MADISON
The box hit the ground with a dull crack.
Mantis's eyes snapped open.
For a moment he didn't know where he was. Pain came first—a slow, grinding fire that ran from his thigh to his ankle, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The antidote rune on his leg still glowed faintly, a pale green ember against the dark. Then memory returned in pieces: the wyvern, the barbed tail, the spray of black blood. The wagon. They had put him in the wagon.
He was lying among crates and folded canvas, the smell of lantern oil and old wood pressing close. The night air was cold against his sweat-damp skin. Above him, through a tear in the canvas cover, he could see stars—sharp and indifferent, scattered across a sky so black it looked like the inside of a closed fist.
Then he heard the voices.
Low. Urgent. Two people who did not want to be heard.
He pushed himself up an inch, biting down on the groan that tried to climb his throat, and looked through the tear in the canvas.
Nocta.
Juvar.
They moved with the careful economy of people who had rehearsed this. Nocta gripped one end of a crate, Juvar the other, and together they lifted it from the caravan's rear stack and carried it into the darkness beyond the lantern circle. Their feet made almost no sound. Their breathing was controlled. This was not impulse. This was a plan unwinding on schedule.
Mantis's breath went cold.
He watched them return for a second crate. Then a third. Each time they moved farther from the sleeping camp, each time their whispered voices grew fainter, until the darkness swallowed their shapes entirely and only the soft scrape of wood on wood told him they were still out there.
He waited.
Waited until his hands stopped shaking, until the night was silent enough that he could hear the wind moving through the plains grass like fingers combing hair. Then he slid from the wagon the way a wounded man slides out of a grave—slowly, badly, teeth locked against the pain that detonated in his leg the moment weight touched it.
His sword lay beside him. He gripped it and used the blade like a cane, steel tip biting into dirt, each step a negotiation between stubbornness and agony.
The camp was only meters away. A circle of sleeping bodies. Gear within arm's reach. Shields leaned against packs. The low, orange pulse of dying lanterns. The smell of sweat and leather and dry grass.
He half-walked, half-dragged himself into the circle.
"Wake up," he rasped. "Wake up—"
Madison's eyes opened at once. Not slowly, not with the fog of deep sleep—she came awake the way Captain Thorne had taught her, hand already moving to her hilt before her mind caught up with her body. Puli's head lifted beside her, bow within reach. Keto rolled onto his side, fingers closing around his sword.
Mantis's voice rose, raw with pain and fury.
"Wake up! We're being robbed. Juvar and Nocta—now!"
The camp exploded into motion.
No one wore full armor. No one slept in plate on the plains—not after a wyvern fight, not with bruises still darkening and muscles still screaming from hauling a broken caravan out of the Stoneheart cuts. They had chain and under-gear at best, blades and shields grabbed with clumsy, sleep-thick hands. Boro stumbled up. Vask swore and reached for the wrong weapon. Rovan was on his feet in three heartbeats, arrow already nocked but no target to give it purpose.
Madison stood with the Sword of Fury in her hand, and the cold in her chest was not the night air.
Juvar healed him, she thought. Juvar made the antidote rune. Juvar cast the barrier that saved Keto's life.
And Juvar was stealing from them.
In the darkness beyond the lanterns, a voice spoke an incantation. Calm. Almost bored.
"In a pox."
A cloud of venom spread from the darkness—greenish, thick, stinking of rot and sulfur. It rolled low across the ground like living fog, swallowing the lantern light at its edges, turning the world into a sick, swimming haze. Madison's eyes burned. Her throat closed.
"Light!" she shouted, backing away from the cloud's leading edge. "Puli—light!"
Puli activated a light rune and fired it skyward. The rune burst above them and hung in the air like a pale, wavering moon—not enough to clear the venom cloud, but enough to outline shapes, to throw long shadows across the camp and the road beyond.
Through that glow Madison saw it.
Another caravan. Sitting on the road fifty meters out, two horses harnessed, a driver in the front holding the reins with practiced ease. A woman. Straight-backed. Still as a painting.
"Athena!" Nocta called, voice sharp, and vaulted onto the caravan's bed with a crate tucked under his arm as if it weighed nothing. The caravan rocked with his weight.
