The forest breathed like an animal, exhaling mist that curled around the ridge. Two eyes burned in the green-black dark — too far apart to be human, too calm to be a beast.
"Stay behind me," Kael said, though he knew Nia wouldn't listen and Taye couldn't.
Nia's reply was a whisper of steel as her twin daggers slid free. Her crimson-dyed locks clung to her cheeks in damp coils; a rain-dark crown. "Mind the shadows."
Taye's laugh was a brittle thing. "I mind them all day. They never mind me back." The blue tips of his locks had dulled to the color of old bruises. At his feet, his shadow lifted like a hackled cat.
The eyes blinked once, slowly, and something stepped from the treeline. Not stepped — unfolded. Limbs unspooled like ropes from a tar-thick mass, skeletal hands braced the thing upright, and its head turned with a dry creak to face Kael.
It wore a face that wasn't its own.
Kael's face.
Not exact — the proportions were wrong, stretched long like a portrait ruined by rain — but the white-tipped locks, the mouth, the scar across the left brow… all there, as if carved from the memory of a stranger spying through Kael's skull.
Nia sucked a breath between her teeth. Taye swore softly.
The thing smiled with Kael's mouth. "Child of the Abyss," it said in a voice like wet rocks grinding. "The river remembers every drop it takes back. We have come to claim our thirsty son."
The sword in Kael's hand quivered, then giggled — a bright, awful sound in the hush. Oh, I like this one. It dressed up for us.
"Name yourself," Kael said.
"I am a Harrow. A borrowed shape. A herald of the Chain Below."
"Good," Kael replied, rolling his shoulders. The world narrowed to weight and breath. "Heralds die like messengers."
He moved first.
Abyssfang flashed, black and slick, the blade pulling at his arm as if it had already chosen a path. The Harrow flowed to meet it, body collapsing into a whip-thin sheet of darkness, then snapping back into shape behind him. Kael twisted, nearly decapitating it on the second stroke, and would have — if the head hadn't melted down the neck and reformed along the spine.
It laughed with his voice. "Sharp."
Taye's shadow lashed from the ground, a black rope that looped the Harrow's ankle and yanked. The creature pitched. Nia was already there — two bright knives, two quick cuts, hamstrings gone. It fell. Kael finished the motion, blade descending like a falling gate—
—The Harrow caught it between bare palms.
Cold shot through Kael's bones. The blade screeched as if offended.
"Chains love eager wrists," it breathed, and its grip turned to iron.
Kael ground his teeth and shoved, every muscle in his back screaming.
He's stronger because he's emptier, the sword sang in his skull. See it? No meat in there. Just a bucket waiting for your blood.
"Less poetry," Kael hissed. "More murder."
He pivoted, driving a knee into the Harrow's jaw — a human trick, good for cracking teeth. The jaw flexed like rubber and slid aside. Nia went low, one dagger burying up to the hilt in the creature's kidney — if it had kidneys — and Taye hauled another coil of shadow over its throat.
For a heartbeat, everything held: rain, breath, knife, rope, blade.
Then the Harrow shed its shape.
Flesh turned to slush. The daggers fell through nothing, shadows slipped as if oiled, and Kael stumbled forward with no weight against his blade. The puddled Harrow spread like ink, then sprang up behind Taye as a forest of arms. Bony fingers plunged into Taye's back like stakes.
Taye screamed.
Kael didn't think. He moved, Abyssfang howling in his grip, a backhand cut that started at the hip and ended above his shoulder, a beautiful, ugly thing that severed six arms and half a head. Black ichor sprayed. It smoked when it touched the air.
Nia's hand flicked, and a thin arc of wire sang between her fingers, catching the stump of the Harrow's neck. She yanked. The head came loose like a rotten fruit.
It didn't die.
The severed head rolled, mouth working, then bit the wire and pulled itself along it toward Nia like a rat on a rope. Nia cursed, dropped the line, and booted the thing so hard it cracked a rock.
Kael's stomach turned. His hands were steady.
He looked at Taye.
The Shadewalker was on one knee, chest heaving, eyes wild. Five punctures bloomed along his back, not bleeding red but a deep, oily black that curled into the air like smoke. His shadow was wider than it should be and grinning too many teeth.
"Don't you dare," Kael snapped, and slammed Abyssfang point-down through Taye's silhouette. The blade pinned shadow to ground. Taye gasped, then breathed again, and the grin in the dark faded to a shaky line.
