9. Brannok
NINE
brANNOK
The Judge speaks with her voice.
I freeze at the base of the gallows stairs, blade raised, every instinct screaming at me to attack. But the words emerging from that shifting, amalgamated mouth are Ismerie’s. Her inflections. Her rhythms. Her fears given terrible form.
My name.
Just my name. In her voice. Carrying the weight of everything she has never said aloud to me, the questions she keeps only for the dark. The Judge found the most unguarded thing it could reach and shaped it into a blade.
Doubt cracks through me before I can stop it. Whatever I feel for her—is it real? Is it mine? Or is it the sigil’s demand, mistaken for something deeper?
“Brannok.” Her real voice, raw and desperate, cuts through the Judge’s mockery. “Don’t listen. It stole my thoughts—my private fears. They’re not—I don’t—”
“Silence.” The Judge gestures, and the ropes around her neck tighten. She chokes, words dying in a strangled gasp.
The claiming sigil blazes against my neck. The sight of her bound, choking, helpless—it tears through every barrier I’ve built, every wall I’ve constructed between myself and the violence I’m capable of.
She’s mine. It’s hurting what’s mine.
I charge up the stairs.
The Judge doesn’t move to stop me. Doesn’t need to. The platform itself responds, old timber groaning as the floor shifts beneath my feet. I stumble, catch myself on the railing, keep climbing.
Then the dead begin to rise.
They claw up from the ground surrounding the gallows.
Hands first—gray, rotted, still bearing rope burns around their wrists. Then arms, shoulders, heads that loll at broken angles. The executed dead of Blackhook City, pulling themselves from shallow graves and blood-soaked soil, animated by the Judge’s terrible will.
I recognize faces.
The merchant I hanged last month for treason—fabricated charges, I suspected even then. His eyes are empty now, his mouth twisted in a rictus that might once have been a plea for mercy. He reaches for me with fingers that have already started to decay.
I cut him down without hesitation.
My blade carves through his neck, severing whatever bindings hold him to false life. He collapses into ordinary death, but three more rise to take his place. Then five. Then a dozen.
The execution square fills with the walking dead.
They’re not fast. Not skilled. They attack with the mindless determination of things that have forgotten what it means to be human. But there are so many of them—weeks of executions, months of accumulated death, all rising at the Judge’s command.
A woman lunges at me—the witch from the revenant incident, her broken neck still visible beneath gray skin. I block her grasping hands with my forearm, drive my blade through her chest, feel the bindings shatter as she falls.
She’s the one I couldn’t save. The one whose death started all this.
More revenants press in. I carve through them, every stroke a killing blow, every movement designed to create space between myself and the horde. The skills I’ve honed over two decades of execution serve me now—I know exactly where to cut, exactly how much force to apply.
But for every revenant I destroy, two more rise from the churned earth.
“Sir!” Halvard cuts through the chaos. He’s fighting his way toward me, four guards at his back, their blades flashing in the moonlight. They must have followed when they realized I’d left the Hall. “There’s too many! We need to retreat!”
“I’m not leaving her!” I drive my blade through the skull of a corpse I don’t recognize—some anonymous prisoner, one of hundreds who died on this platform without anyone to mourn them. “Get to the gallows! Cut her free!”
Halvard nods and pushes forward, his men forming a wedge that carves through the revenant horde. But the Judge is watching. The Judge sees everything.
The ropes descend.
Not from the gallows—from the air itself. Witch-hair nooses dropping like serpents, coiling around necks and wrists and ankles. One of Halvard’s men goes down, screaming as the rope constricts around his throat. Another stumbles, caught by bindings that seem to appear from nowhere.
“Your men die for you.” The Judge’s words drip with false sympathy. “Just as they’ve always died for you. Cannon fodder for the Gallows Warden’s authority. Bodies to throw at problems too large for one man to solve.”
I reach the platform.
Ismerie is bound to the central beam, ropes coiled around her wrists and neck and waist. Her face is pale, her breathing shallow, her amethyst-flecked eyes locked on mine with desperate intensity.
I’m here. I’m coming. Hold on.
The Judge steps between us.
Up close, the wrongness of its form is overwhelming. I can see the individual bodies woven into its fused shape—men and women and children, their features frozen in final moments of terror. Some of them I recognize. Some of them I killed.
