19. Drokhar
NINETEEN
DROKHAR
Istop. Force myself to start again.
“Whatever else is happening, it doesn’t change the fact that an entity is rising beneath this city. The mass graves are stirring. The war dead are organizing. We need every weapon we can get, and she’s the only one who understands what we’re fighting.”
Varn studies me for a long moment. The pyre crackles behind us, embers popping as they collapse into ash. Somewhere in the compound, a warden is sharpening a blade—the rhythmic scrape of steel on stone a sound I’ve heard a thousand mornings running.
Finally, she nods. Once. A concession, not an agreement.
“The Council has given you three days to prove her usefulness.” She clips the words. Professional. “After that, they’ll burn her whether you like it or not. High Arbiter Sevik has already ordered the Judgment Pyre prepared.”
Three days.
Seventy-two hours to find a way to stop the Gravetide King, prove the mourning witch’s value to a Council that sees her as a liability, and figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do about a mating mark that has upended everything I thought I knew about myself.
“Understood.”
Varn turns to leave, then pauses at the edge of the blackened soil. Her shoulders are stiff, tension visible in the set of her spine.
“Drokhar?” She doesn’t turn around. “The revenant we captured in the lower districts. The one from the merchant square attack.”
I remember it. A soldier in ancient armor, its face so decayed I couldn’t determine race or age, its mouth opening and closing in words I couldn’t hear.
We’d severed its spine to stop it from attacking, but it wouldn’t stay down—kept dragging itself forward with its hands, kept reaching for me specifically.
“What about it?”
“It’s been asking for you by name.” Varn’s tone is carefully neutral. “Says it has a message from its king.”
The mark responds beneath my armor. Not pain—recognition. The Gravetide King has been trying to reach me since the crypts, speaking through corpses and rising dead and whispers in the smoke. I’ve been avoiding it. Refusing to listen.
I can’t refuse anymore.
“Where is it?”
“Holding cells beneath the compound.” Varn finally turns, and I see fear in her expression—real fear, the kind she’s learned to hide after a decade of facing the risen dead. “It’s been talking for hours. Non-stop. The guards are refusing to go near it.”
“Talking about what?”
“You.” She swallows. “And someone named Torval.”
The name hits me like a blade between the ribs.
Varn is still talking, but I can’t hear her anymore.
Blood roars in my ears, and my hands have gone cold despite the heat radiating from the dying pyre.
Torval. The revenant knows my brother’s name.
The Gravetide King has been whispering about him through rotting mouths across the city, promising closure I don’t deserve.
“—been saying he has a message,” Varn finishes. She’s watching me with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before. Uncertainty. Concern. “Drokhar? Are you—”
“I’ll handle it.” I force the words out rougher than I intended. “Dismissed, Captain.”
She hesitates, then nods. Her footsteps fade across the blackite soil.
Three days to prove the witch’s worth.
A revenant speaking my brother’s name.
And a mating mark that blazes beneath my armor, pulling me toward a woman I should have burned, reminding me with every pulse that I am no longer the weapon I trained myself to be.
The holding cells are beneath the compound, carved into the same blackite soil that covers the entire pit. I take the stairs down two at a time, my hand on my blade, my heart hammering against my ribs in a rhythm that has nothing to do with the mark.
Torval.
The name echoes in my head with every step. My brother’s face surfaces from the parade of the forgotten—younger than me, less serious, always laughing at things I didn’t find funny. He had our mother’s eyes. Dark amber, full of light. When he smiled, it was impossible not to smile back.
I haven’t thought about his smile in years. Haven’t let myself.
The cells are cold and dark, lit by a single torch guttering in its bracket. Four iron cages line the walls, designed to hold revenants until they can be examined and burned. Three are empty. The fourth—
The revenant raises its head as I approach.
Its face is a ruin. Decades of decay have stripped away any identifying features, leaving only bone and dried sinew and the hollow sockets where eyes used to be.
The armor fused to its torso is ancient—a style that hasn’t been worn since the border wars, covered in rust so thick it looks like dried blood.
Its mouth works. Opening. Closing. Forming shapes that might be words.
I stop three feet from the bars. Close enough to see the corpse-iron chains binding its wrists to the wall. Far enough to draw my blade if it lunges.
“You wanted to speak to me.” I let my voice echo off the stone walls. “Speak.”
The revenant’s mouth stops working.
For a long moment, there’s only silence—the drip of moisture from somewhere deeper in the cells, the distant crackle of the pyres above, my own breath harsh in my throat.
Then the corpse speaks.