Wardyn on the floor against the wardrobe, Shadowbreaker across his knees. Chenguer at the writing desk, Constellation unsheathed on the surface before him, hands folded. Drogoth in the doorway, arms folded, face unreadable. Scarlet at the washbasin with her sleeve rolled to the elbow, cleaning blood from her forearm with a cloth that had gone red. She worked without expression. Lifegiver had closed the wound. The blood remained.
Charles was in the chair by the window with his knees drawn up and his face in his hands. He had stopped shaking, which Philip counted as progress.
Isabelle was on the bed, asleep.
The lamp on the wall had recovered its flame but was still burning lower than it should. The room smelled of blood and something vaguely earthy and rotting that nobody moved to open a window against. Nobody moved at all.
Philip watched Scarlet and said nothing. She wrung out the cloth, looked at it a moment, and set it on the edge of the basin.
“She fought him,” Scarlet said quietly. She wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular. “From inside. The whole time.”
Charles didn’t look up.
Drogoth said nothing. He looked at Isabelle on the bed, then back at the doorway.
Wardyn leaned his head against the wardrobe and closed his eyes.
Philip crossed to Chenguer and crouched beside the chair.
“Chen.”
He didn’t move for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was very quiet.
“I should have said something sooner. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How do you explain two threads in one person?”
“It’s not your fault,” Scarlet said, still not looking up.
Chenguer nodded once.
Philip stayed crouched beside him. The writing desk had a single candle burning at its corner. Constellation lay unsheathed across the surface, no light in the blade.
Outside, the city was silent.
Chenguer’s eyes moved to something Philip couldn’t locate in the room.
His hand came down on Constellation’s grip.
“They’re moving,” Chenguer said.
“How many?”
Chenguer looked at him, held his eyes, and answered.
“All of them.”
It didn’t begin everywhere at once. It began in specific places.
The war memorial grounds east of the river, where soldiers from five border campaigns lay buried. The overflow graves outside the south wall from the last Urukesh push, six years back. The unmarked section behind the harbor that everyone in the harbor district had learned to walk past quickly at night.
These were the concentrations of untimely dead, and these were what moved first. The graves didn’t erupt. They opened slowly, and somehow that was worse.
A woman on her way to the harbor at dawn stopped at the gate of the memorial grounds and watched the nearest stone shift and tilt. She stood there longer than she should have, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, and then she ran. Later she would remember that she hadn’t screamed. She wouldn’t understand why.
It was not a siege from without. It was a rising from within.
Philip sent two riders west before the city had fully understood what was happening. One and a half days’ hard riding to Faerlong Dell. Another day beyond to the garrison, where two hundred trained fighters had been holding the border far too long. He did not say aloud that he had no way of knowing whether either would reach Stormrest before the city ran out of trained men. He did not need to.
“Send them on to my brothers,” Wardyn said. He had written a note in the time it took Philip to saddle. “My people will respond.”
The city had its own fighters — house guards, militia, the queen’s army. Four thousand, by Philip’s estimate. Enough, if they held. If command held.
He needed to know if command held.
He rode to the castle alone.
Winterhaven sat closest to the largest concentration of graves, not because it had been chosen or sought out by any intelligence, but simply because it was nearest. The Unfinished had no strategy. They moved outward from where they rose, in every direction, without preference, and the castle had been in the way.
Philip came through the outer gate, which stood open.
He stopped inside it.
The queen’s guard lay where they had fallen — all of them, every station, every post, each man where his duty had placed him at the end of his watch. They had not run. He stood there long enough to understand that, and to understand what it meant about how quickly it had happened. There had been no time for retreat. No time for anything except the end of it.
He moved through the courtyard to the keep.
He found her in the great hall.
She was in her chair — the working chair, not the throne, the one at the long table where she had sat for her councils and her decisions. She sat precisely upright, as if she had not moved, except that her hands were folded in her lap and the hall was cold and everything else in the room told him what he needed to know.
Philip stood before her for a moment.
He had not liked her every day. He had not agreed with her. He had pushed back when he believed her wrong, and she had pushed back with equal force, and the kingdom had been better for both of them doing so. She had sent him to a campaign that lasted six years and had never once apologized for it, because it had been the right decision. She had ridden to his lodge in person when she could have sent a messenger, because she had known the message required her face. She had laughed at his description of a big-boned, boring, willful girl who smelled of saffron, and the laugh had been genuine.
He removed his helmet and knelt on the floor for a long time.
Then he replaced it, turned, and rode back to Kestrelmont, where he found Chenguer on the roof.
