MasukKai's POVThe side entrance groaned open, stone grinding against stone, and suddenly there was nothing between us and the enemy's heart.I lunged through the gap before it was fully wide, blade up, shoulders tight. The corridor beyond was narrow—built for servants, not soldiers—and it opened into a wider passage maybe twenty feet ahead, shadows moved there and there were voices, raised in alarm."Go, go, go!" I shouted behind me, not slowing.Footfalls echoed off the stone as the pack poured through. Aria's students—Kira, Mira, Koren—were somewhere in the middle of the column, and I trusted they'd stay close to the fighters who could protect them, my job was to clear the way.I hit the wider passage at a sprint and found chaos waiting.Alastair's troops had been caught mid-transition. Some were still pulling on armor, swords half-drawn. Others had formed a loose battle line, but it was ragged and unprepared. The shouts from the main gate had pulled most of their attention so they had
Malrick's POVThe main gate loomed forty yards ahead, torchlight painting the stone in flickering orange. Just after it, Alastair's fortress slept—or thought it slept. In truth, it was about to wake up screaming.I crouched behind a fallen pillar, one of several scattered across the approach. Rylan pressed close on my left, Kira on my right behind us, twenty fighters waited in the dark they weren't enough to take the gate by force but we could trick this defenders. Funny, how I ended up here. A year ago I would have been on the other side of these walls, serving a different master, fighting for different reasons. Circumstance had a cruel sense of humor."Signal?" Rylan breathed."Wait for it."We waited.The night pressed down, cold and patient. Somewhere inside those walls, Sylvie's team was moving through the drainage tunnel, working toward the side entrance. My job was to make sure every available defender was looking the other way when they came out.I checked the sky. The moons
Sylvie's POVThe tunnel smelled like standing water and old stone and something organic I chose not to identify.Reyna's markings were exactly where she had said they'd be, small scratches on the left wall at knee height, invisible unless you knew what you were looking for and were specifically looking for it. I followed them without hesitation, keeping my left hand trailing the stone and my right free at my side. Behind me I could hear the careful, controlled breathing of my team. Seven people moving through a space that pressed in from both sides, slightly narrower than the map had implied, ceiling low enough that the taller members had to duck their heads and keep them down.Nobody made a sound they didn't have to make.I had done infiltrations in tighter spaces than this. Once through a collapsed mine shaft with water up to my waist and hostiles on the other side of a single rotted support beam. Once through a drainage pipe so narrow I'd had to slide through on my back with my arm
Aria's POVThe camp was never fully quiet the night before a battle.Even when the fires burned low and the voices died down, there was always something. The shuffle of a restless wolf who couldn't sleep, the low murmur of someone speaking to their deity or their dead, the sound of a blade being sharpened that had already been sharpened three times that evening. I had learned to stop trying to block it out. The noise was honest. It was what living things sounded like when they were afraid and choosing to stay anyway.I was sitting outside the medical tent with my back against a supply crate, cleaning a gash along my forearm I'd gotten during the last scouting push and hadn't had the time to properly dress. It wasn't deep, it would close on its own before dawn but my hands needed something to do. So I unwound the dirty bandage and started again from the beginning. Clean cloth. Salve from Luma's kit. Tight wrapping. The familiar routine of it settled something in my chest that nothing e
Sylvie's POVThe stronghold was uglier up close.I had seen Malrick's outer fortress from a distance twice before, once during a prisoner transfer I wasn't supposed to witness, and once in a nightmare that left me waking up with my hands clenched into fists. Both times it had loomed like a bad omen, all dark stone and high walls slick with moss and old blood. Standing at the tree line now, crouched low with my team spread out in the shadow of the pines, I felt the same cold dread crawl up my spine.But dread was just information. I'd learned that from Aria. Feel it, catalog it, then move."East wall," Dex murmured beside me. He was belly-flat in the undergrowth, his eyes fixed on the same section of wall I had been studying for the past twenty minutes. "You're sure about the tunnel?""The old drainage maps were clear." I pulled the folded parchment from inside my vest and spread it across my palm. The ink was faded, the edges soft from being handled too many times over the last three
Kai's POVRagnar was ahead of my thinking, which was how I knew the moment had arrived, a heat that pushed upward through my chest, sharp and clean, the particular alertness that hit when everything an instinct had been reading coalesced into something specific and immediate.I raised my hand and the column stopped without a sound.The valley ahead of us was laid out exactly as Sylvie's reconnaissance had predicted, and in it, Alastair's ridge fighters moved across the floor in disarray but still committed to the pursuit, still driving east, their attention entirely forward and their southern flank offered to us with the openness of people who had stopped thinking about their flanks because they were too occupied thinking about the prey ahead of them. They were strung across the terrain in a long, loose thread, and a thread could be cut.Koren drew a short breath beside me, and I understood it. There was a version of this moment that existed in a plan, clean and logical, and then ther







