Chapter 33
VALEN
The camp sat in the throat of the Shadowlands like a splinter the world couldn’t cough up.
No banners. No pride. No ceremony. Just clustered tents and low-burning fires, hidden by ruined stone and dead brush, arranged with the paranoid efficiency of men who knew they were trespassing on land that didn’t belong to any living kingdom.
They were Icespire soldiers, but they looked wrong here. Too rigid. Too clean. Like frost trying to pretend it belonged in ash.
I stared at the perimeter until my eyes ached with it, until my patience turned hot and animal in my veins. The boundary behind us throbbed like a sealed wound.
Elara was on the other side.
In chains. In pain. Alone.
My dragon pressed against the back of my skull, a restless force pacing inside me like it could tear my bones apart just to move faster.
Our queen, it urged.
Save her.
I swallowed the burn and forced my breathing into something controlled. Something that resembled restraint.
Isolde moved beside me without sound, crouched low in the black scrub. Moonlight threaded through her hair like a blade. Her expression was blank, but I could feel the tension in her shoulders like a taut wire. She was holding herself too tightly. Overstimulated, but refusing to show it.
Therynne, on the other hand, looked like she was one misstep away from walking directly into a fire and apologizing to it.
She crouched three paces behind us, cloaked and shivering, whispering something under her breath.
Numbers, I realized. She was counting. Measuring the distance between patrols. Timing footsteps. Cataloging lantern swings like she could solve this with math.
Bertha crouched beside her. She had her hood up, her face shadowed, but the set of her shoulders screamed stubbornness and trouble.
I shifted my grip on the knife at my thigh and whispered, “We move when the left patrol turns. Stay close.”
The camp sat ahead like a bruise on the snow. Men moving in lazy loops that pretended they weren’t watching for threats.
But it wasn’t the steel I noticed first.
It was the air.
A pressure that didn’t belong to weather. A thin, invisible awareness stretched across the dark like someone had pulled a thread through the world and tied it around my throat.
Not wards.
Not sigils carved into stone.
A living alarm.
Therynne leaned in behind me, whispering like she couldn’t stop herself. “That’s not a static boundary spell. It’s sustained. Someone is actively maintaining it, which implies a vigilance-based caster, most likely a?—”
“A Sentinelweaver,” I muttered.
Isolde didn’t speak.
She didn’t nod.
She didn’t even breathe differently.
She just lifted her hand slowly and pointed.
Beyond the camp’s outermost tent line, near the snow-buried stakes and half-collapsed brush, a single figure stood apart from everyone else. Cloaked. Still. Facing outward instead of inward.
He wasn’t guarding the camp.
He was guarding the space around it.
Listening for intrusion.
And I felt the moment his magic brushed the edge of my presence, testing it, tasting it.
My dragon shifted inside me.
Our queen.
Isolde’s fingers moved to the inside of her sleeve. A dart.
Thin. Black. Almost elegant. Poisoned.
Because that was her style.
Therynne’s whisper rose again, rapid and fascinated. “If that’s the Sentinelweaver, then he’s the anchor point for the alarm radius, which means if he drops, the entire field collapses?—”
“Quiet,” Isolde breathed. Then she stepped forward. Not toward the tents. Toward the dark. Toward the man standing alone at the edge of everything.
She moved like a shadow, walking without sound. Snow didn’t crunch under her boots. Wind didn’t catch her cloak. Even the torches seemed to look away from her.
I stayed still, muscles coiled, watching her disappear into the seam between firelight and night.
The Sentinelweaver’s head tilted slightly, as if he’d heard something, not a sound but a wrongness in the air.
Isolde lifted her hand with a flick of her wrist, and the dart flew so fast I barely saw it, only the small, brutal certainty of its path.
It struck him at the base of his neck. He didn’t shout.
He didn’t even flinch at first, only reached up slowly, fingers brushing the point of impact like he couldn’t believe what he felt.
Then his knees gave out and his body folded into the snow without a sound, his magic collapsing with him.
The pressure vanished instantly, like the world exhaled, like the night stopped listening.
Therynne sucked in a breath, eyes wide. “Oh. That’s… incredible. That’s a full disruption. That means the alarm field is mind-sustained, not rune-sustained, which is wildly vulnerable to assassination, and now I’m wondering why they didn’t?—”
I grabbed the back of her cloak and hauled her down slightly. “Move. Now.”
Isolde returned in silence, her expression unchanged, like she’d only stepped away to adjust her gloves.
“How long?” I demanded under my breath.
“An hour,” she said. “Maybe less.”
My dragon surged, impatient, furious.
