Chapter 277 — Tongues and Truths
Varik moved like a shadow that had learned to be useful. He had always been patient — the slow, careful kind of patience that smelled faintly of old roads and older grudges. Zerathis moved like the opposite of patience: a living storm in a hulking frame. Together they had the odd choreography of hunter and thunderbolt, and it paid off.
They returned to the Hollow at dawn, not with the triumphant swagger of warriors but with the tight focus of men who had found what they were told to find.
Kael met them at the gate. Zerathis's silhouette cut a great shadow across the yard; Varik rode up, shoulders tight, a satchel of papers and a small crate clutched at his hip. His eyes were flat. "We followed the trader's routes," Varik said. "He uses a code in his ledgers. We found his halls in Candlecross. He trades in rumors and in people. He thought he was careful."
Zerathis made a sound that might have been amusement. "He thought to hide in tongues and ink. I found he had a strong jaw and weak courage."
They led the man through the Hollow, through streets that were waking up to the odd sight of a daemon escorting a bound, hooded human. Word spread in instant murmurs: the merchant was a person of standing. He had, until that morning, walked with privilege through markets and council circles. Now he walked with a cord at his wrists.
They brought him before the council flanked by Zerathis and Varik. When they drew back his hood, faces around the table tightened with recognition. Edran Vale — prosperous, florid-cheeked, always smelling faintly of coin — stared at the room as if it had suddenly failed in some social test.
Saekaros's hand went to the table. "Edran," he said, voice wound thin. "What have you to say for yourself?"
Edran's jaw worked. His gaze flicked, briefly startled, to the daemon who shadowed the chamber, to Kael who sat like iron at the head of the table. Pride had not yet left him; arrogance clung to the man like a cloak. He opened his mouth and, for a brief, terrible moment, you could see what he had always been: a merchant whose hatred had been polished into a kind of certainty.
"I despise daemons," he said, too loud in the quiet room. "They are a stain. They take. They rot. I spread word so folk could be warned. I did it to protect honest trade from monsters."
"By dragging them to our gates," Varik said softly. "By naming our place to strangers, traders, soldiers, men who will come with coin and spears? You call that protection?"
Edran's mouth hardened. "Better to know the danger than to be a fool."
Zerathis's presence shifted like weather. He leaned forward, molten eyes cutting into the merchant. "You spread the rumor knowing what it would do," the daemon said. His voice did not thunder so much as crush. "You wanted panic, not caution. You wanted anger to bring a sword to our door."
The council stirred. Rogan's knuckles whitened. Lyria's fingers tightened on an arrow shaft. Azhara's face was an unreadable mask.
Kael watched, and when he finally spoke it was with the measured cruelty of someone who had had to swallow savage things and still lead. "You put my people in danger," he said, plain as a blade. "You wagged your tongue where you had no right. That can cost us all our heads."
Edran sniffed. "You can't be so… forgiving of bastards who would drag us into war. You walked with daemons from the start. You threw away any claim to mercy when you brought Zerathis here."
Varik's jaw tightened. "It isn't about forgiveness. It's about deterrence. Your act — spreading our secret to the marketplace — invited enemies. For that you must answer."
Azhara rose, movement quiet, deliberate. "What do you propose?" she asked. Her voice carried no pleasure. There was a healer's steadiness in it — the knowledge of how things mended and how they did not.
The chamber closed in on them all. Arguments rose, careful and furious. Some councilors wanted the old, simple justice: death, outright and unquestioned. Others demanded a ball of law, a sentence to suit the crime and not the feeling it provoked. Saekaros argued for public example — for the Hollow to show strength. Rogan wanted blood. Varik wanted a message sent and a man broken before he could speak again.
Zerathis's impatience was visible at the edge of his composure. He raised a hand as if to speak and a heat hummed in the air. His idea of justice was simple, blunt, and absolute: remove the threat.
"Kill him," Zerathis rumbled, and the room shrank to that sound. The merchant's expression flickered, then paled. He swallowed audibly, and for the first time his arrogance looked like fear.
Kael's hand rose. The command in it was quieter than the daemon's roar, but firmer. "No."
Silence broke like an answered bell. Zerathis's face hardened — he'd tasted fury and found it wanting — and then he relaxed like steam from boiling water left to cool. Kael did not even stand. He sat, the magisteel band catching the torchlight, and looked at Edran like a judge who had been given the power to invent mercy.
"You should be killed," Kael said slowly. "You deserve worse than what I will give. You know that."
Edran's eyes flashed with terror and bristled indignation. "I— I did not mean—"
"You started a fire," Kael went on without heat. "You told the market that we had daemons. You painted a target on our home. People will not forget a target. You are greedy for your safety, and you handed that safety to men who would take it all. For that, you could die a hundred ways."
He leaned forward, voice quiet enough that it was almost intimate. "But I am not a law without mercy. I will not waste the life of one man to teach a lesson about violence when I can teach it another way."
