POV: Thalion

  He went to her tent before the camp had finished waking. Stood at the entrance until she looked up.

  The last time they'd been this close was the anchor. His magic reaching through twenty feet of stone to find hers. They hadn't spoken about it. He'd pulled his hand from the wall and walked away and she'd let him. Now he was standing three feet from her in a tent that smelled like campfire smoke and animal fur, and he could feel the low pull of her fire under his sternum the way he'd felt it at the wall. Fainter. Still there. His fingers flexed at his sides and he made them stop.

  "Two of the escort are dead. The ones who left during the night." He kept his voice even. "Found them on the capital road, a mile south. Demon kills. I ordered burial on site."

  She set her cup down and her hand stayed on it. The tiger cub was in her lap, one ear flattened against her wrist, and when she went still its eyes opened and tracked Thalion without moving its head. He couldn't tell if the animal was protective or just watching.

  "The two who ran."

  "Yes."

  Quiet stretched between them. He watched her face and saw the exact moment she decided what it meant. Her shoulders pulled in and her grip tightened on the cup and she stopped looking at him.

  "They ran because of me." She said it to the cup, not to him. "The soulfire. They saw what I did and they ran and now they're dead."

  She had the reason wrong. Those men weren't running from anything. They were carrying a dispatch sealed with a mark he'd last seen on a dead agent in the palace depths, and someone outside his chain of command had been tracking her movements through his own soldiers.

  The serpent seal was the problem. The same mark from the palace agent and the charred documents the undead had tried to protect, now on a dispatch that detailed her condition and her route. Someone wanted to know where she was and what state she was in, and they wanted it badly enough to plant soldiers inside his escort. He didn't know who. Didn't know how many more of his people were reporting to someone else. And he didn't know what they planned to do with what they learned.

  He said nothing.

  "Anyone else?"

  "No. The rest are accounted for."

  She picked up her cup and drank. He left the tent.

  Outside, Brennan was already waiting by the supply cart. He'd helped dig the graves and he'd seen what Thalion pulled from the dead man's hand before he burned it. His face said he'd already decided he didn't need to know more.

  "Get Garrtio. I want the remaining escort inventoried by name before we move."

  Thalion stopped at the perimeter line. He could end her guilt with four sentences. He could also end any chance of finding out who sent the dispatch and how deep the rot went.

  His hands were tight at his sides. He'd done the right thing. Almost certain of it. The certainty was thinner than he wanted it to be, and her face when she said their deaths were her fault was going to stay with him longer than the dispatch.

  POV: Seraphina

  They broke camp and moved east into collapsing ward territory where the dead zones ran wider and the demons had been breeding unchecked for weeks. Down two soldiers and carrying a tiger cub that weighed almost nothing against her ribs, the escort's numbers were wrong and nobody was going to say that to her. Not yet, anyway.

  Liora rode at her flank the way she had every mile since the capital. Somewhere behind them Edrin had moved up from his usual column position to ride closer to the front, near enough that she could hear his horse's breathing when the road went quiet. He'd been drifting forward since the first estate. She hadn't asked him to stop.

  The fire-scars on her forearms started pulsing an hour into the ride, steadier as the distance closed to the next failing anchor. Drain through the ward network made her teeth ache and her fingers go numb around the reins while the cub rode in the sling against her chest, restless for the first time since she'd made the bond. Its claws kept catching in the fabric and at one point it sneezed so hard its whole body jerked against her collarbone. She almost laughed. The sound got halfway up her throat and died there, but her hand found the back of its neck and the cub went boneless, purring loud enough that Liora glanced over.

  Two soldiers dead because of her fire. Her fire. They saw what she was in that courtyard and they ran and the dead zone caught them before they reached safe ground. Those two must have watched from the picket line and decided that whatever they'd signed up for, it wasn't this.

  She didn't know their names. That was the part that kept circling back.

  The ward network was louder here, if loud was the right word for something she felt in her teeth. The land around the first estate had been dying. This land was already dead. Bare soil cracked into plates where nothing grew, gray and powdered at the edges. A well stood open with no rope and no bucket and the water at the bottom was black. No birds for three miles, and the silence sat wrong on the horses, made them skittish and hard to steer. The road narrowed where the ground itself had shifted, buckling stone that had been flat for a century. How long before the next anchor looked the same, she didn't want to guess.

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  They stopped at midday and soldiers ate standing. Thalion had reassigned two of them from outward-facing watch to face inward, watching his own people instead of the tree line. She noticed that. Two soldiers had run because of her, and now the prince didn't trust his own escort.

  Edrin dropped onto the ground beside her with his rations and his water skin, settling where the supply cart's shadow gave him a clear view of the perimeter. He didn't say anything for a while. Just ate. The cub climbed off her lap and investigated his boot, sniffing the leather and then biting the lace.

  "It's going to eat my boot."

  "Probably." She didn't pull the cub away.

