The path to the village is silent.
Rowan walked beside Lady Teresa, each step muffled by the damp forest floor. The ground was soft, sun-dappled, slick with dew, and the hem of his cloak grew heavier with every stride. Overhead, morning light filtered through the canopy in golden shafts—warm, almost sacred. Birds sang in distant branches. Leaves rustled with a breeze that smelled faintly of pine and wildflowers.
It shouldn't be beautiful.
Not today.
Not when the air, beneath all its spring softness, carried the unmistakable tang of smoke and something darker—coppery, iron-rich. Blood. Death.
Rowan swallowed and kept his eyes forward.
Teresa said nothing. Her presence was silent and strange as ever, her long gray coat swaying at her ankles, boots leaving no trace in the earth. Her gaze was fixed ahead, expression blank. The air around her shimmered faintly, as if the world itself refused to look at her too closely. Sometimes Rowan thought she didn't quite exist in the same way others did—that she bent light, memory, even time around herself like a veil.
At her fingertips, the faintest shimmer of magic pulsed and coiled—like spider silk in the sunlight. Illusions. Ready, as always.
She hadn't said what for.
"Stay close," she murmured, the first words she'd spoken in miles.
He didn't answer. He couldn't.
A single raven croaked above them and took off from a branch, its wings black against the morning sky.
They passed the stone boundary marker not long after—a waist-high column half-cracked and moss-choked. Rowan had passed it a hundred times before, growing up. It was the sign that meant the village was near, that you were close to warmth and cooking fires and laughter echoing from the fields.
Now it was stained.
A dark splash marred the base of the stone, thick and crusted. Rowan tried not to look at it, but his eyes clung to the mark like his thoughts clung to dread.
The forest thinned.
And the village came into view.
He stopped walking.
The breath left his lungs.
What stood before them wasn't a village anymore. It was a corpse. A ruin. A desecration.
Half the buildings were nothing more than jagged bones of wood and stone. Some had collapsed inward, roofs caved like the ribcages of fallen beasts. Others had exploded outward—walls flung wide as if something had burst from the inside. What little remained stood in warped, unnatural shapes, melted and sagging. The cobbled main road was fractured and scorched, gaping wounds of black earth split between the stones. The central well—the old meeting place, where children used to play and the baker sold spiced buns—was toppled. Its rope dangled over the edge, frayed and red.
Red.
Rowan's feet rooted to the earth. The silence pressed against him like pressure underwater. Not the calm of peace, but the stillness after something violent.
Too still.
Too quiet.
Even the birds had stopped singing.
And then—he saw the first body.
A child, no older than six, lay on their side in the grass just off the path. Their eyes were wide open, frozen in a glassy stare. Black soot ringed their mouth. Their hands were outstretched, as if reaching for something—or someone.
A toy lay a few feet away. A carved wooden frog.
Tommen.
Rowan's throat closed.
Further down the road, a man was pinned to the side of a cottage. Something—white and jagged, like a bone the size of a spear—had been driven through his chest and nailed him to the wall. His mouth hung open. His arms hung limp.
And still—nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Rowan didn't speak. Couldn't.
His body was frozen in place, his mind suspended between now and then. The last time he'd come here, the village had been alive. Flora's voice had been laughing from an open window. Children had been chasing geese in the field. The baker had handed him a bag of warm, sweet rolls just because.
"I warned you," Teresa said softly.
Her voice broke the trance.
Rowan turned toward her, slowly, as if it hurt to move. His face was pale, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. "Who did this?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she walked forward, her coat catching the light like silver thread. She didn't hesitate. Didn't pause to look at the bodies. Just stepped over the threshold of devastation, beckoning him.
"We have to look," she said.
Rowan's boots felt impossibly heavy. His knees weak.
But he followed.
They moved through the village in silence, the devastation growing with each step.
Flies buzzed in swarms over blackened bodies. A wagon had been torn in half. Scorch marks spiderwebbed across walls. In the shadows of an alley, three figures huddled together, arms wrapped around each other. Rowan only realized they were dead when he got closer.
He recognized one of them. Old Merra, the weaver, with her crooked back and her soft voice. Her eyes were still open. Her loom was still on the porch behind her.
Rowan stumbled.
He turned away and threw up into the grass.
Teresa didn't stop. She waited until he wiped his mouth, then kept walking.
The bodies were everywhere—in doorways, in the mud, slumped against stone and wood. Some were burned beyond recognition, melted into the earth. Others had been torn apart—shredded by something far too large, too strong. One woman had been nailed to a tree. Her mouth was open in a soundless scream. Her hands were ruined, fingers torn and bloodied.
She had clawed out her own eyes.
Rowan's vision swam.
In one house, he stepped inside and nearly screamed.
A family sat around a table. Still. Upright.
It looked like dinner had only just started—candles flickered in their holders, wax pooled on the wood. Plates were full. Glasses half-raised.
And then Rowan saw the thin, perfect lines at their throats.
Slit. All of them. Precisely.
They hadn't even had time to stand.
He backed out of the house slowly, gripping the doorframe to steady himself.
When he turned, his voice was distant.
"I knew them. The Hendersons. They just celebrated their son becoming a knight."
He blinked, as if trying to reset his memory. "There was a feast. They had dancing in the square. I brought wine. And now…"
His eyes flicked to the man pinned to the post.
"That man. He was a noble's son. He left his family's lands to marry a village girl. Everyone said it was a mistake."
He pointed to the child lying in the grass.
"That boy. Do you know his name, Teresa?"
She looked at him. "No."
"Well, I do," Rowan said. His voice was hoarse, but steady. "His name was Tommen. He thought frogs were magic."
He swallowed hard. "Every person in this village had a name."
He looked her in the eye.
"A life."