“Explain.”
“You want a voice.” I sheathe my blade. The scrape of iron against leather sounds impossibly loud in the sudden silence. “A channel. Someone to carry your words to the living. I’m not a mourning witch, but the mating mark has changed me. I can feel the dead now—their presence, their weight, their need to be heard.”
I take another step forward, closer to Aradya’s unconscious form.
“If you need an anchor, take me. Let her go, and I’ll stay in her place.”
The King tilts its composite head, officers’ faces sliding against each other as it considers my offer.
“You would do that? Trade your life for a woman you’ve known for days?”
“I would trade my life for the woman the mark chose.” I meet the King’s silver eyes without flinching. “And I would do it knowing that she’ll find a way to destroy you. Because that’s what mourning witches do—they give the dead what they need, and then they let them go.”
The words flow easier now, carrying the certainty I’ve found in the past few days. The certainty Aradya gave me when she spoke Torval’s name and let my brother finally say goodbye.
“She’ll give your soldiers their final words. She’ll let them rest at last. And when they’re gone—when there’s nothing left to fuel your kingdom but your own endless hunger—she’ll whisper you into oblivion.”
The King is silent.
For a long moment, nothing moves on the battlefield. The wind that doesn’t blow holds its breath. The flags hangmotionless. Even the distant sound of clashing swords—echoes of battles that ended centuries ago—falls silent.
Then the King laughs again.
But this time, there’s a different quality to the sound. Uncertainty. Doubt. The first cracks in three centuries of absolute conviction.
“You believe she can destroy me.”
“I believe she can save the dead who form you.” I take another step, close enough now to touch Aradya if I reached out. Close enough that the brand over my heart blazes in response to hers, twin marks burning through armor and skin and bone. “And once they’re saved, you won’t exist anymore.”
“An interesting theory.” The King moves closer, looming over me with its fifteen feet of fused bodies, its crown of broken blades catching the blood-red light. “But you assume I’ll let her go. You assume your sacrifice will mean anything when I can simply take both of you.”
“You could.” I don’t step back. Don’t flinch. “But you won’t. Because you’re curious. You’ve spent three centuries building this realm, gathering these soldiers, waiting for the moment when you could demand the justice you believe you’re owed. And now a man who has burned more of your subjects than any other is standing before you, offering to stay willingly.”
I spread my arms, leaving myself open. Vulnerable.
“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Acknowledgment. Someone to admit that what we did to the dead was wrong. Someone to pay the price willingly instead of being dragged down screaming.”
The King’s many mouths work silently, considering.
“So here’s my offer.” I lower my arms. “Take me as your anchor. Let her go. And spend however long you have left wondering whether you made the right choice.”
The silence stretches.
Then the King reaches toward me with a hand made of fused soldiers, fingers formed from merged knuckles and intertwined bones?—
And Aradya’s eyes snap open.
The markon her collarbone blazes with light that drives back even the blood-red sky.
She rises from the ground in a single fluid motion, her hair whipping in a wind that doesn’t exist, her eyes blazing with violet light that I’ve never seen before. Power pours off her in waves—not the gentle whispers she uses for channeling, but force vast and terrible, the full strength of a mourning witch who has spent her life holding back.
The corpses on the battlefield shiver. The waiting soldiers take a step back, their empty eye sockets suddenly uncertain. Even the King hesitates, its reaching hand frozen mid-motion.
“No one is staying here.”
Her voice carries harmonics that make the very ground tremble. It’s a whisper and a roar at once, soft enough to be intimate and loud enough to shake the foundations of this death-built realm.
“Not him. Not me. And not you.”