So that was her name.
Madison remembered the sound she had heard in the night—wheels, soft and distant, fading into nothing. Not a traveler. A rendezvous.
"Nocta—go," Juvar said. His voice was calm. Measured. The voice of a man who had already accepted what came next.
Nocta hesitated. For one heartbeat he stood on the caravan's edge, one hand gripping the rail, his eyes finding Juvar through the venom haze. Something passed between them—not words, not a signal, but the shared understanding of people who had planned for this moment and hoped it wouldn't arrive.
Then Nocta threw a star toward Madison. Not to kill—the angle was wrong, the force insufficient. A warning. A line drawn in the dark. It sang past her ear and buried itself in the side of the nearest crate.
Nocta sprinted for the caravan. The driver—Athena—snapped the reins. The horses surged. The caravan lurched forward into the night.
Juvar stayed.
"Why?" Madison heard herself ask, but the venom cloud was between them now, and the word came out strangled.
Juvar's silhouette was still visible through the green murk. He stood with his staff planted, one hand raised, feeding the cloud's edges wider. A sacrifice. Or a diversion.
Madison surged forward, but the cloud stung her eyes and burned her throat. She coughed, blinking tears, and the world went green at the edges. Her lungs seized. She stumbled back, hand over her mouth, and felt Keto's gauntlet catch her arm.
"Don't," Keto said. "The poison—"
"I know what it is," she snapped.
Juvar lifted his staff and murmured another incantation.
"Utani hur."
He blurred.
He ran not north, not after the caravan. He ran right—into the open plains, where the grass was tall and the darkness had no edges. Fast. Too fast. The speed spell turned him into a dark line against a dark field, pulling away with every heartbeat.
Madison saw the angle at once. He was not escaping with the loot. He was pulling them away from it. Drawing pursuit into the wrong direction while Nocta and Athena rode the other way with everything they had stolen.
"With me!" she snapped, and sprinted after him, the Sword of Fury dragging weight against her hip.
Puli was at her shoulder without a word. No hesitation, no question—just the sound of his boots hitting dirt beside hers, his bow already in hand.
Behind them, Mantis's voice carried: "The rest of you—hold camp! Protect the caravan!"
Then they were running, and the camp fell away behind them.
Juvar was already pulling ahead. A dark shape in the dark, moving through tall grass that parted and closed behind him like water. The speed spell gave him a lead that grew with every stride.
Madison's breath burned. Her legs pumped. She could feel the Sword of Fury's weight in her scabbard, the swing of it pulling at her hip with every step. Sweat ran into her eyes. The air tasted of dust and dry grass and the fading edge of venom.
She glanced at Puli and saw the same calculation in his face. The same math. Juvar was faster. The distance was growing. In another minute he would vanish into the dark entirely, and they would be left standing in an empty field with nothing but grass and failure.
"Puli," she gasped. "The net-bolas. Do you have it?"
His hand went to his belt without breaking stride. To the special rig he kept wrapped in oiled cloth—the tool he had never used in a real fight, only practiced with behind the tavern in Jul when they were children playing at being heroes. He pulled it free, fingers working the straps by touch.
"One shot," he said, voice tight. "Range is closing fast."
"Then don't miss."
He nocked the strange arrowhead—two weighted spheres linked by a folded web of fibrous cord, designed by dwarf engineers who understood that not every problem required a cutting edge. He drew as he ran, which was itself a kind of madness, fighting the bounce of his stride against the steadiness his arms demanded.
The shot was ugly. Rushed. A gamble thrown into the dark with nothing but instinct behind it.
The net-bolas sang through the night and opened midair like a flower made of rope. It caught Juvar low, snarling around his ankles. The weights wrapped tight with a sound like a hand clapping. He stumbled, went down on one knee, and for a heartbeat Madison thought it was over.
Juvar snarled a word and pushed his palm toward the ground.
He lifted—an abrupt, forced levitation that yanked the trap's tension wrong. Fire flared around his legs as he burned the webbing away. Orange light bloomed against the dark, and for an instant Madison could see everything: Juvar's face twisted in concentration, the cords blackening and snapping, the grass curling from the heat.
