Chapter Twenty-Three Frejara #2
A shiver slid down my spine, slow and cold.
I’d seen war wounds split skin from bone, heard men scream with their lungs half-crushed – but this felt crueller than any battlefield reckoning.
Vicious, somehow. Not vengeance, not even warning.
Just control, deliberate and absolute. A price paid to live – and the cost was the one thing that should never belong to anyone else: her voice.
And I didn’t even remember her.
Not her face, not her touch, not the soundless hum of comfort she must have offered in the dark.
I would have cried in her arms. Slept against her chest. And now – nothing.
Not even a shadow of her left in me. She had given everything, and I had carried on through a life built on the absence of her.
I hadn’t even known I was missing someone until she was handed back to me in Maeve’s deep grief.
A deep line tightened between Maeve’s brows. “But Signe saw more than the Queen intended. She realised, too late, what it was Mowgara had planned. That she had no intention of raising a daughter. She meant to raise a vessel.”
She paused, as if the weight of it all needed space to settle. And as it did, something sharp rippled through me, slow and certain, like a key settling into the lock of a door I hadn’t known was closed. Not anger, but the foreboding of it.
“Mowgara feared the old gods still – just enough to avoid their wrath. So she would not strike you down, not while the mark of their favour still was on your skin. But she watched you, waited. Let the power inside you stir, just enough. Then she bound it.” Maeve’s gaze flicked to my shoulder, to the place I still refused to look.
“Through your mark. Through blood and spell and fire, she wove her claim into you like a hook in the gut. And when it was done, she told you the power had never stirred. That you were a hollow child.”
The silence that followed wasn’t calm but tense – like the brittle pause in glass before it shatters.
“And when the binding wasn’t enough,” Maeve went on, her voice fraying now, “she threw you to the barracks. Let war wear you down. Let the blades of others risk what she would not dare. It wasn’t mercy. Just… distance. Enough to keep her hands clean.”
She shifted against the cold stone, the movement slow, as if the years she carried had settled deeper in her bones.
“Signe feared she wouldn’t live long enough to send more.
She begged me to stay safe, stay hidden and to remember who you were.
Who your mother had been. And to wait – for you, perhaps…
or for Alaric, or for another of the Mothers who fled to find this place. But no one did, not until now.”
I don’t know how long I sat there. I must have blinked, must have breathed, but I remembered none of it – only the thrum in my ears and the dull echo of Maeve’s words clawing at memories I’d long buried.
Mathias said nothing, only shifted closer.
His hand was still on my shoulder, but now his thumb moved in slow circles near the curve of my collarbone, as if the motion might draw me back from wherever I’d gone.
I let my head tip slightly towards his, not quite resting, not quite pulling away.
Something in me had splintered, and he was helping me hold the pieces until I could see what still fit.
The blade in my lap caught the light. My fingers had slackened, yet the hilt still pressed into my palm as if it belonged there.
I stared until the weight in my chest gathered into a shape I could no longer ignore.
Many things had broken tonight, but this pressed hardest against what remained.
A face rose in my mind – steady, sorrowful – the man I had let be condemned to the fire.
The one who had looked at me like he knew what I was doing and why I did it.
“I led him to his death,” I said. The words were brittle, colourless. “At Irongate. I thought he was a traitor, someone who had earned the wrath of my Moth….” I swallowed, though my throat ached. “The Queen. The old man in tattered robes. Alaric.”
Maeve didn’t look shocked. Only sad. Only old.
“You didn’t know,” she said, and it wasn’t a comfort, but it wasn’t a condemnation either. “How could you have known?”
“I should have,” I whispered, though I knew it wasn’t true. Still, the guilt sat like old wine gone sour, seeping into everything. “He looked at me like—” I stopped. I had no words for what had lived in his gaze. “Like he knew,” I said instead. “And he let it happen.”
Maeve’s voice was softer now, but no less sure. “Because he believed you’d live. That somehow, some part of her hadn’t taken everything from you. Because even if he couldn’t save you then, he’d rather die trying than become part of her lie.”
