Chapter 4
Rats skulked along the buildings and alleyways, their beady eyes tracking her as she shut the doors.
She fought the bile climbing up her throat as the pool of congealed blood greeted her in the center of the room. She tore her eyes away and focused on dragging the wooden bed from the corner of the room.
Heaving, she peeled back a floorboard where a stash of threadbare but mended clothing lay along with a few keepsakes.
The fibers of her tunic and pants were rough on her fresh skin, but she let the pain ground her.
She wiped Caromir with the edge of her shirt and tested the blade within her hand, half convinced her reflexes had to be relearned.
Caromir felt…alive. More in sync with her than before. It pulsed with the quickening beat of her heart, as if it were an extension of her body.
She flipped it in the air and watched it spin, then caught it on its return, as if it were fated to be so.
She quickly passed it to her other hand, and it obeyed; not like a separate entity, but like a limb she’d forgotten she had.
A soulbound blade was an extension of a wielder’s will and amplified their greatest strengths.
She caught the yellow glint of her eyes in the shaft of the blade as it flew through the air. Ksenia sucked in a breath.
She tilted it, further examining her reflection in the polished steel.
The blade was too thin to show her entire face—only vertical slivers as she turned it.
The familiar but unsettling golden yellowness of one eye stared back at her, then disappeared.
The curve of her tawny cheek was full, no longer gaunt.
Her lips were plump and deep red, as if blood rushed just beneath the surface.
Another angle caught her brow, her slender nose.
Her black, wavy hair. Each piece looked like her, yet not, as if a stranger’s features were woven into her own.
And that frightened her more than anything else.
Tucking Caromir into a sheath at her hip, she had nothing left to ruminate on in the hovel.
Her soul and her sister were trapped at Hearth, the castle at the citadel. The sooner she sought her revenge, the sooner she could be free of this pact. She didn’t want to stay Vornaya’s servant for long. She pulled the hood of her tattered cloak low over her face and stole into the streets.
A fine mist filled the town as did commonfolk out for their early morning errands. Everything and everywhere felt new but familiar at the same time. Ksenia narrowly avoided puddles where stones were missing.
She had never noticed the decayed brick making up the guild hall, moss growing in place of the black mortar and making it look whole from afar.
The pest problem was worse than she’d remembered. Birds of carrion perched along the rooflines, their glossy black forms stark against the gray sky. They tilted their heads in jerky, curious movements, following her down the street.
The drunks at the tavern were earsplitting. The sound of breaking bottles in the alleyways made her head pound.
She wrapped her arms protectively around herself as she rushed on. Her body curved and dipped in places she wasn’t used to, as if she had been rearranged and the puzzle pieces forced back incorrectly.
She slammed into someone’s portly back and stumbled, caught off guard. The town baker smelled of flour, yeast, and warmth—the kind only a fire could leave behind. Familiarity momentarily soothed Ksenia before she recoiled.
She braced for the inevitable—curses, spitting, and the visceral hatred that came with recognition.
King Karsan had driven her family name to infamy, painting them as monsters to justify his purge.
Headhunters and Envorsen alike had been hunting high and low.
She and her sister had managed to thwart them at every turn—until the previous night.
The woman yelped and turned to face her. “Slow down, child! Are you all right? You’re pale as death…” Her tone slipped from worry to wariness.
Ksenia stared back. Did she not recognize her face from the wanted posters? She hadn’t wanted to believe her foreign reflection, but it seemed true. She had an unrecognizable face and body.
“Sorry—wasn’t looking,” Ksenia stammered as a throbbing deepened in her temples and she clutched her head.
The woman didn’t help her up from the ground or stop her from slipping past, so Ksenia continued, her gait uneven.
A chalk grid stretched across the broken cobbles. Ksenia’s feet smeared through it before she noticed the children, waiting their turn.
“You’re messing it up!”
She stumbled past.
Behind her, their bright and breathless chanting picked up as they hopped the squares. “One fold, two fold, three fold, four—bondsmiths won’t be here no more!”
