Chapter 4
For twenty years in my father's house, I had been punished for this. Beaten for breaking my tutor's nose; locked in the cellar for gutting the boar that gored my horse. They had called me unnatural. Monstrous.
Here, in the dark, the monster sang back.
I severed the spine of the second beast, breathing hard, just as the mist parted above me. Two more shapes dropped silently from the top of a shattered column, aiming straight for my exposed back.
I was out of position, my blades tangled in the dying shadow's ribs. I wrenched my left sword free, preparing to take the brunt of the impact on my pauldron—
A blur of slate-black steel intercepted them mid-air.
Julian’s broadsword cleaved through both beasts in a single, devastating arc. The sheer force of his swing parted the fog, sending a shockwave of displaced air against my cheek. He landed crouch-backed beside me, his shoulder brushing mine, turning instantly to cover my blind side.
"Eyes up, little wolf," he breathed, his voice rough with exertion, though his silver eyes were blazing like twin stars. "They hunt in packs."
"I didn't ask for your help, Commander."
"Consider it professional courtesy. I'd hate to have to re-mend Vera's armor twice in one week."
Before I could snap a retort, the ground beneath us shuddered.
From the center of the labyrinth rose something far worse than the hounds. It stood eight feet tall, a stitched-together monstrosity of rusted plate armor and writhing black tendrils, wielding a greatsword twice the width of my torso.
Julian moved to step in front of me, raising his blade. "Stay back. That one is an adjudicator—"
"Move," I snarled.
I didn't let him play the shield. If this fortress wanted to measure my wrath, I would choke it on the scale.
I planted my boot against the base of a fallen statue, launched myself past Julian’s shoulder, and met the titan head-on.
The monster's greatsword came down like a falling portcullis. I crossed my blades overhead to catch it—and the world exploded in white-hot agony. The impact drove me to my knees, cracking the stone beneath my shins. My left short sword snapped clean in half. The jagged edge of the beast’s weapon bit through my right pauldron, slicing deep into the flesh of my shoulder.
Warm blood—my own, bright and scarlet—spattered across the cold basalt.
"Lysandra!" Julian’s voice lost every trace of its detached mockery, cracking like a whip as two shadow-hounds lunged from the flanks to pin him down.
The titan wrenched its sword back to deliver the killing blow.
Pain flared blindingly down my arm, hot and wet, waking every vicious instinct I possessed. I didn't retreat. As the creature raised its arm, exposing the rusted joints of its breastplate, I dropped my broken hilt, reached beneath my lacerated leather vest, and drew the silver stiletto from my thigh.
I leaped upward, hooking my left forearm around the monster's neck, and jammed the narrow silver blade straight through the visor slit of its helm.
Once. Twice. A third time, twisting the hilt until the violet light inside its skull fractured and died with a deafening shriek.
The colossus collapsed, taking me down with it in a deafening crash of scrap iron and dissipating smoke.
I rolled clear of the vanishing wreckage, chest heaving, my right arm hanging useless and slick with red. Across the arena, Julian decapitated the last hound with a savage backhand blow, kicking its dissolving corpse aside before sprinting through the thinning mist toward me.
He dropped to one knee beside me, his hands hovering a fraction of an inch from my bleeding shoulder, as if war-forged steel were suddenly afraid of bruising porcelain.
"Let me see," he demanded, his breath ragged.
I slapped his hand away with my good arm, using my unbroken sword as a cane to haul myself upright. The room tilted, the violet runes spinning in my vision, and I realized the far archway was glowing—the hourglass had emptied, and the iron portcullis at the end of the maze stood open.
"I am walking out on my own feet," I gritted out, blood dripping from my fingertips onto the stone.
Julian stared up at me from the floor. There was a long, shallow gash across his left cheek where a hound's claw had grazed him, welling with dark crimson. Slowly, the fierce panic in his eyes receded, replaced by something so fierce and reverent it made my stomach clench.
He rose to his full height, sheathing his broadsword with a metallic ring.
"So you are," he whispered.
We didn't return to my quarters. Julian guided me through the far archway into a quiet, semicircular chamber tucked directly beneath the outer ramparts. High lancet windows let in the pale, ghostly luminescence of the Shadow Realm’s perpetual twilight, casting silver bars across racks of polished halberds and crossbows.
An armory. Clean, cold, and smelling of cedar oil and dried herbs.
My knees finally buckled as I reached the wooden workbench in the center of the room. I caught myself on the edge, biting the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper to keep from making a sound.
"Sit," Julian ordered, already pulling a wooden box of medical supplies from a low shelf. "Before you bleed all over my newly oiled pikes."
"Your bedside manner is atrocious," I muttered, hoisting myself onto the edge of the heavy oak table.
"I am a castellan, not a wet nurse." He set a basin of clear, sharp-smelling spirits beside me, along with a curved needle and catgut thread. "Unlace the vest. Unless you want me to cut it off you."
My fingers were trembling from the adrenaline crash, slick with my own blood and the black ash of the hounds. I fumbled with the side buckles of the cuirass, my right arm throbbing in time with the distant forge hammers below.
Without a word, Julian stepped between my knees—Wait. Not between, just right in front of me, close enough that the hem of his tunic brushed my boots. He batted my shaking hands away and undid the buckles himself.
His fingers were surprisingly gentle for a man who had just cleaved monsters in half. He eased the heavy leather pauldron and vest off my right shoulder, peeling back the blood-soaked linen of my shift to expose the wound.
The air hit the torn flesh, and I hissed through my teeth.
Julian went completely still.
He wasn't looking at the fresh gash on my deltoid. His gaze had dropped two inches lower, to my ribs and the curve of my collarbone, where the pale light from the window illuminated a lattice of old, silvery-white scars.
The raised welt from my father’s riding crop when I was fourteen. The thin, surgical slice from my cousin’s rapier. The rough, rope-burned ring at the base of my throat where the executioner’s noose had bitten in before the king’s pardon arrived ten seconds too late to save my voice from going permanently husky.
A muscle feathered in Julian’s jaw. The air in the quiet armory grew suffocatingly thick.
"They called us monsters," he said, his voice dropping an octave, so low it barely stirred the dust motes between us. Slowly, with a touch so light it felt like a phantom breeze, the pad of his thumb brushed the silver scar at the base of my throat. "They weep at the gates when our carriage arrives. Yet they did this to you under the sun."
