Chapter Fifteen Mathias #2
There were signs in the dirt – subtle, half-effaced by wind and water, but clear enough to the eyes of someone who had spent much of his life watching for the traces people left behind.
A scuffed print, the sharp break of undergrowth, and a shallow groove where something heavy had struck and slid before coming to rest. He let the reins fall slack in his hand and followed on foot, weaving through the low branches heavy with damp, the scent of bruised pine rising with each step.
The ground sloped gently downward, and the weight of the forest seemed to press closer until—below the roots of an old oak sprawling and half-sunk into the earth— he saw her.
She lay folded in on herself, one arm drawn across her ribs, the other lost in the tangle of her cloak, her body stilled as if cut off mid-motion.
Her head rested against the moss, her cheek pale beneath a streak of dried blood, and her hair – matted and streaked with soil – clung damp to her brow.
The wound had bled freely; its stain marked her collar, her sleeve, and the curve of her jaw.
When he crouched close enough to hear it, her breath was shallow and uneven, drawn through lips that had gone blue at the corners.
She had been here for hours, perhaps longer.
He did not need to push back the hood to know who she was.
Even unconscious, she carried the kind of presence that refused to diminish – the stubborn set of her shoulders, the faint furrow between her brows.
And now she lay here, the Unbroken Blade of the Sorcerer Queen, stripped of ceremony.
Just a figure beneath the tree, wounded and still.
And something about that – about seeing her like this, so still, so entirely human – unsettled him in a way he hadn’t expected.
He knelt beside her slowly, his hand hovering above her shoulder, close enough to feel the faint warmth of her body still trapped beneath the cold.
She was smaller than she had seemed in the square.
Or perhaps it was simply the absence of all that had clothed her in power – no blade at her back, no soldiers at her flanks, no sorcery clinging to the air like a threat.
There was nothing here but her. Flesh and blood and breath, and the slow, steady bleeding of someone who should not have been alone.
A tide of thoughts, swift and chaotic, crashed over him.
They came not with cruelty but with a strange, quiet appeal – born of weariness and the lingering fog of the vision that still clung to the edges of his sight.
He could leave her. Let the elements claim her.
Let the chill of the earth draw the last traces of warmth from her skin.
Let the Queen wonder. Let the armies march blind.
Let the world unfold without his interference.
It would be simple. Clean. A wound left undisturbed.
His people might be safe – safer – from this particular, crushing wave.
And no one would ever know his hand in it.
The silence stretched, filled only by the ragged rhythm of his breath and the faint, unsteady rustle of leaves.
He looked at her – not the legend, not the blade that had carved a warpath through the northern provinces, but the woman lying unconscious at the base of an old oak, blood streaking her temple, her limbs slack, her breath faint but steady.
And even now, there was something in her posture that resisted surrender, an echo of defiance that refused to let her vanish into the moss.
She looked impossibly young and impossibly old, her face slack with exhaustion and marked by the weight of decisions that had not released her, even in sleep.
He tried to imagine what would follow if he left her.
Whether the Queen’s army, finding their General gone, would press forward in vengeance or pause in confusion.
Whether news of her loss would rally them to greater violence or unmake the cohesion that held them together.
He could not be sure. War did not always follow reason, and grief was a poor strategist. But if there was even the smallest chance that her presence might alter the shape of what came next – delay it, divert it, crack it open long enough for something other than fire and destruction to pass through – then he could not afford to look away.
And still, that was not all. He had seen her at the pyre – not surrounded by her army or cloaked in ceremony, but alone, unwatched, kneeling before the dead.
It had not been for show; there had been no audience, and whatever it was – if it was anything at all – it lingered in him now, stubborn and unresolved.
He pressed a hand to his eyes, scrubbing at the fatigue, trying to clear the cobwebs from his mind, to find clarity in this sudden, impossible crossroads.
His gaze swept back to her and then outward, towards the unseen horizon, where the invading host surely waited.
The sheer, overwhelming scale of the Queen’s ambition was a force of nature, a tide that threatened to drown all in its path, and his home stood precariously on the very edge of that coming storm.
What if her capture could buy time? A desperate, audacious gamble, perhaps, but a gamble that might just hold the lives of his people in its slender thread.
She was the Queen’s Blade— absent now, inexplicably – and that absence was not yet known.
That absence was power. And power, misdirected or intercepted, might sow enough confusion, enough uncertainty, to stall the relentless march.
Her army, leaderless, might falter or turn its gaze inward, away from the coastal plains where Tirn’vahl lay exposed.
Or, in the quiet of confinement, stripped of the clamour of command, perhaps she could be brought to see the futility of this war, of bloodshed for bloodshed’s sake.
To convince her to halt the advance, to turn her army away from the shores he loved.
It was a hope as faint as a distant star, yet in the encroaching darkness, it was the only light he could find.
This was not a choice made of comfort, nor of clear victory.
It was a choice born of necessity, of the chilling clarity that came when all other options vanished like mist in the morning sun.
He crouched again, his knees aching, the cold long since soaked into the seams of his boots.
She had not moved. Her breath was still faint and uneven, the wound on her brow dark with blood.
She looked no more dangerous than a fallen girl – but the danger was not in her now.
It was in what her absence meant. In what her recovery might alter.
In the brittle, breakable span of time between now and when the Queen would notice her missing.
The decision, when it finally settled in him, was not a rush but the cold, heavy fall of a stone in a deep well. It was the quiet, terrible acceptance of a burden, a solitary act against an unimaginable force.
He would bind her, secure her, and take her home with him.