Chapter 25 Zeidan #2
My shoulder still bears the faint ache of old wounds, but my body feels…
different today. Stronger in places I cannot name.
The bond has altered the way power rests in me, deepening the reservoir, tightening the control.
I am aware of it in the way I place my feet and listen to the air and taste the magic along the tunnel walls.
This is not just Nytheria’s stone. It is Nytheria’s history.
If Vira is poisoning the ley network, she has to come here or send someone who can.
That someone will leave a trail.
I follow the faintest thread of disturbance, an unnatural slickness along one seam of rock, a residue that doesn’t belong to rootstone. It smells faintly of resin and metal, familiar now from Amelia’s analysis of the first poison. Dusk-bloom, carried into the land like a secret.
The trail is thin, but it is real.
It draws me toward an exit vent that opens near the outer perimeter, beyond the main coven grounds, where wards thin and guards become routine instead of sacred. It is the kind of place a traitor uses because no one expects treason to walk through the mundane.
I emerge under a stand of twisted yew trees, the air cooler, the forest quieter. The sky above is a pale afternoon, and for a moment I breathe in the clean scent of bark and damp earth and allow myself to think of Amelia again, of her in bed, hair loose, eyes bright with plans and defiance.
I am halfway through turning back toward the main path when the world changes.
There is a sound, small, sharp, almost lost in the wind, and then impact slams into my shoulder with enough force to drive me a step sideways. Pain blooms instantly, hot and deep. The shaft vibrates where it has struck, embedded near my collarbone.
An arrow.
Not Nytherian craftsmanship. The fletching is too tight, the shaft too clean, the enchantment too deliberate.
I reach for it instinctively and my fingers brush the wood. The magic on it bites back, a thin, cruel ward designed to punish tampering. Poison already spreads from the wound, racing along my veins like cold fire. My vision sharpens, then swims, the edges of the world flickering.
Professional. A hit meant to cripple fast, bind channels, not kill.
I twist toward the treeline, senses flaring, scanning for the shooter. The forest gives me nothing but shadows and birdsong.
Then my shoulder burns harder, and I feel the poison turn inward, aiming for conduits rather than flesh.
I take a step, and my knee tries to fold.
I catch myself against the trunk of a yew, breathing through my teeth, forcing my magic to clamp down on the spread. My control holds for a moment, but the toxin is designed for my kind. It recognizes Vrakken channels and moves through them with intimate efficiency.
I hate the respect I feel for whoever made it.
My hand tightens around the arrow shaft. I should break it and pull it free, but the warding will detonate deeper if I do it wrong, and I have no healer here.
Then the bond shifts. A surge of awareness snaps through it, and with it comes Amelia, her alarm like a blade drawn, her presence rushing toward me even before I send a thought.
“Zeidan!”
The word hits my mind with raw force, not spoken aloud, but threaded through panic and certainty.
I brace, breath coming shorter. I do not answer, because if I answer she will know how close this is to ending badly, and I refuse to feed her fear.
She finds me anyway.
Amelia crashes through the undergrowth with her cloak half-fastened, hair loose, eyes bright with terror she is trying to disguise as rage. The moment she sees the arrow, her face goes white.
“Gods,” she breathes, and then her jaw sets so hard I hear her teeth click. “Who did this?”
I push upright, forcing my posture into something steadier than I feel. “Stay calm.”
Her gaze snaps to mine, furious. “You don’t get to tell me to stay calm when you’re bleeding into the forest.”
“It is not fatal,” I lie.
Her eyes narrow as if she can taste the lie in the air. “Not yet.”
Amelia’s hands move to my shoulder before I can stop her, careful but fast, fingers bracketing the shaft, her magic already reaching into the wound. The poison reacts to her touch, spiking pain through me making my breath punch out.
She doesn’t flinch.
“Hold still,” she orders.
“I am holding still.”
“You are vibrating with stubbornness,” she snaps, and then her focus locks in, brutal and absolute.
Amelia draws her magic inward, not outward, threading it into the wound with a precision that makes my skin prickle. She isn’t trying to burn the poison away. She is listening to it, isolating it, tracing its path through tissue and conduit as if tracking a predator through brush.