The city stretched out below. Smoke rising from four separate fires being used as barriers. The smell of burned corpses drifting on the cold air. In the streets he could see his own people moving, the city’s fighters, learning the patterns, getting better.
Philip sat beside him.
Chenguer said, “There are fewer than there were.”
“We’ve been fighting all night,” Philip said.
“Outside.” Chenguer turned his head east. “Something is coming from the east. Something they feel.”
Philip looked east.
The road was empty. It would be empty for another day and a half, if the rider had gotten through, if two hundred knights had saddled immediately and ridden through the night. He did not know if any of those things were true.
He stayed on the roof.
The sun continued to rise.
From the roof, Chenguer saw a familiar thread moving away from Kestrelmont. He stood and looked. The flow of auburn hair. Christine was on horseback, heading toward Wyndmere.
“Philip!”
“I see her. Go!”
Scarlet worked.
The keep’s great hall had become a triage room in the first hour. It wasn’t planned or organized. People simply brought the injured to the largest interior space and began laying them on the long tables, and by the time Scarlet understood what was happening there were eleven people in various states of depletion, and the city guards who had carried them in were already going back out.
She started at the left end of the first table and worked right.
The theft of years left its evidence clearly. The face was the most obvious sign — a person drained of a decade looked a decade older, which in the young looked like sudden cruel aging and in those already old looked like collapse, the last reserve of vitality gone in an instant. But it was the hands she had learned to read first. The way they lay when a person had no strength to move them. The texture of the skin.
She did not let herself think about how quickly she had learned to read it.
Lifegiver moved through her and found the edges of each absence and filled them. Not fully — it was never fully — and she no longer mourned that. She had decided somewhere on the road that incomplete restoration was not a failure of the blade but a statement about the nature of what was stolen. What was gone was gone. What remained was what could be saved.
By the seventh she could feel the wound in her chest again. She had worked through worse. She worked through this.
By the eleventh — a guard who had been drained on the south wall and carried in unconscious — she could feel it clearly. She sealed him and straightened and held her hand over her chest for a moment, breathing.
The cost shall be proportional. She shall not be spared it.
She moved to the next table.
Wyndmere was two miles from the keep. He rode hard, took the long way around the memorial grounds, and kept his eyes on her thread the whole way, confirming it was there.
Then it flared — almost too bright to look at — and contracted back to faint.
The gates of Wyndmere stood open, which was wrong. He came through at a canter and pulled up hard.
The Unfinished that had gotten through were shapes on the cobblestones, burned black at a heat that leaves nothing behind. The guards — nearly forty, scattered where they’d held the line — had not burned. They had been taken before the fire came.
Christine was sitting in the center of the courtyard with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. Barely dressed, what remained of her clothing ash at the edges. Flames still moving in her auburn hair. Her body untouched.
He dismounted and crossed to her.
“Chen,” she said.
“I’m here.”
“I don’t—” She stopped. Started again. “I don’t know what happened.”
The scorch patterns radiated outward from where she sat. The inner face of the Wyndmere walls was darkened as if something very hot had moved across the stone and then stopped. He sat down beside her and put his arm around her and she leaned into him and took a slow breath.
“They came through the gates,” she said, after a while. “There were so many of them. The staff were already inside, the doors were barred, I was in the courtyard when they — I couldn’t get to the door in time.” A pause. “I remember being frightened. And then heat, from inside me, and then it was this.”
She looked at her hands. Unburned.
“You’re not hurt,” he said.
“I know. I should be.”
He thought about six years of small things. A summer evening when the candles on the table had burned twice as high when she laughed, and she hadn’t noticed. The time the fireplace had roared in a room with no draft, and she had been the one standing nearest. The fact that she could drink scaling tea and not be bothered.
He held her tighter.
She looked at the east wing, at the scorched stone, at her hands. “I want to go inside,” she said.
He stood and brought her to her feet. She leaned against him a moment, then straightened.
He picked her up because the cobblestones were hot and she had nothing on her feet, and carried her through the Wyndmere doors. She put her head against his shoulder.
“I burned my clothes,” she said.
“You did.”
“All of them?”
“Most of them.”
She was quiet for a moment. “That’s going to be a problem.”
“I’ll find you something,” he said.
The doors opened and servants rushed out. They closed the gate and wrapped Christine in a blanket.
He carried her through the door and looked down at her. She looked up into his eyes, steady now.
“There hasn’t been a human fire shaper since Dorrin,” he said. “Two hundred years.”
“I know.”
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible.