Ch. 12: Echoes of the Heart

They left the citadel under a sky the color of iron.

Fog clung to the cliffs and swallowed sound, making every step feel like trespass. Kaelira kept her palm over the faint glow of her mark as if she could smother it through sheer stubbornness. Beside her, Zevran moved with the same measured economy that had always felt unshakable—until tonight. The bond carried a subtle hitch in his breath, a thin thread of strain he didn’t acknowledge and probably hoped she wouldn’t notice.

She noticed.

They didn’t speak until the citadel’s runes dimmed behind them and the land fell away to frost-silvered pines. Zevran chose a shelf of stone half-hidden by wind-stunted juniper and set a small warding circle with a soldier’s precision. Silver light webbed the ground, gentle as spider silk.

“Not too bright,” Kaelira said, because silence made the bond too loud. “Serane will feel anything stronger.”

“She already knows where we are,” Zevran answered, voice even. “This is for the Dominion scouts.”

“And for me?” she pressed.

His gaze touched her and slid away. “For both of us.”

Taren stirred where Kaelira had bedded him in cloaks and saddle blankets. The black veins had faded to smoke-gray lines. His skin was no longer fever-hot, just restless under the weight of an uneasy sleep.

Kaelira brushed damp hair from his brow. “You’re not theirs,” she whispered, as if defiance could be a cure.

A pulse answered her that wasn’t Taren’s.

She lifted her head. The bond hummed—a low note that vibrated down her bones. It wasn’t just Zevran she felt now. It was something else, a vast pressure turning toward them the way a sea turns toward shore.

The heart. Awake and listening.

“Don’t pull on it,” Zevran said quietly without looking up from the ward. “It will answer.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, too quickly.

He glanced over his shoulder, mouth curving almost—almost—to a smile. “You were thinking too loud.”

She huffed. “You’re impossible.”

“Consistent.”

“Also impossible.”

The smile ghosted away. “Rest. I’ll keep watch.”

“You’re exhausted.”

“I’m not,” he lied.

The ward finished with a soft chime. Zevran straightened without swaying; only the bond betrayed the effort it cost him. Weariness dragged across his aura like a shadow across snow. He moved to the perimeter and settled with his back to a boulder, blade across his knees, gaze on the corridor the fog had made.

Kaelira lay beside Taren, cloak pulled to her chin, eyes shut and stubbornly open inside her skull. Every time she drifted, voices rose in the dark—not words, not quite. The sensation of something massive turning beneath the world. A heartbeat felt through water. A name that wasn’t hers but fit her like a second skin:

Flamebound.

When sleep finally took her, it arrived like falling through thawing ice.

⸻

She stood in a hall of mirrors made of soot and light. Each surface held a different sky: storm-split; dawn-pale; the black disc of the moon swallowing its own rim. Her reflection wandered in a dozen directions she hadn’t chosen, some crowned, some bloodied, some burning and smiling as if fire were a secret.

You want a way out, said her mother’s voice, as gentle as the first time she’d braided Kaelira’s hair, as terrible as the last night she’d sung her to sleep. You always did. Little wolf, little witch—bridges do not get to refuse the weight they carry. They endure. Or they break and drown the travelers with them.

Kaelira touched the nearest glass. It warmed under her palm, then turned to water. A heart beat behind it—silver-blue, the size of a fist, the shape of the moon’s broken core. Threads ran from it into darkness, gold and gray and black; some pulsed steady, some sputtered, some had snapped and curled like burned hair.

One thread glowed bright: gold braided with silver. When she followed it with her eyes, it led out of the mirror, through her own chest, into—

A hand closed around hers.

Zevran stood behind her reflection in the watery glass. Not the king in cloak and leather, but the man in lamplight: tired around the mouth, a scar she’d never seen nicking his brow, eyes that didn’t pretend indifference. The tether burned between them, bright as a drawn blade.

If you pull, he said, voice steady in the way of people deciding to die well, I’ll hold. If you fall, I’ll follow.

“Don’t,” Kaelira said, and found her throat too tight for tenderness. “Don’t make poetry of this. It isn’t romantic.”

No, Zevran agreed. It’s a plan.

The heart’s pulse hitched. Mirrors tilted, showing new angles: wolf-shapes sloughing their skins; witches singing stone awake; a boy with ash on his cheeks looking up with eyes as black as new moons. Taren pressed his palm to his throat. The veins there pulsed like small rivers. When he opened his mouth, something older spoke:

Come home, Flamebound.

Kaelira jolted awake with her hand already at the knife under her cloak.

