Snow still clung to the ruined granary where Malcolm had stood, and the air tasted of iron and cold. Darius’s hand closed on the hilt until his knuckles blanched; the white-flamed sword sang faintly in the hush, an undernote that made the hair along his forearm lift.

  “What good is a sword to a witch?” he said, disbelief and something sharper—hurt—edging his voice.

  Selene’s eyes did not flicker away from the steel. “My father was a Warlock,” she said simply.

  Around them, a dozen faces shifted—Isolde’s composed, Eryndor’s startled, the Inquisitors’ hard. Eryndor blinked, confusion folding his features into a question.

  Aelun’s laugh was soft as he looked at the confusion on the young Saint's face. “Warlocks are what you might call magic-swordsmen,” he explained. “There are three rough paths: knights bind Vaylora to muscle and bone for strength; mages bend Vaylora into spells; warlocks or magic-swordsmen—weld both. They move steel with sorcery and sorcery with steel. It’s rarer than snow in summer. Few touch it, fewer master it. Even Saints and Witches, who are blessed with Vaylora far beyond normal limits, rarely practice this field.”

  Isolde stepped forward, voice patient but edged with the weight of long study. “It is dangerous,” she added. “It requires discipline of mind and body. A single misstep burns the wielder as surely as the foe. Saint Augustine is the most powerful Magic-Swordman in the Empire. But he suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Emperor of Altheryon in a duel.”

  Eryndor’s eyes widened, and he looked over at Selene. She shared blood with the Strongest Witch and the strongest magic-Swordsman, the Warlock Emperor.

  Selene’s jaw tightened. “My father was the strongest Warlock to walk this world, but he is gone now,” she said, voice low. “Know my grandfather is the greatest known Warlock. That sword,”—she jabbed a finger toward Devotion—“was made by my mother for a magic-swordsman, not for an Inquisitor, not for a glorified Knight. Give it back.”

  Darius’s laugh came out like a snapped rope. “I nearly bled myself to death to make it mine,” he barked. “I earned it—”

  “You bound it,” Selene cut him off, voice hard as flint. “You didn’t earn it. You clamped chains on its mouth. You never asked it. You never listened. You only wrapped it until it stopped speaking. I’ve heard it cry since the moment you drew it. It hates you. It doesn’t belong to you. You don't deserve it.”

  For a long instant, he only stared—at her, at his own hands, at the bright pulse along the blade. He had known the temper of Devotion: the way the metal responded, the way it seemed to judge the hand that held it. But he had never considered that it had a voice he might hear. Shame moved through him in hot, awkward waves; pride bristled in the same chest like an old scar.

  “I’ve heard that before—‘you don’t deserve it,’” he said, tone brittle. “I’m tired of hearing it. This sword is mine. End of story.”

  Selene’s mouth flattened. She reached for him with a motion that was neither plea nor demand but something in between: her palm lifted, fingers splayed,

  "Devotion, come." She might call the thing by name. The air shivered. For half a breath, the sword jerked—magnetized, like a thing pulled by old affinity—toward her across the shimmer of the clearing. It snapped back and settled in Darius’s grip; he squeezed the hilt until pain hit the base of his thumb.

  “If you loved it so much,” he said, voice tight, “what took you so long to find it?”

  The sword stilled. For an instant, the white flame along its fuller winked like a reply. It remained in Darius’s hand.

  Selene’s face flamed. “I looked,” she said, fury searing low. “It was my prime objective. I gave up searching the kingdom when I found no trace of its signature. I thought it lost.”

  She then had a moment of realization. Her head whipped toward Aelun. In a movement too quick for many to follow, she reached him and shoved, hard—more insult than force—a gesture that left the elf off-balance.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she spat. “You son of a— I don't know how Garran got it, but you helped him hide it, didn’t you?”

  Aelun did not flinch from the accusation. He showed no surprise—only a shade of tiredness. “I did,” he admitted quietly.

  Selene’s hand snapped back as if to slap him, then closed into a fist that shook. She looked stricken for a breath, then furious. “You had no right,” she said, raw.

  “I had reason.” Aelun’s voice was measured. “Your grandmother and you are not trained as magic-swordsmen. Devotion is made to be borne by someone who can answer its voice with the same kind of song. If it were discovered by the wrong hand—if it chose madness over discipline—it would become a blade that kills its bearer. Garran hid it because he thought it safer in the hands he trusted.”

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  “Trust?” Selene hissed. “So you trusted the enemy of my family to hide my family’s blade from me?”

  Aelun’s eyes were steady. “I trusted my judgement, and I still do.” He inclined his head. “You are not a Warlock, Selene, and your father is gone. The Sword would rust otherwise.”

  “Neither is he!” Selene shouted as she pointed towards Darius.

  “Yet.” Aelun said as a fact. “If you weren’t biased you would see the potential he has for it as well.”

