Chapter 5
The knock came just past dawn.
Three brisk raps, then the door creaked open on its own. Grim rarely waited for an answer.
Ilys groaned, dragging the blanket up over her head. The fire in the hearth had long since gone out, and the stone floor sucked what little warmth remained from the room.
“Ilys.” Grim’s voice nicked her rest, breaking like a snap of frost underfoot.
She refused to answer.
“You’ve five minutes to dress and meet me in the yard,” he said. “If you’re not there, I’ll drag you out by the heels.”
She poked her head out, hair a tangled mess.
“I’m not training today,” she announced, pulling the blanket back over herself.
Grim stepped further into the room. His tunic soaked and veil hanging loose around his neck with a sword belt slung across his back.
“No?” he asked. “And why’s that?”
She turned to face the wall. “We don’t fight. The condemned are bound. The King doesn't ask me to swing like a butcher. It does not make sense to train as we do.”
He paused then, he strode to the bed and yanked the blanket away in one sharp motion.
She shrieked and curled into herself as the cold bit down. “Grim!”
“Get up.”
“You’re cruel.”
“They are not always bound, Ilys. When you embark on the Veilmarch you will cry in gratitude for my training.” He turned his nose up. “You are too soft.”
She sat up, shivering, glaring daggers at his back as he turned and made for the door.
Back to her, he strode from the room. “Ten minutes. Dress warm. It’s a hard frost.” The door shut behind him with a final, solid thud.
Ilys groaned at the sight of the training ground cloaked in cool, whitish mist. She found the timing too early, the setting too muggy, and Grim to be an utter ass. The aforementioned ass stood in the center of the ring, waiting. As she trudged forward, he only tossed her a sword with a short nod.
She caught it and let it drop against her side. “I’m here. You need not be so dower.”
“Take your stance.”
“No good morning?”
“I don’t waste words.”
She muttered a coarse insult under her breath but obeyed, stepping into place, shoulders tense.
He walked a slow circle around her, appraising her posture like a blacksmith eyeing a flawed blade.
“Too stiff.”
“I’m cold.”
“Then warm up faster.”
She adjusted, scowling. Grim nudged her elbow, tapped her wrist, shifted her boot with the toe of his own.
“You swing like your sword’s made of pudding.”
“I swing like someone who believes her duty isn’t savagery.”
Grim’s mouth twitched.
“I don’t perform for bloodlust,” she added. “The Veil is sacred. I end unnatural lives cleanly and quickly, as the First Shepherd would have me.”
“The king knows nothing of what is required of you. He does not care for you, Ilys, despite your believing so.”
She laughed. “You are jealous that he prides himself in me.”
“You think his pride will cradle you when facing unnatural magic?”
She bristled, grip tightening on the hilt.
“Your duty seems reverent and quiet now,” Grim said. “Even with blood pooling at your feet. But come your Consecration Rites, you’ll get dirty, Ilys. Filthy in ways you can't wash off.”
Ilys cringed at the sentiment, her gut pulling taut. Grim often led with vague, ominous threats and warnings. Yet he always failed to speak plainly.
Then tell me. Tell me what awaits then, she urged in her mind.
“You’ll look in the mirror,” he went on, lost in his own weaving, “and you’ll see me.” He stepped closer, voice low and cold. “And you will hate yourself for it.”
“And when I don’t see you in that mirror, Grim?”
“Then you’ll see no one. Be no one. Because a little girl with only psalms is no use in the Bargain with Death. Trust this.”
“Tell me,” she barked. “Tell me what more awaits that is so horrible that the sun turns to night watching me flail at your hand day in and day out?”
“I am showing you, Ilys. In every exercise, I am telling you.”
“Put it into words, you ass. What is so horrible?”
Grim stepped back, shaking his head. He gestured towards the sword. “Again.”
She didn’t move.
“Tell me!” she cried. “I am tired of your distance. I am scared. I am lonely. I am lost. Tell me what I am made for, if I do not know.”
“Death, Ilys,” Grim said. “That is what you were made for. The executions you’ve carried out, those are only a taste.
Horrible, yes. But beyond them you will see so many shades of death that you will forget what living feels like.
Out there, the ones we cut down are not monsters, they are men and women who want what we all want: more days, more love, more time.
And we are the ones who take it from them, again and again.
That is the Veilmarch. That is the burden. ”
He reached across the space between them, shaking her. “So steel yourself. Take up your sword. Because if you falter, it will be me they send to carry your body home.”
The words landed like a slap. Ilys looked away, throat hoarse. She took the blade again, grip firmer this time.
“Better,” he said simply.
Their swords met in the cold morning light, and for the first time that day, she did not falter.
Training stretched on as the sun climbed.
Sweat soaked Ilys’s collar as Grim drilled her through each motion with merciless precision.
Baron leaned against the wall nearby, watching with an easy patience that contrasted Grim’s rough commands.
Every so often he stepped in to correct a stance or a swing, his voice gentler, more coaxing.
