They left Malcolm’s castle beneath a sky the color of rust.

  The last of the Kindred died without ceremony. No hymns. No prayers. Only steel and breath and the dull thud of bodies hitting stone. Blood ran in narrow rivulets down the steps and pooled in the cracks where moss once clung green; by the time the survivors were gathered, the ruin stank of singed hair and alchemical sour.

  Darius gave the orders in a low, steady voice, as if speaking any louder might crack what resolve the day had left them. “Form columns. Wounded in the middle. Keep to the road.”

  Calder and Aelun swept the corridors one final time, boots crunching glass, breaking any tools or vials that still hummed with faint, malign life. Isolde moved through the makeshift laboratory with her jaw set and her eyes bright with a fury she’d not yet found words for. She paused once, briefly, at the slab where a young woman had lain. The table was clean now, scrubbed of gore; absurdly clean. Isolde’s hands flexed, empty, as though still feeling the memory of blood on her palms.

  Outside, survivors huddled beneath smoke-stained cloaks, faces chalky with fear and travel. Children blinked at the torchlight. A mother stood rigid as a spear, refusing to put down the bundle she carried even when her arms trembled. When Selene passed, the woman’s mouth drew into a thin, knife-line, and she turned the baby’s face away.

  Selene said nothing.

  If she noticed the flinches, the small recoils as she moved through the crowd, she gave no sign. Her golden eyes were unreadable. She checked the weight of the satchel slung at her hip, the one that now held Malcolm’s hidden notebooks—thin folios tucked into vent-ducts, micro-etched panes slid behind false plates, a ledger inked in a steady, obsessive hand. Every time Darius looked at that satchel, a heat rose behind his eyes he could not name.

  They set out at dusk.

  It was a long walk to the Sanctum’s church in the neighboring valley—longer with the wounded, longer still with the hush that fell over them like frost. The Inquisitors took the vanguard and the rear while the Saints walked among the survivors, murmuring comforts, bearing weight, steadying. Darius took the middle, matching his stride to an old man’s limping pace. He felt Selene’s presence some distance behind.

  At a narrow ford, they paused. Eryndor, flushed from the effort of lifting a collapsed cart, stood aside to let Selene pass first. She waded through without a glance toward him.

  Tomas watched this from the bank with a sidelong smile. “There it is,” he murmured to Calder as the water sheened around her legs. “If frost were a woman.”

  Calder didn’t rise to it. “Save the chatter,” she said. “Watch the tree line.”

  So they moved, silent save for the rasp of leather and the cough of the wounded. Every mile they put between themselves and the castle only seemed to widen the space between Selene and the rest; a gap measured not in feet, but in the way men kept their hands near hilts and eyes fixed anywhere but on her.

  They reached the church near noon the following day—a modest stone thing stitched to the bones of a larger ruin, its crown-of-thorns sigil newly painted, the gold not yet dulled by weather. Bells did not ring for them. But the sisters of the Sanctum opened the doors and took the survivors in. Bread appeared. Clean water.

  Darius stood in the nave long enough to watch the baby make a sound that was almost a laugh. Then he bowed to the abbess and turned back to the road.

  They did not linger.

  By nightfall, they had made camp in a copse of crooked pines. Fires went up in disciplined circles. The Saints took the furthest ring, their glow quiet and steady. Kaelen and Jareth sat close together, twin shadows, one restless, one silent. Sister Myrren kept to the edge of the light, quill scratching, her ledger balanced on her knees. Aelun produced a wineskin from somewhere and was punched in the arm by Calder, upset that she wasn't offered any. Above them, the clouds finally broke, revealing a hard scatter of stars.

  Darius leaned forward, his voice carrying just enough to settle the murmurs. “We need to speak of what happened in that place—and what we learned."

  A quiet hung, broken only by the crackle of pine resin.

  “Alright,” Tomas said, “What is there to discuss? Malcolm’s dead. The work dies with him.”

  Isolde answered before Darius could. Her voice wasn’t loud either, but it cut. “No, it's not that simple. He had a purpose.”

  A beat of silence, broken by fire-pop. Calder’s eyes flicked to her. “Purpose doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does,” Isolde said. “In his private lab, I saw a tank. Empty. The glass was beading fresh. It had been full not long before we got there.”

  Across the fire, Tomas made a noise like a scoff and a prayer all at once. “So something… left.”

  “Or was taken,” Isolde said. “Either way, that’s not an end. It’s a beginning.”

  “What is going on then?” Jareth asked quietly, the words cutting sharper for how little he usually spoke.

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  Aelun chuckled and raised his chin toward the dark. “Ask her.”

  A dozen heads turned, some sharply, some with the reluctance of men glancing toward a cliff’s edge. Selene sat in the branches of a bent pine a little ways off, one leg dangling, the other drawn beneath her. The firelight caught in her hair like scattered coins and left her face in shadow.

  She looked down at them and saw the faces—disgust in some, weariness in others—and the corner of her mouth lifted without humor. “You’ll sprain something,” she said. “Staring so hard.”

  Darius stood, dusted ash from his cloak, and walked to the edge of the light. “Would you come down?” he asked, voice even. “Join the conversation.”

  Her gaze slid from him to the others and back. “Can your men stomach it?”