The flames licked his own skin too.
He hissed in pain—a high, sharp sound that cut through the night—and the levitation wobbled. He dropped half a meter, caught himself, dropped again. The moment's weakness was all Madison needed.
She closed the distance in five strides.
Her fist found his jaw.
It was not a trained strike—not the kind Captain Thorne had drilled into her with straw targets and padded gloves. It was a street punch, thrown from the shoulder, driven by momentum and fury and the knowledge that if she didn't end this now he would burn his way free and vanish.
Juvar's head snapped back. Blood brightened his lip in the dying glow of his own fire. His eyes went glassy. His staff slipped from his fingers and fell into the grass.
Madison hooked an arm around his neck and wrenched his hands behind his back, muscles screaming from the effort. He was lighter than she expected. Thin-boned, the way druids often were—built for thought, not force.
"Don't," she said through her teeth. "Don't say another word."
A word was all he needed. One incantation, one syllable shaped right, and the venom cloud would fill her lungs or fire would eat her face. She pressed her forearm against his windpipe hard enough to feel his pulse hammering against her skin.
Puli was there, grabbing Juvar's wrist, forcing his fingers open as if prying a weapon from a corpse. He pulled a strip of cloth from his belt and wound it around Juvar's hands—once, twice, tight enough to whiten the knuckles.
Juvar's eyes met Madison's. In the starlight they were bright with something she couldn't name. Not fear. Not anger. Something worse.
Understanding.
They marched him back.
Back to the lantern circle. Back to the caravan that still sat heavy with everything they had failed to protect. Back to Mantis's hard, unreadable stare.
They bound Juvar with rope—wrists, elbows, ankles—then wrapped cloth around his hands so he could not shape a gesture, and gagged his mouth so he could not bite an incantation into the air. They made him sit in the dirt like an animal. Boro put a blade at the edge of his throat, and Vask stood behind him with another.
Madison stood over him and felt the ground tilt beneath her feet. The world seemed to narrow—the lantern light, the circle of faces, the bound man in the dirt with blood drying on his lip. Everything else—the stars, the plains, the road—fell away into darkness.
He healed Mantis. The thought circled like a vulture. He saved Keto. He was one of us.
Keto knelt in front of Juvar. His voice was rough and disbelieving, the voice of a man who has been punched by someone he trusted.
"Why?" Keto demanded. "After the antidote. After the barrier. After the fight—you stood with us against those wyverns. You bled with us. Why do this?"
Madison loosened the gag enough for Juvar to speak. His jaw worked. He spat blood into the dirt between his knees.
Then he smiled. A thin, cracked thing that didn't reach his eyes.
"Because you don't understand how the world works," he said. "We were never yours. We were never Hegal's. You parade around in his colors and think that makes you soldiers. It makes you carriers. Mules. Moving his goods from place to place so he can sit in Barlin and count gold."
"That's enough," Boro growled.
"Is it?" Juvar's eyes shifted to Boro, then to Vask, then back to Madison. "How much does Hegal pay you? Half of what those crates are worth? A quarter? You don't even know what you're hauling. You never asked."
Mantis spoke from the wagon where he lay, leg still throbbing, face gray in the lantern light. "Where is Nocta?"
Juvar's gaze slid to the road where the second caravan had vanished into the dark. The road was empty now. No dust. No sound. Just the wind and the night and the absence of a man who had been among them for weeks.
"Gone," Juvar said. "With what you were too slow to protect."
Boro made a sound deep in his chest, a sound like something cracking under pressure. His knuckles whitened around his sword's grip.
Rovan stepped forward. "How long?" he asked quietly. "How long were you planning this?"
Juvar tilted his head. "Since before you met us."
The silence that followed was its own kind of violence.
Then Juvar leaned forward as far as the ropes allowed, and his voice changed. Lower. Harder. The defiance was still there, but underneath it something new surfaced—something that sounded almost like a warning given by a man who knows warning will not help.
