Enzo
Igave Mira to Evara first.
Not because her death mattered more than any of the others lying in the ash, but because I knew her name. The knife that had killed her rested on my knee, its blade dark against the road. I hadn’t been able to throw it away. Not yet.
I knelt beside her and closed her eyes with fingers that did not shake. Smoke dragged low through the square, bitter in my throat, carrying burned timber, scorched grain, and the sweet-sick smell of bodies left too long in heat.
For one treacherous breath, I remembered flour on a child’s cheek and a loaf pressed into my hands. Then I put the memory away. She deserved more from me than grief while there were rites still owed.
I touched my thumb to the ash beside her and drew Evara’s crescent across her brow.
“Mira,” I signed, because the dead should be carried by their names when a name remained.
Then I signed the old form my mother had taught me four centuries ago, my fingers gliding in the silent way of the goddess.
“Evara, Lady of the Long Quiet, this one was sent to your gates before her hour. Take her gently. Take her well.”
The wind moved through the ruined square. Ash lifted from the road and settled over my knees.
Then I went to the next body. And the next.
The witch in the doorway of her hall, her hands burned black where she’d held the last of her working against the men who’d come through her door. The man collapsed over the fountain’s rim, his blood dried in a dark fan across the stone. The bodies behind the ruined door of the baker’s shop.
The children.
I didn’t think beyond that word. Not yet. Not while my hands were still steady enough to serve them.
I gave each of them to Evara. Named them where I could. Marked their foreheads with ash where faces remained to mark, with blood where fire had taken the ash, with nothing but my hand and the prayer where neither was possible.
It took a long time.
Nadia stood ten feet behind me and never spoke.
She didn’t ask what I needed. She didn’t interrupt the rites. She simply took the position I couldn’t hold while I knelt among my dead: her back to mine, her dagger loose in one hand, her attention spread through every shadow at the edges of the square.
Guarding me while I grieved.
The pull went quiet. Settled. She was near enough that it no longer had to call for her. That knowledge struck somewhere beneath the rage, and I put it away before it could become another wound.
When the last soul had been committed, I returned to the center of the square and sank to my knees in the ash. The knife that had killed Mira rested across my palms.
I should’ve dropped it.
I couldn’t.
There were two more rites owed in Tharros, and I would not rise to give them. This work was older than pride. Older than rank. Older than the throne my father had once intended for me and then placed in my brother’s hands.
I lowered my head.
“Vireth,” I whispered, the name tasting of smoke. “Lord of Shadow and Sovereignty, witness me. They have entered my province. They have burned my people. They have written their message in the bodies of those under my protection.”
I turned the knife in my palms and closed my hands around the blade, slicing into the flesh. My blood fell to the dusty earth, each drop a plea to the unseen god.
“Give me the strength to stand against them. Give me the patience to find the hand that ordered this. And when I find it, give me the will to cut it cleanly from the body that raised it.”
The wind rose again, stirring ash in small circles around my knees.
Then I spoke the name I hadn’t called on in three centuries.
“Tharos.”
For a moment, the town seemed to listen.
I hadn’t needed the God of Chaos in the long, ordered middle of my life. Tharos didn’t answer prayers with comfort. He answered them with ruin, with choice, with the terrible freedom to become something you couldn’t turn back from.
Some stories said he’d given the first vampire blood enough to survive death. Others said he’d only taught us how to want it. I’d never been certain which version frightened me more.
I called to him, anyway.
“Tharos, Lord of the Unbound, hear me. I will not leave this town unanswered. I will not leave this province unanswered. I will not let the order remain in the hand that gave it.”
My voice roughened. For the first time that evening, I allowed it.
“Walk with me into what comes next. Make me sufficient.”
The rite ended.
I lifted my head.
For one heartbeat, there was only the ruined square. Smoke. Ash. Nadia at my back. Mira’s knife in my hands.
Then I understood the wind hadn’t been shifting on its own.
A boot settled onto broken stone at the southern edge of the square with care too deliberate to belong to a survivor.
“Nadia?”
“I hear them.”
Her voice came from behind me, low and utterly calm, and not even remotely surprised.
She’d heard them before I had. The realization landed cold and clean: she’d known they were there, closing in through the burned-out town while I knelt with my dead, and she’d said nothing because she’d decided I would have the time to finish.
She’d held the line for me.
Rage moved through my grief and found its shape. I closed my hand around the knife that had killed Mira.
“How many?”
“Eight. Maybe nine.” Nadia’s voice stayed low behind me, calm enough that anyone listening might have mistaken this for an ordinary conversation in an ordinary square instead of a potential death sentence. “South and east. One on the witch’s hall roof.”
“Archer?”