My chest ached, sharp and deep, like something had cracked open and let the cold in. “He was my father.”
The words caught in my mouth even as I spoke them – too small for what they held. A cold flush crept up my neck, and for a heartbeat, I wasn’t in the ruins of this old temple at all. I was back in the square, watching the fire take his robes, and feeling nothing that made sense.
“He was my father,” I said again, but this time, I could barely hear it.
She nodded. “And the first true Speaker of the old gods since their voices fell silent.”
I turned toward her slowly, the words unmoored in my mind. “Speaker?”
“Not a priest in robes and rituals,” Maeve said.
“Not the kind that comes from doctrine or decree. Alaric was touched. Not by flame, not by blood – but by something older. He heard them. In dreams, in storms, in the still places between. He was the first in generations to feel their gaze again.” She paused, letting the thought settle. “And they answered him.”
The fire cracked behind her, its light catching in the lines at the corners of her eyes.
“He and Eleonora were bound long before you were born. And together, they carried hope that maybe the gods hadn’t turned from us entirely.
That something might be salvaged. And the Queen hated them both for it.
Not just because they defied her, but because they made her rule feel fragile. ”
I listened, though the air in my lungs still felt frayed.
But something twisted in me then—like heat, whetted and bitter.
I wanted to strike something. To scream.
To drag her name down into the dirt where she’d left the rest of them.
Instead, I swallowed it – the anger, the sheer horror of it all – and let it settle in my chest like cinders.
“When Eleonora fell,” Maeve went on, “he must have believed the child had died with her. And Mowgara must have let him believe it. It was her cruellest kindness. And so he turned his back on the lost fortresses and the wars and vanished from the Queen’s grasp – but not from the world.”
She drew in a breath. “He walked the continent for years, preaching in whispers, never to crowds. Tying ribbons to ruined shrines. Speaking the old names in places where the gods might still be listening. His words travelled further than he ever did—even here, to the end of the world, to my ears. There were those who began to listen, quietly, cautiously. Not many, but enough to give him hope. Enough to make Mowgara nervous.”
“But he found out,” I murmured. “Somehow, he knew I lived.”
Maeve nodded slowly. “Years later, there were whispers. A girl in the capital, golden-haired but without flame. Raised by the Queen but never claimed in full. Alaric would have heard them and realised the treachery of Mowgara. He could never reach you – not without risking your life or those protecting you. But he watched. Waited. And when the time came, he made his choice.”
My hands had curled again around the dagger, the edge of the hilt biting faintly into my skin. “Haedor.”
“Yes,” she said. “He let them catch him. Let himself be dragged in chains, wrapped in shame and death. He knew what the Queen would do. She burned him to silence him, to stop his words from spreading and to show all who followed him what became of those who defied her.”
“And he let her.” My voice felt distant, like it belonged to someone watching from the edge of a dream.
“He must have believed his death would be the one thing she couldn’t twist,” Maeve said, the words slowing as if weighed down by what they carried.
“That you would see it, feel it, that it would break something loose inside you and you would begin to question what had always been just out of reach. Or maybe he just hoped. I can’t say for certain. We never spoke of endings.”
Something in me turned over, no softer for the change – harder now, sharper, and full of heat that had not been there before. I thought of Irongate. Of the crowd. Of the moment his eyes met mine before the pyre was lit – and the recognition that flared between us like a match struck in the dark.
“He died for me?” The question slipped out before I could bury it, raw at the edges. “He didn’t even know me.”
Maeve’s voice had a gentleness to it now, as if she heard what I hadn’t said. “He died for the gods. For Eleonora. For the Sisterhood. For all of it. But aye. For you most of all. I believe that.”
And maybe that was enough. Belief, even borrowed, could be its own kind of truth – not carved in stone, but held in open hands.
I looked down at the dagger and kept my grip firm.