"Release me," he said. "I am telling you this because it is the truth, and the truth does not care whether you like it. If I don't make it back, they will know something happened. And then they will send people you can't bargain with." He paused. Let the words settle. "Assassins. Hunters. People who do not come in pairs and do not announce themselves with venom clouds. They will find you on the road, and they will end this in ways I would not choose."
"Who?" Madison asked. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Flat. Empty.
Juvar's smile widened. Blood on his teeth.
"The Brotherhood."
The word fell into the camp like a stone into still water. Ripples of silence spreading outward, touching each face in turn. Madison saw it move through them—Rovan's jaw tightening, Boro's grip shifting, Vask swallowing, Puli's eyes going still and distant.
She had heard the name before. Everyone had. Stories told in taverns, in guild halls, in the whispered conversations of merchants who traveled roads without escort. The Brotherhood was not a rumor. It was an open secret—a guild that operated without charter, without oath, without the rules that bound Hegal's people to something resembling law.
Mantis didn't blink. From the wagon, his voice came like a blade drawn slowly across stone.
"Treason is paid with death," he said. "It's guild law."
Vask swallowed. "And if what he says is true? If there are more of them?"
"Then we fight them," Mantis said. Not bravado. Not performance. A simple statement of how his mind worked, as natural as breathing. "They steal from us and demand we accept it. That cannot be."
"He's trying to scare us into letting him go," Keto said, but there was a question at the end of it, hiding behind the certainty.
Juvar said nothing. He didn't need to. His silence was louder than his threats.
They argued in low voices while the sky paled.
Madison stood apart and listened to them debate. The stars were fading. The eastern horizon was turning from black to a deep, bruised purple that would soon be gray. Dawn was coming whether they were ready for it or not.
Merita still hadn't woken. She lay in the wagon beside Mantis, breathing shallow, face pale from the wyvern's blow. The crates they had left—the ones Nocta hadn't taken—still sat stacked and heavy with stolen goods that were now a target painted bright in the dark.
We can't take him with us. The thought arrived in Madison's mind with the cold clarity of something she had been avoiding. We can't release him. We can't keep him bound for days while we march. He's a druid. He'll find a way to speak. And then the venom cloud fills our lungs while we sleep.
She didn't want to think what that left.
In the end, decisions were made the way they always were in the field—quickly, brutally, and with too little information.
"If we do this," Mantis said, "we do it now. Before the sun is fully up. Then we move for Solundria as fast as we can. Guild walls. Guild eyes. Better ground."
He looked at Madison.
The others looked at Madison.
And she knew, before he said the words, what was coming.
"You caught him," Mantis said. "You execute him."
The words hollowed her.
She felt them enter and leave, and what remained was a silence inside her chest that was worse than noise. The camp seemed to recede—the lanterns dimming, the faces blurring, the sound of wind and breathing falling away until all that existed was her and Juvar and the dirt between them.
Madison had fought a bear in the Haze trials and told herself it was proving, not killing. She had cut spiders in the Stoneheart mines while their legs twitched and their venom sprayed. She had driven the Sword of Fury into a wyvern's neck and felt it convulse beneath her.
But those were creatures. Creatures made for dying, built by a world that expected violence from its children.
Juvar was not a creature.
Juvar was a man who had knelt over Mantis's poisoned leg and pressed a rune into his flesh with careful hands. A man who had cast a barrier to save Keto's life. A man who had said Breathe to Mantis the way a healer says it—not as advice, but as a command that means I will not let you die.
And he had been lying the entire time.
Madison drew the Sword of Fury from its scabbard.
Her father's sword.
The weight of it was familiar now—she had carried it since Jul, since Captain Thorne had pressed it into her hands on the docks with salt spray on his face and said Be present, girl. Whatever comes, be present for it. The blade caught the first gray light of dawn and held it along its edge like a thread of silver.
She heard Thorne's voice in her head. Be present.
She heard Elane's voice—soft, distant, belonging to a world that felt impossibly far away. Come back to us.
She heard her father's silence. The silence of a man who had been turned to stone defending a port city from a threat no one else would face. Maximo had never come back. He had made his choice and paid for it with everything, and the sword Madison held was all that remained.
Would he have done this?
She stepped toward Juvar.
