Chapter Fifteen Mathias
The sky was caught in that pale, aching shade before dawn as Mathias rode beneath it.
The light bled slow and reluctant across the horizon, brushing the world in muted colour.
The air was sharp with pine and damp earth.
Beneath the steed’s hooves, the ground gave softly, and the path ahead was little more than a thread between reeds and creeping groundmist. Mathias followed it all the same, not because it guided him, but because it was the only way available to him.
Days ago, he had left Irongate at dusk, slipping free of the city like a man finally exhaling after holding his breath for too long.
But the fire had followed. Not its heat – there was no warmth left in him – only the memory of it, curled deep in his bones, rising now and then like smoke that would not clear.
He had not slept, and though his eyes burned with fatigue, it was not rest he longed for, but forgetting.
He let the steed pick the pace, trusting his hooves more than his own sense of direction, and for long stretches he thought of nothing at all.
Not of the Queen. Not of the General. Not even of the vision that had nearly broken him open beneath the crumbling eaves of the old wall.
But the mind can be a treacherous beast, and silence only ever invites the old ghosts to speak louder.
The tension had gathered in him like wire drawn too tight, a slow pull that crept from his spine into his jaw, into the base of his skull. Every sound made him start. Every shift in the wind made him glance over his shoulder. As if he were not just leaving something behind but being followed by it.
By late morning the land began to rise slightly, the low valleys giving way to firmer ground where the undergrowth thickened and the trees stood taller.
The path narrowed, winding between gnarled trunks and faded stone markers half-swallowed by ivy, their runes worn to nothing.
He passed a shrine – little more than a crooked stump with a strip of red cloth tied to its branch – and though he did not slow, he found himself muttering the old phrase beneath his breath, not out of belief, but out of habit.
“Step light where old things sleep.”
The wind stirred as he spoke, curling back over his shoulder, and a faint unease settled in his chest—subtle and insistent, like the air before a storm.
It was then, just as the light began to shift again – just as the rhythm of hoofbeats began to lull him into that old, half-waking state that sometimes passed for calm – that the Sight took him again.
Not with the slow bleeding at the edge of the world that he had come to dread, but all at once, like the crack of something splitting deep inside his chest, a fracture so sudden and complete it felt as though the air had been driven from his lungs by a hand he could not see.
The plains vanished. The trees, the trail, the silver light of morning – all torn away in the space between one heartbeat and the next, until there was only the dark, and he was no longer astride his horse but standing once more in that harrowing, unhallowed chamber.
They rose around him like a sickness remembered – the same walls, the same terrible stillness, the same scent of old iron and burning stone clinging to the back of his throat.
The floor was slick with blood, dark and heavy, seeping into the cracks between the flagstones.
The fire moved along the walls in slow, deliberate coils, not dancing but pulsing, as if the room itself were holding its breath.
Heat gathered low, not against the skin but beneath it, like a fever just beginning to take root.
The woman lay curled on her side, her limbs twisted by pain, her gown soaked through in the middle and plastered to her skin, her hair clinging to her cheeks in wet strands— just as he had seen her before.
Her blood had spread further now, or perhaps he simply saw more of it this time, painting the stone beneath her in wide, ragged arcs as though she had tried to claw her way back into life and found the way barred.
Her hand was pressed to her belly, fingers trembling slightly where they rested, not in death, but in something worse – something that would not yet release her.
And towering above her, formidable and unmovable, was the Queen.
Mowgara stood at the centre of it all, as if the chamber itself had been built to frame her, her hands slick to her wrists with blood that did not drip, her crown catching the firelight with a hard, unyielding gleam, and she neither turned nor spoke, her presence a gravity that seemed to hold the room in place.
But the air around her had changed – thickened, darkened – and when Mathias looked beyond her, into the long hollow of shadow that stretched along the wall behind him, he saw them.
Figures. Five, he thought, but couldn’t be sure.
Women, but only just – shapes cut from smoke, their faces blurred as if the room itself refused to recall them clearly.
They stood in silence, shoulder to shoulder, their presence a pressure rather than a sight, a weight that pressed down against the air and made it difficult to draw breath.
They neither moved nor spoke, but the space they filled was alive with fury – old and endless, wound tight and burning slow beneath the surface.
The chamber seemed to draw in on itself, the walls pressing closer as though the space had been waiting for this.
And then, without sound or warning, the woman stirred – her head lifting slowly, as if pulled by some unseen thread, hair falling back to bare a face pale with agony and streaked dark with drying blood.
Her eyes found him at once, unerring and absolute, locking to his with a clarity that cut through time and distance, through everything that should have kept them apart.
She saw him – as if he were there, not in a vision or dream, but standing over her, too late to stop any of it.
In her eyes, a raw, blazing anger that seemed to ignite the air between them, a fire in the depths of her gaze that burned with an unquenchable rage.
Her lips parted, slowly and deliberately, and he saw the shape of words, but he could not hear them.
But the impact of her gaze, the scorching fury in her eyes, shook him to his very core.
And then the world broke open, and the vision gave way, not gently, but suddenly and mercilessly, leaving him gasping in the saddle, the reins slack in his hands, and the valley around him impossibly still.
He crumpled then, not from the saddle, but inward, as if the force of the vision had compressed his spirit, leaving him hollowed and trembling.
The steed, sensing his abrupt loss of grip, snorted nervously, shifting beneath him, but he barely registered the mount’s unease.
His lungs clawed for air, the phantom stench of blood and burning stone still thick in his throat, and he coughed, a dry, ragged sound that tore at his chest. Sweat, cold and clammy, beaded on his brow, and his hands, still clenched to the point of pain around the slack leather, felt numb.
The woman’s eyes, blazing with that impossible, searing rage, burned into him, and he knew she had seen him – not as one sees a shadow cast against a wall, but wholly, as if something in her had reached through the veil between this world and wherever it was his visions came from.
And though her lips had moved – slowly, purposefully, with a precision that left no doubt the words were meant for him – the meaning never reached him.
Whether it had been a name, a command, or a curse, he could not tell.
All that remained was the weight of it, lodged in him like a splinter, a certainty that whatever she had spoken mattered, and he had failed to understand it.
At last, he urged the steed forward with a numb gesture, driven less by thought than by the simple instinct to keep moving.
They moved slowly now, through the raw haze left in the vision’s wake, the kind that made the world feel altered, as though nothing would ever sit quite where it had before.
The trail returned beneath them in fragments, pine needles breaking softly beneath hooves, the fissle of damp leaves shifting overhead.
It was some time before he saw the horse.
It stood some distance ahead, half-hidden beneath the bend of an overgrown branch, its reins snagged in a knot of bramble.
Steam still rose faintly from its flanks in the cold air, and though it turned its head at his approach, it made no sound, only watched him with the wide, dark eyes of an animal trained to wait.
The saddle was worn but well-kept, the bags tied with a soldier’s efficiency, and the blanket roll had slipped halfway loose, trailing damp against the forest floor.
There was something about the way it stood – alert, not panicked – that unsettled him more than panic might have.
This was a warhorse. Waiting for its rider.
He dismounted carefully, boots sinking slightly into the soft riverbank, and moved forward with caution, one hand extended.
He didn’t say anything, only touched the animal’s neck lightly, as if to confirm it was real.
And then he saw the marks – the scuffed edge of the leather, the faint embroidery at the saddle’s edge, the way one stirrup still held a sliver of dried mud, not yet washed away by dew.