“Longbow. Two more reek of witchcraft. Three vampires holding their breath in cover because they think you can’t hear what isn’t breathing.” She paused for a moment, deliberating. “Two Shadow Fae for certain. There may be another one hiding from me.”
For one long heartbeat, I heard nothing but the soft settling of ash.
Vampires. Witches. Shadow Fae.
Not one court sending knives into another province. Not one traitor testing a border road. No. A coordinated strike force, waiting in the smoking remains of my town while I knelt among the people they’d slaughtered.
They’d burned this place and left the bodies in the square because they knew I would come. Because they’d wanted me on my knees when they finished the message.
The grief in me hardened.
I rose slowly, Mira’s knife in my right hand and my sword in my left, both hilts slick against the cuts in my palms. I kept my movements deliberate, as though the prayer had ended and nothing more. As though I hadn’t just found a place to put every violent thing clawing through my ribs.
Then I turned my head enough to see Nadia.
She was pale beneath the soot and dying light.
Too pale. She’d been on her feet far too long, guarding my back while I prayed over my dead, and the wound in her thigh hadn’t healed simply because she was too stubborn to admit it still hurt.
Her weight was shifted subtly to one side. Her dagger was steady in her hand.
Only her dagger.
Not her body.
Every instinct I had demanded that I move her out of the square. Put her behind stone. Put her with Sugar. Put her somewhere no blade could find her while I tore this town apart with my bare fucking hands.
But there was nowhere safe.
And Nadia would no more let me remove her from this fight than she would agree to stop breathing because it was inconvenient. The fear of losing her rose sharp enough to nearly split the rage open.
I crushed it down.
Later, if the gods were merciful enough to give us one.
“Stay on my left,” I said quietly. “They’ll come from the south first. East flank will wait until we’re occupied. The witches won’t show themselves until we’ve committed.”
“And the roof?”
“All yours.”
A faint, vicious curve touched her mouth. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Saints.
She was injured, furious, and already choosing which one of them she intended to make regret surviving long enough to enter her range.
I wanted to drag her behind me.
I wanted to kiss her.
I wanted to kill every breathing thing in this town that had come here believing it could take either my province or her from me.
There was no time for any of it.
“Don’t overextend that leg,” I warned.
“Try not to be distracting, then.”
Under any other circumstances, I might have had something to say to that.
The south end of the square went quiet. Ready.
Nadia shifted half a step closer to my left side. Not touching, but near enough that I could feel it—that low, wordless pull answering for once.
Then they came.
The first one out of cover was a vampire, which was no surprise.
Our kind had been used as the first blade in coordinated kill teams for longer than most kingdoms had names. Fast enough to break a line before the witches exposed themselves. Strong enough to keep the target looking forward while the quieter weapons moved in from the sides.
He crossed the burned square at speed, curved blade low, coat snapping behind him through the ash.
He was good.
I knew his school from the angle of his wrist before his first strike reached me. Lyrenne. Southern form. Pretty in salons, lethal in alleys, refined by courtiers who mistook elegance for superiority. I had trained against Lyrenne duelists before this man’s grandfather had drawn his first breath.
He came in low, and I let him.
His blade met Mira’s knife with a bright ring of steel. For one instant, the dead woman’s weapon held between me and another knife meant for my body.
Thank you, Mira.
Then I stepped through his guard and drove my sword up beneath his jaw. He died against the blade, eyes wide, his momentum carrying him close enough that his blood struck hot across my wrist. I pulled the sword free and let him fall into the ash of the people he’d helped murder.
“Nadia,” I said.
“I’ve got mine.”
From the roof of the witch’s hall, a bowstring whispered.
Nadia vanished from my left side before the arrow ever reached the square.
I didn’t see where she went. I didn’t have the luxury. A Shadow Fae broke from the eastern cover at the same moment, paired blades catching firelight as he drove toward the place she’d just been.
He found her, anyway.
Or she found him.
They met in a collision of black leather and silver steel, too fast for anyone without vampire eyes to follow.
He came at her with the clean, brutal precision of Court enforcement.
She took the first blade aside on her dagger and turned under the second, but the movement dragged at her injured thigh.
I saw the fractional hitch in her balance.
So did he.
Rage punched through me so hard my grip tightened on the sword hilt.
He went for the opening. Nadia let him believe he had one.
Her dagger opened the inside of his thigh in a single bright line. His leg failed beneath him, and she drove inside his reach before he could recover, caught his jaw in one blood-slick hand, and buried her blade upward beneath it.
He died with her face inches from his. She shoved him off the blade before his body had finished folding.
For one vicious heartbeat, pride struck through the fear. There she was. Wounded. Furious. Merciless.
Mine.
Then another Shadow Fae rose from the smoke behind her.
“Nadia!”
I saw the moment she realized she was in danger, saw the instant she tried to move.
But she turned too late.
And there was nothing I could do.