The hilt warmed beneath my fingers, not with the fleeting heat of the brazier, but with a slow glow that seemed to rise through my hand and into the hollow beneath my throat.
A shiver followed, and with it a memory I had never buried: the pyre in Irongate, white flames roaring skyward, the sting of smoke in my lungs, and the sudden, blistering flash that tore through my birthmark as the fire took his robes.
I had called it pain then – shock, perhaps outrage – but now, as the same molten hum gathered under my skin, I knew it had been older, deeper, and deliberate.
“I felt that heat when he burned,” I said, the words drawn out like thread from a spool, fragile and fraying.
“It wasn’t just in my shoulder. It spread – across my chest, down my arms. White-hot.
Alive. I thought it was overwhelm or maybe even a hangover from the night before.
But it was her, wasn’t it? It was the spell. ”
Maeve nodded, slow and heavy, as though the truth itself carried weight. “Every year, she renewed the binding. Every Feast of the Black Flame, another soul fed the fire.”
The air clung to my lungs and for a moment refused to let them go.
I had always believed the Feast was meant to terrify – a public reckoning, a lesson in flame.
The condemned were paraded through the streets, their faces masked, their names shouted once and then never spoken again.
Traitors, I’d been told. Enemies of the realm.
I, like everyone else in Irongate, had stood in the square and watched them burn.
But now Maeve’s words curled inward, scraping at something I had never dared to examine. What if it had never been about justice? What if those chosen were not criminals but vessels of their own?
“She never could make the spell hold – never completely. So she kept feeding it. Stoking it. Trying to seal the power she’d stolen into herself by force of sacrifice.
” Her gaze lingered on the blade in my lap, then lifted to meet mine.
“But with Alaric, I suppose she thought she’d finally found the missing piece.
Your blood. Her spell. His soul. She probably believed that would be enough to hold the binding – forever. ”
The words hung there, trembling between us, and I could feel the shape of what they meant begin to settle into something jagged and final in my chest. The Feast had never been about spectacle, or justice, or fear. It had been about betrayal.
“She used him,” I whispered. “Not even to hurt me. But to seal me. To shackle me.”
Maeve’s voice thinned to a hush, but the firelight caught the tightness in her jaw.
“And yet it was his death that undid her. Dragon Fire will answer to blood – but it will not be caged. A Speaker’s soul is not fuel.
It is flame. And when she tried to consume it, it must have called to what still lived in you. ”
Something had begun to stir in me, slow and steady, like heat rising behind my eyes and travelling down my spine, a warmth that was not mine yet lived within me, patient and ancient.
Each breath seemed to carry it further, threading through me without violence, only certainty – as though reclaiming a home long denied.
The air thickened. My skin prickled. Deep within, it stretched – tentative at first, then bolder – testing the space it had been shut away from. There was no fear. Only the steady thrum of something rising, awake now, and unwilling to fade.
I turned to Mathias, perhaps to steady myself in the shift of it all, or perhaps to see if he felt it too.
His brow was furrowed, his gaze sharp and searching, and in the flicker of firelight, I saw his breath catch at the sight of me.
He reached for me then, the gesture deliberate, as if drawn not by habit but by something unfolding between us for the first time.
His fingers brushed my cheek, gentle in a way that held the moment still – as if marking that I was here, and so was he. As his touch lingered, the heat behind my eyes intensified, a vivid, spreading warmth that felt ancient and alive within me.
“Your eyes,” he murmured, his voice hushed with a wonder that mirrored the unfolding in my own chest. “They’re like flames.”
The warmth in me now threaded through bone and breath like it had always known the way.
It didn’t surge, didn’t clamour—it simply was, unfolding beneath the surface.
Mathias didn’t look away, his eyes lost in whatever he saw in mine.
His hand stayed where it was, gentle and unshifting, and I let it remain – not because I had made peace with what stirred beneath my skin, but because he looked at me as if he had.
In that moment, the world narrowed to the space between us, a shared breath in the sudden, quiet roar of something new, shifting and settling into place.