Ksenia’s head pounded. They had no idea what they were singing. Damascus folds were a testament to a bondsmith’s skill, each one compounding the power within a blade, deepening the pattern until the metal held incredible potential in the hands of the right fighter.
Her grandfather’s fold count with Radegast had been among the highest in their family’s history.
Now it was a hopscotch rhyme.
She bumped absentmindedly against a wooden fruit stall, bracing her hand against the beam for balance.
Her hands had no grip. Decades’ worth of calluses and toughened skin—gone. She cursed their soft weakness when she came away with a splinter. She yanked it free between her teeth and spat it out.
She looked to the distance through bleary, watering eyes.
Separated by several major cities, Ksenia could see the black gothic spires piercing the sky at the heart of Kraal. The architecture grew more ornate the closer one got to Hearth Castle—garish and filigreed, each city trying to outshine the other.
She could navigate the straight and true path from Brannfels, but it was full of people, and she wasn’t exactly in the mood for people.
More than that, every city would demand tithe at the gates: coin, then blood. The first, she didn’t have. The second, she didn’t want to give, no matter how immune she was.
Travelers would cough up a fee and then prick their finger upon their own blades or the one proffered by the city guard and surrender a single drop of blood into a crystalline vial held at the gate.
Ravens then flew to Hearth from their posts, carrying vials strapped to their clawed feet.
It was a ritual of “loyalty” that the kingdom had made as ordinary as breathing.
By the time someone reached the throne room, they’d have bled multiple times.
To the citizenry, it was just a macabre show of sacrifice to their king.
But bondsmiths knew what it really was.
Radegast’s hellbound power of compulsion had no godlike, sweeping dominion over the land, but it worked quietly, elegantly; those within its reach found Karsan able to compel an honest answer if he asked the right question, to believe his will to be their own when he needed it most.
And that second part was how the butcher king rewrote history itself.
Her throat made a visceral sound as it closed, preventing bile from reaching her tongue.
Her feet moved without second thought.
Cobbled paths turned to cracked stone, cracked stone to hard-packed dirt, roots splitting the path like exposed veins.
Ahead, the forest waited. It was around a day’s journey on foot, and the sight of the reaching branches snapped tension down her spine—she’d bled out under similar trees not even a day ago.
Still, she’d rather be eaten alive by the beasts and hunters and whatever else lurked in the darkness than the alternative.
She’d take her chances over bruising her ego.
A light rain filtered through the dense canopy, turning the daylight a hazy, grayish-green. The floor was a carpet of sodden leaves releasing their perfume of decay with every step.
Water ran in rivulets down the tree trunks, pooling in the hollows that gaped like empty eye sockets—lifeless and weary in the daylight.
Whatever menaces had tracked her every movement the night prior now appeared dormant—just another feature of the landscape.
Vibrant green moss cushioned every fallen log and rock.
The cool, damp air clung to her skin and seeped into her clothing.
Fog began rolling in, filling the uneven ground with hazy white pools and strips.
Occasionally, she passed landmarks: the splintered barrel, banded with ivy and rusted iron. A shrine to a minor god of merchants, its eyes scratched out, offerings rotted black in its hands.
A faint metallic tang wafted to her—blood? Or perhaps old iron, buried deep. Her sense of smell had never been so strong.
Now, her senses caught everything, and it revulsed her.
She remembered her own blood spilled onto the muddy forest floor and empathized a little more with Danika’s disdain for the outdoors. She pressed her palm against the closest tree, catching her breath as she fought back the nausea.
When she resumed walking, her boot squelched and the mud threatened to yank it clean off her foot.
Ksenia froze. She had stepped square into a rusted metal trap opening, its jagged teeth covered with moss and leaves, but still capable of snapping her shin in two.
Her vision narrowed as she spotted the hairline fractures in the metal, where it had been crudely tempered. The rusted coil appeared welded in place by water and time. These woods were a trove of traps, laid by hunters of big game: bears, wildcats, and boar.
