2. Chapter 2
AMARIA
Morning came cold and unwelcome.
We sat on the rooftop across from the loft, hidden behind a crumbling chimney stack.
I’d pulled my leathers back on before dawn, every blade strapped where it belonged—Dawnrender and Voidbringer at my sides, stars in the vambraces, steel settled against wrists and elbows and knees like parts of myself returned.
The tiles were slick with last night's rain, but at least we could hear the city waking up below.
Vendors calling out prices. Cart wheels grinding against cobblestones.
The ordinary machinery of a world that had kept turning while ours fell apart.
Serenya had the dog in her lap again. It had found half a rat somewhere and was gnawing on it with cheerful determination. She let it.
"We can't just storm the palace," Maxx started. "Even if we had weapons big and bad enough. Even if the four of us weren't—" He gestured vaguely at the state of us. "This."
"I know."
"The King has an army," he continued.
"I know."
"And Eryndor is—" He stopped. Started again. "Whatever deal he made, he's bound to it now. We try to grab him without a plan, we're not rescuing him. We're getting him killed."
I dug my thumbnail into the tile beside me. Watched a crack spider out from the pressure.
"We're not ready. Not without Dreadscale," Serenya said.
Maxx exhaled through his nose. Ran a hand over his face.
"I have contacts," he said. "People who owe me. People who hear things." He looked at me. "I can put out feelers. See if anyone knows where a seven-foot fire-breathing bastard with a death wish might be."
"How long?" I asked.
"A day. Maybe two."
Two days. Forty-eight hours of sitting in this rotting loft while Eryndor played the puppet prince and I did nothing. My skin crawled just thinking about it.
"Fine." The word tasted like surrender. I hated it. "Fine. Do it."
The dog finished its rat and burped. Below us, the market was filling in.
Merchants and buyers and beggars, all moving through their ordinary lives.
A sharp-tongued fae argued over the price of flour.
A child darted between stalls, quick fingers hunting for unguarded pockets.
An Enforcer patrol moved through the crowd, midnight-blue cloaks cutting through the drab greys and browns of the common fae.
I watched them pass and felt nothing.
"—ceremony today."
The words snagged in my ear. Two ladies at a vegetable stall, heads bent together.
"Another one?" The taller fae balked. "Third this month."
Maxx pushed to his feet, scanning the rooftops for his exit route. I put my hand on his arm to still him. “Listen,” I hissed.
"Princess Vivienne herself. In the eastern fields, they're saying. Public healing for the Veil rot. Free attendance for anyone who wants to witness the miracle."
"Miracle." The fae hawked and spat. "My cousin lives near those fields. Says her chickens stopped laying the day after the last 'miracle.' Some blessing."
They moved on. Their voices faded into the general hum of the market.
The eastern fields.
Princess Vivienne.
Public.
"No." Serenya's voice. She was looking at me with a hard edge in her gaze.
"I didn't say anything," I grunted.
"You didn't have to." She shifted the dog to one arm and grabbed my wrist with her free hand. "Amaria. Whatever you're thinking—"
"I'm thinking I want to see it," I said.
"Why? What could you possibly—"
"Because I owe him that much."
Serenya blinked. "You owe—"
"He's living it. Every single day, he wakes up and performs this... this lie so that Caden is free. So that I didn't have to watch my brother rot in a cell." My throat tightened. "The least I can do is witness it. I don't get to look away just because it hurts."
He didn't get to look away when they put the crown on his head and the ring on his finger.
"I need to see it," I said again. Quieter. "I need to carry the same weight he's carrying. Even if I can only carry the memory of it."
"Tactical error,” Caden stated. "High probability of capture."
The words came in that same clipped, operational cadence, and grief brushed cold down my spine.
"Yes," I replied.
"No extraction protocol."
"I know."
"Visual identification is likely. Asset exposure is... unacceptable."
Maxx's head tilted slowly, like a cat watching something fascinating and mildly offensive.
"Did he just call you an asset?" He looked between us. "Should I be insulted on your behalf, or is this a family thing I'm not understanding?"
"Maxx."
"No, genuinely asking." He gestured at Caden. "Because that was either a very tactical way of saying 'please don't die, sister,' or I've fundamentally misread this relationship."
Caden's brow furrowed. The expression looked almost painful on a face that hadn't had much practice with expressions.
