Chapter 3 #2
We were halfway to my safehouse—a rented room above a blacksmith's forge on the edge of the merchant district—when Jinx tugged my sleeve.
"Miss," she whispered.
"Just Wolf. Or nothing."
"Wolf, then." She pointed subtly toward the main square, where a crowd had gathered around a posting board. "They put up new royal notices tonight. I saw them before Malachi's goons caught me."
I changed direction, merging with the crowd. The posting board was thick with parchments—tax announcements, bounties, recruitment posters for the royal army. But the newest one, pinned with a silver nail and written in the flowing script of the royal scribe, drew the eye like a wound.
[WANTED FOR TREASON AND DESERTION]
Beneath the words was a sketch. Crude, but recognizable. A woman's face, sharp-featured, silver hair. The scar through the left eyebrow.
My face.
Or rather, Iraia's face.
The reward was enough gold to buy a small castle.
And beneath the sketch, in bolder letters:
[DEAD OR ALIVE]
[BY ORDER OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, CROWN PRINCE CASSIAN THORNE]
The crowd murmured. Some fearful, some greedy, most just curious. A dead traitor, back from the grave. Good tavern gossip.
I stood there, reading the words, feeling nothing. Not fear. Not anger. Just a cold, clinical assessment.
He knows I'm alive. Or suspects. The sketch is recent—someone described me from the Blood Fields, or from one of my jobs in the last three months.
He's hunting me. Actively. Publicly.
Good.
Jinx was staring at me, eyes wide, putting it together. The sketch. The silver hair. The scar. She opened her mouth to speak.
I squeezed her shoulder—hard enough to warn, gentle enough not to hurt.
"Not here," I murmured. "Walk."
We melted back into the crowd. I kept my hood up, my pace steady, my breathing even. We passed a group of royal soldiers in their blue-and-silver uniforms, laughing about the bounty, speculating about what they'd spend it on.
Fools.
They didn't know what they were hunting. They thought they were chasing a ghost. A memory. A desperate survivor scraping by in the gutters.
They didn't know I was building a kingdom in the shadows.
We reached the safehouse. The blacksmith—a Voss loyalist named Torvald who'd lost three fingers at the Blood Fields and would follow Iraia's memory into hell—nodded as we passed. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The forge was always hot, always loud, always ready to hide the sound of secrets.
My room was small. A bed. A table. A window overlooking the alley. I kept a go-bag under the floorboards, weapons behind a false panel, and enough supplies to disappear in under five minutes.
Jinx stood in the center of the room, looking around with the critical eye of someone who'd learned that comfort was usually a trap.
"So," she said. "You're really her. The Lady Commander. The one they say Prince Cassian killed himself."
"I didn't die," I said, locking the door and checking the window. "That's what matters."
"But he wants you dead. The prince himself. That's... that's big, Wolf. That's bigger than Malachi. Bigger than the market. That's the whole damn crown."
I turned to look at her. Small. Dirty. Fierce. Seeing the world in terms of power and threat, just like I had at her age.
"Jinx," I said. "Do you know what the difference is between a king and a ghost?"
She shook her head.
"A king sits on a throne and waits for the world to come to him. A ghost moves through the world and takes what she needs."
I pulled the hood back, letting my silver hair catch the lamplight. "They think they're hunting a dead woman. They think they're offering gold for a corpse."
I smiled, and for the first time that night, it reached my eyes.
"But I'm not a corpse. I'm a promise."
I walked to the table, unrolled the map of Aethelgard I'd been building from memory and stolen documents. The capital. The noble houses. The military outposts. The trade routes.
"And promises," I said, placing my palm over the heart of the kingdom, "are much harder to kill."
Jinx moved to stand beside me, her small finger tracing the ink lines with something like wonder.
"What are we gonna do?" she asked.
Not what are YOU going to do. Instead, she said WE.
She'd already chosen. Faster than I'd expected. Maybe she saw something in me that I didn't see in myself yet. Or maybe she was just tired of being alone.
Either way, I didn't correct her.
"We're going to build an army," I said. "We're going to find every survivor of the Voss Legion. Every soldier who was betrayed. Every family who lost someone to the Blood Fields. And we're going to give them something they haven't had in three months."
"What?"
I looked at the map, at the city, at the kingdom that thought it had buried me.
"Hope," I said. "And then, we're going to give them revenge."
Outside, the Night Market roared on, oblivious to the ghost in its midst. Somewhere in the capital, Prince Cassian Thorne was probably staring at the same bounty poster, wondering if the woman in the sketch was really out there, really alive, really coming for him.
Let him wonder.
I blew out the lamp and sat in the dark, planning, plotting, becoming the thing that would haunt his dreams.
—————
A/N:
The Lady King wasn't crowned yet.
But she had her first knight.
And soon, she would have her army.