Zerathis made a sound of disgruntled amusement.
Kael's gaze found Azhara. "You will perform the sentence. Remove his tongue."
The room inhaled. Even Zerathis's molten veins seemed to twitch. The words had weight. They were harsh and irrevocable, but not the same as death. They were a silencing — apt, cruel, and symbolic.
"You'll silence him," Varik said, the edge in his voice unsoftened. "Publicly?"
"In a manner befitting the crime," Kael replied. "Not to be forgotten. Not to be pitied. He will live with the price for what he did." He turned back to the merchant. "You will be spared the blade. You will walk, an example. Your tongue will be removed so you may no longer set markets to burning with gossip and venom. You will live fed and guarded, and you will have time to learn what your words cost."
Edran stared at him like a man trying to wake from a nightmare and find it real. "You cannot—" he began, then his voice broke. "You can't do that."
"Watch me," Zerathis said softly. There was no anger in the daemon's voice now; only a brutal, heavy certainty.
Azhara's hands trembled as she stood, the priestly calm in her face not covering the gravity beneath. She had healed broken tongues of speech and broken hearts of soldiers; she knew the weight of silence. She did not relish the task. She had not been the first healer to be asked to do harm in the name of protection, and she understood the bitter calculus of leadership.
Edran's last words before the sentence were raw and terrible, half a plea and half a prophecy. He spat them into the air even with the cord at his wrists.
"Your dream of a free nation for all —" he rasped, voice bright with spite despite the wetness at his lip. "It will never come. The councilors, the priests — they will never let that stand. You'll be hunted. Your people will be driven out. Mark my words: the church, the kings — they will not let children of daemons sit upon thrones." His mouth twisted into a grin meant to sting. "You'll fail, Kael. Your kindness will be its own ruin."
A hush followed that final spit. Kael's jaw tightened. For a breath he was a man balancing everything he'd done to build a risky, terrible home.
Azhara inclined her head once, small and sorrowful. "We do what we must," she said, voice a whisper as she turned from the man.
The procedure — for that was what it had become — was quick, clinical, and done with the sober exactness of a surgeon who had closed too many wounds. I will not dwell on the mechanics. It is enough to say the merchant left alive, but altered; his cry of outrage choked down into raw breath, his throat permanently made quiet of the particular kind of hate that had sent tongues like flints into the world.
When it was done, Varik and Zerathis stood across the chamber and watched the merchant's hands tremble as he stumbled to a bench. Rogan's face had gone white and then pinched into a mask of approval; some people needed the catharsis of punishment to feel secure. Lyria's posture did not soften — she had seen what rumors did to people in the past. Zerathis's grin was small and hungry for the victory of it, but even he seemed to sense the gravity in the quiet aftermath.
Kael sat back, the room's heat settling around him like an old cloak. He had chosen a path between blood and total impotence. He had sent a message: the Hollow would not be toyed with, but neither would Kael become a monster identical to the ones he fought. He had allowed mercy — a hardened, surgical mercy that would linger longer as a lesson than any execution could.
After the council broke, and the councilors left in various tempers and degrees of satisfaction, Kael went out to the courtyard. Lyria found him there, shoulders hunched against the cold.
"You did what had to be done," she said, and it was not entirely praise.
Kael's hands rested heavy on the rail. "I spared him a quick death," he admitted. "But I did not spare him the world he wanted to throw at us. He'll carry it with him. A silence that will remind him every day what he did."
Lyria's fingers found his. "And if the kings and priests come?"
Kael's mouth was a thin line. "Then we will see them too." He looked up at the dawn, the light hitting the edges of the Hollow that they had carved with sweat and blood. "I built something people like that can never understand. If they choose war over understanding, then we will answer in kind. But I'll do my damndest to give our people a chance first."
They stood a long time in quiet. The Hollow had been kept safe for this day. A merchant who had thought himself safe no longer had the single easiest tool to wreak ruin — the tongue that made rumors quick and sharp. It was a bloody, bitter lesson. It was also, Kael told himself, a stewardship.
Back inside, Zerathis walked among the walls like a shadow invited to mend fences. Varik and Rogan bickered in low voices about patrol routes and the old mill road. Azhara returned to her small room in the healer's wing, hands stained with the work she had done, not proud but necessary.
Edran's last words hung in the corridors like smoke. Kael did not answer them then. He had spent too long hearing what his enemies promised. He had work to do: to strengthen walls, to weave alliances, to teach the Hollow how to hold itself when the world pressed in. He had chosen a penalty that spoke of survival and shame, not blood alone.
Outside, the early sun rose higher. The Hollow exhaled and went back to making its life. But everyone would remember what had been done today, and no one — not the merchant, not the visiting traders, not the kings who watched with hungry eyes — would forget that Kael could cast both mercy and menace with the same hand.