"Asset. Noun. A useful or valuable thing." He paused, then recalibrated. "Person."
"There it is." Maxx's grin softened. "Knew there was a compliment buried in all that military jargon."
“Maxx could glamour us before he goes…” I side-eyed my brother, smiling. “So, visual identification will be less likely.” Maxx beamed. "Finally. Someone appreciates my talents."
He crossed to us in two strides, fingers already moving. The glamour settled over Serenya first—her features shifting, blurring, becoming forgettable. A stranger's face over familiar eyes.
"Hold still." He turned to me, and I felt the magic brush across my skin like cobwebs. "There. You're now a very plain merchant's daughter with terrible posture. You're welcome."
"And Caden?"
Maxx studied my brother for a long moment. Caden stared back, unblinking.
"Him, I'm leaving him alone. Anyone who looks at that face is going to assume he's a bodyguard anyway." He tilted his head. "Or an assassin. Either way, people will give you space."
He reached down and scratched the dog behind its dirty velvet ear. "Guard them for me, Menace." Then, to us: "I'll find one of my contacts. Don't do anything—"
"Stupid?" I deadpanned.
"I was going to say heroic. Same thing with you."
He dropped over the edge of the roof before I could respond. I listened to his footsteps fade across the tiles, then nothing.
"Eastern fields," I said. "Let's go see a miracle."
I plunged off the roof and hit the alley below. My knees absorbed the impact.
Footsteps behind me and Serenya cursing under her breath, the dog yipped in protest. Caden landed heavy and off-balance, still relearning how to move in a body that belonged to him.
They followed. Of course they followed.
Idiots. Loyal, stubborn idiots.
Gods, how I loved them for it.
We cut through the lower market and into the eastern quarter, where the streets widened just enough for wagons and chains.
The sound reached us before the line did—iron striking iron, boots in mud, the flat bark of Enforcer orders. Then the procession turned the corner.
Mine workers.
A dozen adults. More children than that.
They wore the dull iron collars of the Veil Mines, their wrists blackened with grime that no rain could wash off.
Their clothes hung in strips. Their faces were the color of old ash, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed, like the dark had gotten into them and stayed there.
A cart rattled behind them under heavy guard, stacked with void-iron bars wrapped in oilcloth.
Even from here, I could feel my Marks recoil.
One of the children couldn’t have been more than eight. Shadowmarked.
The Mark crawled black spreading from his chest to his throat like spilled ink, half-hidden beneath the collar.
He stumbled in the mud, and the bar he was helping carry dipped low enough to wrench his shoulders from their sockets.
The Enforcer beside him struck him across the back with the butt of a spear.
“Up,” the male snapped. “You want the rot back in your lungs?”
The child straightened without a sound.
Void-iron.
The same bars they used to build the pain-sinks. The same bars that drew the sickness out of fields and wells and bodies and sent it screaming somewhere else. They were making the Marked carry the bones of their own execution.
No one in the street moved to help. No one even looked surprised. They just pressed themselves against the walls and let the line pass, like this was ordinary. Like this was the cost of waking up to clean fields and unspoiled water and baskets full of food.
My teeth ground together so hard my jaw ached.
Vivienne raised her jeweled hands in one corner of the kingdom, and somewhere else children were marched into the earth to swallow what she would not cure.
Serenya had gone pallid beside me. Even Maxx was quiet.
Caden watched the line pass and went unnaturally still, like some hidden mechanism inside him had clicked into place. “Pain displacement,” he said flatly. “Sustained containment labor.”
I wanted to tear every iron bar off that cart and drive it through the palace gates.
The last of the workers disappeared into the drizzle, chains clinking softly, and then the city ate the sound.
“Still want to see the miracle?” Serenya asked.
“Yes,” I said.
More than ever.
The eastern fields were a sea of bodies. The threatened storm had finally broken, a freezing drizzle washing over the crowd and turning the ground into a slick, treacherous mud.
Maxx found us and melted into our group, hood pulled low.
The crowd thickened the closer we got. Farmers and merchants and refugees with haunted eyes, all straining forward, all craning their necks toward the same point on the horizon.
The air smelled of sweat and packed bodies, heavy with the cloying drift of myrrh. Or rot dressed up to smell holy.
My scar throbbed once, sharp and useless, like some part of me was still trying to reach for a bond that no longer existed.
Then I saw her.