“That Torval is waiting. That he has words he never got to speak.” The syllables emerge barely above a whisper. “That if I bring you to him, he’ll tell me how to stop the King.”
“And you believe it?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He finally turns, and I see the devastation in his expression—the fractures in the armor he’s worn for so long. “My brother died hating me. The last words we spoke were anger and accusation and things we couldn’t take back. For years, I’ve told myself that silence was better. That not knowing was easier than hearing whatever final truth he had for me.”
“And now?”
“Now the dead are speaking his name. Now they’re promising closure I don’t deserve. And I can’t—” His words falter. “I can’t do this alone. I can’t face what he might say.”
I reach up.
My hand moves without conscious decision, drawn by the mark, by the grief radiating from him in waves, by an instinct deeper than thought. My palm presses against his armored torso, directly over the place where his mark burns.
The heat is immediate. Scorching. The leather between us does nothing to diminish the intensity—if anything, it amplifies, the barrier making the pull stronger, making the magic strain toward completion.
His hand closes over mine. Not pulling away. Holding me there.
“The King told me Torval is among its thousands.” My words drop to a whisper—the register I use for channeling, for reaching through the Veil and touching what waits on the other side. “But the spirits that form the King aren’t fully absorbed. They’re still individual, still aware, still waiting for the closure they were denied.”
His breath catches. “You can reach him?”
“I can try.” The words come slowly, carefully. “The suppression wards are weakened by the mark—by your presence. And Torval... if he’s been waiting for you, if he’s been holding onto words he never got to speak, he’ll be reaching back. The dead always reach back when someone is finally ready to listen.”
His grip on my hand tightens. “What do you need?”
“Nothing.” I close my eyes, let the whispers press against the edges of my consciousness. The wards muffle them, but they can’t silence them completely—not with the mark burning between us, not with his grief so thick I can taste it on the back of my tongue. “Stay still. Let me find him.”
I whisper his brother’s name.
“Torval Stoneveil.”
The effect is immediate.
TWENTY-THREE
ARADYA
The mark blazes—both of them, mine and his, flaring with light bright enough to drive back the shadows of the cell. The suppression wards shriek, a sound of tortured metal that makes my teeth ache, and then they fail. Not gradually. Not partially. They collapse entirely, the runes going dark, the iron bars losing their hum of contained power.
The dead pour in.
Not physically—there are no corpses rising through the floor, no skeletal hands clawing at the walls. But I feel them. Thousands of spirits pressing against my consciousness, drawn by the breach in the wards, desperate for the channel I represent. They clamor for attention, for voice, for the closure they’ve been denied.
And among them, one voice rises clear.
Young. Male. Carrying the same inflections I’ve heard from Drokhar—the same cadence, the same rhythm of speech. But lighter. Less burdened. The voice of a man who died before life could harden him.
Sister.
The word resonates in my skull, and I realize he’s speaking to me. Not through me—not yet—but to me directly, soul to soul across the boundary between life and death.
Thank you for trying. He never would have asked on his own.
“He’s here.” The words come out strange—layered, harmonic, the first sign that a spirit is preparing to speak through me. “He’s ready.”
Drokhar’s hand spasms around mine. His other hand rises, grips my shoulder, steadies me as my body begins to tremble with the effort of channeling.
“Torval?” A rasp. Barely recognizable. “Brother?”