I saw it. The raw edge before the walls came back up.
“What is it?”