Four days on the road since the ruins. Thalion kept the count because no one else would.

  She'd eaten twice yesterday. Both times Yona put food in her hands and stood there until she chewed. The night watch reported she woke gasping before the second bell, same as every night since the ward work dropped her.

  Her fire was slower now. He'd timed it without meaning to during the demon fight, the gap between her hand rising and the flame leaving it. At the courtyard weeks ago it had been instant.

  At the ruins the gap stretched long enough for the last demon to close the distance before the light hit, and when it did the fire came weak and sideways and she had to throw a second burst to finish what the first one missed. She hadn't missed before.

  The fire-scars glowed past her elbows every night after camp went dark. She thought no one saw. He saw, and he didn't know what to do with that information yet.

  He'd watched soldiers come apart before. Performance held until it didn't, and the break came without warning. She was close.

  The cub wouldn't eat.

  Yona set dried meat beside it for the second time that morning. The cub sniffed once, turned its head, and walked back to where Seraphina sat against the supply cart. It dropped at her feet and didn't touch the food.

  Seraphina watched it settle and said nothing. The rider to Lucien had gone out the morning after the ward work. That was done.

  Caelan's letter sat in her hand. She'd pulled it from her robe the way she did every morning now, unfolding the paper along splits that ran deeper than yesterday. The ink where her thumb always rested had faded to almost nothing. She could still read the words underneath but they'd stopped meaning anything three days ago.

  Just shapes on paper. She held it because there was nothing else of his to hold. The flatness where the grief used to cut was worse than the cutting had been.

  She folded the letter and put it back. The cub watched her do it.

  Maren was still at the capital with a guard detail that was routine when Seraphina left and nobody since to tell her whether routine was still enough. Another person she'd left behind a door she couldn't watch from here.

  Her body ached in a way the fire-scars didn't explain. The scars burned along her arms, hot and sharp and visible. This was different. Deeper.

  A heaviness in her bones that made standing cost twice what it should. She'd felt it before the ruins, before the road even. The fire-scars hurt louder and everything underneath got lost in the noise.

  Yona checked her arms that evening. Traced the boundary of the gold lines past her elbows. Made notes. Looked at Seraphina's face for too long, the look she got when the numbers told her something she wasn't ready to say.

  "You're not sleeping."

  "I'm sleeping enough."

  "You're tired in a way that doesn't match the scarring." Yona frowned at her own notes. "The progression accounts for the fire symptoms. It doesn't account for this."

  She filed it under the scars anyway. There was nowhere else to put it.

  Liora's voice came through the tent canvas an hour before dawn. Low. Not meant to carry.

  "She hasn't slept through a full watch in four days. The scars flared twice last night without her touching anything. The delay on her fire is getting worse."

  Yona's response was too quiet to hear. The conversation moved on. Footsteps shifted and the sound faded.

  Seraphina lay still on her bedroll and stared at the canvas above her. She hadn't been sleeping. She'd stopped trying an hour ago and stayed flat because sitting up cost more than it was worth.

  Her own guard was filing reports on her. Liora's tone was flat and controlled, the way it got when she was worried enough to stop showing it. She wondered how long the reports had been going on before she overheard this one.

  They passed a homestead the next day that hadn't been abandoned yet. Smoke came from the chimney. Laundry hung on a line.

  But the garden behind the house was half dead, the rows closest to the road gone white and brittle while the rows nearest the building still held color. The boundary ran through the middle of someone's food.

  A woman stood at the edge of her land with a child on her hip. She just stood on the last strip of ground that was still growing and watched them ride toward the thing killing her soil.

  Every node she hadn't reached was another boundary moving closer to someone's house. She was the only person who could slow it down and she was losing ground faster than she covered it.

  The escort was two soldiers lighter. The dead zone killed them on the capital road.

  Her fault for being too slow. Her fault for costing more than she fixed. Her fault for existing at the center of a problem she couldn't solve fast enough to matter.

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  She found Yona at the supply cart.

  "Send word to the Empress. Tell her I can't continue. Someone else needs to be found for this."

  Yona's hands stilled on the ration pack she was counting. She didn't look up right away. When she did, her face held the expression of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and hoping it wouldn't come.

  "The fire is getting worse. The scars are spreading. Every node I stabilize costs more than the last." Her voice came out hollow. Not composure. The emptiness of someone who'd run out of everything, including the energy to cry.

  Her hands rested open at her sides. She'd already decided. The words were just catching up to what her shoulders and her breathing had been saying for the last hour.

  "There are people dying in the spaces between because I'm too slow." She swallowed. "I'm not enough for this. Tell the Empress."

  Yona set the ration pack down carefully. Her eyes moved across Seraphina's face, then back to the fire-scars, then to her face again. Her thumb pressed the edge of her notes. Damage she couldn't treat and didn't have an answer for.

  She didn't argue. Yona, who argued about ration sizes and sleep schedules and wound wrapping angles, said nothing about the Empress's mandate or replacements.

  "I'll draft it."

  "Thank you."