"Thanks," Taye croaked. "Ow. You stabbed my… shade."
"Later," Nia said. She flung a blade; it pinned the rolling head through an eye.
The Harrow — the rest of it — came on, a tumbling mass of limbs and faces, now borrowing others from Kael's memory. The old fisherman who'd taught him to cut scales clean. The Verdant priest with the soot on his forehead. The girl who'd once put a flower bead in his locks and called him pretty. The faces came and went with wet pops, guilt made flesh.
Kael's world staggered.
The sword's laughter turned cruel. Oh, he knows you. He knows the wrists you won't cut.
"Stop," Kael whispered.
Make me.
"Not you."
He stepped into the Harrow's rush and let it take him. The mass closed over his shoulders and ribs, cold as grave water, and the faces pressed against his cheek. Someone sobbed in his ear. The girl with the flower. He had forgotten her name.
The world muted to heartbeat and breath. Kael closed his eyes. When he opened them, everything was narrow and bright.
"Kael!" Nia's voice was glass breaking.
"Don't," he said, calm now. "I've got him."
He remembered an old Verdant oath, carved on temple bark: Only the chained can cut their chains. He had scoffed at it as a boy. Now he raised Abyssfang in both hands and whispered his own vow:
"First Oath: Sever the Borrowed."
The sword shivered. A line of red light crawled the fuller like a vein.
Oh, the blade sighed, hungry and surprised. You found a word that fits me.
He cut — not flesh, but claim. The edge hissed through something unseen, a band around his chest that snapped like wire. The Harrow jerked as if struck by lightning. Faces slid off his skin like paint under rain, sloughing away until only the wrong Kael face remained, smooth and empty and hateful.
"Mine," the Harrow hissed, clutching at his throat. "Mine—"
"Not today," Kael said, and took its head properly.
The severed neck spouted black silk that writhed like snakes. Nia was there already, looping her wire and tightening until the silk frayed. Taye's shadow climbed the wriggles like vines and strangled them to stillness. The body thrashed armlessly, then went still.
It should have been over.
It wasn't.
The air grew heavy, as if the forest had stopped breathing. The Harrow's head laughed — not with Kael's voice now, but with something deeper that made his teeth hurt.
"A promise," it croaked. "A chain."
The thing's tongue unrolled like a scroll, and a sigil burned on it: three rings linked, old as graves.
Kael didn't feel the brand hit him. He heard it — a clink inside his ribs, like a shackle finding its lock.
Nia's hand was on his shoulder. Taye's breath sawed like a saw. The Harrow's head crumbled to ash, and the ash crawled toward Kael's boots, then into them, then up through his soles like cold fire.
He gagged and tore his boots off too late. A red mark kindled over his heart, three rings glowing through skin.
Abyssfang purred. Pretty.
"What did it do?" Taye rasped.
Nia's eyes were dark. "It marked him. Claimed him as a debt."
"My debt," Kael said. The words tasted like iron. He stood, swaying, and looked west where the Gilded towers pricked the cloudline. "We're moving."
"Kael—"
"Now."
He didn't look back at the ash or the faces, or at the tree where he had carved his name when he was ten, the bark split and oozing in the rain.
He walked.
The border post to the Gilded Domain wasn't a wall so much as a promise. Lanterns in glass globes bobbed along a high iron fence, each one filled with a slow-turning firefly the size of a fist. Banners in cloth of gold snapped damply, embroidered with the scales of law and a gilded eye that watched. A long line of traders hunched under tarps: spice men with dyed mustaches, desert riders in indigo, fisherfolk from the ice with sealskin coats, students in linen carrying baskets of glass, pilgrims of a dozen shapes and skin tones. Small gods rode their shoulders in carvings and cloth. The air smelled like wet parchment and saffron.
Kael did not slow. The brand on his chest had cooled to a steady ache, a second heartbeat that wanted a leash.
"Smile," Nia murmured without turning her head. "Gilded folk smell worry like sharks smell blood."
"I can't smile," Taye said. "My back is a colander."
"I told you to stop teasing shadow gods," Nia said. She produced a folded triptych of papers from somewhere inside her coat. "We have passes."
"We do?" Kael asked.
"We do now," she said, fanning them like cards. "House Mercator subcontracting. Merchants of salvage. Names?"
