Chapter 21 Kielyne
TWENTY-ONE
KIELYNE
The brands touch his skin, and he screams.
The sound tears through the cathedral—raw, animal, the kind of agony that strips away everything civilized and leaves only primal suffering. His massive body arches against the altar chains, muscles straining, veins standing out black against green skin as the sigil brands burn deeper.
I feel it too.
Not an echo of his pain—the brands are attacking the oath itself. The mark on my arm blazes white-hot, searing into my flesh as Hadrin’s magic tears at the bond that connects us. My knees buckle. The soldiers holding me are the only reason I don’t hit the floor.
The brands aren’t just hurting him. They’re trying to rip us apart.
I feel the magic unraveling. Feel the threads of blood and will that Blorjorn wove in that ravine straining, fraying, beginning to snap.
If the oath breaks by force, we both die.
Morra said as much in the Bonefields—the bond is carved into our blood, our bones.
Ripping it apart would be like ripping out our hearts.
Hadrin knows. He’s counting on it.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The general’s voice cuts through Blorjorn’s screams, calm and conversational.
“The sigils attack the oath from outside while my blight chains eat at him from within. A two-pronged assault—one I’ve spent years perfecting.
” He glances at me over his shoulder, pale gaze flat as a snake’s.
“How does it feel, healer? Watching your monster die?”
I don’t answer. Can’t answer. My throat is locked around a scream of my own, trapped there by sheer will because I refuse—refuse—to give him the satisfaction.
But my mind is racing.
The oath. The brands attack it from outside. Hadrin’s weapon assumes the bond is static, unchanging, something that can only be broken or destroyed.
But I’ve used the oath before. Channeled my blood to save Blorjorn in the Bonefields, purged the blight from his system by pouring my own life force into him. The magic isn’t a chain—it’s a channel. A river that can flow both directions.
What flows from me to him can be pushed harder. Faster. Stronger.
The thought crystallizes. Sharpens. Becomes something I can use.
I’m not a sorceress. I’ve never had an ounce of magical talent—no hedge-witch gifts, no shadow-touched bloodline, nothing but a healer’s hands and a healer’s knowledge. But the blood oath doesn’t care about categories. It cares about blood. About will. About the desperate need to save someone.
And right now, my need is the most desperate thing I’ve ever felt.
I close my eyes.
Shut out the screaming, the brands, Hadrin’s satisfied voice cataloging Blorjorn’s suffering. Shut out everything except the mark on my arm and the searing heat radiating from it.
I reach for the oath.
Not with my hands—with my will. The same way I reached for it in the Bonefields, when Blorjorn was dying of blight poison and I cut my palm and let my blood become his medicine. I find the place where the oath lives, buried deep in my chest, and I push.
The brands are trying to tear the bond apart. Destroy what connects us.
So I strengthen it instead.
I gather everything I have. Every scrap of strength, every ounce of will, every memory of the man I’m trying to save.
The way he looks at me—fierce and tender and hungry—like I’m the only thing in the world worth wanting.
The way he held me in that cellar, whispered my name against my skin, made me feel wanted instead of useful.
I pour it all into the oath. Into him.
The pain hits instantly—a wall of fire slamming into me, stealing my breath, setting every nerve ending alight. Blood fills my mouth. Streams from my nose. The soldiers holding me stumble back as something erupts from the mark on my arm—light, heat, raw power bleeding from the oath in waves.
“What—” Hadrin spins, his composed mask cracking. “What are you doing?”
I don’t answer. Can’t answer. I’m burning from the inside out, feeling my life force drain in a torrent I can barely control.
But it’s working.
I hear the sigil brands sputter. Hear Blorjorn’s scream change pitch—from agony to shock to something that sounds almost like relief. The blight chains shudder, groan, as my blood floods into him and fights the magic eating him alive.
Hadrin’s weapons were designed to attack from outside. They have no defense against power rising from within.
“Stop her!” Hadrin’s voice cracks with something that might be fear. “Kill her if you have to—”
The blight soldiers move. Hands grab at me, trying to drag me down, trying to break my concentration.
Too late.
I give everything. Every last scrap of strength, every drop of blood the oath can channel, all of it flooding from me to him in a single desperate surge.
The blight chains shatter.
The sound is like thunder—a crack of breaking metal that echoes off the cathedral walls, followed by the clatter of chain links hitting stone. The deep red light of the blight magic flares once, twice, and dies.
Blorjorn surges upward.
His wrists are still bound by manacles, but the chains themselves are gone—destroyed by the blood I poured into him.