  Yona pulled paper from the supply cart and wrote. She didn't seal the letter when she finished. Didn't call for a rider. She set it on the edge of the cart and went back to counting rations.

  She went back to her spot by the cart. The cub was still at her feet. Still not eating. The camp moved around them both and neither of them were part of it.

  Thalion didn't hear it from Yona. He heard it from his soldiers.

  The formation had been tightening for days. When the word spread through camp that the Flamebearer was quitting, he felt it in the unit before anyone said it to his face. Garrtio's shield grip shifted wrong during the afternoon drill. Edrin checked the watch line twice in ten minutes.

  Two soldiers at the evening fire kept glancing toward the supply cart where she sat and then looking away when they caught each other doing it.

  The ward network had fifteen anchor sites left on the route. There were no Celestine replacements. The numbers didn't require interpretation.

  He walked across camp to where she was sitting. The resonance caught him halfway, the same unwanted spark from the ruins. It settled behind his ribs as a low ache that carried what the count couldn't.

  Her fire was faltering. He felt it through whatever connected his earth magic to her soulfire, an uneven signal stuttering under her skin. The sparks hurt. He didn't want them. They told him she was closer to breaking than his count suggested.

  Four days of numbers and none of them gave him an answer for this. She wasn't a military problem. He had two words and no certainty they'd do anything at all.

  She looked up at him. Flat eyes. The gold lines visible past her sleeves. The cub at her feet that hadn't eaten in two days. Yona's unsealed letter sitting on the cart behind her.

  "Your guilt is a luxury it can't afford. Get up."

  The flinch came before his voice finished. Not from volume. He hadn't raised his voice. From someone standing in front of her and saying what was true when every other person in camp had been choosing kind.

  Hatred. It hit her chest before she recognized what it was. After days of flat nothing, the first thing to break through. It burned when the numbness cracked. Painful and too much after too little.

  Her jaw locked. Her fingers curled against the dirt. The gold lines on her forearms pulsed once, hot, and the heat flared strongest on the side closest to where he stood. Not fire. Not a blast. Just the scars responding to the only person in camp who'd walked over and said it to her face.

  She wanted to say something back. The words got as far as her teeth and stopped there because every one of them was a defense and he hadn't attacked her. He'd just refused to look away.

  That was worse. The anger she could use. The fact that he'd seen her, all of it, the quitting and the sitting and the not eating, and hadn't pretended otherwise. She hadn't invited him to see that. She hadn't invited anyone.

  She stood up. Her knees protested and the heaviness in her bones pulled at every joint but she stood.

  The first thing she did was reach for the dried meat Yona had left by the cub that morning. She crouched and held it out. The cub leaned forward and pressed its head into her palm before it took the food.

  A small sound came from its throat, not a growl, something softer and uncertain. It ate too fast, like it had forgotten it was hungry until the meat was there. Its eyes stayed on her face while it chewed. When it finished it pushed its weight against her knee and stayed.

  Then she took a ration from the cart and bit into it without looking at Thalion or anyone else. The bread was stale and her throat was dry and she chewed through both because the alternative was sitting back down.

  The cub ate because she ate. She ate because someone had to go first. Neither of them enjoyed it. That wasn't the point.

  Garrtio saw her standing and his shield grip corrected. Edrin stopped checking the watch line. The formation settled back into shape without anyone giving an order. She hadn't realized how much of the camp's tension had been about her until it wasn't.

  Thalion walked back to the perimeter line. He didn't look at her again. His left hand stayed closed at his side for a long time after.

  Four estates in three weeks. She didn't remember most of them.

  White soil. Golden fire poured into cracked foundations. The cub heavier each time she knelt. Soldiers who knew where to stand without being told.

  Yona's hands on her arms at every camp, tracing boundaries that climbed higher after each site. She stopped rolling her sleeves down because there was no point pretending.

  Blood she stopped wiping from her face because it came back every time. At night the scars glowed bright enough to read by.

  Six of seventeen. Eleven left and the scars were already past her elbows. One of the sites had smelled like wet ash for hours after she finished. She couldn't remember which.

  Yona's rider to Lucien was somewhere on the road behind them.

  She kept going. Every time her legs wanted to stop she heard it again, cold and flat. Get up. The anger answered before she could think past it, and that was enough to reach the next site.

  Forgiveness had nothing to do with it. But the anger went somewhere useful and that was more than grief had ever done.

  A soldier nodded at her on the road one morning. Small. Deliberate. A gesture she hadn't seen from any of them before.

  She nodded back without thinking about it and kept riding.

  Thalion's perimeter circuit passed her tent every night. She noticed. She didn't comment.

  The road bent south toward the next site on the route when the ground beneath her horse changed.

  The vibration wasn't the dead zone hum she'd learned to read through the ward network. Wasn't the hemorrhaging pull of a starving node. Something lower ran through the road itself, older, and her fire-scars picked it up before her mind caught the difference.

  The structure on the horizon was different too. Partially intact instead of collapsed. Stone walls still standing around a roof that had only half fallen in.

  And underneath it, something hummed in a frequency her scars recognized even if she didn't.

  She pulled the reins shorter and kept riding toward it.