Kael stared at her.
Taye brightened despite the pain. "I call 'Jali the Handsome.'"
"You always call 'the Handsome.'"
"It's a brand!"
"Your brand is screaming in the rain and stealing teeth."
"Rude."
At the head of the line, a Gilded clerk peered at them from beneath an enormous hat that had an entire ledger sewn into the brim. He was fine-boned, with skin the color of honey tea and neat, shoulder-length locks threaded through with thin brass tubes. His lips were pursed to a blade. "Purpose?" he asked.
"Salvage," Nia said smoothly, snapping open the passes so the golden eye stamps flashed. She smiled with just enough teeth; the kind of smile that moved money. "House Mercator. Subcontract."
The clerk sniffed the documents, which was either a custom or a personal quirk. "You smell like war."
"We came from it," Nia said. "That's why we have salvage."
"Mm." His gaze slid to Taye, who was attempting to stand in a way that didn't involve his back. "You are leaking."
"Pure charisma," Taye said weakly.
The clerk's eyes narrowed. They flicked to Kael and stuck there, lingering at his chest as if the brand burned through his shirt. The man's nostrils flared.
Kael felt Abyssfang hum against his hip.
"Problem?" Nia asked, voice gentle, dangerous.
The clerk's smile did not reach his eyes. "None… if you enjoy trouble. Welcome to the Gilded Domain, subcontractors." He stamped the passes with a neat, satisfying thump and waved them through.
As they stepped past, he added without looking up, "There is a bathhouse three streets on. Your… charisma… is disturbing commerce."
Taye blinked. "Was that a threat or customer service?"
"Yes," Nia said.
The first sight of Giltspire (no one who wanted to be taken seriously called it by its official name, Aurelion) was always a shock: tiered streets climbing a hill of stone, each ring brighter than the last, goldleaf catching what little sun crawled through the clouds. Bridges arced between towers like taut sails. Laundry flapped like flags. Markets overflowed the seams — spices piled like sand dunes, bright fruits split to show jeweled guts, carpets rolled like sleeping serpents. In the gutters, tiny mechanical crabs scuttled along to pick trash, clicking politely when kicked.
The people were a tangle from everywhere: Verdant shamans with painted masks; Crimson veterans with medals they'd bought, sold, bought back; icefolk with hair braided into crowns; islanders in linen the color of seafoam; scholars of the Broken Sky in long coats that snapped when they turned; dark-skinned merchants with locks in every style — short coils dyed copper, waist-length ropes set with shells, tight twists bound in gold filigree. Kael felt the city press hands on him from all directions, picking pockets with one palm and patting cheeks with the other.
He felt watched.
"Nia," he said quietly.
"I know," she replied without moving her lips. "Stay light. We have three tasks: stop your brand from chewing you hollow, sell enough salvage to breathe, and make sure Taye doesn't die from holes."
"I can multitask," Taye protested, then winced. "Ow. No, I can't."
They took a side street shaded by tarps. A boy with grease-black fingers offered to paint their locks with powdered glass, "so the gods notice you." Nia flashed her knives and he reconsidered. A woman the color of cinnamon with locs dyed frost-white hawked skewers of char — oily fish blistered over coals — and shouted blessings in a language Kael didn't know. The sword muttered that it preferred curses.
"Bathhouse," Nia said, steering. "Then healer. Then someone who deals with curses that think they are taxes."
"You speak like you've been here," Kael said.
"I have," Nia replied, too quick. "During the small war with House Aureline." She tilted her chin toward a distant tower with a crown of clockwork. "They buy information and sell laws. Careful with your eyes."
"Eyes?"
The bells rang.
They weren't bells like church bells. They were small, bright things — dozens, hundreds of them — hung from wires that webbed the air between buildings. They rang all at once in a rippling hush. People paused as if a hand had been lifted and might descend again.
"Witness hour," someone murmured. "The Bureau walks."
A line of figures emerged from an alley and turned into the street with the inevitability of a knife sliding from a sheath. All were cloaked in white trimmed with gold, their locks bound with thread. Each carried a staff topped with a glass eye that rotated and blinked lazily. The people of Giltspire lowered their gazes to show they had nothing to hide.
Nia cursed under her breath.
"Problem?" Kael asked.
She darted a look at his chest. "They smell contracts and binding law. That brand on you is both."