“You stand on the bones of your victims, Gallows Warden.” The Judge spreads its arms wide. “How does it feel to see them rise?”
“Like every other day in this city.” I raise my blade. “Death doesn’t stay buried in Blackhook. I’ve always known that.”
“But you never cared.” The Judge sharpens. “Never questioned. Never hesitated before pulling the lever.” It gestures at Ismerie. “Until her. Until the brand demanded you protect a death witch instead of executing one.”
“The brand didn’t demand anything.” The words come out harder than I intended. “I chose to save her. I chose to defy the council. I chose to tear apart everything I’d built because—”
“Because the magic compelled you.” The Judge’s stolen faces twist into expressions of contempt. “Because instinct overwhelmed reason. Because you’re no different from the beasts who howl at the moon—a slave to urges you can’t control.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?” The Judge leans close, and I smell grave-dirt and old blood on its breath. “Then prove it. Release the claiming. Break the bond that binds you to her. Show me that your devotion is more than magical compulsion.”
Break the bond. Let her go.
The thought rises unbidden, poisonous in its simplicity. If I release the claiming, the Judge might let her live. Might accept her as an anchor without destroying me first. She could survive, even if we’re no longer bound.
But Era’s rule holds: both parties must want separation.
And I don’t want it.
“No.” The word comes out unwavering. Certain. “I’m not releasing her. Not for you. Not for anyone.”
“Then you condemn her.” The Judge straightens to its full height. “To watch her mate die. To sense the sigil tear itself from her flesh as your life ends. To spend the rest of her existence knowing that your stubbornness killed you both.”
The ropes around Ismerie constrict. She gasps, her body arching against the bindings.
I attack.
The Judge is faster than it has any right to be.
My blade carves through the space where its chest should be, but the merged form simply shifts—bodies rearranging themselves to avoid the strike. Arms sprout from shoulders, hands grasping for my neck, faces screaming accusations from positions no living creature could occupy.
I duck under a reaching limb, slash at the rope-woven robes, feel my blade bite into witch-hair and stolen flesh. The Judge shrieks—a hundred voices harmonizing in pain—and I press the advantage.
But I’m fighting on its throne.
The gallows respond to the Judge’s will. The platform tilts beneath my feet. The ropes reach for me with hungry intent. The death wards carved into every surface blaze with cold light, draining my strength with every second I remain on this cursed timber.
The mating bond sears against my flesh—Ismerie’s fear flooding through the connection, her desperation matching my own.
She’s struggling against her bindings, dark power crackling at her fingertips, but the suppression ropes are holding.
Even a death witch can’t break free of witch-hair bonds while her magic is bound.
I need to reach her. Need to cut her free. Need to—
The Judge’s hand closes around my windpipe.
The strength is inhuman. Impossible. I’m lifted off my feet like a child, my blade clattering to the platform as my hands claw uselessly at the grip crushing my airway.
“Twenty years.” The Judge’s faces cycle through its victims—the young, the old, the guilty and innocent alike. “You served this platform for twenty years. Pulled the lever. And now you think you can defy it?”
Black spots dance across my vision. My lungs scream for air that won’t come. Through the haze of suffocation, I see Ismerie—still bound, still struggling, tears streaming down her face as she watches me die.
The claiming sigil blazes between us. Heat spreading from my neck through my chest, down my arms, into my hands—
Into my hands.
The sigil’s power floods through me with sudden intensity. Not magic—something older, something primal, the bond’s desperate response to the threat of permanent separation. Strength I shouldn’t have floods my muscles.
I grab the Judge’s wrist. Twist. Feel something that isn’t bone snap beneath my grip.
The entity releases me with a shriek of surprise. I drop to the platform, gasping, reaching for my fallen blade as the Judge recoils.
“Impossible.” The stolen visages contort with confusion. “The claiming bond cannot—”
“The bond knows what I want.” I rise to my feet, blade in hand, the mating sigil still searing against my flesh. “And I want her free.”
I attack again.
This time I don’t aim for the Judge. I aim for Ismerie.
My blade slices through the ropes binding her wrists. Through the coils around her waist. She’s already moving, her freed hands reaching for the noose around her neck, her ending magic surging now that the suppression bonds are broken.
The Judge screams with fury.
The platform buckles beneath us. The entire gallows structure shudders, old timber groaning as the entity pours its rage into the wood that serves as its throne.
