The infirmary smelled of boiled herbs and iron. Lanterns hung from beams and painted the rows of cots in a sickly gold; cloths lay folded and sodden, bandages piled like white flags. The wounded rolled in and out of consciousness, mouths slack with fever or pain, while healers moved through them like a tide, hands steady, faces tired beyond words.
Kaelen woke as if surfacing from a long, hot sleep. Lira sat near his cot stitching a strip of cloth into a poultice, her silver eyes reflecting the lantern light. He felt the brand on his forearm like a weight, a slow drum under the skin. The paper he had given the Maw was gone; an emptiness lived where a laugh once had been. The ache of that absence was oddly private—sudden and yet as enormous as a cave. He touched the place reflexively, as if testing for a bruise.
"You slept hard," Lira said without looking up. Her voice was soft but had the shape of someone who had spoken truths to kings and heard the answer of stone. "You bled the conduit in your sleep. The healers managed it quick."
Kaelen swallowed. "Did I—?"
"You did what was needed," she said. "The Warden's channel is awake. It pulled deeper than the sigil itself; it touched the vein. That's why the Crown's machine stalled."
"Then we bought time?" The question was a thing he needed to ask aloud to make it real.
"For a moment," Lira answered. "But the Maw took your memory. And the mountain answered the bargain louder than I feared." She set the poultice down and met his gaze. "Something moved in the valley after you used the conduit. Not just men. A march that stank of iron and crystal and old hunger. The binder tasted your channel."
The words landed like a stone. Kaelen could feel the dent in his chest where the laugh used to be: smoothed, flattened, a place for something else to be stitched.
Serenya pushed through the tent flap at that moment, boots clattering, face grim. Beside her Varik walked with a limp that suggested yesterday's battle had gone beyond bruises. Daren followed, mud on his knees and the fierce light of someone who had seen the edge and came back.
"Reports," Serenya said. She moved to a small table and spread a map across it, pins and strips of cloth marking positions. "Our scouts tracked the Crown's retreat, and then their columns vanished. Not routed—gone." She jabbed a gloved finger at a ridge. "There. That is where their spoor ends. They didn't march home. They moved into the gullies and northward in small, fast groups."
Lira folded her hands. "We have word of something else—folk in the lower forges claim they saw men in black with woven crystal cords moving like shadow and rope. And an old name surfaced on a ragged list the smiths found—Hollow Flame."
"Hollow Flame?" Kaelen repeated. The name sounded like a fire reverberating in the hollow of a drum. "Who are they?"
"A splinter," Lira said. "Of the old way. Not Ashborn. Not Crown. They are smiths and zealots — men who worship fire and temper in the image of the first binding. They burn what they cannot bind. They claim to cleanse by heat."
Serenya punched the table so that the map jumped. "That sounds like a faction that will burn everything if it thinks it serves the Maw."
Daren tightened his hands on his spear. "If they are in the valley and the Crown has learned the Warden's tongue, then we are caught between two things that want the same doors open."
Kaelen listened and felt the brand throb like an answering drum. The conduit had given them the ability to move stone; it had also sung to anyone who knew to listen. He had thought giving the Maw a thing of himself would let them lock doors shut. Instead it had rung a bell loud enough to be heard by those who kept an ear for old languages.
Serenya's voice softened. "We hold the forges tonight. But we must know who watched our movements while we slept. Someone inside the stronghold knew the Crown's shift before our scouts reported it."
At the mention of someone watching, the tent grew colder in a human way: suspicion slipping in like a draft.
Lira crossed to a trunk near the tent entrance and pulled out a rolled note, edges browned and smudged. "This was brought in at dusk by a runner," she said. "Sealed in Crown wax. It was meant for the armory oversight more than the wardroom, but the runner doubted and brought it to the council. He swore it was frisked by no one. When they opened it, it contained a supply request with odd details—the dates matched the Crown's movements, down to the hour a vanguard might pass a certain bluff."
Kaelen felt the old hairs raise at the back of his neck. "So someone in the stronghold is passing our logistics to the Crown," he said. "Or someone is making us look like we are."
"Either way," Serenya said bluntly, "we have a rat."
