Chapter 16: The Intruders

Chapter 16: The Intruders

The lower granary was a scene of chaos. Two guards lay dead at the entrance, their throats cut. Inside, sacks of grain and wool stores were ablaze. And in the center of the room, a section of the wall had been pried open, revealing a dark, yawning tunnel mouth—the old aqueduct.

Standing before it, holding a torch, was a man in Gryffen’s colors, a miner’s pick in his other hand. Around him were five others, armed and fierce. They had done their work and were preparing to flee back into the mountain’s bowels.

“Stop them!” Valerius roared.

The fight was brief and brutal in the cramped, smoky space. Arlen’s scouts and Rykker engaged the saboteurs. Steel rang against stone and steel. But the man with the torch, their leader, saw Makil and Leigh enter.

His eyes, bright with fanatical hatred, locked on Makil. “Prince of ruin!” he spat. He threw the torch onto a pile of oil-soaked rags, which erupted into a wall of flame, cutting the room in two. Then he turned and fled into the tunnel.

“The fire will spread to the supports!” Leigh shouted. “The whole level could collapse!”

“Let him go!” Valerius ordered, turning to fight the spreading blaze. “Contain the fire!”

But Makil saw the leader vanishing into the dark, the architect of this cowardly strike escaping to report, to plot again. He saw the dead guards, the attempted destruction of a fortress that had just saved the kingdom. A red haze descended over his vision.

He didn’t think. He acted.

As the others fought the fire, Makil grabbed a fallen guard’s sword and plunged into the aqueduct tunnel after the fleeing man.

“MAKIL, NO!” Leigh’s scream was lost in the roar of the flames.

She didn’t hesitate. She snatched a dagger from a fallen saboteur and sprinted after him, into the swallowing darkness.

The tunnel was low, damp, and utterly black. She could hear Makil’s running footsteps ahead, and farther, the panicked scramble of the saboteur. She ran, her hand on the slimy wall, her heart hammering against her bruised ribs. The air grew colder. The sounds of the fire faded, replaced by the drip of water and their own ragged breath.

She rounded a bend and saw a pinprick of daylight ahead—the tunnel’s exit in the southern crag. Silhouetted against it, she saw Makil, and the saboteur, locked in combat at the tunnel’s mouth.

The man was skilled, desperate. He fought with the pick, its heavy head whirling in the confined space. Makil, with the shorter sword, was defending, but the tunnel gave him no room to maneuver. The man swung the pick in a wild arc. Makil ducked, but the pick head grazed his temple, sending him stumbling back, dazed.

The saboteur raised the pick for a killing blow.

Leigh didn’t shout. She threw the dagger.

It was a perfect shot, born of a thousand hours of practice in the dark. The blade took the man in the side of the neck. He gurgled, the pick falling from his hands, and slumped against the tunnel wall, then slid out of the exit, tumbling down the scree slope outside.

Silence, but for the drip of water and Makil’s harsh breathing. He was on one knee, blood sheeting down the side of his face from the glancing blow.

Leigh rushed to him. “You idiot!” she gasped, tearing a strip from her tunic to press against the wound. “You royal, reckless idiot! Charging into a dark hole after a trained killer!”

He looked up at her, his vision swimming. The anger in her voice couldn’t mask the terror in her eyes. “He... was getting away,” he managed.

“And you almost got yourself killed for your pride!” she fumed, but her hands were gentle as she staunched the blood. “Why? Why would you do that?”

He caught her wrist, his grip weak but firm. The world was blurred at the edges, but her face was clear. “Because,” he said, each word an effort, “he threatened my... my...”

He didn’t finish. The adrenaline crash, the head wound, the sheer exhaustion of the last two days, hit him like a hammer. His eyes rolled back, and he slumped forward into her arms.

She held him, the prince’s dead weight against her, in the cold, dark mouth of the mountain. The wind from the exit whistled around them. She looked from his pale, blood-streaked face to the dead saboteur outside, to the distant, smoking scar of the chasm.

Gryffen’s arrow had found its mark. The mountain had taken its price. Not in stone, but in blood. And as she held the unconscious prince, Leigh knew with a certainty that froze her more than the tunnel’s chill: the border war was over. A new, more personal war had just begun. And Makil, in his stubborn, princely way, had just made himself the heart of it.

And she, against every instinct of self-preservation, had already chosen her side.