26. Eirene
TWENTY-SIX
EIRENE
The claiming is worse than I imagined.
I feel him. Not just when we’re touching—not just when his hands are on my skin or his breath is warm against my throat. I feel him constantly. Unavoidably. A dark presence in my mind, as familiar now as my own heartbeat, as inescapable as the blood flowing through my veins.
We’re in my cottage, the thin walls doing nothing to keep out the chill of pre-dawn air.
Varkhul is asleep on the narrow bed—the first sleep he’s allowed himself since the attack, his massive form taking up so much space that I barely fit beside him.
His breathing is steady. Deep. The rhythm of a man at peace.
The Stray Boy is gone. Korvax had taken him east—before the guards were dismissed, before any of us had chosen our sides.
I hadn’t asked him to, not in words. But Varkhul had seen to it, pressing the name of a miller called Sorem into Korvax’s keeping: two villages past the ridge, whose wife had taken in boundary children before and asked no questions.
Even then, even while choosing his loyalties, Korvax had done that much.
Through the Veil I could feel the moment the boy crossed the ridge line and out of the boundary’s reach—a small absence, a thread going slack, the way a held breath finally releases.
He would reach them by dawn. He would be safe. That, at least, had been managed.
I’m not at peace.
The consummation had sealed the link between us deeper than either of us understood—and now that Varkhul slept, his conscious walls down, his mind was open in a way it had never been while he was awake.
Because even in sleep, his mind pours into mine.
Not words. Not coherent thoughts. Fragments.
Shards of memory that cut as they pass, bleeding images into my consciousness like water through cracked stone.
And the memories aren’t gentle.
I see a woman kneeling in chains, her hair gray with age, her eyes bright with defiance. She’s accused of practicing blood magic—forbidden rituals, they called it. Treason against the Veil. Steel flashes. Blood sprays. Her defiance doesn’t falter even as the light leaves her eyes.
I see a man begging. Tears streaming down his face, hands reaching for the executioner who stands unmoved before him.
He has a family, he’s saying. Children. A wife who’s sick.
He didn’t mean to cross the boundary—he was just trying to find medicine.
The sword descends. His tears dry to salt on dead cheeks.
I see soldiers. Witches. Boundary-crossers and oath-breakers and people whose only crime was being in the wrong place when the order needed a body to execute.
I see them all.
The memories flood through me in an endless tide, and I can’t make them stop.
I pull away from him. Physically. Emotionally. As far as the tiny cottage allows.
It doesn’t help. The mark on my chest burns in protest, demanding proximity, demanding the warmth of his body against mine. But I can’t—I can’t be near him right now. Not while his sins are pouring into my skull, painting the inside of my eyelids with blood.
I press my back against the far wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the cold floor. My hands are shaking. When did my hands start shaking?
Another memory crashes through me. This one is different. This one is—
A child.
A boy, maybe twelve years old. His hands are bound behind his back.
His face is streaked with dirt and tears.
He’s accused of being touched by shadow—of carrying the Veil’s taint inside him, spreading it to everyone he meets.
The evidence is thin. A village’s hysteria.
A scapegoat for a plague that had nothing to do with magic.
But the order has spoken. The sentence has been passed.
Through Varkhul’s eyes, I watch the blade rise.
Through his ears, I hear the boy’s final words—not a plea, not a curse, but a question.
“Did I do bad?” His voice is small, confused.
He doesn’t understand why he’s here. Doesn’t understand why the tall orc in dark armor is looking at him with such careful blankness.
The blade falls.
I feel Varkhul’s horror—buried deep, suppressed immediately, locked away behind walls of duty and discipline. He didn’t let himself feel it then. The order doesn’t allow doubt. The blade doesn’t allow mercy.
But I feel it now. Eight years later, carried on the claiming mark between us, I feel the scream he never let himself release. The grief he never acknowledged. The question he never asked: Was I wrong?
There are more children. Two girls accused of witchcraft—not boundary witches, just village girls who happened to know which herbs cured fevers.
A boy who threw a rock at a Veil-warden and was sentenced to death for treason.
An infant—gods, an infant—born to a woman who’d crossed the boundary while pregnant, condemned before it could even open its eyes.
The order doesn’t discriminate. The law doesn’t care about age or innocence or circumstance.
And Varkhul has been their blade for twenty years.
I’m crying. I realize it distantly, feel the tears sliding down my cheeks, taste salt on my lips. I’m crying for people I never knew, people who died before I ever came to the Veilborder, people whose faces are now burned into my memory as surely as if I’d watched them die myself.
I claimed a murderer. I gave myself to a man who has killed children.
The mark on my chest pulses with warmth, trying to comfort me, trying to remind me of the man who held me against the stones while the world fell apart. But I can’t feel that man right now. All I can feel are his victims, screaming in my skull.
“Eirene.”
His voice cuts through the flood of memories. I didn’t hear him wake—didn’t feel him move—but suddenly he’s there, crouched in front of me, his massive form blocking the thin light filtering through the window.
I flinch away from him.
The hurt that crosses his face is devastating. Raw and immediate and completely unguarded. He felt my revulsion—of course he did, the claiming doesn’t allow secrets—and it hit him harder than any blade.
Good. Let it hurt.
“You’re feeling them.” It’s not a question. He knows. He can feel exactly what I’m experiencing, even if the memories themselves are his. “The executions.”
“How could you?” The words tear out of me, rough and broken. I can’t look at him. Can’t stand to see the face that watched so many others take their final breath. “Children, Varkhul. You killed children.”
He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t try to explain or justify or minimize. He just nods, a single jerking motion, and I see his jaw clench tight enough to crack teeth.
“I followed orders.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I was wrong.” The words come out quiet. Broken. “I was wrong, Eirene. About all of it.”
“Wrong doesn’t bring them back.” I’m on my feet now, pacing the tiny space between us, unable to stay still.
The cottage walls feel like they’re closing in.
The memories keep coming—a steady stream of death and doubt and carefully suppressed conscience.
“Wrong doesn’t undo twenty years of murder.
Wrong doesn’t give those children their lives back. ”
“I know.” He doesn’t try to touch me. Doesn’t try to close the distance I’ve put between us. He just watches me with eyes that hold no defense, no excuse, no attempt to make himself appear better than he is. “I know it doesn’t.”
“Then what? You expect me to forgive you because the mark says I have to? Because we’re bound and I can’t escape what you’ve done?”
“No.” He shakes his head, slow and deliberate. “I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
The question hangs between us. Outside, the sky is lightening toward a dawn that never quite arrives. The Veil hums with the new stability we created last night—bought with blood and claiming and desperate surrender. But inside this cottage, stability feels like a distant dream.
“I want you to see all of it.” His voice steadies. “Not just the deaths. See why I did it. What I believed. What I was before the order made me a weapon.”
“Why would I want to see that?”
“Because you’re going to spend the rest of your life with these memories in your head.” He rises from his crouch, and even across the room, his presence fills the space. “And I’d rather you understand them than drown in them.”