  He watched the cub gnaw the lace flat and then lose interest and wander back to her knee. "My sister had a barn cat that did the same thing. Ate through three pairs of boots before anyone figured out she liked the taste of saddle oil."

  It was such an ordinary thing to say. Barn cats and saddle oil and a sister who lost boots. She hadn't heard someone talk about something that small and normal since before the courier arrived with news from Thornwall.

  "Did the cat stop?"

  "No. My sister stopped buying good boots."

  She almost smiled. It didn't reach her face but something in her chest shifted a quarter inch toward a position that hurt less. Edrin finished his rations and stood and brushed the dirt off his trousers. He nodded once and walked toward the watch line where Liora was checking positions, falling into step with the rotation as if that had been the plan all along.

  Yona pressed a strip of dried meat into her hand and Seraphina looked at it for a long moment before eating half. The other half went to the cub, who grabbed it with both front paws, lost its grip, chased the strip across the dirt, and pinned it with its face. Yona's mouth twitched. Seraphina watched the cub tear into it growling and felt something loosen in her chest that had been locked tight since morning.

  Across the clearing Thalion ate standing near the horses with Brennan, voices low enough that nothing carried. He'd been up before dawn digging graves and it showed in the way he rolled his neck when he thought nobody was looking. She was looking. He said something that made Brennan exhale through his nose. She didn't know Thalion could make people almost laugh. He glanced toward her and she looked away before he caught it.

  The afternoon was worse. The drain deepened the closer they got, pressure behind her eyes that wouldn't let up, the fire-scars pulsing in time with something underground that her blood could feel before her mind could name it. Halfway through the worst stretch her fire slipped sideways, reaching for something that wasn't the ward network. Something solid and near, the way earth felt when you pressed your hands against warm stone. She yanked it back and her horse stumbled from the shift in her weight. Thalion's head turned. She steadied the reins and didn't look at him.

  Her control was thinning. The fire had done the same thing at the anchor wall. That was all it was.

  By the time camp went up and the fire was lit and the flames leaned her direction the way Celestine fire always did, her hands were shaking again and she sat down before her knees made the decision for her.

  Under her robe, Caelan's letter pressed against her ribs. The fold lines had started to split from how many times she'd opened and closed it. She touched it once, held her palm flat against his words the way she did every night, and then Yona brought the pack.

  They looked at each other. Neither spoke. Seraphina opened the pack and set out paper, pen, and ink while the cub circled twice at her feet and dropped with its chin on the toe of her boot. When she uncapped the ink the cub stretched forward to sniff the bottle, got too close, and pulled back with a black smudge across its whiskers. She wiped it off with her thumb. Small things. She wasn't sure why they still got through when nothing else could.

  The sixth time. She put the pen to the page.

  Ink pooled where the nib landed, a small black dot that bled into the grain of the paper. Her hand shook once and then steadied, or close enough to steady that she could pretend.

  Caelan.

  She hadn't written his name since the letter she burned before departure. That one had been grief without shape. This one had been building across four failed attempts, each closer than the last. Tonight the distance closed.

  The letter that mattered was the one she sent before Thornwall. The scars are stable. Don't rush back. He read them and stayed. She still didn't know if he would have come back in time even without them.

  Her hand stopped. The cub made a sound against her boot, half growl and half whine, the way it did when her fire spiked without her meaning it to. A soldier coughed somewhere behind her and the fire cracked and threw sparks that died before they landed. She kept writing.

  I don't know if the dead can hear. Maybe there's nowhere you are now where words reach. I need to say this even if it goes nowhere because I can't hold it anymore.

  I told you there was time. The scars are stable, I said. Don't rush back. You read those words and you stayed because I asked you to stay. I don't know if you hesitated.

  You died because I told you not to rush back.

  I came back from death to save everyone and I got you killed instead. That's what my second chance bought. Your life for my purpose.

  I thought I was changing fate. I was just picking who it took next.

  She read what she'd written and her throat closed. She folded the letter once and held it over the fire, and for a second she almost didn't let go.

  Celestine fire caught the edge on contact and spread across the fold. His name went first, then the rest. She wondered if it got easier, if the tenth letter would hurt less than the sixth. Probably not.

  Ash crumbled between her fingers and she let it fall. Under her robe, his letter sat warm against her skin. His words stayed. Hers burned.

  Yona sat beside her, close enough to reach and not close enough to crowd. The tiger cub crawled forward and pressed the flat of its skull under her palm, holding still until she curled her fingers around its ear. It stayed like that, breathing slow against her wrist, until hers almost matched.

  Across camp, past the soldiers and the low fire, Thalion sat on a supply crate cleaning his sword. He did not look up.

  Embers were all that was left of the fire. Yona's breathing went slow and steady beside her, the cub a small knot of heat against her thigh, Edrin's boots scraping gravel somewhere on the perimeter as he shifted on watch. None of it was enough to keep her awake.

  The dream found her anyway. It always started with the pyre.