Chapter 9

  It was Vaeyra knocking on their door early the next morning. The lock was still fastened, yet Tivric heard the knob being tested—and only moments later the door swung open as Vaeyra announced her entrance.

  “I’m coming in,” she said, her tone playful.

  “Did you just pick the lock to our door, Vaeyra?” Tivric asked.

  “No,” Vaeyra replied innocently. “Why would you think that?”

  The three of them prepared quickly, packing their belongings and sharing breakfast in the common area. As they were heading out, the innkeeper called after them.

  “Something that belongs to you was left outside.”

  They exchanged puzzled looks, thanked him, and stepped out into the street. It was early, and Selenar had only just begun to glow again. The town lay quiet and empty. A lone guard slept upright at his post.

  In front of the inn sat a large pile of objects, huddled together as if carefully arranged.

  Vaeyra picked up a piece of parchment. A soft glow spread from her hands, illuminating it so Tivric and Skorval could see.

  Thank you for protecting us.

  Was scribbled onto the partchment

  Beneath the words were two crude drawings of rats holding swords—clearly the work of children.

  Surrounding where the note was resting were rations, tools, spare equipment, healing draughts—everything they might need for the road, even a pack to carry it all.

  “That was really nice of them,” Tivric said quietly.

  “I wish they’d drawn me,” Vaeyra muttered.

  “It’s on the back,” Tivric said. “They must’ve run out of room.”

  Vaeyra flipped the parchment over.

  “Oh,” she said, chuckling. “They are a lot better at drawing Grimtails.”

  Tivric and Vaeyra both laughed at the good intentioned Dawnborn drawing.

  “Skorval, ready to go?” Tivric asked.

  Skorval moved without a word. Quick—though not quite quick enough to fool fellow Grimtail. Tivric caught the motion as Skorval tried to quickly turn away to wipe his face… then his eyes.

  They rode on for two more days, giving the horses frequent rest and making camp well off the road each night. By Tivric’s reckoning, Solcaris was no more than two days ahead—the end of their mission.

  He could only hope the aid they brought back with them would reach the Burrows in time… and that the Burrows still stood.

  “Trouble,” Vaeyra said.

  Tivric and Skorval looked up. A large group of riders crested the road ahead—nearly twenty by count, all heavily armored.

  “Should we try to escape?” Skorval asked

  Vaeyra shook her head. “I don’t think our horses can outrun that many.”

  The three of them eased their mounts to a slower pace, bracing for what was coming.

  As the distance closed, the riders fanned outward, practiced and deliberate, surrounding Tivric, Skorval, and Vaeyra in a wide circle. Most remained mounted. A few dismounted.

  One of them helped a woman down from her horse. Her armor bore more symbols than the rest, the trim ornate and polished. She lifted the visor of her helm.

  “Greetings, lawbreakers,” she said calmly. “I am Vespera, High Warden of the Wardens of Dawn.”

  “We have broken no laws,” Tivric replied. He raised a seal, its markings clear. “We are diplomats of the Black Burn Burrows, bound for Solcaris on official business.”

  Vespera’s gaze flicked to the seal—then past it.

  “Perhaps not all of you,” she said. “But one among you has.”

  She motioned to a man standing slightly apart from the others—less armored, but unmistakably prepared. He raised his hands, and a blue geometric sigil began glow and unfolded floatingbetween them, sharp and luminous. When the spell resolved, he pointed directly at Skorval.

  Two soldiers stepped forward.

  Skorval did not resist. Instead, he reached into his pack—the same pocket Tivric had seen him check the night before—and withdrew a black crystalline stone. He placed it into the soldier’s outstretched hand.

  The soldier carried it to the spellcaster. The spellcaster casted another spell before looking up to Nyxana to confirm.

  “A Black Quiet,” the man announced. “He aids the undead.”

  Vaeyra stiffened. Her breath caught.

  “Seize him,” Nyxana ordered.

  The soldiers grabbed Skorval by both arms. He didn’t fight. He didn’t shout. He didn’t deny a thing.

  “Skorval!” Tivric shouted. “What is this? What’s happening?”

  “That’s a Black Quiet,” Vaeyra said, her voice tight. “A forbidden artifact. It masks the living from the undead. The undead will not attack its bearer. It’s given to agents of the Still Shadow.”

