Chapter 36
The walls shuddered, and Ivan came out of sleep with his fist already half-thrown.
The room lurched around him—firelight guttering low, rough stone overhead, the last amber breath of dying coals staining the dark red—and for a beat, he could do nothing but lie there and let his senses crawl back into place.
Then the sound came again. A deep, breaking groan that traveled up through the floor and into his bones, hard enough to set his teeth on edge.
Then came the shouting.
He swept the room and found only the Sídhe stretched motionless on his pallet across the chamber, pale and wrong in the guttering light. Another crash boomed through the stone, nearer now. Dust whispered from the ceiling. The dying coals jumped in the hearth.
His mouth went dry.
The Legion.
Ivan was moving before the thought had fully materialized.
He came off the pallet too fast, and the world pitched savagely to the left, the herbs still clinging thick as swamp-mud in his blood.
He struck the wall hard enough to bark the skin from his palm and stayed there, head bowed, while darkness surged up behind his eyes in a hot black wave.
He breathed through it, slow and ugly, jaw clenched against the nausea.
When he forced his eyes open again, he searched the room properly. No sword. No knife. Not even a length of iron worth swinging. Whoever had left him here had been careful. He ground his teeth together and shoved off the wall.
The doorway narrowed him into a corridor of the same rough-dressed stone. The ceiling pressed low, the air close—a space half-buried, as if the mountain had swallowed the structure and only begrudged them passage through it. Under other circumstances, he might have admired the craftsmanship.
As it was, he was bleeding.
He noticed it in the second corridor—a pulling along his right side. He pressed a hand against it and kept moving.
In the third room, he found a sword propped against the wall—military-issue, nothing special—as though someone had set it down in a hurry and never came back for it.
Ivan bent to pick it up, and the simple act of lowering himself sent a hot line of pain through his side, bright enough to hollow him out.
He locked his knees and waited it out before getting his hand around the hilt, adjusting his grip, and pushing on.
Daylight waited ahead.
Ivan shifted the sword, sweat pebbling down the back of his neck despite the northern chill, and stepped through.
The cold came first. Then the scale of it.
The ridge opened up above him—mountains that didn’t so much rise as arrive, their snowbound crowns swallowing the horizon until the sky was reduced to a pale, narrow strip above them.
Pine pressed in on every side, dark and thick, the forest drinking what little light the day had to offer.
The air smelled of sap and frost. Each breath left a ghost before his mouth.
He took it in for the span of a heartbeat.
Then he felt the wards, and his stomach turned.
Across the slope, the glowing weaves sputtered, sigils faltering mid-pattern. It looked almost beautiful: the collapse of order rendered as starlight unraveling. Cracks spiderwebbed outward from a single point in the treeline, the glow fading where the lines split and bled away into nothing.
Below, the Vredians were strung along the incline—Dominic’s stance rigid, Yoni squinting through sweat, Bryn and Godfrey already muttering incantations.
Further upslope, Gideon braced himself with both palms out, channeling until his arms shook.
Draoth poured into the breach, while Dario hovered at the perimeter with his blade drawn, scanning the trees for what they all felt coming.
Ivan reached inward for the current, and it met him like an exhausted creature—reluctant, settling immediately back into hibernation. A cold pulse of panic twisted in his chest. He tried again, teeth set against the ache building behind his eyes.
The treeline cracked.
He spun toward it, sword up, and the pines bowed, their trunks bending in unison as air rushed backward from the force about to emerge.
The wards flared once more—a scream of light and Draoth—then shattered across the slope in a haze of dying brilliance.
The Vredians staggered under the backlash.
Snow and ash blew sideways through the breach, and Ivan lifted his arm against it, squinting into the dark hollow between the trees.
Two figures stepped into view, and his sword arm sank.
He knew them before his thoughts properly caught up—knew them in the old, unreasoning way the body remembers what it has loved too long to mistake.
Sybil came first, composed as ever, her pale hair cut blunt at the chin, the dim light catching and slipping oddly around her as she crossed the dying shimmer of the wards.
Tristan followed half a pace behind, all loose-limbed arrogance, dark hair falling untidily over his brow, his fine-boned face wearing that same faintly insolent smirk that made him look every inch the spoiled highborn he was.
His hands were buried in his coat pockets, his shoulders slack, as if this were no crisis at all but merely an entrance he had chosen to make late.
The Vredians were already forming ranks, boots crunching over ice and pine needles, and Ivan almost warned them. Almost. Then Sybil lifted a hand.
The Draoth came off her like surf breaking through bone.
It had weight. Direction. But it moved off-kilter, enough to make the skin at the back of his neck tighten—its force running against the natural order, twisting the very air until the snow at their feet lifted and hung there for a breath before exploding outward in a shockwave.
Even twenty paces off, Ivan felt the distortion of it in his bones, the world’s laws bending under her will.
It took the others down as cleanly as a scythe through grass. One moment, they were upright; the next, they were thrown across the slope, weapons skidding from their hands, left sprawling and stunned by a force they had never been taught to fight.
Ivan stayed on his feet—barely. His knees buckled, but instinct and old horror steadied him. He hadn’t seen her draw on that part of herself since she was a child—before she understood what it meant to unmake the air around her.
When Sybil and Tristan finally looked at him, it was almost in the same breath—Sybil’s gaze dark and flat and giving nothing away, Tristan’s mouth already curving at the corners.
Sybil’s gaze dropped to Ivan’s hand pressed hard against his ribs. “You’re bleeding.”
He huffed a not-laugh. “I’m aware.”
“Extensively.”
“Still aware.”
