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CHAPTER 15: THE ONE WHO WAS NEVER CLAIMED

Author: Patricia Dickson
last update publish date: 2026-09-20 19:21:52

You told me once, Fenn, that you'd rather be nobody's than somebody's mistake. I didn't understand what that meant until you told me the whole of it, three nights after Wren Halloway's confession, sitting on the training yard fence with a bottle you never quite got around to opening.

I found Fenn on the training yard fence three nights after Wren's questioning, a bottle of something amber balanced on his knee, untouched, watching the last light drain out of the sky with an expression I hadn't
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  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 45: THE CRACK IN THE WALL

    TALIAI didn't sleep at all the night after Voss left my cell. I lay with my knees closest to my chest, the rough wool blanket pulled up to my chin, and finally let the grief catch me. I hadn't allowed it while he was still close enough to watch me break. Four strangers. Four people who shared some scattered thread of Briar's own blood. Who woke up one ordinary morning never knowing a man like Voss existed. And who died anyway — far from anyone who loved them — because a gift that was meant to be a blessing turned on them the instant they tried to use it alone. I cried until my throat was raw and my eyes had swollen half-shut. As silently as I could manage, my fist pressed hard against my mouth so the sound wouldn't carry past the door. When the grief finally burned itself down to something I could carry, instead of something carrying me, what was left underneath wasn't despair. It was fury. A fury that was cold and clean and wholly mine. And lying there in the dark, my whole

  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 44: PRICE OF A NAME

    BRIARThe second morning on the granite shelf dawned bitter and still. Frost furred every blade of grass in the clearing, and our breath fogged thick every time we spoke. I'd slept poorly, if at all — curled close to the fire's dying embers with Ronan's coat draped over my shoulders and his arm a steady weight across my waist. I woke to hoofbeats on hard ground. Still distant, but closing fast. Ezra's party found us within the hour, horses blown hard, lather drying pale and crusted along their flanks, Grier slumping half out of his saddle the moment he drew rein, exhaustion carved deep into a face that had gone grey and hollow since I'd last seen it properly lit by firelight rather than this thin, unforgiving dawn. He didn't waste time on pleasantries. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, tightly folded square of paper. The edges were soft from handling. In one corner, a dark smear — ink, or maybe blood. "Mira's contact came through," he said, voice rough with three d

  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 43: WHAT HE'S ALREADY DONE

    TALIAFour grey rectangles of light had crawled across the far wall and faded again by the time the door finally opened a second time — four mornings, by my count, scratched with a fingernail into the soft mortar between two stones where the guards' torchlight never reached. My voice had gone rough from disuse. I'd tried singing once, something half-remembered from childhood, to hear a sound that wasn't dripping water or my own heartbeat, and it had cracked. The bruise along my cheekbone had faded from furious purple to a sickly yellow-green, visible even in the weak light when I caught my reflection in the water bowl. The guard who brought my meals never spoke, never met my eyes. Twice a day he slid a wooden bowl of thin grey porridge through the low gap at the base of the door and withdrew before I could thank him or curse him, whichever mood was winning that hour. I'd learned the rhythm of the place regardless — the distant clang of a larger door each morning, the murmur of voi

  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 42: WHERE THE TRAIL SPLIT

    BRIARWe rode out at dawn, with a map covered in ink and not nearly enough certainty underneath it. I keep thinking of Talia's empty chair by the fire. I keep riding anyway. Dawn came up thin and colourless over Ashgrove's eastern wall, the kind of grey morning that hadn't yet decided whether it meant to clear or close in further, and I stood in the courtyard with a cup of tea gone cold in my hands, watching my own breath cloud pale in the chill. Frost still silvered the cobblestones underfoot, crunching faint and brittle beneath Fenn's boots as he crossed to check the last of the saddle straps, his sandy hair dark with damp from the morning mist already settling over the yard."Tracks hold for the first six miles," he said, not looking up from the buckle he was tightening. "After that, the quarry road forks three ways. Whoever laid this trail knew it would." "Three ways." Ronan's voice was rough, scraped thin by two sleepless nights. He was already dressed for the road, dark circle

  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 41: THE MAN IN THE DOORWAY

    TALIA I counted my heartbeats while I waited, an old trick for steadying a mind that wanted to run ahead of itself. One. Two. Three. Somewhere beyond the door, a key turned with a dull, oiled click — no scrape of rust, no hesitation. The sound of a mechanism someone maintained with real care, which told me more about the kind of captor I'd landed with than any word he'd yet spoken. The door didn't creak. That struck me first — absurdly — a door this old, this heavy, should have groaned on its hinges like every other door in this miserable place. This one swung open as silently as held breath, oiled recently and carefully, and the man who stepped through moved with the same deliberate quiet, as though noise itself were beneath him. He was at least twenty years older than Ronan, with silver threading through the dark hair at his temples. He filled the doorway without seeming to try — not broad the way Ronan was broad, but tall, unhurried, dressed in dark wool cut with the kind of u

  • The Severer's Bargain    CHAPTER 40: WHAT THE GROUND KEPT

    RONANThe earth at the centre of that torn circle told its story without a single word. Dark soil, churned black and wet. The iron-sweet smell of blood was thick enough to catch at the back of my throat before I was halfway across. Three distinct patches, darker than the mud around them, where something had gone down hard and stayed down. A single tuft of fur — deep brown, the same brown as my sister's hair — snagged on a splintered branch at the circle's edge, trembling in the wind like it hadn't understood it was the only piece of her left behind. The mud had already begun to stiffen at the edges where the cold worked on it, dark red gone almost black in the torchlight. The whole clearing carried a thick, coppery weight that made swallowing its own act of will. Three paces from the nearest patch, a single boot print half-filled with rainwater — not Talia's. Too large, too heavy, the tread unfamiliar. I crouched beside the largest patch and made myself look, jaw locked. My hands

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