The canvas roof sagged with dew, a cold weight that made every breath steam. Rope bit the posts. Iron kissed iron where the locks met. The yard beyond their lean-to thrummed with the sleep of a camp that believed itself awake.
"We don't get a second try," Mira whispered.
Kael listened to the patrol's rhythm—eight heartbeats between passes, then the soft rattle of a spear butt against a post. "We won't need one."
Elira flexed her fingers. The ropes had left faint burns on her wrists; the ache kept her mind sharp. Lumeveil was a quiet line along her palm—cool, steady, waiting. "On my mark," she breathed.
They moved like a sentence written in three hands.
Mira knelt by the door bar and exhaled a film of water across the bell's tongue. A thin rime crawled over the metal, sealing the gap between clapper and cup. With her other hand she drew a thread so fine it was almost imagined, an ice-filament that held the ringer still.
Kael set his palm to the lowest hinge and let Draga hum just under the skin. No gleam. No crackle. Only pressure: bone to iron to earth. The hinge pin sighed downward a finger width. He did the same to the middle hinge, then the top, spreading the strain until the door forgot it was supposed to resist.
Elira lifted her hand and gathered the air. The Wind Barrier she wove was thinner than paper, a skin pulled over every rubbing point. Friction dulled. Splinters decided not to speak. She pressed her other palm to the lintel and whispered to the weeds sunk in the mud there; thin roots climbed the grain and braced the wood so it wouldn't snap under a push and cry about it.
"Now," she mouthed.
Kael's forearm rolled once, a small quake living inside muscle. The bar eased. The door asked to complain and found someone had left its voice outside. Mira caught the end, guided it down so the iron only kissed leather. Elira leaned the barrier into the seam and they slid the door open the width of a hand, then two, then just enough for three bodies to become shadows.
They slipped out.
The yard's lamps were hoods of gold against wet dark. Supply crates stacked like low walls; arrow racks turned to hedges. A horse shook in its sleep and rain left itself scattered on its mane. They ghosted the shelter edges, Mira's fingers leaving nothing but the faintest long beads of frost on the ground to mark their angle back—not enough to catch a torch, only enough to forgive a future misstep.
They were two tents shy of the outer palisade when voices cut across the ropes.
"…not the originals," a courier said, breath hard, words quick. "They insist on retaining the first copy."
"They can insist," Vaelis answered, voice low and flat. "In the morning we'll take their route and call it ours. Give them three corridors to choose so they think the choice is theirs. Copy their notes; return summaries. Summaries burn better."
The courier hesitated. "And the report?"
"For my desk," Vaelis said. His tone cooled further. "And then forwarded to the level you do not speak to. You do not need a name for the hand above yours to pass it what it is already holding."
Elira felt Mira's eyes on her in the dark. Kael breathed once through his nose—the only sound he allowed himself. They didn't move.
"Commander," the courier said softly, "and the girl?"
Vaelis took a beat that made the canvas listen. "She'll hold," he said. "Or crack. Both are information."
Footsteps retreated. Rope creaked where a post leaned. The two guards turned in opposite directions, satisfied with the shape of their night. Elira led them along the backside of the command tent, past the slant of its guy lines, to the exterior rack where gear gone unfashionable waited for a second life. Their kit sacks were there, and Elira's map—rolled tight, tied with plain string, labeled as if no one cared it existed.
They didn't get six steps before a helmet's lamplight found a glint: a single frost bead Mira's thread had left on a trampled strip of dirt.
"Hold," the guard said, too calm. His hand lifted in a sign that was older than the camp. Four more shapes woke from the dark, shields slanting, spears not yet up.
Elira didn't raise the wind. Not yet. She stepped forward as if she intended to obey. The closest shield man relaxed by a breath.
She moved.
"Breeze Edge," she whispered—more reflex than declaration. The air along her blade tightened into a thin crescent. She didn't cut meat. She shaved the leather strap that held the shield to the man's forearm. Weight fell. Surprise made a gesture where an attack had been meant to be. Mira's hand flicked; water turned to a slick film under two sets of boots, and a curl of grass rose from a crack in the planking to hook an ankle.
Kael was already there. He didn't swing. He stepped, and the ground under the nearest guard stepped with him, a low ripple that stole balance. An elbow—not a strike, a correction delivered hard—found the hinge of a jaw. The man folded around it and slept where he landed.