  Selene let out a bitter, humorless sound. “Well Cassian IS one,” she snarled, sharp as a thrown knife. “Perhaps I’ll give it to him as part of the dowry, or to my grandfather as tribute. Or hand it to someone who can keep it from fools.”

  Aelun’s mouth curved. “Would something you made not be more meaningful? Your magiccrafting is spoken of as much as your mother’s. If you made something—”

  “Don’t,” Selene warned, half-laughing, half-snapping. “One day you’ll have to pick a side.”

  “Perhaps,” Aelun said. “But not today.”

  She turned away, shoulders rigid. The clearing felt suddenly smaller, as if the world had wedged tight around this single argument. Darius’s throat worked; then, before anyone could speak, she took two long strides and stopped.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Darius called.

  “To put my rage to use,” she said without turning. The group could see the flare at her jaw—the bright edges of a plan forming. “To destroy Malcolm.”

  She threw her staff forward. It slammed into the air, rooted to some invisible axis, and she leapt—standing, not sitting—on its shaft, the pose as wrong as it was graceful. The staff shivered, threaded with Vaylora, and rose. Around her, the air whined—no longer the polite hush of courtly magic but a blade-edge confidence.

  “We don’t even know where to look,” one of the Inquisitors objected.

  Selene’s lips thinned. “When I performed the Visions of Past spell, I wove a tracked spell on top of it.” Her eyes met Darius’s. “Everyone who was in the spell's range when it was cast is marked. I can follow them to the ends of the world for two days. I will find where he took the living.”

  Without notice, she took off with speed greater than when they left the capital.

  Darius’s eyes narrowed. The fight inside him curdled into a single bright purpose. “Follow.”

  Vaylora flared around him. He was gone—a sudden absence and then a blur—charging so fast that the snow exploded outward where his boots had been a breath before.

  Aelun glanced over his shoulder at the remaining Inquisitors with a half-smile. “Do try to keep up,” he called, and vanished into a gust that smelled of pine and rain, moving with a fluid grace that left no sound but a ripple through the trees.

  The Inquisitors swore as they drew in the Vaylora, they all ran forward harder and faster than their horses could take them. Calder looked at the Saints before taking off,

  "Can you keep up?" She asked.

  "We'll be fine," Isolde responded as she chanted a spell, and Eryndor followed suit. Their bodies rose slightly above the ground as if carried by the wind, and then with a gentle step, they were carried forward dozens of meters in the blink of an eye.

  — — —

  Far from ruined granaries and the pursuers’ flaring rage, in a room lit by greenish lamps and the glow of instruments that hummed like trapped insects, Malcolm watched the tiny figures move inside an orb. The sphere floated above its stand, its surface alive with captured weather—wind whirling in miniature, a flash of the white flame from Darius’s blade like a comet across its skin.

  He stood with his hands clasped behind him, expression thin as paper. In the corner, an array of glass cylinders stood lined like teeth, each one housing an impossible experiment: pale shapes folded in viscous fluid, instruments that faintly whined, notes of old arcana scrawled across blackened paper tacked to the bench.

  “You were marked,” said a voice from the doorway, soft and composed.

  The woman remained in the shadows. Her voice was old-money silk, trimmed with the kind of patience that has seen empires crumble into useful ruins.

  “I know,” Malcolm said. He turned the orb so that Selene’s bright path was traced like a scar across its surface. He smiled—a quick, delighted slash. “Curiosity, my lady. I wanted to see what made them speak of her with both loathing and a kind of reverence. She is everything the rumor promised and more.”

  “Of course she is,” the woman said. There was no warmth in it. “She is the thing we all reach for. Perfection.”

  “Perfection,” Malcolm echoed, but his tone undercut the word with something like disdain. “So now perfection is a series of accidents and happenstances? She was just lucky to be born with that assortment of blood.”

  He moved to the bank of glass, hand ghosting over each cylinder as if feeling for a pulse. In one, the thing inside turned—white hair dark against the fluid, features almost his but not quite. Veins like ink threaded the skin, a face half-formed with an expression of patient, terrible expectation.

  “I’m too close,” he said. The sentence was not a complaint so much as a fact. “A few more hours. If I walk now, I undo decades of work.”

  “If you die here,” the woman said, “we will lose you. A Point like you is not easily replaced.”

  Malcolm’s grin narrowed. “I can not be replaced, not by anyone, save for this.” He tapped the glass with the heel of his hand, the sound a small, satisfied percussion. “If this succeeds, I will gladly lay my life for it. I'll send it in my stead—let it be what I no longer can. It will carry my will.”

  The woman paused, weighing danger on a scale only she could read. “Very well,” she said finally. “I'll inform the others. I'll begin the process of storing and moving your research. Stall as long as you can.”

  “I will stall,” Malcolm promised. He watched, through the orb, the white streak that was Darius vanished into the trees following behind Selene. Then he looked back at the creature in the glass and smiled like a man who has learned to hunger for more than names.

  “If I must,” he murmured to the sleeping thing, “I will let that little witch take my head. I will taste the blade myself. But not yet.”