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CHAPTER 42
publish date:
2026-05-16 03:18:23
Latest chapter
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 76
AmaraIt came back four nights later, and I knew the second the coin on my neck went cold that it had changed its mind about what it wanted.The other nights it had reached for me. I'd feel the pull aimed at the center of myself, the hand cupping the back of my skull, come here, come to me. Not this time. This time the cold came up off the river and went past me. I stood on the wall in the middle of it and felt the dead pour into the lower town and felt nothing reaching for me at all."It's not coming for me," I said. Aldric was beside me, blade out. "Aldric. It's not coming for me.""Then who..."The dead answered him. They came up the ramp in a wedge, ignoring the fires, ignoring the people screaming and stabbing at their flanks, walking through wounds that should have stopped them, and they came straight for the man standing next to me. Not me. Him."Get back from the wall," I said, and grabbed his sleeve, and it was the first time in a year I'd been the one to grab. "Aldric. Insid
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 75
AldricBram had a man dying in the long shed three days after we came home, and that was how we learned what anchored meant.The man was one of the seventeen. Call, a quiet one, who'd taken cold through a gap in the siege Sela couldn't have known about and held it secret two days because he didn't want to be a bother, which is the most of the seventeen there is in one sentence. By the time Bram found the gray climbing his ribs it was past the elbow of where you cut. Into the trunk."He's got till morning," Bram said, in the flat voice he uses when he's already lost and won't insult you by hiding it. "Maybe. I can make it not hurt. That's the whole of what I've got."Amara stood at the foot of the cot a long time."No," she said. "Not him too. I'm tired of standing at the foot of the cot.""You can't chase it out of the trunk." Bram didn't move from her path, but he said it. "We learned that with the woman from Two Creeks. You'll pour yourself into a man who's already leaving and lose
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 74
BramSix. They'd left with six. For one breath I let myself think everyone was coming home.Then I counted again, and there were five riders and one shape tied across a saddle, and I knew the shape was Maren.I had the gate open before Rell gave the order. Some things you don't wait to be told.They came in slow, all of them gray and thinned by the road, and the first thing I did was to move down the line deciding who needs me most, and the answer was nobody, the wounds were old and the worst hurt on any of them wasn't the kind I treat. Amara sat her horse like a woman carrying something heavier than herself. There was new white in her hair, a whole streak of it. Zane wouldn't leave her side, close as a guard. And Wren had Maren's rein and wouldn't give it up, even at the gate, even when hands came to help."I've got her," Wren said, to nobody, to everybody. "I had her the whole way. I've got her."Sela came across the yard on her crutch faster than she should have, and she and Amara
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 73
ZaneWe wrapped Maren in her own cloak and tied her across her horse, because you don't leave anyone in that country, not even to the warm grass, and we turned north out of Orsel's little circle of summer back into the cold we'd crossed to get here.Wren wouldn't let anyone else lead Maren's horse. She took the rein and walked, and nobody argued, and that was the funeral. A girl walking a dead woman's horse out of hell, dry-eyed.Amara rode in the middle of us, quiet but here, present, her hand off her neck. The grave had done something. She'd come back up off that warm stone changed, steadier, like touching Orsel had shown her the worst and the worst turned out to be survivable, at least to look at. I let myself feel almost good for half a day.Then, around noon, she made a sound and folded over her own saddle horn like she'd been hit.I had her before she came off the horse. "What. What is it.""Greywater." Her face had gone white and far away. "The cold's there. It's there now. I c
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 72
SelaThe cold reached Greywater on the fifth night they were gone.I was awake because the leg doesn't let me sleep much, and because somebody has to be awake when everybody else is pretending the quiet is restful and not the held breath it actually is. I was up on the wall-walk with a blanket and a bad attitude when the river stopped.You'd think a river stopping would be loud. It's the opposite. One moment there's the sound a river makes, and the next there's nothing. I looked down and the water had gone to gray glass under the moon, edge to edge, in the time it took me to notice."Rell!" I don't have a fighting body anymore but I've still got the loudest mouth in any building. "RELL. River's froze. It's here."She was on the wall before the echo died.We did the things. We'd drilled the things a dozen times against the chance and now the chance was a wall of white coming up off the ice into the lower town, and the things were: fire and people behind fire and the weak in the middle.
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 71
WrenWe propped Maren against the warm stone with her legs out in the green grass, and for a moment the heat of it gave her back a little color, enough to lie to myself with.She ran her fingers over the face of the stone, by touch, her eyes half shut. There was writing on it. Not letters I knew. Old marks, worn soft, and Maren read them with her fingertips and her lips moved and her face fell, piece by piece."What does it say," Amara said. She'd knelt in the grass across from Maren, close to the stone, and the warmth had brought the human color back to her face too. For the first time in three days she didn't have her hand on the back of her neck."It says her name. Orsel. And under it..." Maren's fingers stopped on a mark. "Under it the word for held. Not died. Not rests. Held. Present. Still happening." She looked up, and her eyes were wet and afraid. "Wren. She's not buried here. There's nobody in the ground. The stone isn't a marker. It's a door, and she's behind it, and she's b
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 69
AmaraBy the third day in the dead ground, Maren couldn't ride more than an hour without Wren walking beside her stirrup with a hand on her knee to keep her in the saddle, and the weight on the back of my neck had stopped being a coin and started being a hand again, the way it was the night it firs
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 68
SeraphineWe left before dawn, six of us, while the cold was still a half-day off and the gate could still be opened without letting winter in. Six against a thing that had frozen a town standing up. I'd have laughed if I'd had it in me.Amara. The two brothers. Maren, who should have been in a bed
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 67
AldricBy the second evening the cold had reached the bend in the river you could see from the tower, and I stood up there with Rell and watched a line of white come down the valley at a walking pace, slow, and tried to make a plan out of a thing you can't fight with a plan."We can't hold a wall a
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 66
BramThey came in off the north road at first light, eleven of them, and I knew before they reached the gate that I'd lose some.They were from Two Creeks. A mill town, a day and a half north, never anybody's enemy, never worth taking. Two Creeks had nothing the dead want except warmth, and warmth,
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