17. Aradya
SEVENTEEN
ARADYA
The King doesn’t want closure. It wants vengeance. It wants to drown the living in the grief they tried to ignore, to force them to feel every ounce of suffering they’ve been avoiding for centuries.
That’s not peace. That’s a different kind of war.
“The dead I speak for choose to be heard.” I straighten against the bars. “They ask for my help. They trust me to carry their words. You’re not asking, are you? You’re demanding.”
Silence. The King’s presence presses against the wards, testing them, searching for another crack.
The dead have been asking for centuries.
The voice returns, harder now. Colder. They have begged and pleaded and screamed for acknowledgment.
The living have ignored them. The death wardens have silenced them.
The Council has burned them before they could finish speaking their truths.
We are done asking, mourning witch. We are done trusting the living to give us what we deserve.
I don’t have an answer for that.
Because the King isn’t wrong. The dead have been ignored. Silenced. Erased. Every pyre the death wardens light is a denial of closure, every mass grave a monument to grief the living refuse to process.
But drowning Blackreach in corpses won’t give the dead what they need. It will only create more of them.
You can hear me. The King’s voice shifts. Becomes calculating. Becomes the voice of an entity that has spent centuries contemplating strategy. Through these wards. Through the suppression that was supposed to silence you. Do you know why?
I don’t answer. Don’t need to. The King will tell me regardless.
Because you are more powerful than they know. More powerful than you know. The magic in your blood is older than these wards, older than this city, older than the wars that created me. You could speak for all of us, mourning witch. You could be the voice that finally makes the living listen.
“By forcing them?”
By giving them no choice. The King’s voice caresses the words. The same way they gave us no choice. The same way they dumped our bodies in pits and covered us with lime and forgot our names.
The mark beneath my collarbone intensifies with sudden heat.
Not warning. Recognition. The King has touched on a truth that resonates with the magic binding me to Drokhar—the Ashwalker, the man who lit more of those pyres than anyone else.
Tell him we offer absolution.
The words come soft. Gentle. A whisper that cuts deeper than any scream.
Tell him if he comes to us willingly, we will spare the city. No more risings. No more attacks. The dead will rest—truly rest—if the Ashwalker surrenders himself to our judgment.
My heart stutters.
“You want me to deliver a message?”
I want you to make a choice. The King’s voice drops to a murmur, intimate and terrible. The man whose mark burns alongside yours has silenced thousands of us. His blood is the price of peace. His death is the payment that will let the forgotten finally rest.
“No.”
The word comes out before I’ve finished thinking it. Instinct. Refusal. The same primal response that made me raise my wrists for his iron restraints in the compound, trusting a monster because the mark told me he was mine.
You would let the city burn for him?
“I would find another way.” My hands shake, but I don’t take the words back. “There has to be another way. You want acknowledgment? You want your names spoken, your truths heard? I can give you that without blood. I can—”
You cannot give us anything from inside this cage. The King cuts me off. You are as helpless as we were. Silenced. Forgotten. Waiting for someone else to decide your fate.
The comparison stings because it’s accurate.
But you are not alone, mourning witch. The Ashwalker carries your mark as you carry his. He will come for you. He will fight through every barrier the Council raises, burn through every ward that stands between you.
A pause. The King’s presence shifts, and I feel it smile—not with any physical mouth, but with the weight of centuries of patient waiting.
And when he does, we will be ready.
“Leave him alone.” The words come out harder than I intended. Possessive. Protective. “Your quarrel is with the Council, with the system that created you. Not with one man.”
He is not one man. The King’s voice hardens. He is the hand that lit the pyres. The symbol of everything the living have done to us. His brother understood this, in the end.
My blood freezes.
“What?”
I remember the story. Fragments of it, overheard in whispered conversations between death wardens in the streets. The Ashwalker’s brother, killed in the last major war. The grave that was sealed before Drokhar could reach it. The pyre that burned before he could say goodbye.
Torval is among us now. The King’s voice drops to a caress. One of thousands who make up our collective. He has been waiting decades for the chance to speak to his brother.
My stomach turns.
“You’re using his grief as a weapon.”
We are giving him what he was denied. The King’s voice carries no apology. The chance to finish what was interrupted. The chance to say the words that have been building in his throat for longer than you’ve been alive.
The suppression wards flare again, the crack narrowing to a hairline fracture. The King’s voice grows distant, muffled, but its final words slip through with terrible clarity.
Tell him we offer absolution. Tell him if he comes to us willingly, we will spare the city.
A pause. The pressure in my skull builds to a crescendo.
Tell him his brother waits among us. And his brother has so much to say.
The wards slam shut.
The King’s voice vanishes, leaving me alone in the silence of my iron cage with a message I can’t deliver and a truth I wish I didn’t know.
Drokhar’s brother is part of the Gravetide King.
Drokhar’s brother has been waiting decades to speak to him.
And the King is going to use that grief to drag the Ashwalker into its realm, whether I warn him or not.
I press my hands against the mark beneath my collarbone, feeling it pulse in time with a heartbeat somewhere above ground. He’s still up there. Still fighting. Still believing he can protect me from the forces gathering against us both.
He doesn’t know what’s coming.
He doesn’t know that the King holds his brother’s spirit like a card up its sleeve, ready to play at the moment it will hurt the most.
And I’m trapped in an iron box, surrounded by wards designed to silence me, with no way to warn him that the dead don’t want blood.
They want him.
Specifically, personally, inevitably.
The Gravetide King has been building toward this moment for centuries. Every pyre Drokhar lit. Every grave he sealed. Every name he failed to record. It was all feeding the entity that now demands his surrender as the price of peace.
And his brother—the brother he never got to mourn, the brother whose grave was burned before he could say goodbye—is part of the trap.
I curl onto my side in the narrow sarcophagus, pressing my forehead against the cold iron bars.
The mark throbs beneath my ribs, a steady pulse of heat that tells me exactly where Drokhar is even though I can’t see him, can’t hear him, can’t do anything but lie here and wait for a judgment that might end with fire.
I have to warn him.
The thought circles in my head, relentless and desperate and useless.
I have to find a way out of this cage. I have to tell him what the King said. I have to—
The mark intensifies.
Not with heat this time. With awareness. A pull at the edge of my consciousness, stronger than before, insistent in a way that makes my breath catch.
He’s coming.
Not arguing anymore. Not pacing. Moving with purpose, his presence growing clearer with each passing moment as the distance between us shrinks.
The guards in the corridor stiffen. I hear their footsteps quicken, hear the clatter of weapons being drawn, hear voices raised in challenge that are quickly silenced by a rumble I feel in my bones even through the suppression wards.
Then the door to my cell block crashes open.
And the Ashwalker stands in the entrance, his blade drawn, his gaze finding mine through the darkness with unerring accuracy.
“Time to go.” He strides toward my cell. The voice of a man who has decided to burn every bridge behind him.
The mark blazes between us, and for one breathless moment, I forget about the King, the brother, the trap that’s waiting to spring.