  “But he was attacked,” Tivric said desperately. “Just days ago!”

  Even as he spoke, doubt crept in. He had seen Skorval put the crystal back into his pack. Not worn. Not active. He intentionally did not carry it with him into battle.

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  Tivric looked at him.

  “I’m sorry, Tiv,” Skorval said quietly. “I was angry. Marn stood against the undead, and my parents died for it. And I hated the surface folk—for how they treated us all these years.”

  The pieces slid into place. Too easily.

  How Skorval always seemed to know when the attacks would come. His arguments with Marn. The insistence on letting the undead through the side tunnels.

  “I didn’t want more Grimtails dying for surface people,” Skorval continued. “I gave the Still Shadow information. I thought if the undead breached the outer tunnels, we’d stop fighting them. I thought… we’d survive.”

  Tivric felt sick.

  “But I was wrong,” Skorval said, guilt breaking through his voice. “Marn was right. Spending time up here… seeing these people… I was wrong.”

  Nyxana removed her helm fully.

  “For the crime of aiding the Still Shadow,” she said, “and for possession of a Black Quiet, you are sentenced to death.”

  A soldier shoved Skorval to his knees, pinning him there. Another stepped into the light, unsheathing a heavy blade of white and gold that hummed with authority.

  Vaeyra’s heart hammered—she barely had time to draw breath before Tivric blurred into motion, moving with a speed that defied the natural world.

  He hit the soldier hard, slamming him into the dirt with a bone-jarring thud. In one fluid motion, Tivric pinned the man’s chest beneath his foot, the point of his blade already biting into the guard’s throat.

  A heartbeat later, Vaeyra was a shadow at the executioner’s back. Her steel pressed so flush against his throat that the man was forced to crane his chin toward the sky, to keep from getting his thoat cut open.

  “Drop it,” she commanded.

  The heavy gold blade clattered to the dirt. In an instant, the air filled with the rasp of unsheathed metal as the knights dismounted and drew their steel—every last one of them, save for Nyxana.

  Tivric loomed over the guard he’d pinned, his sword held firm. The man’s eyes were wide with shock—his own blade still trapped in its sheath, and he could not draw his sword from this position.

  “You aren’t killing him without going through me first,” Tivric said, his voice flat and iron-hard. “By my count, there are twenty of you and three of us. But Grimtails are at their best when the odds are stacked against them.”

  He pressed his blade a fraction deeper. “Step back. Or I execute your man where he lies.”

  Vaeyra marveled at Tivric’s speed—he was a blur of lethal intent. As she held her ground, her own hair ignited with a golden radiance, shimmering like the star Selenar itself. Her blade burned with the same cold fire as she locked eyes with Nyxana, waiting for the woman to break the stalemate.

  “We will kill you all if we must,” Nyxana said, her voice like cracking ice.

  Looking at the knights, Tivric saw the flicker of fear in their eyes. They didn’t doubt her; they had clearly seen Nyxana discard the lives of her men as if they were nothing more than broken tools. Even more unsettling were the ones who remained oddly expressionless.

  Skorval rose slowly, his movements reluctant. He glanced at both Vaeyra and Tivric, who still stood between him and the Wardens on either side of him.

  “Tiv… let them have me. They don—”

  “No,” Tivric snapped, the word cutting through the air like a lash.

  Skorval met his eyes and froze. There was a fierceness there he rarely saw—anger, yes, but more than that. Resolve. It was the same look Tivric had worn when he’d gone back for Brimlow. That same stubborn defiance of fate.

  At that moment, Skorval was convinced Tivric was willing to die.

  “Fine,” Skorval said at last, a crooked, dangerous smile tugging at his lips as he unsheathed his twin blades. “We carved through twenty-five on our best Latchrun. This’ll be a walk in the park—with Vaeyra watching our backs.”

  Tivric and Vaeyra gave a sharp, synchronized nod.

  The warden that Vaeyra’s was holding hostage made a restless, careless twitch of his boots. Her sword didn’t flinch, but her voice drifted toward him, cold as a tomb.

  “Don’t,” she whispered.

  The steel in her hand began again pulse with a pale, hungry light. “When my blade glows like this, it carves through stone as if it were silk. I highly doubt your neck is sturdier than stone.”

