Not arguing anymore. Not pacing. Moving with purpose, his presence growing clearer with each passing moment as the distance between us shrinks.
The guards in the corridor stiffen. I hear their footsteps quicken, hear the clatter of weapons being drawn, hear voices raised in challenge that are quickly silenced by a rumble I feel in my bones even through the suppression wards.
Then the door to my cell block crashes open.
And the Ashwalker stands in the entrance, his blade drawn, his gaze finding mine through the darkness with unerring accuracy.
“Time to go.” He strides toward my cell. The voice of a man who has decided to burn every bridge behind him.
The mark blazes between us, and for one breathless moment, I forget about the King, the brother, the trap that’s waiting to spring.
EIGHTEEN
DROKHAR
The mark beneath my armor pulses with steady heat, a reminder of the woman who waits in the Mausoleum Prison. I left her there this morning—delivered her to the guards myself, iron restraints biting into her wrists, her expression unreadable in the torch-light. The walk through the city was silent. The dead rose on every street, watching us pass, their rotting mouths forming her name in an endless whisper.
Aradya. Aradya. Aradya.
She didn’t seem afraid. That bothered me more than the corpses.
A woman facing imprisonment in an iron sarcophagus, surrounded by suppression wards designed to silence everything she is, should be terrified. Instead, she’d walked beside me with that unnatural stillness she carries—the patience of someone who has learned to wait for the dead, and found that the living are rarely worth hurrying for.
I wanted to tell her I’d get her out. Wanted to promise I’d find a way to prove her usefulness to the Council, to keep her alive long enough to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do about the Gravetide King.
I didn’t say any of it. The words felt hollow in my mouth, and she deserves better than hollow promises.
The mark intensifies beneath my sternum, and I press my palm against the leather covering it. The brand has been burning since the moment it manifested—hotter in Blackreach than anywhere else, responding to the death magic that saturates every stone and shadow in this city.
She’s underground. In the prison. Still alive.
My fingers curl against my armor, pressing harder, as if I could reach through leather and bone to touch the brand itself. The heat responds to the pressure—spreads outward from my sternum in waves that make my breath catch.
I’ve never experienced anything like this. Not in forty years of carrying a dormant mark. The brand has always been a scar—nothing more. Now it’s a beacon. A compass. A chain that binds me to a woman I barely know and can’t stop thinking about.
The relief that knowledge brings is dangerous. I’ve seen what the mating mark does to orcs—watched warriors who were stone-cold killers become desperate fools the moment their mark found its match.
I’d accepted that such bonds weren’t for men who light pyres for a living. Accepted that my fate was to stand alone at the edge of the flames, feeding the fire until it consumed me too. The mark manifested when I was nineteen—a faint burn over my heart that never quite healed—but it stayed dormant. Forty years of silence. I stopped hoping a long time ago.
Now it blazes for a mourning witch.
“You’re thinking too loud.”
Captain Varn’s voice cuts through my brooding. I don’t turn around—I heard her approaching across the blackite soil, her boots crunching on ground so saturated with cremated remains that nothing will ever grow here again. She stops beside me, her scarred face angled toward the dying embers of the Great Pyre.
A decade of service has etched lines around her eyes that weren’t there when she started. Her hair is more gray than brown now, cropped short to keep it out of the flames. The scar that runs from her left temple to her jaw is a souvenir from a revenant that got too close before I could sever its spine.
She’s never questioned my orders. Not once in ten years.
Until now.
“The Council wants to know why the mourning witch is still alive.”
I keep my gaze on the pyre. “Because she might be useful.”
“Useful.” Varn’s tone is flat. Skeptical. “The corpses respond to her voice. If we can use that?—”
“We can.” The lie comes smooth, practiced. I’ve been lying to the Council for days now, weaving half-truths and misdirection to buy time for a woman I should have burned the moment I found her. “She understands the dead in ways we don’t. The Gravetide King is using accumulated grief as a weapon. She might be able to disrupt that.”