NINE XELA
NINE
XELA
We take shelter in a clearing near the ravine to plan.
The clearing is small—barely wide enough for the two of us—ringed with ancient oaks whose roots break through the surface in arching waves. Bones scatter the ground here, as everywhere in Briargrave, but these are older than most. Pale and crumbling, worn smooth by decades of forest growth.
Tharos crouches at the clearing’s center, hands pressed to the earth. I give him space, taking a position at the edge where I can watch the treeline. The forest is quiet around us—the eerie, loaded quiet of something waiting.
“They’re moving in two columns,” he says without looking up. “The main force and the siege engine on separate paths. They plan to converge at the outer Heartgrove boundary.”
“Separate paths. That means we can hit one without engaging the other.”
“The siege engine is the priority. Without it, the force has no way to break the binding. They’re dangerous to each other in here—hunters always are—but they can’t free the King with numbers alone.”
I crouch beside him, studying the patterns in the dirt that he seems to be reading like a map. “How many guards on the engine?”
“Eleven. Plus the operators. Specialists, not regular hunters—they move differently. The forest reads the intent behind movement, and these people have done this before.”
“Done what before? Attempted to break a warden’s binding?”
“Something like it.” He looks at me then, and the weight in his expression makes my breath catch. “I’m not the first warden to face this kind of assault. The Consortium has been studying Briargrave’s weaknesses for longer than you’ve been alive. They’ve refined their methods.”
“Comforting.”
“No. It isn’t.” He rises, brushes soil from his hands. “But understanding an enemy is better than being surprised by one.”
We spend the next hour mapping out an approach. The thornpaths give Tharos options I don’t have—underground routes, canopy paths, ways of moving through the forest that make the terrain irrelevant. My options are more limited but I’ve been solving problems like this my whole life.
Two fighters. One siege engine. Eleven guards plus operators.
I’ve had worse odds.
“There’s a secondary concern.” His voice is careful.
Not quite hesitant. Tharos doesn’t hesitate—but he weighs his words sometimes, the way someone does when they’re deciding how much truth to offer.
“The King will use the chaos of the assault as cover to attempt possession again. It’s been pressing against the binding since the scouts died. ”
“How bad?”
“Manageable. For now.” A pause. “If we take significant casualties—if there’s enough death—it could tip the balance.”
He means if I die. That’s what he’s not saying.
I think about the silver-haired woman with the Consortium seal. The hunter six months dead in the outer graves. All the people the forest has consumed over its long and hungry centuries.
I think about Cyrilla.
“Then we don’t take casualties,” I say.
He looks at me for a long moment. “Just like that.”
“Just like that.” I stand, rolling my shoulders, checking the familiar weight of my blades in their sheaths. “Where do we start?”
The first engagement is brief and brutal.
We intercept a Consortium supply line—six hunters carrying fuel canisters for the siege engine’s fire weapons. Tharos takes the four on the left. I take the two on the right. The whole thing is over in under a minute.
I wipe my blades on the nearest hunter’s armor and don’t think about it. This is the job. This is what I’ve been doing since I was old enough to hold a weapon.
What I haven’t been doing is feeling anything particular about the people I work alongside while I do it.
Tharos is already moving again, the thornpaths opening ahead of him. He doesn’t look at the bodies. Doesn’t linger. Just moves through the violence like weather moves through a landscape—present, powerful, and entirely indifferent to what it leaves behind.
I keep pace.
The forest is growing louder around us. Not sound—something beneath sound. A tension in the air that my body registers before my mind catches up. The same feeling I get before a fight, the pre-violence awareness that tells me something is about to break.
“The King.” He says it quietly, almost to himself. “It can feel how close the siege engine is.”
“Can you hold it?”
“For now.”
I’ve learned that ‘for now’ from him means yes-but-ask-me-again-in-an-hour.
We push deeper.