"Great," Taye whispered. "Should I fake being dead? I'm half there."
The lead Witness's glass eye clicked and focused. It turned toward Kael as casually as a cat noticing a mouse. The staff tilted.
Kael's brand heated under his shirt.
"Walk," Nia said. "Don't hurry. Don't breathe like you want to run. Think of taxes."
"Thinking of taxes makes me want to run," Taye said.
They walked. The Witnesses walked. The bells chimed and chimed, each note a coin on stone, a law's teeth closing. The glass eye fixed on Kael's ribs like a thumb pressing a bruise.
He touched Abyssfang's hilt and the sword tutted. No, no. Not here. You will cut a law and the whole city will bleed you for it.
"Then what?" Kael asked. He meant Nia.
"Left," she said. "Then down. Then through the steam before they can see the edges of your fear."
The bathhouse's doors were carved with fat dolphins. It was warmer inside than anything had a right to be with the rain still in their hair. Steam gathered in the rafters. A woman at a low desk — dark cocoa skin, locks swept into a braided crown studded with freshwater pearls — looked up with professional disinterest that sharpened when she saw Taye's back.
"We don't launder blood," she said flatly.
"We'll pay to vaporize it," Nia replied, sliding a coin across the desk. It wasn't gold, but it was shiny enough to pass for it at a glance if you wanted to be a fool. The woman was not a fool. Her eyebrow rose.
"House Mercator chits," she said. "They bounce."
"They bounce into more, if you let them," Nia said, and smiled with only half her mouth.
The woman's gaze weighed that. She sighed. "Fine. Third pool. Keep your blade wrapped. I don't care if it has papers — the steam will peel the lacquer off the walls."
Kael blinked. "You can smell the sword?"
She gave him a look. "I can hear it giggling."
Taye stared at Kael. "It giggles out loud? I thought that was just in your head."
Rude, Abyssfang said primly. I have timbre.
They slid through the steam, heat opening Kael's lungs and making the brand on his chest pulse slow, heavy beats. For a moment he thought he could breathe normally again. Then the Witnesses' bells trembled outside, closer now, and the brand flared back hot and hard like a hand tightening around his heart.
Nia swore and grabbed his wrist. "In."
"Mixed pool?" Taye said brightly. "I love civic unity."
"Submerge," Nia snapped.
Kael stepped into the water and sank. Heat swallowed him. The brand burned like a coal dropped on his sternum, then hissed as the water took some of its heat. The voices of the bathhouse blurred above him — splashes, mutters, a laugh that might be Taye's if he had any laughter left.
The water turned loud with his own heartbeat. And under it, another rhythm — a slow, patient clink of chain.
He opened his eyes into blur and green light. The world slowed to the waver of heat. He reached for the brand and felt something reach back from inside, a hand made of hooks.
He jerked, inhaled scald, and shot up coughing.
"Kael?" Nia's face hovered close, hair a red halo made wild by steam. "Talk to me."
"It—" He coughed again, tasted copper. "It's… not just a mark. It's a latch."
"Can we… unlatch it?" Taye said from the next pool over, half-floating, eyes closed. "Asking for a friend whose back is fully perforated."
"Not here," Nia said. "We need an unbinder. A legalist. A—"
"Chainbreaker," someone supplied, voice dry as sun-bleached bone. "And you've just found one."
They turned.
She stood at the edge of the pool, condensation beading along the bone beads woven through her thick braids. Her skin was deep night, her eyes knife-bright, and her sword sat high on her back in a lacquered scabbard etched with stormbirds. Her locks were threaded with pale bits of shell and bone — trophies from duels, if rumor spoke true. A faint scar ran from jaw to ear, the kind earned while smiling at an enemy.
Nia's brows lifted. "Abeni."
"Abeni Sky-Slasher," Taye said, admiration and alarm mixing like oil and spark. "Here to kill us or kiss us?"
"Kiss you?" Abeni clicked her tongue. "I prefer my men unpunctured."
Taye lay back deeper in the water. "Rude but fair."
Kael climbed out of the pool, steam peeling from his skin. The brand shone through water and cloth, an angry red with three interlocked rings. Abeni's gaze snagged on it. Her jaw tensed.
"You dragged the Abyss into Giltspire," she said. Not a question.
"It followed me," Kael said. "I didn't invite it."
