Chapter 3
I stepped forward, gripping the iron chain connecting his manacles, and hauled him to his feet.
He stumbled, his knees buckling beneath him. His chest hit mine, his head dropping against my shoulder for a brief, breathless second before he caught his footing. The scent of him invaded my senses—smoke, crushed pine needles, iron, and the sharp, ozone tang of lightning.
My breath hitched.
Pine needles and iron.
It was a ridiculous thought. Half the men in the Northern Marches smelled of pine and iron. It was the scent of the border forests. Yet a phantom memory flared in my chest—the faint, lingering smell that rose from the parchment whenever I unsealed Cipher’s encrypted wax.
*Stop it,* I scolded myself fiercely, shoving Kieran back a step to establish distance. *You are losing your mind. This is Kieran Vance. The butcher of the Red Gorge. He has burned Tribunal outposts to ash.*
“Walk,” I ordered, drawing my side-dagger and pressing the tip lightly against the small of his back. “We have fifteen leagues of rough country before we reach the outer perimeter of Fortress Valemount. If you drag your feet, I’ll tie you to a pack-saddle.”
Kieran didn't move. He turned his head, looking at me over his shoulder. The silver in his eyes seemed to pool with a dark, suffocating intensity that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Valemount,” he repeated, the word tasting like poison on his tongue. “You’re taking me straight to Valemount.”
“It’s the seat of Arch-Prelate Malakor’s regional command,” I said coldly. “Where else would I take the most dangerous man in the Umbral Court?”
Kieran closed his eyes for a moment. A muscle ticked violently in his clenched jaw. When he opened them, the sorrow had hardened into something grim, desperate, and utterly terrifying.
“Malakor,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Of course. The glorious, radiant Arch-Prelate. Does he know you have me?”
“I haven't sent a courier hawk yet,” I replied, narrowing my eyes. “I was ambushed while scouting the ravine. Finding you bleeding out in the brush was an unexpected gift. But the fortress garrison will see my signal flare the moment we clear the high pass.”
Kieran let out a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. It was the most chilling thing I had ever heard.
“An unexpected gift,” he echoed softly. “Lyra… listen to me. If you have ever believed in anything true, listen to me right now.”
He took a step toward me, ignoring the dagger pressing into his spine, ignoring the golden wards of the manacles that flared against his skin with a searing warning hiss. His gaze locked onto mine with a gravity that paralyzed my feet.
“Do not send that flare,” he said, his voice dropping to an urgent, frantic whisper. “Do not take me to Malakor. If you reach Valemount with me alive, the trap springs. Not just for me. For *you*.”
My fingers tightened around the hilt of my blade. Anger flared hot in my chest—the righteous, indignant anger of an Inquisitor whose faith was being questioned by a heretic.
“You’re trying to sow discord,” I snapped. “You think you can play psychological games with a Senior Inquisitor? I was trained in the sanctum of truth, Vance. I know the poison your court spreads. You want me to hesitate so your search-parties can catch up and slit my throat.”
“I don’t give a damn about my life!” he snarled, taking another violent step forward, the chains rattling between us. His face was inches from mine, his silver eyes blazing with a feral, terrifying sincerity. “Look at me! Do I look like a man trying to save his own skin? I asked you to kill me! I begged you to leave my corpse in the dirt!”
The sheer force of his words struck me like a physical blow.
He was right. A captured spy or warlord lied to stay alive. They bargained. They offered gold, secrets, safe passage. They did not beg to have their throats cut in a ditch just to prevent their captor from claiming the glory.
“Why?” The question slipped out of me before I could stop it, small and unsteady. “Why do you care what happens to me?”
Kieran’s breath caught.
He stared at me, his gaze sweeping over my eyes, the bridge of my nose, the curve of my mouth, with a reverence so profound, so agonizingly tender, that the ground beneath my feet felt entirely unstable. His lips parted, a word forming on his tongue—a word that seemed to carry the weight of a thousand silent nights.
Then, his jaw tightened, snapping the word back into the dark.
“Because,” he said quietly, his voice cracking with a restraint that bordered on agony, “some lights are too bright to watch burn.”
A gust of freezing wind swept down the ravine, carrying the distant, hollow baying of an Umbral night-strider. The enemy war-party had found something. They were circling back.
The spell broke.
I cleared my throat, forcing the tremor from my limbs, and shoved him forward toward the narrow trail leading up into the jagged, frost-bitten peaks.
“Move,” I commanded, my voice flat, though my heart was beating a frantic, erratic rhythm against my ribs. “The high pass is three miles ahead. If you try to run, I’ll take your legs out.”
Kieran didn't answer. He simply bowed his head, his shoulders heavy under the weight of the golden chains, and began to climb the steep, rocky incline.
I followed half a pace behind him, my hand resting on the pommel of my radiant blade, my eyes tracking every breath he took.
The wind howled through the granite spires, carrying the smell of snow and coming war. Ahead of us lay the jagged teeth of the border mountains, and beyond them, the shining, impenetrable bastion of Fortress Valemount—the sanctuary of my faith, the seat of my master, the place where justice reigned supreme.
I had captured the great enemy. I was bringing him to the light.
So why, as I watched Kieran’s blood drip slowly onto the frozen stones ahead of me, did every instinct in my soul scream that I was walking straight into an open grave?
The frost did not fall in the high crags; it hunted.
By the second night, the wind off the Razor Peaks was no longer weather—it was a serrated blade scraping the marrow from our bones. Below us, the jagged ravines fell away into bottomless drifts of blue-black shadow, while above, the stone teeth of the mountains bit into an iron-gray sky.
Kieran was failing.
I could feel it through the iron links of the chain coiled around my left forearm. Each tug grew heavier, sluggish, like dragging deadweight through wet clay. He stumbled on an outcrop of black basalt, his knees hitting the sleet-slicked shale with a wet, hollow crack.
I spun around, my hand dropping instinctively to the pommel of my radiant blade. “Get up.”
He didn't move. His head hung low between his shoulders, his breath coming in shallow, shuddering wheezes that crystallized in the freezing air. The dark hair at the nape of his neck was matted with sweat and frost.
