The fever did not bring sleep. It brought ghosts.
Ciro was no longer in the damp ravine. The smell of wet pine and rotting leaves vanished, instantly replaced by the metallic tang of old blood and the suffocating stench of wet sawdust.
He was ten years old again.
He was small, his ribs showing through his skin like the bars of a birdcage. He stood in the center of the Pit—a circular depression carved into the stone floor of the Kennel.
Above him, looking down through the rusted iron grate, stood the Houndmaster. A giant of a man whose face was a roadmap of scars, holding a bucket of ice water.
"Again," the Houndmaster's voice boomed. It wasn't a shout; it was a gavel striking a sounding block. Final. Absolute.
Young Ciro trembled. His hands were raw, blisters bursting as he gripped a dull wooden practice knife. Across from him stood another boy—Number Seven.
Ciro was Number Four. They didn't have names here. Names were for people. They were tools.
"I can't," Seven whispered. He was crying, snot and blood mixing on his face. "Please, Master. My arm... it's broken."
"Pain is information," the Houndmaster recited the creed. "It tells you that you are alive. If you can feel it, you can fight through it. Again."
Seven lunged, desperate and sloppy. Ciro parried instinctively. Wood cracked against bone. Seven fell, sobbing into the sawdust.
Ciro stood over him. He felt a flicker of pity—a dangerous, warm thing in his chest. He lowered his weapon.
"He is down," Ciro called up to the grate. "It is finished."
The Houndmaster stared down. His eyes were voids, devoid of light or soul.
"Mercy," the man said, spitting the word like phlegm, "is a luxury of the dead. You think the world will pause because your enemy is crying? You think the King's enemies will hesitate because you are bleeding?"
The bucket tipped.
Ice water crashed down on them, shocking and heavy as stones.
"Finish it, Number Four. Or you take his place on the wall."
Ciro looked at the wall. Rusty shackles hung there, stained dark with dried fluids. He looked at Seven.
In the dream, the wooden knife in Ciro's hand turned into cold steel. The sawdust turned into mud. And Seven's face... Seven's face shifted.
It wasn't the boy anymore. It was Elara.
She was looking up at him, bleeding from a thousand cuts.
"Ciro," she whispered. "Why didn't you save me?"
"I tried," Ciro screamed, but no sound came out. The Kennel was filling with water. Black, acidic water rising to his neck. "I tried!"
"You are a dog," the Houndmaster laughed, his voice merging with the howling wind. "Dogs do not love. They only bite."
Ciro began to drown.
"Ciro!"
The scream tore him from the depths of the nightmare.
His eyes flew open, but he saw nothing but dancing shadows. He gasped, his lungs seizing as if he were truly drowning. He thrashed violently, his hand flying to his belt for a dagger that wasn't there.
"Ciro, stop! It's me! It's Elara!"
Hands pressed against his chest. Cool, small hands. They pushed him down, holding him against the hard earth with surprising strength.
"You're safe," the voice sobbed. "You're in the ravine. Look at me."
Ciro blinked rapidly. The hallucinations receded slowly, peeling away like cobwebs in the wind.
He was not in the Kennel. He was lying on cold stone. The air was freezing. Above him, illuminated by the faint grey moonlight filtering through the moss, was Elara.
She looked terrifying. And beautiful.
Her face was smeared with mud and dried blood—his blood. Her hair was a tangled mess of leaves and knots. Her eyes were rimmed with red, wide with exhaustion and fear. She looked like a wraith of the forest, wild and undone.
"Elara?" Ciro rasped. His throat felt like he had swallowed broken glass.
"I'm here," she whispered, her hands trembling where they rested on his burning chest. "You were screaming. You were fighting someone."
Ciro slumped back against the stone, the adrenaline draining out of him instantly. His shoulder throbbed with a sickly, hot pulse that synced with his heartbeat. The willow bark Elara had placed in his mouth was gone—likely swallowed or spat out during his thrashing.
"The fever..." Ciro muttered, closing his eyes against the spinning world. "How long?"
"Hours. It's past midnight," Elara said. She reached for a makeshift cup—a large, curved piece of tree bark she had scavenged. "Drink."
She lifted his head. The water was icy and tasted of moss and dirt, but to Ciro, it was nectar. He drank greedily, coughing as the liquid hit his raw throat.
"Slowly," she chided gently.
When he finished, he looked at her. Really looked at her.
She was wearing his spare wool tunic over her ruined dress. It was too big for her, swallowing her small frame, but she had cinched it with a vine. In her hand, she clutched a sharp, jagged piece of slate rock like a dagger.