Ropes whip through the air like striking serpents, death wards blaze with killing light, and the spirits of the executed dead rise in waves to drag us down.
“You think you can escape?” The Judge’s harmonized voices shake the square. “This is my court! My throne! My domain!”
“Not anymore.” Ismerie’s hand finds mine. Her dark power mingles with the bond’s heat, and for a moment I sense what she senses—the scaffold’s corruption, the centuries of wrongful death pooled beneath its foundations, the anchor stone that binds the Judge to this place.
“We need to go.” She pulls me toward the stairs. “Now. Before it recovers.”
We run.
The platform collapses behind us as we descend—boards snapping, supports cracking, the entire execution apparatus tearing itself apart in the Judge’s fury. Revenants claw at us from every side, but between my blade and her magic, nothing can touch us.
We burst from the execution square into the chaos of a city in upheaval.
Behind us, the Judge’s scream echoes across Blackhook City—a promise of vengeance, a declaration of war.
We don’t look back.
The Execution Hall has never felt safe.
But tonight, with Ismerie’s hand in mine and the mating bond thrumming between us, it’s the closest thing to sanctuary we have.
Halvard’s guards have retreated to the perimeter.
The revenants didn’t follow us far—without the Judge’s direct control, they collapsed back into ordinary corpses within minutes of leaving the square.
But the damage is done. The city knows something terrible is happening.
The council knows their Warden has turned against them.
And the Judge knows we’re coming for it.
“We need to destroy the anchor.” Ismerie sits on the edge of my bed—our bed, now, though neither of us has said it aloud.
Her hair is tangled, her clothes torn, dark bruises forming where the ropes bound her.
She’s never looked more beautiful. “The stone beneath the gallows. It’s the source of the Judge’s power. ”
“I know.” I kneel before her, checking her injuries with hands that refuse to stay clinical. My fingers trace the rope burns on her wrists, the marks on her neck, the places where the Judge’s bindings cut deepest.
“Brannok.” Her hand covers mine. “I’m all right.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I’ve been hurt before.” She lifts my chin, makes me meet her gaze. “And I’ll be hurt again before this is over. That’s what happens when you fight monsters.”
“I should have protected you better.”
“You came for me.” Her thumb traces my cheekbone. “When the Judge had me, when the ropes were tightening—you came. That’s what matters.”
The bond pulses between us—not with pain this time, but with warmth. With connection. With the certainty that whatever we face, we face it together.
“The anchor.” I force myself back to strategy, though every instinct wants to pull her close and never let go. “How do we destroy it?”
“Ending magic.” She rises, paces toward the window. The moonlight catches the sigil on her collarbone, makes it shimmer like captured starlight. “The same force that sustains the Judge can unmake its foundation. But I’d need to get close. Closer than tonight.”
“The Judge will be waiting.”
“I know.” She turns to face me. “Which is why we need a distraction. Something to draw its attention while I reach the anchor stone.”
“You mean me.”
The words hang between us. She doesn’t deny it.
“The Judge wants you.” Her tone is gentle, careful. “Blames you for its existence. If you walked into that square alone, offered yourself for judgment—”
“It would be too focused on killing me to notice you corrupting its anchor.” I rise, cross to where she stands. “That’s the plan? I’m bait while you destroy the monster?”
“I hate it.” Her hands fist against my chest. “I hate every part of it. But I don’t know another way.”
I cup her face in my scarred hands. Feel the bond thrumming between us, the connection that transcends magic or instinct or anything either of us can name.
“Then we do it.” I bring my mouth to her hair, breathing her in. “Tomorrow. At dawn. We end this.”
“And if something goes wrong?”
“Then we die fighting.” I kiss her—soft, then fierce, then desperate. “Together. The way it should be.”
She responds with matching intensity, her body pressing against mine, her hands fisting in my shirt. The day’s terror transmutes into something else—need, hunger, the primal drive to affirm life in the face of death.
I lift her. She wraps her legs around my waist. We stumble toward the bed, shedding armor and torn clothes, the bond blazing between us like a beacon.
Tomorrow we face the Judge.
Tonight we have each other.
Morning finds us still tangled together—and a message chalked across the wall in letters that radiate cold light:
COME TO YOUR THRONE, GALLOWS WARDEN. JUDGMENT WAITS.
The Judge has issued its challenge.
And I intend to answer.