Selah
The gambling night is loud enough that no one hears the harbor bell until it rings three times. Then four. Then it stops entirely.
I’m standing near the back of the common room when the sound cuts off, a cup of rirzed wine in my hand that I haven’t touched in an hour.
Brinna has half the inn on their feet, cards and coins scattered across four long tables.
The air is thick with pipe smoke and laughter and the desperate energy of people who have decided tonight they will win back everything they’ve lost.
It’s almost convincing. But I see the way Corvin keeps moving through the room without stopping, and the way Rennic’s eyes keep pulling toward the windows, it almost looks like a normal night.
The bell stops.
Rennic’s gaze finds mine across the room.
Then the front doors come off the hinges.
The first dark elf through the doorway doesn’t slow for a single breath.
He moves through the room the way a blade moves through water.
Three more come through behind him before the screaming starts, and then it’s all screaming, chairs overturning, the card tables going sideways as the crowd surges away from the entrance.
Brinna’s voice cuts through everything. “Down! Everyone get down and follow Wynn to the cellar, now—”
Someone grabs my arm, and I nearly swing before I see it’s Corvin.
He doesn’t say anything. He pulls me low through the crowd while the room erupts into chaos behind us.
Glass breaks. One of the assassins vaults a table and cuts down a smuggler who moves too slowly.
I hear the sound it makes and don’t look back.
The cellar entrance is behind the kitchen.
Corvin gets it open and starts pushing people through two at a time, then three, then shoving them in groups because there’s no time for single-file.
Brinna materializes from the chaos with her skirts hiked to her knees and her face entirely calm, counting heads as they go down.
“You’re not going,” Corvin tells me.
“I wasn’t planning to.” I am absolutely planning to do whatever gets the most people out of this building alive, but we can argue about it later.
Outside, something hits the harbor square hard enough that I feel it through the stone floor.
Then Droza screams.
Not in pain. I know the difference by now, know the exact frequency of the sound the tether pulls out of him when he’s afraid versus when he’s enraged. This is something older than rage. It’s been waiting inside him since before he was stone.
The windows on the harbor side of the inn explode inward.
I hit the floor behind the bar and stay there while glass rains across the kitchen doorway, and then I make the mistake of looking up.
Through the blown-out window frame, in the firelight of two burning market stalls, I see Droza without restraint.
He has never been small. But the gargoyle that tore out of the statue on the night we met was disoriented, furious, and half-blinded by a century of sleep.
What moves in the harbor square now is something else.
Wings fully spread, he blocks out the torchlight from the docks entirely.
His stone skin has split along the old black rite markings and gold bleeds through the cracks.
He moves through a group of four armed dark elves the way water moves through a crumbling wall, and the sounds that follow are brief and horrible.
I don’t look away. I want to understand exactly what he is when nothing inside him is held back. Every movement has a target and an outcome, and the outcome is that nothing threatening gets to stand between him and Gullhaven. Between him and me.
Corvin touches my shoulder and I realize I’ve moved closer to the window.
“Tunnel’s clear,” he says quietly. “Last group is going down now.”
“Go. Get them out.” I turn to look at him. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He nods, then turns to leave. I don’t follow him.
The back door opens instead, from the outside, and Vaedrin steps through it like he’s been invited.
He looks worse than the last time I saw him.
The careful elegance he usually wears is stripped away.
His noble insignias are torn at the shoulder, and his hair is loose and disordered.
But his eyes are steady. That’s what makes my stomach drop.
After everything happening outside, after whatever Droza is doing to his forces in the square, Vaedrin’s eyes are steady.
“I didn’t expect you to stay,” he says.
“I’m full of surprises.”
He looks at the cellar door, still swinging slightly on its hinge. “They won’t get far. I have people on the eastern tunnel.”
The cold that moves through me isn’t fear, not exactly. It’s the specific understanding that I have miscalculated, and that the window of time I have to fix it is closing.
“The relic,” he says, his gaze dropping to the shape of it beneath my coat.
“You understand what it is, truly, do you not?” He moves closer, unhurried, because he knows the exits and I do not.
“It was not created for one noble house. It was not created to find one bloodline.” His voice is almost gentle.
“It carries every hidden descent in Protheka. Every family that buried its lineage to survive. Every child born to a union someone powerful wanted erased. With it, we could identify thousands.”
Thousands of people with forbidden ancestry—gargoyle blood, crossed lineages, everything the noble houses spent centuries burning out of their records and their bloodlines—walking around alive, unaware they carry a death sentence.
The relic pulses once against my ribs, as if it hears him.
“You would burn through all of them,” I say.
“I would protect what has been built.” He stops three feet away. “And yes.”
I look at him, and then past him, through the blown-out window, to where Droza is a living siege engine.
He turns every few seconds in my direction. Even from here, I can feel the tether pulling taut every time he can’t locate me visually, a low urgent vibration that I know, by now, means he is about to do something catastrophic.
Stay out there, I think, as hard as I can. Stay out there and keep them off the tunnels.
Vaedrin reaches for the relic.
I step back because I already understand that this ends one way. As long as this thing exists, it doesn’t matter where I run.