"You stayed awake," Ciro realized.
"Someone had to watch the door," she said, her voice tight. She glanced at the moss curtain, her body tense as a bowstring.
"Did you hear anything?"
"Wind. Falling branches," Elara said. Then she hesitated. "And... howling. Far away. But getting closer."
Ciro tried to sit up, instinct screaming at him to move, to fight, to run. But his body betrayed him. His head swam, and nausea rolled through his gut. He fell back with a groan.
"The Rangers," Ciro whispered. "They are sweeping the ravine. They will use the dogs to find the blood trail."
"The mist is thick," Elara said, trying to sound hopeful, though her fingers whitened around the slate rock. "Maybe they lost us."
"Silas doesn't lose trails," Ciro said bitterly. "He waits. He knows I am wounded. He knows I will seek shelter. He is checking every cave, every overhang."
He looked at Elara. The Princess of Morvath, huddled in the dirt, guarding a broken assassin with a rock. The guilt washed over him, hotter than the fever.
"You should leave me," Ciro said quietly.
Elara stiffened. She looked down at him, her expression hardening into something unrecognizable.
"What?"
"I am dead weight, Elara. The poison is setting in my blood. Even if the fever breaks, I cannot fight five Rangers. I cannot carry you." Ciro forced the words out, each one a dagger in his own heart. "If you leave now, head downstream... you might find a village. You can hide."
"And you?" she asked, her voice dangerously low. "What happens to you?"
"I will wait for them," Ciro said. "I will buy you time. I can take two or three with me before I go."
Elara stared at him for a long moment. The silence stretched, filled only by the dripping of water and the distant wind.
Then, she moved.
She crawled over to him, looming over his chest. She didn't look sad. She looked furious.
"You stupid, arrogant fool," she hissed.
She grabbed the collar of the tunic she was wearing—his tunic—and yanked it.
"You threw me off a cliff today. You chewed raw meat with me. You washed the monster's blood off my skin." Her eyes blazed with green fire in the dark. "Do you think I did all that just to walk away when it gets hard?"
"Elara, listen to logic—"
"To hell with logic!" She slammed her free hand against the stone floor. "I am not a Princess anymore, Ciro. I buried her in the river. I am your partner. And partners do not abandon each other."
She leaned down, her face inches from his. He could feel her breath, warm and fierce against his fevered skin.
"If we die, we die together. With our teeth in their throats. Do you understand?"
Ciro stared at her. He saw the steel in her spine that had been hidden under silk for years. He saw the Wolf reflected in her eyes.
Something inside him—the cold, broken part that the Houndmaster had built—cracked. And through the crack, something warm flooded in.
He reached up with his good arm. His hand, shaking and hot, cupped her cheek. His thumb brushed away a smear of dirt.
"I understand," Ciro whispered.
Elara leaned into his touch, her anger dissolving into exhaustion. She closed her eyes for a second, savoring the contact.
"Good," she murmured. "Now shut up and heal."
She pulled away and checked his shoulder bandage. The green yarrow paste had dried, forming a crust. The redness around the wound seemed slightly less angry, though the heat remained.
"The medicine is working," she lied, or perhaps prayed. "But we need more willow. The pain is keeping your heart rate too high."
"No more foraging," Ciro warned. "It's too dangerous."
"I have some left." She reached into a small pocket she had torn in the dress. She pulled out the last strips of bark.
She placed them in his mouth. Her fingers lingered on his lips for a fraction of a second too long.
"Sleep, Ciro," she commanded softly. "I will wake you if the shadows move."
Ciro closed his eyes. The fever still raged, and the pain in his ribs was a constant, dull roar. But the nightmare of the Kennel was gone. The image of the dying boy and the cruel master had been replaced by something else.
A girl with mud on her face and a rock in her hand, standing between him and the dark.
He drifted off, not into the black water this time, but into a dreamless, healing grey.
Elara watched him breathe. She adjusted the tunic over his chest to keep him warm. Then, she turned back to the moss curtain.
She gripped the piece of sharp slate until it cut into her palm, the pain keeping her awake.
Outside, the wind shifted. And on the breeze, faint but unmistakable, came the sound of a snapping twig.
Snap.
Close.
Elara stopped breathing. She stared at the curtain, her grip on the rock tightening until her knuckles turned white.
Let them come, she thought, a cold resolve settling over her heart.
She raised the jagged stone, ready to strike.
I am not a rabbit anymore.