Chapter 3
"No," he said.
The word was flat. Chillingly flat.
The warmth that had filled his voice moments before vanished, replaced by an empty, hollow resonance. His hazel irises glazed over, that strange, milky sheen returning like a ghost rising through floorboards.
"There is no company," Garrick said, his voice dropping an octave, reciting something that sounded less like a memory and more like an incantation carved into bone. "There are no contracts. There is only the shield. There is only the vow. I protect Aveline. Even if the sky falls. Even if the earth opens. I must keep her breathing, or my soul burns in the ash."
Aveline’s fingers recoiled from his shoulder as if the skin had turned to white-hot iron.
She backed away a step, sitting on her heels in the dirt, staring at him.
He sat there upon the limestone slab, perfectly upright despite the gaping wounds in his body, staring straight ahead into the darkness of the kiln. His expression was placid, devoid of the fierce passion, the sarcastic wit, the rough humor he had possessed when they first crossed paths months ago. He looked like an automaton forged of flesh and bone, waiting for its next instruction.
*Gods forgive me,* she thought, burying her face in her blood-stained palms. A hot, silent tear tracked through the dirt on her cheek. *Gods forgive me for what I have done.*
She reached out with her mind—a gentle, feather-light brush of her weaver’s talent.
In the psychic ether between them, she felt the construct. It was there, anchored deep in the root-system of his subconscious. It was a massive, pulsing knot of silver threads, woven so tightly around the core of his spirit that it had choked out the man he once was. Whenever his thoughts wandered toward his past, toward his identity, toward the reasons *why* he fought with such suicidal ferocity, the threads tightened, drowning his consciousness in a flood of unyielding, artificial instinct:
*Shield her. Die for her. Love her.*
She had woven it during those frantic, blood-soaked nights after the fall, when she had been a cornered, terrified girl running for her life, using the only weapon her fragile mind possessed to turn a rabid beast into a guardian hound.
And now, the hound loved her. And she...
Aveline looked up at his broad, scarred silhouette against the shadowed stone. She looked at the blood she had just bandaged, blood spilled entirely because he had thrown himself into the path of an iron bolt meant for her breast.
She felt the terrible, treacherous ache in her own chest. She had spent months relying on his strength, leaning into his warmth when the cold threatened to freeze her blood, listening to him whisper promises of a quiet cottage beyond the mountains, a hearth, a garden. She had allowed herself to fall in love with the gentle giant who guarded her sleep.
And every second of it was a monstrous lie.
"Aveline?"
His voice cracked through the silence.
The glassy glaze had faded from his eyes. Garrick was looking at her again, his expression softening into profound concern as he noticed her tears. He leaned forward, ignoring the fiery agony in his stitched shoulder, and reached out to gently cradle her chin in his rough, calloused fingers.
"Why are you weeping?" he murmured, thumb wiping away a tear from beneath her eye. His touch was so profoundly tender it made her want to scream. "The pain is gone. The bleeding has stopped. You saved me, little bird."
"I didn't save you," she choked out, her voice barely a whisper in the gloom.
"You did," he insisted, leaning in until his forehead touched hers, his warm breath washing over her trembling lips. His heartbeat was strong, rhythmic, thumping against her palm where she rested her hand against his uninjured chest. "You save me every day. Rest now. I’ll take the first watch."
"Garrick, you're bleeding, you need to sleep—"
"I don't sleep when the mist is thick," he whispered, pressing a soft, lingering kiss against the crown of her head. It was chaste, reverent, and absolute. "Sleep, Aveline. Nothing touches you while I breathe."
He picked up his broadsword with his right arm, rose from the stone, and walked toward the entrance of the kiln. He leaned against the rough stonework, turning his back on the warmth within, his gaze fixing unblinkingly upon the gathering dark of Hollowmere.
Aveline curled into a ball on the cold earth, pulling her cloak tight around her shivering shoulders. She stared at his broad, bloodied back—her savior, her lover, her butcher—and prayed that the morning would never come.
Dawn in the cursed mistlands did not bring light. It brought only a curdled, gray luminescence that bled through the suffocating canopy like grease on parchment.
By the time the third bell of morning would have chimed in the southern cities, they were already ankle-deep in the black, sucking peat of the Weeping Mire.
The landscape was a graveyard of petrified ironwood trees and pools of stagnant water filmed with toxic emerald scum. A low, phosphorescent fog clung to the bog, smelling of sulfur and rot. Every step sucked at Aveline’s leather boots with wet, smacking kisses, threatening to drag her down into the cold silt.
Ahead of her, Garrick broke the trail.
He carried a heavy ash-wood walking staff in his left hand, probing the trembling crust of the peat before every stride, while his right rested habitually upon the pommel of his broadsword. His stitched shoulder was bound tight beneath his weathered leather coat, the linen already faintly discolored by a seep of yellowish lymph and old blood. A normal man would have been delirious with fever, shivering in the grip of septic agony.
Garrick merely breathed through his teeth, his stride relentless, his massive back broad and unyielding against the creeping chill.
"Step where I step," he said without looking back. His voice was gravel dragged over slate. "The moss here is false. It grows over sinkholes deep enough to swallow a wagon and team."
"I know how peat works, Garrick," Aveline muttered, though she dutifully planted her boots into his heavy, churning footprints. "I spent my youth gathering bog-violet along the lower fens."
"You gathered flowers," he grunted, pausing beside a twisted ironwood trunk to reach back and offer his calloused hand. "You didn't fight fen-stalkers. Give me your hand. The ridge narrows here."
She looked at his extended palm. The skin was crisscrossed with small, healed nicks from whetstones and parrying daggers. It was warm—far warmer than her own frost-numbed fingers.
Hesitating only for a second, she placed her hand in his.
His fingers closed around hers instantly. The grip was firm, sheltering, possessing that instinctive, terrifying precision she had come to rely on. He hauled her up the slick limestone outcrop with effortless strength, catching her against his chest for a brief, breathless second before she found her footing.
Through the thick wool of his tunic, she felt the rapid, heavy thrum of his heart. It beat with the measured cadence of an iron forge, but there was an unnatural tremor beneath the rhythm—a faint, rhythmic hitch, like a gear slipping a tooth.