She wrenched her foot out, taking care not to disturb the device.
A metallic crack broke the silence.
An unmistakable scent hit her—sharp, coppery, and immediate.
Fresh blood.
A wild stag barreled toward her, a broadhead arrow jutting out from its shoulder.
It was formidable at fifteen hands. Its glossy coat quivered; antlers boasting a dozen or more points, the horn darkly stained.
Ksenia’s pulse thundered in her ears, every nerve electrified. With one wrong move, the beast could eviscerate her along his path. She tucked into the underbrush, her body moving faster than she could think.
The stag’s hoofbeats exploded in her ears, and she could hear the sound of a hunt nearby: creaking leather, baying hounds, and arrows rattling in their quivers.
Ksenia instinctively clenched Caromir’s hilt. Her focus crescendoed into a painfully sharp warning.
She stilled her breath, muscles tensed and coiled as if she could feel every inch of terrain between her and the hunters. Even the stag had paused its rampage a few paces away, locking its pupils onto hers in…recognition?
A branch cracked underfoot, and the stag bolted.
The forest responded in kind. Ravens shrieked and soared from the trees. Hooves pounded the dirt. Arrows loosed in haste.
Without thinking, Ksenia leaped before the beast, grabbing hold of the massive antlers mid-run and twisting.
The stag careened off the trail as an arrow whizzed by, sinking instead into the sodden tree trunk.
She let go, and the stag sprang away with ease as the hunters cursed their spoiled shot.
Ksenia ducked against the hollow of a tree, waiting out the minutes until the forest began to fall back to silence.
Her mind was anything but quiet, however. She had never moved that fast in her life. In the forge, there were specific situations that required speed, but precision came first. There was little room for error, and moving brashly had always cost her.
This was different.
She was lean but strong, newly shaped for endurance. She looked behind her at the trampled underbrush, the trees cast to the side by the stag’s rampage. It was inhuman how she’d diverted it from its path.
Her thoughts whirred and she blinked, clearing the haze from her vision.
She hadn’t had strength or speed on her side before, but now she could combine brain and brawn.
She only needed a way in. Some way into Hearth—she didn’t care what.
She’d be a servant girl for all it mattered if she could infiltrate the castle’s defenses.
She took rest by a running creek, the day half gone and a few more hours of travel to go.
The streaming water cooled her sore feet. She hadn’t adequately prepared for her journey, and she winced at the tender blisters.
The air dropped a few degrees.
The eddies ceased to swirl, pooling leaves in the inlets.
The chirp of insects and birdsong quieted, until all Ksenia could hear was her rising pulse.
In the distance, barely audible, the sound of flexing metal, cooling after being tempered in oil.
Ksenia drew Caromir from her hip, but couldn’t pinpoint the noise. It was everywhere, yet not from the woods at all.
The sound pricked at the edge of her bondsense. Faint, but insistent. Growing louder and sharper until it reached a crystalline chime.
It came from Caromir itself, like the perfect strike of a hammer upon the anvil. In her panic, she threw it into the bank before her.
Instantly, white-hot pain erupted in her skull, and she doubled over, hands and knees in the mud. She found it impossible to breathe through the pain. She crawled into the water, seeking relief against the raging fever. Steam wafted from her body.
She began to cool as she neared where Caromir lay against gray river rock.
She waded into the shallow stream and retrieved the blade from the current, a soothing balm instantly coating her heated skin, seeping through her limbs and into her core.
“This pact will be the death of me.” Ksenia kicked a pebble irritably as she slogged out of the water.
And you need to be tempered to survive. Ksenia jolted backward. The voice hummed inside her skull, just behind her ear. She spun, eyes wild, searching for Vornaya to no avail.
Caromir quieted, leaving Ksenia with a phantom ringing in her ears. She stiffly shouldered her pack and pressed on, the castle’s spires still hours away through the forest’s trees.