The ward shivered. A breeze threaded the juniper. Zevran was exactly where she’d left him, only his knuckles had gone white on the sword hilt.

“I heard it,” she said.

“So did I.”

“Taren—”

“Sleeping.” He didn’t take his eyes off the fog. “The voice wasn’t his.”

“No.” Kaelira swallowed the taste of salt and ash. “It was the heart.”

For a few breaths, they listened to the silence as if it would confess who else had overheard their dream. The bond settled to a tight ache.

“Serane said to call it so I can silence it,” Kaelira said. “What she didn’t say is what it does while it’s answering.”

Zevran finally looked at her. “It eats.”

“Magic?”

“Us.” His mouth thinned. “Every time you use power, the tether grounds you through me. It was theory before. It isn’t now.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since the citadel,” he said—and then, because lies couldn’t cross between them easily anymore, “Before.”

Her chest went cold. “The night of the bond.”

He didn’t nod. He didn’t have to. Her memory filled the lack with the feel of his hands at her face, the way the pain had left her like water leaving a cut—and the way he had trembled after.

“You should have told me,” she said, low.

“You would have burned alone.”

“It’s my fire.”

“It’s our tether.” Firm, not cruel. “If I’m the ground, then let me ground.”

She wanted to rage. She wanted to thank him. She settled, badly, for honesty. “If you break, I break.”

“Then we don’t,” Zevran said. “Not tonight.”

He pushed to his feet and crossed to Taren. When he touched the boy’s brow, the tether flared, bright and brief. Zevran flinched—not dramatically, not in a way anyone but her would see—but the bond relayed the pinch of pain like a bell struck inside her ribs.

“Enough,” Kaelira said. “We test it.”

Zevran arched a brow. “You want to experiment with a curse that could kill us.”

“I want data.” She stepped into the ward’s center. “Small flame. Controlled. If you feel more than a sting, say stop.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I keep going until you do.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Consistent.”

“Impossible,” she returned, and lifted her hand.

She called a thimbleful of heat. A candle’s-worth. Fire pooled in her palm, gold and white, delicate as breath hoarfrosts on glass. The bond answered with a faint tug—no more than a thread caught on a nail. Zevran’s shoulders tightened. He nodded once: fine.

She fed the flame. It licked higher, brightened, leaned toward Zevran as if it, too, recognized its path. The tug became a pull. Zevran’s jaw set. Sweat gleamed at his hairline.

“Stop,” he said calmly.

Kaelira closed her fist. The flame vanished. Pain vanished with it, snapping back so fast she stumbled. Zevran swayed but did not fall.

“Again,” he said.

“No.”

“Kaelira—”

“You’re bleeding for me.” She thrust her hand under his, palm up, daring him to see the tremor. “Once to know is enough.”

Silence. The wind hissed through juniper needles. Somewhere, a fox barked once and thought better of it.

Zevran’s gaze softened a measure. “We’ll ration your magic,” he said. “Only when it’s life or death.”

“It’s always life or death,” she said, and hated that it was true.

They were still standing too close when Taren whimpered. Both turned. The boy’s back arched; his eyes snapped open—black, pupil to rim. Frost crystallized along his lashes, then sublimated in a whisper.

Kaelira went to her knees. “Taren?”

His mouth moved. The voice that came out was two voices braided: a child’s and something vast beneath the earth.

Come home, Flamebound.

Door’s open.

His hand lifted and drew in the dirt with a finger that shook: a circle, a vertical line, three dots. The rune gleamed, then sank like a coin into water. The ground thrummed an answer.

Zevran grabbed Kaelira’s wrist before she could touch the mark. “Don’t. It’s a key.”

“To what?”

“To us.” His eyes had gone very still. “To wherever the heart wants you next.”

Taren’s gaze cleared by degrees. He blinked, confused and young again. “Did I—do something wrong?”

“No,” Kaelira said, smoothing his hair, though her pulse was a drumline. “You did perfect.”

He smiled, small and sleepy. “Good. I dreamed you were fire. It wasn’t scary.”

When he slept again, Kaelira stood and faced the rune the earth had swallowed. The bond hummed, low and warning. Zevran stood beside her, close enough that his cloak brushed her arm.

“Door’s open,” she murmured.

“And Draven knows how to walk through doors,” Zevran said. “He’ll be waiting on the other side.”

Kaelira lifted her chin toward the east, where the fog thinned to a seam of darker shadow over the horizon. “Then we stop knocking.”

She stepped out of the warding circle.

The ground underfoot answered like a held breath released—soft, terrible, inevitable.

And far off, beneath stone and sea and centuries, something smiled.