Save her.
I looked at the dark line of tents like they were already dead.
“Let’s steal the sigil,” I growled. “Before the camp realizes it’s blind.”
Isolde nodded once. Therynne nodded too hard, like her neck was trying to detach from her body.
Bertha made a quiet sound of disgust.
“What?” I hissed.
Bertha leaned in, her whisper blunt as a fist. “Ye’re sneakin’ like a man who’s never had to steal nothin’ in his life.”
I froze.
I turned my head slowly toward her.
Bertha stared right back at me, unafraid, unimpressed, as if she were critiquing a poorly patched roof.
I didn’t have time for this.
I motioned, and Isolde slipped forward like ink pouring into cracks. I followed her, keeping low, letting the darkness swallow my movement. The Shadowlands weren’t kind, but they were useful. Sound carried strangely here. The air itself swallowed noise, the way ash swallowed heat.
Therynne moved behind me, careful at first, then less careful when her boot caught on a root and she made a humiliating noise.
I whipped my head back.
She froze, wide-eyed.
Then, very quietly, she whispered, “Sorry.”
Bertha made a tiny choking sound that might have been laughter or despair.
Isolde didn’t look back, but I felt irritation ripple off her like cold fog.
I kept moving.
We passed the first ring of tents, then the second. The smell of cooked meat made my stomach tighten with bitter disgust, not because I wanted it, but because Elara was starving while these men ate like their world wasn’t ending.
I saw the Warden Lord’s tent before the others did. Larger. Reinforced. Guarded by two soldiers standing outside with their cloaks pulled tight and their eyes half-lidded.
They looked bored.
A dangerous kind of bored. The kind that snapped awake fast.
I started to calculate angles. Timing. The fastest kill. The quietest route. If I could get past the guards without alerting the camp, I could take the sigil and be gone before anyone understood what had happened.
Then Bertha sighed, loud enough that it made my blood go cold.
I swung toward her.
“What are you doing?” I mouthed silently, fury tightening my throat.
She lifted a hand and waved me off like I was nothing but an inconvenience, then turned and walked away.
She didn’t crawl. She didn’t slink. She didn’t creep.
She walked, straight into the camp. My dragon surged beneath me, alarm snapping through our bond. Idiot.
Isolde went rigid beside me, and Therynne whispered, horrified, “She’s abandoning the stealth plan.”
I stared after Bertha, pulse hammering. For a heartbeat, I almost went after her. Almost grabbed her by the cloak and dragged her back into the dark.
But Bertha moved with the confidence of someone who belonged anywhere she decided she belonged. She dipped her head toward a passing soldier, muttered something that made him laugh, then vanished behind a cook tent.
I turned back to Isolde, my jaw tight.
“She is going to ruin this,” I whispered.
Isolde’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not quite anything.
“That woman,” she murmured, “ruins plans the way fire ruins paper. Entirely and with great enthusiasm.”
Therynne swallowed. “Should we retrieve her?”
“No,” Isolde said.
I didn’t like how quickly she’d said it.
I kept my eyes on the Warden Lord’s guards and counted the seconds, like they could warn me before something went wrong.
Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Then Bertha appeared again, carrying a tray, a real one, wooden and heavy, steam curling up from a bowl of soup with bread on the side and a cup of something dark beside it.
She walked straight toward the Warden Lord’s tent, and Isolde stiffened, her breath catching.
Therynne whispered, fascinated, “She’s performing a social infiltration tactic utilizing servant archetypes.”
I hissed, “Quiet.”
Bertha stopped in front of the guards and lifted her voice into something sweet enough to rot teeth.
Bertha strode up like she belonged there, tray balanced on one hip, shoulders squared like she’d personally built the camp with her bare hands.
“Dinner, sir,” she called, loud enough to carry, polite enough to sound official.
One of the guards blinked at her, then frowned like the tray had offended him. “You’re not Geraldine.”
Bertha stopped mid-step and fixed him with a stare so flat it could’ve frozen a river. “Aye,” she said slowly, like he’d just asked her if snow was wet. “An’ you’re not clever.”
The guard’s mouth twitched. “Where’s Geraldine?”
Bertha shifted the tray, huffing. “Geraldine’s sick.”
The second guard narrowed his eyes. “Since when?”
Bertha made a sharp sound of disgust, the kind a woman made when she’d been forced to witness men being useless for too long.
“Since she had to listen to the Warden Lord whine about stew bein’ too warm,” she muttered.
“Near killed her spirit. I told her to lie down ’fore she did somethin’ regrettable with a ladle. ”
The first guard snorted, half-amused despite himself.