EIGHT XELA
EIGHT
XELA
We don’t reach the siege engine that night.
The King’s stirring forced Tharos to pull back twice on the approach—every step closer fed the hunger pressing against his binding, and we ran out of darkness before we ran out of distance.
A bone hollow he led me to was cold and old and the safest ground he could offer.
He spent an hour anchoring its edges against the King’s reach. Then he left to scout.
Tharos disappears into the forest before dawn.
I don’t sleep after that. Just sit in the hollow with my back to the curved wall of roots, listening to Briargrave breathe around me and trying to convince myself that the ache in my chest is exhaustion, not something more complicated.
He comes back two hours before sunrise.
I hear him before I see him—the subtle shift of the forest making way for its warden, the soft crunch of ancient bones. He moves through the hollow’s entrance and drops to a crouch across from me, close enough that I can see the exhaustion written into every line of his face.
“The scouts are dead.” His voice is barely above a whisper. “All eight of them. The forest took the last one near the ravine.”
“And the main force?”
“Still coming.” He leans his forearms on his knees, sap-dark hands hanging loose between them. “Fifty hunters at minimum. Armed with siege weapons I haven’t seen before. Something designed to breach the Heartgrove’s outer defenses.”
I digest this. Fifty hunters. A siege engine. The Consortium doesn’t send this many resources for a standard bounty contract.
“They’re not here for you alone, are they?”
His jaw tightens. “No.”
The fire between us burns low. Outside, the forest creaks and sighs, settling into the pre-dawn hours.
The cold has deepened since we took shelter here, and I’ve had to press my knees to my chest to hold onto the warmth my body generates.
Tharos doesn’t seem to feel it. Probably stopped feeling cold decades ago.
I watch him in the low light. The bark-ridges on his arms. The way his eyes occasionally lose focus, as if he’s listening to something I can’t hear. The warden of a forest that eats people, sitting three feet away from me, and I’m more worried about the army coming to kill him than I am about him.
That tells me something I’m not ready to examine.
I took the first watch without asking.
He doesn’t sleep. But he does close his eyes, and the lines around them ease slightly, and whatever communion he has with the roots beneath us seems to settle into something quieter. I watch the entrance to the hollow and try not to think about how strange it is to feel safer with him nearby.
The scouts come at mid-morning.
Eight of them, moving through the forest with the careful discipline of people who’ve been trained to treat every shadow as a threat. They’re better than the hunters I’ve encountered before—lighter armor, no fire weapons, moving in a spread formation that makes them harder to ambush.
Tharos and I watch them from the canopy, lying flat against a broad branch twenty feet up. His hand is on my shoulder—not restraining, just grounding—and the warmth of it registers at every inch of contact between us.
The scouts pass below us and don’t look up.
“They’re pathfinders,” he murmurs against my ear. “Sent to verify the target before the siege engine arrives.”
“The siege engine.” I keep my voice to a breath. “That’s what they’re calling it?”
“The Binding Breaker. That’s what my awareness of the forest calls it. A device designed to sever the bond between warden and forest.” His voice is carefully neutral. “If it works—”
“The King breaks free.”
“Yes.”
We wait until the scouts pass, then drop from the branch in silence. The thornpaths close behind us as we move, Briargrave sealing our trail.
“They’ll reach the main force soon,” he says. “Report what they’ve seen. The main force will push harder once they know I’m aware of them.”
“How many are coming behind them?”
“More than fifty now. The forest counts seventy-three heartbeats heading toward the Heartgrove.” Something hard surfaces in his expression. “Your Consortium has been busy.”
“A larger group than the first. Reinforcements must have arrived at the boundary.”
I walked into this forest carrying their seal and their promises, and now their hunters are about to stumble into a fight they can’t win.
“The eight scouts,” I say. “Can you stop them without—”
The forest erupts.
Not a sound—a feeling. Pressure in my chest, sudden and overwhelming, like the moment before a lightning strike. Tharos stumbles, one hand slamming against a tree trunk to keep his balance. The bark beneath his palm splits, dark sap welling up.
“The scouts.” His voice is wrong—thin, strained. “The forest just took them.”
I look back. The path we came from has sealed completely, thorns interlocked so tightly I couldn’t push through them with a blade. Somewhere in the undergrowth behind us, eight people have just died.
“Tharos.”
“I know.” He straightens, but his eyes are distant. Listening. “The King. It’s pleased. I should have—”
“You couldn’t have stopped it from here.”
“No.”
A pause—longer than the others. “One of them was still breathing when the forest reached him. They carry their last words in the roots, sometimes, long enough for me to read.” His mouth thins to a hard line.
“He knows what sleeps in the Heartgrove. They all do. This was never a bounty hunt. The Consortium wants the King—what it can offer them.”
“But I’ll need to work harder to keep it contained while the main force pushes closer.”
We move again, faster now, the thornpaths opening and closing ahead of us in a rhythm that feels almost like running.