“That’s my girl,” he said when her blade finally struck clean.
Across the yard, Jorrin, the stablemaster’s son, passed by. He offered a small smile, wincing a bit as his gait rattled his broken ribs. Even veiled, Ilys felt heat rise to her cheeks as she murmured, “Hello, Jorrin.”
Baron caught the exchange. His tone shifted, heavier in the space of a breath. He clapped Grim on the shoulder. “Take a break before you grind her into dust.” Then he turned toward Ilys. “Walk with me.”
They reached the ivy-shaded wall. Baron stayed beside her, silent in a way that felt borrowed from Grim. Finally, his voice low, Baron spoke, “There’s a story. Once, a Veilwalker stripped off his veil—not for ritual, not for prayer, but for love. He gave himself to another for one night of joy.”
The pause that followed suspended, broken only by the crackle of cicadas in nearby trees.
“Come dawn, Death arrived. He stood at the foot of their bed, raised his hand, and the story ended, as ours always do.”
Ilys stiffened, the fabric of her veil clinging muggy against her lips. Baron tilted his head toward her. Not a warning, not pity, but an apology trying to take shape.
“Because love makes cowards of gods. And Death cannot stand to be afraid.”
Later, long past night’s bell, Ilys stood outside Grim’s chamber.
Quiet as breath, she slipped inside. The room lay small, spartan with a fire burning low in the grate.
Grim sat beside it, cloak draped across his shoulders, his veil discarded, jaw shadowed by stubble.
He read with his head bowed, eyes sharp on the page.
The wrongness struck her at once. No crest on the spine, no seal of the Archive. Too worn. Too real.
“You’re not meant to have that,” she said.
Grim didn’t look up. “No?” His tone carried the condescension of someone who already knew the answer.
“Where did you get it?”
“Darrant.”
Her breath caught. “You brought it back. From the last march.”
He said nothing.
“What is it?”
He turned a page.
“Grim.”
He sighed, low and tired. “Something old. The sort they’d never let us keep.”
She moved closer. “Why not?”
“Because it speaks plainly.”
She knelt beside the chair, the hem of her nightrobe brushing the stone.
“Why does that matter?” she asked.
He closed the book. “They don’t want people thinking beyond the bounds. Books make things louder. Questions. Doubt. Desire.”
Ilys studied his face. “Is that what it gave you?”
Grim didn’t look up. “No. I had all of those already.”
She sat with that, then said, “The Veilmarch.”
He hummed in acknowledgement. “What is it truly like? Why does it take so long?”
He turned the book once in his hand, slow and thoughtful. “I’m not always at Veilmarch when I’m gone. The march itself is but a single day, near the end of spring. It’s the path to it that takes time.”
She watched him. “And what lies along that path?”
He glanced at her, then let his gaze drift back to the fire. “Those who live beyond the Fates’ reach. Necromancers. Seers who look past the veil and try to bend what lies beyond. We deal with them while we wait for the call.”
Her brow furrowed. “Are there many?”
“Few,” he said. “But strong. Clever. Dangerous. No one endeavors to give up life so easily.”
“But Death is with you,” she said. “Is he not?”
“Death does not intervene. That’s why we exist.”
She nodded, but her fingers knotted tight in her lap.
“And if I’m not ready,” she said, voice smaller now, “when the time comes… ”
“You will be.”
“And if I’m not?”
He looked at her then. A long look. The firelight caught in his eyes.
“I’ll go with you.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Your first march. I’ll ride with you. See it done,” he hummed, turning back to his book. “I’ll see to it.”
She studied him, searching for a smile. But tenderness in Grim took the shape of certainty. There lived his love; unsensational and immovable.
Grim turned another page. When his voice came, it creaked like armor easing open.
“The path that is not drawn may yet be taken, if the soul hopes and yearns for more.” His dry cadence recited the record instead of weaving a tale.
But the words were doughy, and soon he shifted without realizing, his tone smoothing, deepening, finding a rhythm that wrapped around her like an embrace.
“The boy, nameless and known by none, passed beneath the pale sky. The stars made no sound, yet he listened still, for even in silence there is song.”
Her eyes fluttered. Grim read on, voice an invariable thread in the dark. Time slowed. The fire crackled. His cloak rustled faintly as he turned another page.
“And the boy wept, not from sorrow, but from knowing he could not turn back.”
She drifted, comforted by the familiar timbre of his voice and a story so unlike The Book of the Veil.
The chair’s wood pressed cool against her cheek, but she didn’t mind.
She could still hear him. Still feel the echo of his promise in the room.
She barely stirred as he moved. The heavy wool of a blanket fell across her shoulders, smelling faintly of ash and cedar.
Then the brush of fingers, just at her temple, tucking her veil.
A breath. A moment. A kiss, pressed light to her veiled forehead, so light she might have dreamed it. And though she didn’t open her eyes, her lips curved the smallest bit.
Because she was safe.
Because he was there.