He raised his chin. His eyes were not smug now. The defiance was there still—buried, habitual—but on the surface something else moved. Something raw and involuntary.
Fear.
He was afraid.
Madison felt her stomach clench. She tightened her grip on the hilt until the leather bit into her palm.
"Say your last," Mantis told Juvar from the wagon. His voice carried no pleasure. No triumph. Only the weight of a man enforcing a law he wished did not apply.
Juvar's mouth twitched. He looked at Madison—really looked, not through her, not past her, but at her, as if seeing her for the first time. His bound hands trembled behind his back.
"You think this makes you safe?" he said. His voice cracked on the last word.
The camp's silence tightened, as if everyone held the same breath.
Madison stepped closer. She set the blade at the side of his neck where the flesh was soft, where the blood ran close to the surface. She could feel his pulse jumping against the steel—quick, desperate, alive. A rhythm that begged without words.
The sky was lightening. Purple turning to gray. Gray threatening to turn to gold.
This is real, she thought. This is happening. I am doing this.
"No," she said quietly. "I think it makes me guilty."
Then she pulled.
It was not clean.
Nothing like the stories. Nothing like the executions described in Captain Thorne's war tales, where the blade falls once and the body drops and the crowd goes home. The Sword of Fury bit and tore, and the resistance was worse than anything she had imagined—not hard, not like cutting wood or bone, but wrong in a way that went deeper than muscle. She felt the moment his body stopped fighting. Felt the tension leave the rope as his weight shifted forward.
Blood spilled into the red-brown dirt. Juvar's body sagged against his bonds, head at an angle that nature never intended. His eyes were wide and already emptying—not closed, not peaceful, just... going. Like a lamp running out of oil.
Madison staggered back.
The Sword of Fury hung at her side, heavy with blood that caught the first real light of morning. She realized she was shaking. Not from fear. From the fact that she could still feel the cut in her arms—the resistance, the give, the awful, irrevocable completion of it. Her muscles remembered what her mind was already trying to forget.
No one spoke.
The wind moved through the camp and stirred the dead man's hair.
Madison turned away. She walked to the edge of the lantern circle, knelt in the dirt, and breathed. In and out. In and out. Captain Thorne's voice again, steady as a heartbeat: Be present. Be present. Be present.
When she stood, her face was still. Her hands had stopped shaking. Something in her eyes had changed, but she did not know what it was, and no one who saw it knew how to name it.
They left Juvar in the plains where the wind could take what it wanted.
No grave. No marker. No words beyond the ones already spoken. They untied the ropes—Madison insisted on that, though she couldn't say why—and left him lying in the grass as if he had fallen asleep and chosen not to wake.
They loaded Merita—still breathing, still unconscious, her face pale and unresponsive—into the caravan beside Mantis. They tightened ropes. Checked straps. Counted the remaining crates twice and compared the number to what they remembered loading in the Stoneheart cuts. Six missing. Nocta's work.
Mantis gave orders from the wagon in a voice that sounded like it was being pulled from the bottom of a well. "Archers placed where they can see. Knights where they can shield. Rotating flanks. No one walks alone."
They set formation.
Madison took point. The Sword of Fury was clean now—she had wiped it with grass and oil until the steel shone again—but she could still feel the weight of what it had done. It hung at her hip the same way it always had, and that sameness felt like a lie.
They started moving toward Solundria with a stolen fortune, a wounded leader, an unconscious archer, and a fresh corpse behind them.
No one looked back.
THE FEMUR HILLS
Nocta and Athena reached the hills by late day.
The land there rolled in long bones of earth between Varlin and Ab'Dendriel, five hard riding hours from the plains where Madison's party had left Juvar's body to the wind. The Femur Hills were mostly open field broken by low rises, wind-bent grass the color of old copper, and pockets of stone that offered little shade and less mercy. Sound carried strangely—voices arriving before their speakers, hooves echoing off limestone ridges that amplified every noise and gave nothing back but direction.
Their camp sat in the center of that open ground, spread wide instead of hidden.
Bozton had designed it that way.