The braid between us flares—his blood answering mine—and I drag the blight through the bond instead of letting it devour him.
He tears at the remaining restraints with animal fury, muscles straining, the weakened metal groaning under his assault.
The manacles snap.
He’s free.
I try to stand. Try to move toward him. But my legs won’t hold me—the surge left me hollow, emptied, every scrap of strength I had poured into saving him. Blood still streams from my nose, drips from my chin, spatters the flagstones beneath me. My vision swims. Darkens at the edges.
The soldiers around me hesitate. They weren’t prepared for this—for the chains to break, for their prisoner to rise, for their careful trap to collapse around them.
Blorjorn doesn’t hesitate.
He crosses the distance between the altar and me in three massive strides, shoving through blight soldiers like they’re made of paper.
His hands close around the soldier nearest me—the one still gripping my arm—and throws the man across the cathedral.
The body hits a pillar with a crack of breaking bone.
Then his arms are around me, dragging me against his chest, and I’m pressed against warmth and muscle and the thundering heartbeat of the man I just burned myself out to save.
“Kielyne.” His voice breaks on my name. Shatters like the chains that held him. His hands find my face, turn it toward his, and I see his expression—terror and awe and something raw and devastating that steals what’s left of my breath. “Kielyne, what did you do?”
“Saved you.” The words come out slurred. My tongue feels thick, clumsy. “Told you I would.”
“You’re bleeding.” His thumb swipes at the blood streaming from my nose, his touch impossibly gentle for hands that just broke a man’s spine. “You’re bleeding everywhere, you impossible woman—”
“Had to.” I try to smile. Probably fail. “You were dying.”
“So you decided to die instead?” His voice cracks. His hands are shaking where they cup my jaw, trembling with something that isn’t weakness. “That’s not—you can’t—”
He stops. Presses his forehead to mine. Breathes something in orcish—words I don’t understand, rough and ragged against my skin.
“You stubborn, impossible—” His breath hitches. “I watched you collapse. Watched the blood pour from you. I thought—”
“Still here.” I manage to lift one hand, press it against his chest. His heart pounds beneath my palm—alive, strong, real. “Still yours.”
The words slip out without permission. I don’t know if I mean them the way they sound. Don’t know what I’m promising, what I’m admitting, what door I’ve just opened.
But his grip tightens. His gaze burns into mine—dark fire, banked but blazing.
“Mine,” he breathes. “You’re mine, and I’m not letting you go. Not for Hadrin. Not for anyone.”
“Kill them.”
Hadrin’s voice shatters the moment—cold, flat, stripped of all pretense.
He’s standing by the altar, the sigil brands dark and useless in his hands, his composed mask finally cracked beyond repair. His pale gaze burns with fury—the rage of a man who’s calculated every variable and still come up short.
“Kill them both.” His voice rises, echoing through the cathedral. “Now!”
The blight soldiers surge forward—dozens of them, pouring from every shadow, weapons drawn.
Behind them, through the shimmer of the ward wall, I hear the thunder of war drums. The human army outside, rallying for assault.
Hadrin’s backup plan, ready to flood the cathedral and finish what his brands couldn’t.
We’re trapped. Surrounded. Outnumbered a hundred to one.
Blorjorn’s arms tighten around me. I feel his body shift, positioning himself between me and the approaching soldiers, preparing to fight and die to buy me a few more seconds.
“No.” The word scrapes from my throat. “Not for me. Not like this.”
“I won’t let them take you.” His voice is gravel and steel. “I won’t—”
“Then don’t die.” I force my head up, meet his gaze. “Fight. Survive. Do what you do best, and trust me to do the same.”
Something shifts in his expression. The desperate protectiveness wars with something else—respect, maybe. Recognition of the woman he’s claimed, who refuses to be a burden even when she can barely stand.
“Can you walk?”
“I can try.”
“Then stay behind me.” He presses a fierce kiss to my forehead—quick, claiming, a promise made in the shadow of death. “And when I make a path, you run.”
“Blorjorn—”
“Run,” he repeats. “Whatever happens, you run.”
He releases me. Steps forward to face the approaching wave of blight soldiers. His axes are gone—still somewhere on the cathedral floor—but his hands are weapons enough. A century of combat has made his body into an instrument of death.
He’s going to fight an army bare-handed.
And somehow, impossibly, I believe he might win.
The first soldier reaches him.