Her power shifts, darkening slightly at the edges, blood magic, controlled and deliberate. I feel the sharp point of it like a needle sliding under skin, and I force myself not to recoil. This is not my realm of magic, and I have learned that Purna work demands trust.
Amelia’s voice is low now, almost to herself. “It’s laced. It’s designed to bind to your channels.”
My jaw tightens. “Can you remove it?”
“Yes,” she says, and the word is so steady it almost breaks me. “But you will hate it.”
“I can endure it,” I tell her.
She gives me a look that says she doubts that. Then she braces one hand on my chest, steadying me, and brings the other to her own palm. With a small, efficient motion she slices the skin, just enough for blood to bead bright and red.
I start to protest, and she cuts me off. “Don’t.”
Her blood touches my wound.
The effect is immediate. The poison reacts violently, drawn toward the new source like it recognizes something older than itself.
Amelia’s magic becomes a funnel, coaxing the toxin out of my veins and into her blood, where she can trap it.
The sensation is brutal, cold dragging through my shoulder, then heat, then a deep ache as the poison is ripped from places it has already begun to invade.
My vision blurs. I grit my teeth and force air into my lungs.
Amelia’s face is set in concentration, sweat beading at her hairline, lips parted with controlled breaths. Her eyes flick to mine once, and the fear there is real, naked for a heartbeat before she buries it under discipline.
“Stay with me,” she says quietly.
The command lands differently than any order I’ve ever taken. I nod once, because it is all I can manage.
She draws again, deeper this time, siphoning the last threads of toxin until the burning fades into a dull throb. When she finally pulls her hand away, the blood in her palm has darkened, almost black at the edges, poison contained within a web of magic.
She exhales hard and closes her fist around it, sealing it away.
For a moment we simply stand there in the quiet forest, her hand still braced on my chest, my heartbeat hammering under her palm. The urge to pull her against me is immediate and fierce. I do not, because she is still shaking, subtly, but unmistakably.
Amelia swallows and lifts her gaze to the arrow shaft. “Don’t touch it,” she says, voice tight. “The warding is… complicated.”
“I noticed,” I mutter.
She huffs a breath that might have been a laugh in any other context. Then her attention shifts to the fletching, the markings burned into the wood near the base, thin symbols arranged in a pattern that is meant to be hidden unless you know what to look for.
Amelia’s eyes narrow.
I follow her gaze and feel my stomach go cold. It is the same mark.
Not identical artistry, but the same core insignia, the same signature line-work that we found on the first assassin’s gear, the hired hand, the silent compulsion, the poison designed to destabilize magic.
A group. A network. Not one traitor acting alone.
Amelia’s voice is barely above a whisper. “This is connected.”
“Yes,” I say, and I feel the truth of it settle into my bones. “This is the same hand.”
Her fingers tighten against my chest, and when she looks up at me her expression has changed. The fear is still there, but it has sharpened into something more dangerous. Resolve.
“Then we stop reacting,” she says. “We hunt.”
I look at her, this furious, brilliant, exhausted heir with blood on her hands and defiance in her eyes, and the love in my chest turns into something even steadier.
“Yes,” I answer quietly. “We do.”
Amelia reaches up, careful now, and cups my jaw as if checking that I am truly still here. Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth, almost absentminded, and my breath catches.
“You’re going to tell me next time you decide to patrol alone,” she says.
“I wasn’t alone,” I reply, and when she frowns, I add, “I had the forest.”
Her glare is immediate.
I try for something like a smile. It is not my best work.
Amelia’s eyes soften anyway, just slightly, because she knows what I am doing: trying to steady her with anything I can offer.
“We go back,” she says, already shifting into motion. “We show this to no one except those we trust. We don’t give Vira time to rewrite the narrative.”
I nod, then hiss as the movement pulls at my shoulder.
Her hand immediately returns to my arm, supportive but firm. “Lean on me.”
I hesitate. Amelia’s gaze dares me to argue.
I do not. I shift my weight slightly into her, and she adjusts without complaint, bracing us both as we start back toward the coven grounds with the arrow in my shoulder and a conspiracy in our hands.
Behind us, the yew trees whisper in the wind like they are carrying news through root and shadow.