Watchfires ringed the perimeter in disciplined intervals, each one flanked by spear-posts driven into packed dirt—sharpened stakes angled outward, not as a real defense but as a signal. We are here. We know you know. Come if you dare. Cook pits were cut into the earth in long trenches, their smoke channeled through ground-level vents that dispersed it before it could rise high enough to mark position from a distance. Horse lines were staked in precise rows—watered, fed, hooves checked, every animal saddled and ready to ride within minutes.
People moved through the camp with tight purpose. Archers waxed bowstrings and checked broadheads by lantern light, their movements repetitive and precise, the way soldiers work when the work is the only thing keeping their minds still. Knights oiled armor, rewrapped gauntlets, tested edge alignment against whetstone sparks that spiraled into the dark like tiny orange stars. Two druids marked ward-circles with ash and powdered rune stone while quartermasters counted crates and cross-checked ledgers under canvas awnings, their quills scratching in the silence.
No singing. No drunken boasting. No dice games or storytelling circles.
This was not a camp. It was a machine waiting for orders.
The Brotherhood.
When Nocta and Athena arrived with the caravan, some of the camp cheered. Others clapped, hands meeting in the firelight. Most only watched with the quiet hunger of people who measured profit before praise.
Bozton stood as they entered the central ring.
He had been sitting by the main fire, but the motion of his rising was itself a statement—unhurried, deliberate, the kind of movement that pulls attention the way gravity pulls water. He was a knight in the way old legends remembered knights: heavy in presence, not in posture. Broad across the shoulders, thick through the arms, with hands that had broken things and a jaw that looked like it had been carved from the same limestone that ridged these hills. His armor was dark steel, well-maintained but not ornamental. Functional. Earned.
He looked like he could stand still and make the world hesitate.
His eyes went first to the caravan. He counted crates with a glance—six. Fewer than expected. His mouth tightened by a fraction.
Then to Nocta. Standing at the caravan's edge, face drawn, hands empty.
Then to the space beside Nocta where a third person should have been.
"Where is my cousin?" Bozton asked.
His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. In the silence of the camp, with the watchfires crackling and the horses shifting on their lines, it carried like a blade across still water.
Nocta's throat worked. He looked at the ground, then at Athena, then at the ground again. When he spoke, his voice had none of the cold competence it carried in combat. It was the voice of a man delivering news he knew would not be forgiven.
"He—he distracted them," Nocta said. "Held them off so we could run. Cast the venom cloud, the speed spell. He said he'd meet us. He said he'd circle back through the southern grass and—"
"Did he?"
The question cut Nocta's explanation in half.
"No," Nocta admitted.
Bozton's jaw tightened. The muscle under his ear moved like something alive beneath the skin. He looked at Athena, who sat on the caravan's bench with the reins still in her hands, her face carefully empty.
"And you?" he said.
Athena opened her mouth as if to explain—to offer context, justification, the calculus of survival that had made leaving Juvar seem reasonable. Then she met Bozton's eyes, and whatever she saw there made her close her mouth again. Her gaze dropped.
Bozton stared at them both until shame did its work.
The camp was silent. Even the fire seemed to burn quieter.
Bozton's cousin. His blood. The boy he had trained, fed, protected, brought into the Brotherhood when the rest of the world had no use for a skinny druid with too much anger and not enough sense. Juvar had been reckless and sharp-tongued and frustrating, but he had been family. And now he was somewhere on the plains, either captured or dead, and the two people who were supposed to bring him home had brought six crates instead.
"We don't abandon our people," Bozton said. The words were simple. The weight behind them was not.
He exhaled through his nose—a long, controlled breath that in another man might have been a scream—and turned away from Nocta and Athena. He needed a moment. Just one. To press the fury down deep enough that it would not make him stupid.
"Dragon Eye," he said.
A figure stepped from the shadow near the eastern ward-circle. Taller than Juvar had been. Thinner. Staff in hand, carved with old marks that looked like scars in the firelight—deep, deliberate, and unsettling in the way all things are unsettling when they carry the memory of pain. His gaze was pale, the color of river ice, and unpleasantly calm. He looked at Bozton the way a surgeon looks at a wound—assessing, not sympathizing.
