The name hits me like a blade between the ribs.
Varn is still talking, but I can’t hear her anymore. Blood roars in my ears, and my hands have gone cold despite the heat radiating from the dying pyre. Torval. The revenant knows mybrother’s name. The Gravetide King has been whispering about him through rotting mouths across the city, promising closure I don’t deserve.
“—been saying he has a message,” Varn finishes. She’s watching me with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before. Uncertainty. Concern. “Drokhar? Are you?—”
“I’ll handle it.” I force the words out rougher than I intended. “Dismissed, Captain.”
She hesitates, then nods. Her footsteps fade across the blackite soil.
Three days to prove the witch’s worth.
A revenant speaking my brother’s name.
And a mating mark that blazes beneath my armor, pulling me toward a woman I should have burned, reminding me with every pulse that I am no longer the weapon I trained myself to be.
The holding cells are beneath the compound, carved into the same blackite soil that covers the entire pit. I take the stairs down two at a time, my hand on my blade, my heart hammering against my ribs in a rhythm that has nothing to do with the mark.
Torval.
The name echoes in my head with every step. My brother’s face surfaces from the parade of the forgotten—younger than me, less serious, always laughing at things I didn’t find funny. He had our mother’s eyes. Dark amber, full of light. When he smiled, it was impossible not to smile back.
I haven’t thought about his smile in years. Haven’t let myself.
The cells are cold and dark, lit by a single torch guttering in its bracket. Four iron cages line the walls, designed to hold revenants until they can be examined and burned. Three are empty. The fourth?—
The revenant raises its head as I approach.
Its face is a ruin. Decades of decay have stripped away any identifying features, leaving only bone and dried sinew and the hollow sockets where eyes used to be. The armor fused to its torso is ancient—a style that hasn’t been worn since the border wars, covered in rust so thick it looks like dried blood.
Its mouth works. Opening. Closing. Forming shapes that might be words.
I stop three feet from the bars. Close enough to see the corpse-iron chains binding its wrists to the wall. Far enough to draw my blade if it lunges.
“You wanted to speak to me.” I let my voice echo off the stone walls. “Speak.”
The revenant’s mouth stops working.
For a long moment, there’s only silence—the drip of moisture from somewhere deeper in the cells, the distant crackle of the pyres above, my own breath harsh in my throat.
Then the corpse speaks.
TWENTY
DROKHAR
Not with its own voice. The sound that emerges is a harmony of a thousand dying breaths, deep and resonant, layered with echoes of every soldier the Gravetide King has absorbed. But beneath that chorus, one voice rises clear.
One voice I’d know anywhere.
One voice I’ve been hearing in my nightmares for longer than I’ve been a death warden.
“Brother.”
The word lands with the force of a physical blow. I stagger back a step, my hand dropping from my blade, my carefully constructed walls crumbling under the weight of a single syllable.
Torval’s inflection. Torval’s cadence. The way he always said that word—half affection, half exasperation, the tone of a younger sibling who loved me even when I made it difficult.
“You’re not him.” The words scrape out of my throat. “You’re the King. You’re using his voice?—”