“Drokhar.” Varn turns to face me, and I’m forced to meet her gaze. Her expression is unreadable, but her words carry an edge I’ve rarely heard directed at me. “I’ve followed you into mass graves and burning pits and chambers where the dead rose screaming. I’ve never questioned your judgment.”
“But?”
“But I’m questioning it now.”
She gestures toward my armored torso—toward the faint glow bleeding through the leather where the mating brand burns against my skin.
“I saw the mark. On both of you.” Her words land like blows. “I know what that light means. I’m asking you—as your second, as your friend—whether your judgment is still sound.”
The honest answer is that I don’t know.
The mark has already changed me in ways I’m only beginning to understand. I’ve started noticing things I shouldn’t—the way light falls across the mourning witch’s face, the cadence of her voice, the stillness she carries like armor. I’ve started wanting things I’ve never let myself want. Her safety. Her presence. Her hand in mine, her body pressed against my side, her whispers filling the silence that has been my only companion for far too long.
Dangerous thoughts. Deadly thoughts. The kind that get death wardens killed when they hesitate at the wrong moment.
“My judgment is as sound as it’s ever been.” Not a lie. Not quite the truth either. “The witch knows how to speak to the dead. We need that knowledge. Whatever else is happening between us?—”
NINETEEN
DROKHAR
Istop. Force myself to start again.
“Whatever else is happening, it doesn’t change the fact that an entity is rising beneath this city. The mass graves are stirring. The war dead are organizing. We need every weapon we can get, and she’s the only one who understands what we’re fighting.”
Varn studies me for a long moment. The pyre crackles behind us, embers popping as they collapse into ash. Somewhere in the compound, a warden is sharpening a blade—the rhythmic scrape of steel on stone a sound I’ve heard a thousand mornings running.
Finally, she nods. Once. A concession, not an agreement.
“The Council has given you three days to prove her usefulness.” She clips the words. Professional. “After that, they’ll burn her whether you like it or not. High Arbiter Sevik has already ordered the Judgment Pyre prepared.”
Three days.
Seventy-two hours to find a way to stop the Gravetide King, prove the mourning witch’s value to a Council that sees her as a liability, and figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do abouta mating mark that has upended everything I thought I knew about myself.
“Understood.”
Varn turns to leave, then pauses at the edge of the blackened soil. Her shoulders are stiff, tension visible in the set of her spine.
“Drokhar?” She doesn’t turn around. “The revenant we captured in the lower districts. The one from the merchant square attack.”
I remember it. A soldier in ancient armor, its face so decayed I couldn’t determine race or age, its mouth opening and closing in words I couldn’t hear. We’d severed its spine to stop it from attacking, but it wouldn’t stay down—kept dragging itself forward with its hands, kept reaching for me specifically.
“What about it?”
“It’s been asking for you by name.” Varn’s tone is carefully neutral. “Says it has a message from its king.”
The mark responds beneath my armor. Not pain—recognition. The Gravetide King has been trying to reach me since the crypts, speaking through corpses and rising dead and whispers in the smoke. I’ve been avoiding it. Refusing to listen.
I can’t refuse anymore.
“Where is it?”
“Holding cells beneath the compound.” Varn finally turns, and I see fear in her expression—real fear, the kind she’s learned to hide after a decade of facing the risen dead. “It’s been talking for hours. Non-stop. The guards are refusing to go near it.”
“Talking about what?”
“You.” She swallows. “And someone named Torval.”