  The knights began to advance, a tightening ring of steel and plate. Every step narrowed the world. Tivric felt the air grow thin; if they surged now, he’d be forced to end the man beneath his boot and fight for every inch.

  Then, a detail caught his eye. Perhaps it was the angle of the light, or the way she removed her helmet.—an echo of a face he’d seen in the dark. Recognition hit him with the force of a physical blow.

  “You look just like him,” Tivric said, his voice barely a whisper, yet it cut through the clank of armor.

  Nyxana’s eyes widened. A flicker of something human pierced her cold mask. She snapped her hand up, palm flat, and the entire line of knights froze as if they had turned to stone.

  “You know him,” Nyxana said. It wasn't a question.

  “I do,” Tivric replied, his grip tightening on his sword. “I ran into your father recently.”

  “You’re lying,” Nyxana snapped, though her voice lacked its earlier iron.

  “Mordryn,” Tivric countered, the name hanging heavy in the air. “Necromancer. Long, ink-black hair. A certain... chill that follows him.”

  Beside him, Skorval stiffened. He didn’t like how casually Tivric was speaking—but then Skorval looked at Nyxana again. The resemblance was undeniable.

  “We won’t be able to tell you much else if we’re dead,” Tivric added, a note of mock disappointment lacing his voice.

  Nyxana’s hand curled into a tight fist. She gave a sharp signal, and the knights sheathed their steel in a discordant rattle, beginning a slow, disciplined withdrawal.

  “Let us go,” Tivric said, “and we’ll tell you all the information we have on him.”

  “Mercy does not erase a crime committed,” Nyxana replied, her eyes like flint.

  “I’ll turn him over to the Burrows myself,” Tivric promised. “He’ll answer to the law there.”

  “I will spare your turncoat his life,” Nyxana commanded, her eyes never leaving Tivric’s. “But the Black Quiet remains with us. It is a corruption upon this earth, and I will see it utterly destroyed.”

  “Deal,” Tivric said, the word leaving his lips before Nyxana could finish her sentence.

  At Nyxana's sharp command, the knights withdrew, melting back down the road to establish a camp at a wary distance. Vaeyra finally eased her glowing blade away from the executioner’s throat.

  “No hard feelings,” she said, her voice airy and light, though her eyes remained sharp.

  The soldier spat a curse under his breath and scrambled toward his unit. Tivric stepped back, allowing the man he’d pinned to finally find his feet. As the soldier stumbled past, Tivric reached out, a mock-polite gesture to brush the grave-dirt from the man’s breastplate.

  He froze. The metal wasn't just cold from the air. It was a deep, biting frost that seemed to seep out of the man’s very soul.

  Now, only the four of them remained.

  Up close, Nyxana looked strikingly young—far younger than Tivric had anticipated. The resemblance to Mordryn was haunting; they shared the same heavy, ink-black hair, straight and lustrous. But where her father’s eyes were pools of weary sadness, Nyxana’s burned with a volatile, concentrated rage.

  Skorval was the first to break the silence. “You aren't worried?” he asked, glancing back at her distant camp. “Three of us, one of you. Your soldiers are out of earshot.”

  “You haven't the slightest chance of taking me down,” Nyxana replied, her voice as steady as a drumbeat.

  “We saw him less than a day ago,” Tivric interjected, pulling her focus back to the present. “He had just finished tearing through Hearthrun.”

  A smile touched Nyxana’s lips—thin, cold, and deeply unsettling. “Then I am closer than I thought.”

  She turned her gaze to Skorval, her eyes narrowing with predatory interest. “Did he give it to you? Did he give you the Black Quiet?”

  “No,” Skorval said, his gaze dropping to the dirt, avoiding the eyes of the only two people who mattered.

  “I won’t offer mercy a second time,” Nyxana warned, her voice trailing over her shoulder. “Do not aid the agents of the Still Shadow as nothing good ever comes from it.

  She turned, her cloak swirling as she strode back toward her silent knights. Shame crashed over Skorval then, heavy and suffocating. He kept his head bowed, unable to face Tivric—until he felt a heavy hand grip his shoulder.

  Their eyes met. For a heartbeat, Skorval feared he would see judgment there, a permanent shift in how he was known. But Tivric looked at him exactly as he always had.

  Like a brother. Like a friend.