"Nobody invites the tide," Abeni said, stepping closer. Up close she was all edges softened by humor she could sheathe or draw. The bone beads in her braids clicked; her locks were dyed in the middle — a wash of dusky blue like storm sea. "But you did take a chain. Why?"
Kael wanted to say he hadn't. His mouth didn't like that lie. "Because the world keeps trying to bind me with softer things," he said. "Names. Memories. Pity."
Abeni's expression did not change. "You'll need a Chainbreaker. House Aureline keeps one on retainer. She drinks truth for breakfast and spits out contracts at noon. She'll charge you the weight of your head in gold or blood."
"We have salvage," Nia said smoothly. "And favors."
"Hmm." Abeni's gaze flicked to Nia. "You again. Still threading needles through wars?"
"Still cutting storms for coin?"
"Always," Abeni said, and then the bells outside shivered in a new pattern — not the soft tick of Witness hour but a hard, hammering peal that made the steam ring.
The bathers went quiet. Someone whispered, "Inquest."
Abeni's hand found her hilt without looking. "They're early today."
The bathhouse door opened, and the Witnesses entered in a neat white file, steam curling off their robes like souls. The lead's glass eye rolled and fixed on Kael's chest as if the brand glowed through walls.
"Citizen," the Witness intoned, voice echoing inside Kael's skull. "You carry a foreign bond within the limits of Aurelion. You are under arrest for unlicensed metaphysic."
Taye raised a hand from his pool. "Question: if you license it, is it still a crime?"
The glass eye swiveled toward him. Taye sank until only his nose and locks floated.
Nia stepped between Kael and the Witness, daggers not drawn but drawn in intention. "He is a subcontractor operating under House Mercator. He has papers."
The Witness did not look at the papers. "He has chains."
Abeni's smile was slow and mean, a blade of a different kind. "And he has a duelist."
"Duel?" the Witness repeated, as if tasting a new food.
"Law allows trial by edge when bonds are disputed and a Chainbreaker is unavailable," Abeni said. "Unless Giltspire has forgotten its own spine." Her hand slid the sword an inch from its scabbard; the air sharpened.
The Witness considered that, glass iris narrowing with soft clicks. "Trial granted. Witnessed."
The bathhouse owner sighed so deeply her pearls rattled. "If anyone chips a tile, I will charge the Bureau."
Kael stood, water streaming, brand burning. He met Abeni's eyes. "Why are you helping us?"
Abeni shrugged one shoulder, the motion sliding the stormbirds on her scabbard like they were about to fly. "Because I don't like seeing Giltspire bullied by a swamp in a boy's chest. Because Nia owes me a favor so complicated we both pretend it's simple. Because you will owe me after, and I collect." Her gaze twitched toward his sword. "And because I've wanted to see if a blade that laughs can be taught to shut up."
Rude, Abyssfang sniffed. But… she's pretty. I will allow it.
Outside, the bathhouse's courtyard steamed in the rain. A ring of damp onlookers gathered with the speed of gossip. The Witnesses arrayed themselves like teeth along the fence. Nia's fingers brushed Kael's knuckles — a touch like a talisman.
"Win," she said softly.
"And if I don't?" he asked.
"Then Taye and I will do something regrettable in your memory," she said. "Probably several things."
Taye managed a thumbs-up from the doorway, towel slung over one bony shoulder, blue-dyed locks dripping. "If you die, I'm stealing your boots."
"I threw them away," Kael said.
"Then I'm stealing your sword."
Ha, Abyssfang said. He would be so dead.
Abeni stepped into the center of the yard, sword still sheathed. "First cut claims the question of law," she said. "Second settles it. Third sends the loser to the god of their choice. Ready?"
Kael nodded. The brand chimed inside him: clink, clink, clink.
The lead Witness raised the staff. "Begin."
Abeni moved like rain skidding off a blade — forward, then not, then suddenly there, the scabbard's mouth whispering as her sword slid free. Kael met her in the middle, Abyssfang laughing high and clear. The first clash rang like a coin on stone.
Heat and light. Edge and edge.
Abeni's style was sky writ human: clean lines, no waste, cuts that made the air flex. Kael's was river: pressure, pull, a sudden flood that stole your feet. She cut for wrists; he cut for breath. She smiled; he didn't.
On the third pass, her blade kissed his brand.