Tristan crossed to him and stood close enough that Ivan could see the travel dirt on him, the hollows under his eyes that said he hadn’t slept properly in days. “You’re a genuinely difficult man to find,” he said. “I want that acknowledged.”
Ivan didn’t smile. “How are you alive?”
“Talent.” Tristan clapped him once on the shoulder—and winced as Ivan nearly doubled over in pain. “Missed you too.”
A groan tore through the slope—earth sliding against itself, dirt and shale heaving underfoot. Four jagged walls erupted around them before Ivan had time to move, damp soil and packed stone solidifying in mid-air. Raw and furious, the way Yoni’s Draoth always was.
Inside the circle, dust hung in streaks of light. Ivan coughed once, tasting grit. Sybil just tilted her head upward, that calm, infuriating gaze sweeping the newly built prison walls like someone appraising the decor. Through a jagged gap, Yoni glared back, chest heaving.
“I let you have that,” Sybil said.
Dominic arrived a beat later, boots crunching over debris. He stopped at the cage, tension thrumming through every line of him. His gaze tracked Sybil like a weapon, cataloging her from the tilt of her chin to the casual way she rested one hand on her hip.
Dominic’s mouth flattened. He folded his arms, dark hair falling loose over one shoulder. “That was my strongest line. Months of work in those patterns, and good men keeping them standing.” His gaze narrowed on Sybil. “How did you break it?”
“Easily,” Sybil said, deadpan. “You might consider hiring better men.”
Dominic’s jaw tightened. “Those wards are the only thing standing between us and Osin’s Legion.
Some of us have a vested interest in continuing to exist.” He stepped up to the narrow gap in the wall until the packed earth pressed against his chest. Dark eyes, deep-set and unyielding, held on her face.
“I’m not moving this rock until you tell me how you brought them down.
” He glanced at Ivan then, quick and cutting. “Who the hell are they?”
“My cousin. Sybil. And Tristan—a friend.”
“Best friend,” Tristan corrected cheerfully from behind him.
Ivan’s eye twitched. “They’re not a threat.”
Dominic snorted. “Not a threat,” he repeated, glancing pointedly at the cracked wardline still smoldering on the slope. He exhaled through his nose, hand dragging once through his hair. When he looked up again, some of the sharpness had burned away, leaving command in its place.
“They come to Vredia,” he said. “Both of them. Until I know what she did—and how to stop it—no one leaves. I’m not letting that kind of power walk out of my camp without an answer.”
“Generous,” Tristan said, brushing dirt from his sleeve. “We accept.”
Dominic arched one brow. “It wasn’t an offer.”
“I know. We accept anyway.”
Ivan pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting the pulse hammering behind his eyes. “You’re not taking them into Vredia.”
Sybil let out an inelegant sniff, wholly unimpressed. “You don’t get a vote, cousin. You could barely fight off a stiff wind right now.”
“Harsh.” Tristan snorted, glancing between them. “Accurate, but harsh.”
“They have no part in this.” Ivan ignored them both, his eyes on Dominic. “They’re not leverage. Whatever you need to know about the wards, she’ll tell you here—tonight—and then they go. That’s the only arrangement I’m entertaining.”
Sybil’s gaze found Ivan through the thin haze of dust. “We’re already here,” she said. “Which means you’ve already lost this argument, so you might as well sit down before you fall down, and let me see what catastrophic damage you’ve managed to do to yourself this time.”
Ivan’s temple throbbed as he studied her, already knowing the conversation was, as ever with Sybil, a courtesy. He had never had much luck telling her what to do.
“How did you even find me?” he asked, mostly to fill the space between them.
“Scrying, of course,” she said, arching a brow.
“We’ve been tracking you for weeks. Took longer to leave, though.
” Her gaze slid to Tristan, who was studying a crack in the ground with exaggerated interest. “I had to free this one out of his own stupidity before I could go,” she sighed.
“Why is it that every man within breathing distance of me insists on needing rescue?”
Tristan’s grin was all teeth. “You say that like it’s a flaw in us, Syb. I maintain it’s just consistency on your part.”
Ivan scowled but didn’t rise to it. He was too tired, too aware of the irony of arguing adulthood at sword-point while standing inside a cage of dirt, half bleeding to death.
Sybil's blonde hair caught a glint of the dying wardlight, and for a heartbeat Ivan saw the little girl she'd once been, standing over her first collapsed circle, unafraid of the power smoking through her veins.
She'd had a book back then, pages in a script no Latherian scholar had ever named, that taught her to bend Draoth in ways their tutors never sanctioned.
They had used it together, once. Ivan had stopped within the week—something in it had unsettled him in a way he'd never put words to—but Sybil never had.
Ivan wanted to tell her she shouldn’t have come, that this wasn’t her fight.
But that was the thing about Sybil: she never came when she was asked.
She came when she had already decided you wouldn’t last without her.
And Godfrey had warned him that Osin was laying traps.
Maybe it was better to keep them close, where he could see them—better that than let them become leverage.
Even if it meant marching straight into enemy territory.
He sighed. His vision blurred, the warmth bleeding out of him faster than he could stop it.
“Fine,” Ivan said at last, the word rasping through clenched teeth.
His tone made it sound more like surrender than agreement—to Dominic’s orders, to Sybil’s choices, to whatever came next.
He knew her well enough to understand: if she hadn’t wanted to go to Vredia, no force alive would have made her agree so quickly.
Dario muttered something about securing the perimeter. Gideon started in on the wards, already listing materials and glyphs, but Dominic cut him off with a shake of his head.
“No point wasting half a day building protections we’ll only tear down again,” he said. His gaze shifted to Sybil—pointed—then to Bryn. “Clean the Hunter up as best you can. We move out for Eldham.”