“I’m both.” The revenant’s hollow sockets fix on my face with unerring accuracy. “I’m the King and I’m Torval and I’m threehundred soldiers who died in the same mud and got dumped in the same pit. We’re all here, brother. We’ve been waiting.”
My legs won’t hold me. I sink to one knee on the stone floor, the cold seeping through my armor, the mark blazing beneath my breastbone with heat that feels like a brand being pressed to raw flesh.
“You died.” My voice fractures on the word. “You died, and I didn’t get there in time, and they burned you before I could?—”
“We know.” The chorus fades slightly, letting Torval’s voice rise clearer. “We felt it. The fire. The way our words turned to smoke before we could finish speaking them.”
“I’m sorry.” The apology tears out of me—years of suppressed guilt finding voice at last. “I’m sorry for what I said. For how we left things. For?—”
“We didn’t bring you here for apologies.” The revenant’s chains rattle as it leans forward, the empty sockets boring into me. “We brought you here because the mourning witch will die in three days unless you stop it. And you can’t stop it alone.”
I force myself back to my feet. My knees are shaking, but I lock them. Lock everything down. The way I’ve been doing since I first lit a pyre with a body on it and realized I’d have to do it again, and again, and again.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.” The revenant’s ruined mouth curves into a shape that might be a smile. “Really talk, brother. Not through this corpse, not through the King’s filters. Bring the witch to me. Let her channel what’s left of us. And I’ll tell you how to stop what’s coming.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then the King rises in three days regardless.” The chorus swells, drowning Torval’s voice for a moment. “The witch burns on the Judgment Pyre. And the mass graves beneath every city in the Veillands vomit forth their dead.”
The torch gutters. For a heartbeat, the cell plunges into darkness—and in that darkness, I see them. Faces in the shadows, mouths opening and closing, the accumulated dead of a thousand forgotten wars pressing against the veil between worlds.
The light returns. The faces vanish.
The revenant slumps in its chains, the King’s presence withdrawing like a tide going out.
But Torval’s voice lingers for one final moment, soft and sad and achingly familiar.
“We need to talk, brother. And I’ve been waiting a long time to say goodbye.”
Silence falls.
I stand in the cold beneath the Ash Pits, the mark burning over my heart, the weight of all those years of silence pressing down on my shoulders.
The witch. I have to get to the witch.
I have to bring her here, let her channel whatever remains of my brother, hear the words he never got to speak.
And I have to do it before the Council lights the Judgment Pyre.
Three days.
I turn and climb the stairs, leaving the revenant to its silence, carrying my brother’s voice with me into the ashen night.
The mark throbs beneath my armor.
She’s still alive. Still waiting.
I break into a run.
TWENTY-ONE
ARADYA
He comes to my cell at midnight.
I know it’s him before I see him. The mark beneath my collarbone flares with sudden heat, and the suppression wards carved into the iron bars of my sarcophagus flicker—a tremor in the magic that has been smothering me for days. The wards don’t fail. They never fail. But they stutter when he approaches, as if even ancient runes recognize the claim burning in his skin.