The bell did not ring. Mira's ice thread held. Arrows hissed awake anyway—from the left, a double hiss, the tell-tale breath of a team that had practiced together too long to miss. Elira's hand turned and the Wind Barrier snapped tight to the angle that mattered. Two shafts smacked and skittered aside, tails whispering past her ear.
"Left!" Kael called, and already his shoulder had met a shield's rim like a door meeting a storm. Wood spat splinters. The rim went wide. Mira's arc carved a line of steam through the night that did not burn because she didn't let it; the rope it touched parted, and a curtain of canvas collapsed into three surprised men.
"Out," Mira said, not triumph, not fury. Necessity, given a voice.
They hit the palisade. It was not high, but it was honest—hard wood sunk deep, cross-braced, meant to make a man consider whether he meant what he thought he meant. Kael set his palm and the bracing thought about its life choices. Wood groaned; nails found they had not been sworn in for this kind of service.
"Now," Elira said again, and meant the part where minds go quiet to let bodies do the work.
They were three breaths from the gap when the yard changed shape.
Light sprang up—dozens of lamps unhooded at once. A line of soldiers stepped from behind the carts like a sentence closing. The deputy's voice did not shout; it arrived with the certainty of a ledger. "On your knees. Hands where I can see them."
Mira's arcs hummed. "If we break this line, we hurt too many."
Elira's lungs hurt in a way that had nothing to do with running. "We don't break it," she said. "We slip it."
Kael shifted his stance, Draga climbing his arms as a second skin. "Make me a lane."
Elira gathered wind along the ground line. A low push, not a storm—air that made mud think it was ice and boots think they should reconsider. Mira drew moisture from the night and wrapped it around the lamps' throats. Their light guttered, not gone, smaller—enough to make men remember how many shadows a spear has.
The deputy planted his feet. "Last chance."
Something answered for them.
The sky tore.
It didn't sound like thunder, not exactly. It sounded like a mountain taking a breath. Wind slammed the yard flat. Lamps fell over screaming. The palisade shuddered down the length of its bones. A shadow crossed the ground, and then there was no ground—only the thought of ground and an enormous body blotting it out.
The dragon fell through the camp like a god that had forgotten it had ever been worshiped.
Wings beat once, badly. The left membrane was torn, ragged as a pennant after a siege. Scales charred from throat to haunch; heat rippled above hide where it should have been held close. Its eyes were bright and wrong. Magic bled out of its mouth and wouldn't choose a shape—black wind and pale light snatching at each other until both unraveled.
"Line!" the deputy shouted, too late for lines.
The first sweep of a wing took down three tent poles and turned an orderly stack of shields into a conversation about whether metal could fly. Vaelis's voice cut the night, precise as a lance: "Bows up! Center mass!—"
The downdraft hit, and the first two ranks went to their knees as if they had meant to pray there.
The dragon's head swayed. Its throat convulsed. Fire tried to be born and failed, collapsing into a spray of heat that blistered the air and made canvas ignite in pale, embarrassed patches. Screams bloomed; orders smashed into them and broke.
"Don't," Lumeveil said inside Elira—no sound, a command given with the care you use to stop a blade already moving. "This isn't breath. It's pollution."
Elira's chest clenched. The locator under her shirt went cold, then hot, then cold again, as if it couldn't decide which way the world was supposed to be.
Mira's eyes tracked the fires as if they were a puzzle. "I can open a path with steam," she said, half to herself. "Pull heat forward, drown it into fog—"
"Shield first," Kael snapped. He had already stepped between them and the dragon, Draga sealing to his shoulders with a sound like stone remembering it knew how to be a wall.
Elira lifted Lumeveil. Light climbed the blade like it had been waiting for an invitation. Shadow traced its edge like it refused to be left out. The dragon's gaze hit her and held, and for a breath the yard forgot how to move.
Behind them, soldiers re-formed on reflex and instruction. In front of them, madness with wings gathered itself for another try at burning.
"Choose," Mira said, and Elira knew she meant more than one thing.
Elira took one step forward. The wind leaned into her back like a friend ready to be a shield or a hand. The dragon's throat brightened from within, then tore itself apart into rival currents—black wind twisting through white glare.
They all moved at once.
And the world decided to end the chapter there.