  “It is… difficult,” Tomas said, each word chewed dry. “To stay near someone who counts the lives of ordinary folk as noth—”

  “Enough,” said Saint Eryndor, and the word rang like a struck plate. The young saint rose from his seat and faced the Inquisitors with an expression Darius had only ever seen on older men. “Is that truly what you believe?”

  Confusion rippled, then a simmering shame. Eryndor didn’t give it time to cool. “The girl with her insides on the slab—Selene shielded her when the while we were attacked. After everything was done, she was the one who put her together again. Isolde and I tried. We were found wanting. She wasn’t.”

  Isolde nodded once, sharply. “Without her, that girl dies.”

  Calder pitched in, low and certain. “And not one of the survivors was touched by the meteors she called down. Not one.” Her gaze slid to Selene. “That’s not luck.”

  “It was a miracle of the goddess,” Tomas said, half-defiant, half-hopeful.

  “Miracle,” Calder said, “or precision.”

  Selene’s voice drifted down like cold water. “What’s the difference?”

  Tomas inhaled to answer and found Darius instead, his voice quiet. “Actions speak louder than words.”

  Selene held his look for a breath, then another. Her eyes flicked to Devotion at his side. She had shouted for everyone to hear that he was unworthy of that blade, but he had proved otherwise. “Indeed, they do.”

  “Come down,” Darius said again. “Please.”

  She didn’t climb so much as she unhooked herself from the tree. The air took her weight easily; pine needles trembled. She drifted to earth. When her boots touched dirt, the firelight struck gold across her eyes.

  “Malcolm,” she said without preface, “was attempting to make a perfect being.”

  A grunt. A scoff swallowed back—Kaelen’s this time, sharp with disbelief.

  “With demon blood,” she added. “The tank was no baptismal font. It was a cradle.”

  “Then why,” Tomas snapped, anger stiff in his shoulders, “do you look so untroubled?”

  Selene laughed—brief and bright. “Because a cradle for a devil is a problem for the Church before it’s a problem for me.”

  A murmur like brushfire rolled through the campsite. Darius didn’t miss the way Eryndor’s head turned, watching men’s faces. Sister Myrren’s quill scratched even faster. There was no way she would miss the chance to write down every bit of knowledge this woman would share.

  Selene’s laugh died as quickly as it had come. “But he wasn’t working alone.”

  The air thinned.

  “Based on the notes he left,” she continued.

  “You read them already?” Darius asked. “All of them? When?”

  “As I found them.” She lifted one shoulder, a small, unconcerned motion that made a few men bristle. “Pages speak if you know how to listen while you run.”

  She didn’t give them time to marvel at her brilliance and continued. “He was part of a circle, a coven.”

  The word fell and kept falling. Aelun’s smirk vanished. Jareth cursed under his breath.

  Darius steadied the group the only way he could: with knowledge. “Witches who bind themselves in a circle can pull power from the coven itself—more than any single vessel can hold. What one cannot do alone, ten can.”

  Darius’s jaw tightened. His fingers curled harder around Devotion’s hilt, the weight of it reminding him why Malcolm had fallen so quickly. “And Malcolm still fought like a butcher with a dull knife,” he said, though the words rang hollow — he knew it was the blade’s power, not his own, that had carved the difference.

  Selene’s gaze cut to him. “Not everyone can draw a circle’s full strength. That too is a talent. And he had already spent what skill he had on whatever was in that tank.”

  She let the firelight play across her face, voice low and steady. “That is why I went after him first. Among the known sorcerers, Malcolm was by far the weakest. If he had broken you, there would be no hope against the others.”

  A cold clenched Darius’s stomach that no fire could answer. He looked around the circle and saw their faces: brave, yet frightened.

  He drew breath. “We return to the Capital,” he said, and every back straightened instinctively at the word. “This is beyond us.”

  Eyes swung to him, then—some reluctantly—to her. Darius turned to meet Selene’s gaze and lifted a brow. “Do you disagree?”

  She sighed as if the night were a cloak that had grown too heavy. “I loathe admitting it,” she said, “but a sorcerer circle is more than even I care to tangle with alone. We'll need more bodies.”

  Darius nodded once, decision set. “We break at dawn. Two watches rotate on the hour.” He let his voice carry. “Sleep if you can. Sharpen what you must.”

  Men stood, the conversation shredding into smaller threads as they moved toward their assigned fires. The night seemed to exhale. Stars wheeled imperceptibly on their cold hinges.

  When the circle had frayed into pairs and trios, Darius took up Devotion and crossed the camp again. Eryndor rose with him without being asked; so did Calder, Aelun, and Isolde. Kaelen muttered something to Jareth and reluctantly stayed behind. Sister Myrren followed at a distance, ledger hugged to her chest.

  They approached the tree where Selene had taken her seat again, higher this time, as though to reclaim the distance the conversation had burned away.

  “What now?” she asked, not unkindly. Only tired. “More gratitude? More suspicion?”

  “Neither,” Darius said. “You promised us answers.”

  Her eyes narrowed—not in anger, but in calculation, like a scholar measuring the breadth of a page. She dropped lightly, boots whispering against bark, and for a heartbeat they were only five figures at the lip of a low fire, faces carve-lit by flame.

  “Fine,” Selene said, and the pines seemed to lean closer. “Ask your questions.”