Blorjorn’s fist crashes into the man’s face with a sound like breaking stone. The soldier crumples—dead or unconscious, it doesn’t matter. Blorjorn is already moving, spinning, driving his elbow into another attacker’s throat, catching a sword blade in his bare hand and wrenching it free.
Blood splatters. Bodies fall. He wades into the blight soldiers like a storm through wheat, and they can’t stop him—can’t even slow him down.
I’ve seen him fight before. In the marauder attack, the building siege, a dozen skirmishes across the Bloodscar Plains.
But this is different. This is an orc captain with nothing left to lose, fighting not for survival but for fury.
Every strike carries the weight of what Hadrin tried to do. Every kill is vengeance.
It’s beautiful. Terrifying. Exactly the monster the stories made him out to be.
And it’s not enough.
Because more soldiers are coming. Pouring through the ward wall in waves, filling the cathedral, pressing in from every direction. He’s magnificent, but he’s one orc against a small army, and the numbers will overwhelm him eventually.
I have to help him. Have to do something.
My legs wobble when I force them to move. The world tilts, threatens to spill me onto the flagstones. But I spot what I’m looking for—one of Blorjorn’s axes, lying near the altar where a soldier dropped it, the blade still slicked with drying blood.
I’m not a fighter. I’ve never been a fighter. But I know how to use a blade when I have to, and right now, I have to.
My fingers close around the handle. The weapon is heavy—heavier than I expected, weighted for an orc’s strength, not a human healer’s. But the balance is perfect, and when a soldier rushes toward me, I swing.
The axe takes him in the side. Not a killing blow—I don’t have the strength for that—but enough to drop him, enough to make him scream, enough to clear a path toward Blorjorn.
“I told you to run!” His voice carries over the chaos.
“Changed my mind!” I swing again, catch another soldier in the arm. “You’re not dying alone!”
For a moment—one perfect, impossible moment—he looks at me across the blood and chaos of the cathedral floor. His expression shifts from fury to something else. Wonder, maybe. Or disbelief that this stubborn human woman is fighting beside him instead of fleeing.
Then the crash comes.
The cathedral’s rear doors explode inward.
Not human soldiers. Orcs.
Grothak leads the charge—his war cry shaking the rafters, his massive axe carving through the first wave of blight soldiers before they can turn to face the new threat. Behind him, more orcs pour in. Twenty. The survivors of the Blackbone war band rallied, armed, and furious.
“CAPTAIN!” Grothak’s voice booms through the chaos. “WE’RE WITH YOU!”
The tide of battle shifts. What was a slaughter becomes a fight, then a rout. The blight soldiers—designed to fight individuals, not armies—break against the orc assault. Human soldiers who’d been pressing through the ward wall hesitate, stumble, retreat as the war band carves through their ranks.
Blorjorn reaches me in the chaos. Pulls me against him, shields me with his body as weapons clash and blood sprays around us.
“Grothak.” His voice is rough with disbelief. “How—”
“Vekra found an unwarded passage.” Grothak appears beside us, his gray-green skin splattered with blood, his grin fierce and wild. “Figured you might need backup.”
“I had it handled.”
“Sure, you did.” Grothak’s gaze flicks to me—to the axe in my hand, the blood on my face, the way I’m leaning against Blorjorn because my legs won’t hold me on their own. “Little healer’s been busy.”
“She broke the chains.” Blorjorn’s arm tightens around me. “Channeled blood into the oath and shattered them.”
Grothak’s eyes widen. “That’s not possible.”
“Tell her that.”
The fighting surges around us. I should be paying attention—should be watching for threats, for soldiers, for Hadrin. But my strength is gone, burned away by the surge, and all I can do is cling to Blorjorn and trust him to keep us alive.
“Hadrin.” The word scrapes from my throat. “Where’s Hadrin?”
Blorjorn’s gaze sweeps the cathedral. Searching. Hunting.
“There.” His voice goes flat. Dangerous.
I follow his gaze. The general is retreating toward the altar, flanked by his remaining blight soldiers, his face twisted with rage. He’s been beaten. Outmaneuvered. His perfect trap collapsed around him, his army fighting for survival instead of victory.
But as I watch, his hand finds something at his belt. A glass sphere filled with swirling darkness.
A blight grenade.
“If I can’t have her,” Hadrin snarls, “no one will.”
He draws back his arm to throw.
Blorjorn moves—but he’s too far, too slow, the distance between us and Hadrin too great to close in time.
The grenade leaves Hadrin’s hand.
Arcs toward me through the blood-red light of the cathedral.
And shatters against the flagstones at my feet.