They spent hours like predators tracing scent. Neren's quick hand mapped minor traffic in the supply lines: wagons that had left late but returned early; men assigned to rear guard who'd requested leave for "family reasons" the night before the Crown's device next appeared; a runner who had been seen meeting a cloaked figure at the southern gate. None of it named a traitor, but it made a shape of suspicion.
Varik watched the list and said nothing. When Kaelen's gaze met his, Varik's face was a closed thing—no guilt, no confession, only a tired soldier's hardness. That lack of ease mattered, because it made everyone else look sharper by contrast.
As the evening fell, Kaelen walked the ramparts. From above the valley looked smaller and more treacherous: the Crown's damaged machine lay like a broken leviathan in a field, pieces scavenged and carried by Crown engineers who slunk back to their lines, while smaller fires dotted the horizon where scouts had lit beacons. The mountain itself hummed beneath their boots, a slow, patient thing that had registered his bargain and answered in echoes.
He reached a narrow parapet where the wind could speak and leaned on the stone. The conduit pulsed in his arm, faint and steady—an instrument now, not simply an ache. He drew breath and let himself listen.
At first it was only the rhythm of the mountain, but then the sigil whispered images into him—fragments rather than speech: a chained giant with metal plating, teeth like boulders, eyes of molten glass; a circle of men in a cage of light, their mouths stiched with crystal; a hand—huge, bone-pale—reaching up just beneath the surface of the earth. The vision was not kind; it was a ledger of things the Maw had kept.
A voice, thick as slow iron, filled his mind—not Lira's voice, not the Warden's, but something deeper and older. "Next key will cost blood," it breathed, syllables like falling stones.
Kaelen's heart hammered. He did not know if the warning was a threat or a plea. The conduit had shown him the thing he had traded for his memory—a giant bound to the mountain, waiting for keys. If the Maw's mouth had spoken that line, it meant either that the next bargain required a cost much larger than a private memory, or that an inevitability had been set in motion and warned him because warning was the Warden's duty.
He staggered, breath ragged. Beneath him, the forges roared as men worked to mend armor and fashion new coils. He gripped the parapet until his knuckles whitened.
When he turned, Serenya stood behind him without sound, like a shadow drawn long. "What did it show you?" she asked, not unkindly. There was a steel in her question, the way a sword asks the point of another.
"Something big," he said. He kept his voice low. "A thing bound by metal, waiting for the key. The Warden—what we woke—said the next key would cost blood."
Serenya spat into the wind. "Then we do not bargain with bargains. We make sure the Crown does not get another chance."
"And Hollow Flame?" Varik asked, joining them. He had returned from a supply round with lines in his face like ropes. "If they're near, they might take the key for themselves. They burn what they can't bind."
Kaelen closed his eyes. The emptiness where the memory had been ached like an unstitched seam. He could no longer call the exact sound of his sister's laugh into his throat, but he could call her name and the weight of it steadied him. I chose to give that away, he thought. I chose this so the Ashborn might live another day.
A young runner came up the stairs breathless, a scroll clutched in his fist. "Commander!" he panted. "Scouts to the east found a banner. Not Crown — a pale flame on black. They say the Hollow Flame moves like a wind between the gullies."
Kaelen straightened. The wind cut his face like a knife. The conduit under his skin thrummed in uneasy sympathy with the running riders.
"Gather a watch," he ordered. "Double the patrols. Seal the forges. Anyone who moves ropes or wheels without orders is to be held."
As the runner darted away, Kaelen stared into the valley. The night was full of small lights, and each one was a question. He had the key now. The mountain had granted him a conduit to move stone and stop small gears. But a deeper machine breathed beneath the teeth of earth, and the Maw's voice had warned him what the next demand would be.
Blood.
He had traded a private thing for that key. The thought of what a public price might look like made his stomach turn. Still, the war pressed forward like a weight. Choices had been made. Men had bled. Now, to hold what remained, Kaelen would have to command not only swords but bargains he could no longer imagine paying.
He pulled his cloak tight and walked the wall, a sigil alight under his skin and a hollow where a laugh once lived. Beneath the stone, something waited and watched, and the night was full of echoes that wanted to be keys.