27. Sabine
SABINE
Istare at the canvas ceiling and count the stitches.
My ribs ache. The claw wounds along my left side are crusted and hot beneath the linen wrappings, and every time I inhale too deeply, pain flares sharp enough to make my vision blur at the edges. I have been lying here since before dawn. I am not sure if I slept. I am not sure I tried.
It has been roughly ten days since I left. I keep replaying the moment I walked away from him.
The look on his face before he stopped himself. The way his hands dropped open at his sides—massive, still, like weapons laid down on a table. He chose restraint. He chose me over his own instinct and I left anyway, and somewhere in the mountain above this valley, he is alone with that knowledge.
The tent flap opens. Cold air rushes in and Velka drops into the camp stool beside me like she's been dragging herself uphill all morning, which she probably has.
"You look terrible," she says.
"Thank you, Vel."
She unrolls a strip of fresh linen from the kit on her belt and reaches for my bandages. Her hands are rough and efficient. She doesn't pretend the unwrapping doesn't hurt.
"The perimeter held through the night," she says, keeping her eyes on her work. "Three scouts reported movement on the north ridge. Nothing came down."
"He's keeping them back."
She pauses. Just briefly. "We don't know that."
"I know that."
Velka ties off the linen and sits back, studying me with those steady copper-brown eyes. She looks tired. She has looked tired since the fire took her home.
"Sabine." Her voice is quiet. "Stay here."
"Vel—"
"I'm not finished." She folds her hands between her knees, leaning forward.
"I know what he is to you. I'm not stupid and I'm not blind.
But what you feel and what is survivable are two entirely different things.
You go back up that mountain and Tharros will use you to break him completely. You said it yourself."
"He let you walk away," she continues. "That means he can live without you if he has to. Let him."
The words land somewhere soft and they hurt in a way the claw wounds don't. Because she isn't saying it to be cruel.
She is saying it because she believes it, because from where she stands—from where any reasonable human in this valley stands—the math is simple.
Lesser creature, greater risk. Remove the variable, save the equation.
I almost agree with her. I am still lying here counting tent stitches and agreeing with her when the shadows at the edge of the tent shift.
Velka is on her feet with her blade drawn before I can sit up. The shadow that detaches from the canvas is enormous—dark slate skin, wings folded so tight against his back they look like carved stone.
Vorgrym.
"Put it away," he says to Velka. "If I came to kill either of you, you would not have heard me enter."
Velka sheathes the blade but doesn't step back.
Vorgrym turns to me. "There is something you need to know."
He doesn't sit. He stays standing in the tent and speaks in low, careful sentences, like a commander delivering intelligence before a battle—which is, I suppose, exactly what this is.
He begins where I left off in the crypt archives.
Sevrik's letters, the inside collaborator I found referenced to in the ledger.
I know all this. I read it. But somewhere in the hours between then and now the cold fact of it had been buried under grief and guilt and the sight of Tovian’s face when I pulled my hand from his.
And then Vorgrym goes further.
"There was a second signature on the original sealing orders," he says. His voice is low and grounding. "A gargoyle mark. It was smeared, the ink bled into the parchment by time or intent, but the rank is unmistakable. An Ashwing General".
I shift my aching joints, the silver markings on my wrists itching with a sudden, cold tension. "You don't know which one?"
"The seal is fractured. It could belong to any of the inner circle who stood beside Tovian before the sleep," Vorgrym admits, his good eye fixed on the tent flap as if watching for shadows.
"I said nothing because to bring a half-truth to Tovian now is to hand a torch to a man standing in a powder magazine.
If he suspects his own commanders of the ancient betrayal before I have a name, he will tear the territory apart looking for a ghost. He will go on a witch hunt that ends in a massacre of the very few kin he has left".
Someone in the Ashwing rank orchestrated the ancient massacre to isolate Tovian.
To prove that loyalty between species breeds catastrophe.
And now Tharros is doing it with me. With the mate bond.
With every rival general who watches Tovian flinch when I'm threatened and calls it weakness.
Tharros doesn't need to kill Tovian. He needs Tovian to destroy himself.
And I walked out.
I gave them exactly what they needed. I took the one thing that was keeping Tovian's restraint intact and I handed it to his enemies wrapped in good intentions.
"Sabine." Velka's voice is careful now. "Whatever you're thinking—"
"I have to go back."
"You don’t know—"
"He is alone up there." I reach for my coat. "Alone, in front of every general who is looking for a reason to abandon him or betray him again, and I left because I thought I was protecting him. I wasn't protecting him. I was finishing Tharros's work for him."
"You have claw wounds."
"I've had worse."
"You are one human woman—"
"I know what I am." I pull the coat on and reach for my blade belt. The drakestone hilt is cold beneath my palm. "I know exactly what I am. That's why I have to stand there."
She doesn't stop me. I think she knows, somewhere behind the practicality and the loyalty and the genuine fear for my life, that this was always how it was going to go. She stares at me for several seconds. Then she exhales through her nose and says nothing at all.
The mountain trail is frost-choked and steep, mist hanging so thick between the pines I can barely see ten feet ahead. My side pulls with every uphill step. I don't slow down.
I think about what Tharros expects. He expects grief from a broken Alpha whose mate fled and whose court has already started the eulogy.
He expects the narrative he built—that the bond is a weakness, that Tovian's attachment to a human woman is proof of instability, that a ruler who can be moved by love can’t be trusted with a kingdom.
I think about what they are going to see instead.
The primary entrance to the great cavern yawns open below the cathedral ruins, and I walk straight through it. The guards at the entrance go rigid. One of them takes a step toward me. I look at him once. He steps back.
The murmur starts ahead of me before I even reach the staging area. I can hear it, low and rippling, moving through the assembled generals and commanders like a current through still water.
I keep walking.
The cavern opens up around me—high ceilings, twisted stone pillars, torchlight throwing long shadows across the marked walls. It is crowded. Gargoyle generals, allied commanders, what remains of Tovian's inner vanguard. The smell of stone and cold fire.
And Tovian.
He stands at the center of it, and the sight of him quiets the screaming in my chest that has not stopped since I left.
He looks haggard. His stone skin has gone dull and grey-flat, stripped of the low luminescence it carries when he's rested.
His wings are slightly lowered — not folded tight, not spread for aggression, just dropped at the edges, like a weight he's been carrying for hours.
His eyes are fixed on the middle distance.
The breath he pulls in as he sees me is sharp enough that I hear it across the cavern.
His wings twitch once like a reflex he didn't choose. His hands, hanging at his sides, begin to shake. The stoic mask cracks completely.
I walk to him, stop beside him.
The cavern is absolutely silent.
I don't explain myself or offer apologies or beg the assembled court for patience. I simply stand in the heart of the Ashwing court, beside Tovian's shoulder, where I belong.