Bellatrix rode like a blade through the night.
Her black mare's hooves beat the soil into thunder, a dark metronome that measured her anger. The queen's cloak whipped behind her in a storm of fabric. Under the moonlight her face was a mask—cold, composed, carved in shadow—but beneath that mask her chest was a furnace. Her people had been butchered. Children, merchants, watchmen—torn down without mercy. She had felt every death as if it had nicked her own skin. She would not show it. To show pity was to invite weakness. Still, the fury that braided with her grief made her ride harder, faster, until the trees along the road blurred into black streaks.
The first strike came like a gust of wind.
A blur flashed out of the darkness, a shadow that moved too quick for the eye to follow. Bellatrix barely had time to pull the reins; the rider slammed into her flank and slid away like water. Her mare shied and reared. For a heartbeat the world went wild—hoofbeats, a cry, and then empty air where an enemy had been.
They were fast, like lightning. The hunters moved in and out of the trees as though the night itself obeyed them, striking from nowhere and vanishing again. They laughed; there was a giddy cruelty in the way they toyed with their prey. They thought they were playing with a woman. They did not know they were dancing with a death that wore a crown.
Bellatrix slowed only long enough to settle the horse, then let her predatory smile come. "Fools," she murmured. "You taste arrogance for appetite."
They thought they could hide their faces and their purpose; they thought the queen would bellow orders and panic, but Bellatrix was patient. She let them taunt her—let them believe the game was theirs—because patience was a blade she could hide in plain sight. She stepped down from her horse and disappeared into shadow as silent as smoke.
The ambush began in earnest.
One by one they lunged, blades glittering, figures darting like moths to flame. Bellatrix met them the only way she knew: with precision, with cruelty, with the ancient efficiency of one who had killed for centuries. She did not roar; she did not plead. She moved like ice that cuts. Flesh gave where she willed it; breath left bodies like spilled lantern oil. The hunters were skilled, but they had never faced immortality close and intent. They had never felt the stillness of someone who had watched empires fall and found no pity in the aftermath.
She took them apart. There was no poetry in her method. She ripped, she struck, she ended things cleanly and without redemption. When the last of the group lay still beneath the trees, Bellatrix stood alone among fallen forms, the night heavy around her like a wet shroud.
Yet one lived.
He had not joined the frenzy. He had watched—waited—an expression like pain and calculation worn at the corners of his mouth. Blood stained the hem of his coat, but his eyes were clear and steady. When Bellatrix stepped toward him, he pushed himself up on shaking arms and laughed softly, a sound that was almost a plea.
"I am not one of them," he said, and there was a strange mixture of fear and bravado in his voice. "Majesty—please—spare me."
Bellatrix's blade hovered near his throat for a long moment. She tasted the cowardice in his scent; she felt the lie of desperation. Yet something in the angle of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, gnawed at a place she did not like to name. For reasons she could not have explained—reasons that were not love but were not merely curiosity either—she hesitated.
"Name yourself," she said at last. Her voice was flat as the edge of winter. "Speak quickly if you want air in your lungs."
He swallowed. "Magnus Veylor," he offered. "You may call me Lord Magnus… or anything you wish, Majesty. I only ask for life."
Mephisto, watching from a low branch with the silent cruelty of a spy, tilted his head. The crow's eyes glinted. He had seen hundreds of faces; not all of them meant anything. Still, the bird's instinct pricked. "Hmph," Mephisto croaked. "You smell of wolves and the road. You smell of them—and yet you wear no mark of their guild."
Bellatrix's mouth curved. She knew how to test men quickly, the same way she tested plots and courtiers. "If I let you live," she said, "you will be mine. You will serve at my side. You will be fed from the same hands and sleep under the same roof. You will be my slave."
Magnus's laugh was shaky, then sincere. "Whatever you command, Majesty. I would be honored." He bowed until his forehead brushed the soil.
She watched him put his trust into hollow words and took his oath coldly. "You will wear iron around your wrist until I remove it," she ordered. "You will carry my colors. Remember this—disobedience is answerable by death."
"Anything," Magnus whispered. He sounded relieved enough to cry.
Mephisto fluttered down to the corpse of the nearest hunter and began to pick at the fabric with an elegant, indifferent curiosity. "She is a fool to keep him," the crow said under his breath, the tone almost playful.
Bellatrix did not answer. She had her own calculation. Magnus would be useful—a puppet, perhaps, or a distraction. He was loud, eager to please, easy to break. She preferred her puppets pliant and fragile. Holding someone like this close was sensible: better to keep a potential threat within reach than asleep in the dark outside.
What she did not know—and no one in the clearing knew—was the truth behind the man who now knelt before her.
When the horses had gone and the wind had settled, Magnus walked alone a short distance into the black trees. He turned his face up to the moon and let a smile spread slow and sharp across his features. The voice he kept in his mind was cold and clear.
She believed.
He had not only planned this night—he had engineered it. The ambush, the staged retreat, the bodies left to be found; every piece had bent to one purpose: a place at her side. To be her slave was his way close enough to learn her smell, to learn the rhythms of her life. Up close he could test whether she truly ruled the dark or whether she could be broken like the rest.
He wiped blood from his palm and clenched it until his nails went white. The smile hardened like a blade.
Bellatrix had made a choice. Magnus intended to use it.
And where she saw a fool kept for convenience, he saw the first move in a game whose end was a pyre.