Pain like a hook in the heart yanked. Kael staggered, vision flashing white. He tasted rain and iron and the memory of muddy streets. The chain inside him tightened.
Give, Abyssfang sang. Give it me. I'll bite it.
"Bite," Kael gasped, and let the sword drink heat off the brand. The laughter turned low, content. The ache cooled, just enough.
Abeni's eyes narrowed. "Clever.
"Desperate," he said.
"Same shape," she allowed, and came again.
They traded questions in steel. Why take a chain? — because the soft ones failed me. Why come to Giltspire? — because law turns hunger into coin. Who do you bleed for? — depends who stands behind me.
Nia watched, lips a flat line. Taye watched, lips open in painful awe. The crowd murmured like a hungry stomach.
Abeni feinted right and snapped left, the blade's flat slapping his knuckles. Abyssfang jumped to his other hand like a living thing. He let it, pivoted, and cut low, the laugh turning mean as it tasted air under her guard. Abeni hopped, toes whispering on wet stone, and the edge went under her heel by a hair.
The Witness's glass eye glowed approvingly. The law loved a tidy fight.
"First cut," Abeni said, almost regretful, and drew a line on his cheek he barely felt until the heat of it sang. Blood beaded and ran.
Kael smiled then — not the crooked grin he showed dying men, but a lopsided, rueful thing. "Second," he said, and knocked her sword aside with a twist that made bone beads leap in her braids. Abyssfang's edge kissed her shoulder. Red brightened on brown skin, thin as a thread, then thick.
They broke apart, breathing.
The brand pulsed: clink. It wanted a third. It always wanted a third.
"Law says we could stop," Abeni said, low. "One each. Question balanced. Call a Chainbreaker."
"Law's never met my luck," Kael said. The ash of the Harrow sat under his tongue. "Finish it."
"Stupid," she murmured, but there was approval under it, or maybe shared disease.
They came together a last time. The yard narrowed to rain and faces and the slip of steel. Kael fed the brand into Abyssfang until the sword's laughter went too loud, then starved it so it hissed. He made pain a metronome. He made law a rhythm. He let Abeni show him the sky, and he showed her the river.
When they broke, Kael had the third cut.
Abeni stared at the line on her ribs, then at him. The Witness's staff chimed. "Question settled in the challenger's favor," the glass eye declared. "Foreign bond… deferred." The word had a knife under it. "Chainbreaker will be summoned for removal at dawn. You will present at the Ninth Hall."
The crowd breathed as if they had been held underwater.
Abeni slid her sword home and nodded once, as if conceding not just a fight but a conversation. "Dawn," she said. "Don't run. They will only enjoy it."
"I don't run," Kael said, though his knees wanted to.
She hesitated, then reached and thumbed the line she'd cut on his cheek, gentle as a sister. "You should start," she said, and smiled with half her mouth, and turned away into the steam.
Nia was at his side before the bells finished their last chime. Her hands were steady, even if her voice wasn't. "We have until dawn to find a Chainbreaker who won't sell your heart to a ledger. I know one. She drinks in the Third Ring and hates everyone equally."
"Perfect," Taye said faintly from a bench where he had collapsed. "My type."
Kael wiped rain and blood from his face. The brand ticked in his chest, patient as a taxman. The Harrow's laugh still crawled under his skin. The city clicked and hummed around them — laws, gears, gods, debts.
"Dawn," he said.
The Witnesses began to disperse. The crowd broke with the appetite of people who had seen a neat slice and now wanted soup. The bathhouse owner counted tiles and sighed.
Kael looked up past steam at the gold-rimmed towers and the sliver of sky over them, ragged with rain.
The sword at his hip chuckled softly, almost fond. You cut well when it hurts.
"It always hurts," he said.
Then we will always cut.
Somewhere far west, the Crimson Domain's war banners were being raised. Somewhere east, the Broken Sky's islands were clinking against their chains. Somewhere under his ribs, three rings waited for dawn.
"Come on," Nia said, already moving. "Let's go buy our freedom before someone else does."
They stepped into the street.
A pale boy with a messenger's knot in his hair watched them go and ran in the opposite direction toward a tower with a crown of clockwork.
Up in that tower, a woman with a voice like sugar and a spine like wire would soon smile and say, "Bring me the boy with the laughing blade."
But for now, it was rain and steam and the hammer of Kael's heart, counting down.
To be continued…