"I heard," Dragon Eye said. Nothing more.
Bozton began assembling a party without raising his voice. He pointed. Named. Each selection was precise: Nocta, because he knew the route. Athena, because she had been there. Another archer—a broad-shouldered woman named Talia who said nothing and checked her bowstring twice. Another knight—Falk, square-jawed, a scar across his forearm that he wore like a rank insignia. Bozton himself.
And Dragon Eye.
"Saddle up," Bozton said. "We move now. We find Juvar."
Nocta hesitated. "If they captured him—"
"Then we take him back." Bozton's eyes were flat. "If they harmed him, we take more than him back. Questions later. Move now."
They left at a pace that turned miles into hours. The horses were fresh and the riders drove them hard, cutting through the hills on paths that followed ridgeline and shallow cut, avoiding the main roads where guild patrols might spot a mounted column and ask questions that would slow them down.
Bozton rode at the front. He did not speak. He did not look back. His body moved with the horse in the effortless rhythm of a man who had spent more of his life in the saddle than out of it, but his hands gripped the reins too tightly, and the muscles in his jaw never unclenched.
Hold on, boy, he thought. Whatever you did, whatever trouble your mouth got you into, hold on.
They found the trail where the plains opened.
Crushed grass marked the passage of boots and wheels—a camp broken in haste, gear dragged and loaded without care for neatness. Bozton read the signs the way other men read letters: boot depths told him weight and hurry; wheel ruts told him direction and speed; the spacing of footprints told him how many had walked and how many had run.
They followed the trail past broken wheel ruts and flattened grass, past the place where someone had slept in a hurry—a rectangular impression in the dirt, body-shaped, with the marks of a shield laid flat. Past faint stains in the soil that the wind hadn't yet taken—dark spots that could have been oil or blood or both.
Dragon Eye dismounted and knelt by one of the stains. He touched it with two fingers, brought them to his nose, and said nothing. His silence was its own verdict.
When they found Juvar, the sky was already turning. Dusk painted the plains in shades of amber and rust, and the wind had picked up—a low, constant moan that moved through the grass like breath through a reed.
Nocta saw his boots first.
Then his legs.
Then the rope, dark with dried blood, lying in loose coils beside a body that no longer needed binding.
Bozton dismounted.
He walked to where his cousin lay and stopped. The grass around the body was trampled flat. The earth was stained. Juvar's hands were free—someone had untied him after the act, a gesture of mercy or guilt that Bozton registered without understanding.
His cousin's eyes were open. They caught the last light of the dying sun and held it, but saw nothing.
Bozton knelt.
He stayed there for a long time.
The others waited. Nocta turned away. Athena's face was white. Dragon Eye watched with those pale, steady eyes that gave nothing and took everything in.
Bozton reached out and closed Juvar's eyes with his thumb and forefinger. The gesture was gentle. Almost tender. The hands that had broken men and bent steel moved with the care of a man handling something fragile.
When he stood, his face was not the face of a man in grief.
It was the face of a man who had decided something.
"Who leads them?" he asked. His voice was quiet. Dangerously quiet.
"Mantis," Nocta said. "A knight. Hegal's man. But there is a warrior—a woman. Madison. She carries a blade I have not seen before. She is the one who chased Juvar. She is the one who—"
He stopped.
"Say it," Bozton said.
Nocta swallowed. "She is the one who would have done this."
Bozton looked down at his cousin's body one last time. The wind moved through Juvar's hair, lifting it gently, as if trying to tell him a secret he could no longer hear.
"Wrap him," Bozton said. "We bring him home."
He turned to Dragon Eye. The druid met his gaze. No words were needed. The question was asked and answered in the space between two breaths.
"They move toward Solundria," Bozton said. "They will reach it within two days."
"Then we have two days," Dragon Eye replied.
Bozton mounted his horse. His shadow stretched long across the plains, touching the edge of Juvar's body and beyond, reaching toward the road that led east.
"We will find them," Bozton said. "And we will make them understand what it costs to kill one of ours."
No one argued.
The wind carried his words across the open ground, and the grass bent beneath them as if even the earth understood what was coming.