Solis lay in Dahlia's back room with a bandage across his flank and a small, stubborn bruise across his ribs. He felt like a man who had been used to this kind of injuries. The story had been told his way for a sliver of a second — Lily's whispered thanks — but the public would remember only the polished image: K.P.P. saved the princess. The city would breathe a little easier. And someone else — some strategists in neat rooms — would nod and write down how effectively they had shaped a narrative.
He closed his eyes and felt Captain Seraphine's hand close once on his shoulder — solid, a point of contact that meant something that politics could not undo. He had saved a life; the rest of the day would have to stand on the truth of that quiet, undeniable thing.
Outside, the market reassembled itself, as a community must when the storms come: people put tents back in line, children returned to the games, and someone began to hum that tune that fixes a place. The K.P.P. men melted back into their posts, faces neutral, duty perfect.
Inside the inn, Ada sat cross-legged, mending bandages and muttering curses to the sky. "If that bastard Orsic tries to pin any kind of accusation on you," she said, as if the boy had understood the politics of the world, "I will personally string him from the nearest flagpole."
Solis managed a short laugh in the dark, pain and irony braided in it. They had been used as a shield; he had been used as a test subject. That night, as he drifted between sleep and the raw, simple ache of blood and fatigue, he could not know the long terms of what this day would mean — only that he had stood between a blade and a princess and had tried, with the whole of his meager strength, to be a person who could be trusted.
---
Night lay across Kreg's camp like a thrown cloak. Lanterns burned in hollows and the shifting tents made the field look like a sleeping beast, ribbed and breathing. Raiders returned in drips and small waves; the ones who'd slipped through the Postknight and K.P.P. lines moved with the caution of men who'd smelled close danger and seen the teeth of city law. They gathered around low-fires, soles muddy, armor dented, eyes blown wide with the kind of fear that still trembled with the memory of a blade that had found skin.
The raiders' commander — a hard-faced man who answered to the crooked name of Jorik — patted the embers and spat. He smelled of camp smoke and cheap ale. As the men unloaded their small trophies and re-slung broken weapons, he barked for a quick report.
"Sir," said one, voice thin. "We struck at the western lane, distracted the market. We—" He hesitated, hands making a small animal of his recounting. "We tried to take the princess without blood but... it went wrong. K.P.P. watchers... they were hidden... (sigh) they came out of nowhere. They acted like they had been waiting. We took losses."
Jorik's jaw worked. Around him the men shuffled, looking for words that wouldn't pull teeth.
At the center of the camp, beneath a sky that had no patience for small mistakes, a presence braided the air into a different current. Kreg sat high in a raised pavilion ringed with leaded glass and iron, a throne that looked like it had been grown from storm. He was not loud; the terror around him had taught him that people who raised their voices had to earn it. He watched reports move up.
When the raider chief returned to Kreg's presence he knelt, head bowed. Kreg's face was lit by the pale green of a lantern; deep grooves gave him a carved, patient look. He did not rise when they came; they came to him.
"So," Kreg said softly, the sound of pawing wind around a bend. "You called this an attempt at assassination?"
"No — no, my lord." Jorik's words tumbled, the shape of his courage already eroded. "We meant to take her covertly. It was to look like an abduction, to get her away and then—"
"And then?" asked Kreg, a slow blade of curiosity. He steepled his fingers and the tent pressed toward silence as if waiting for a piece of music.
"And then we were to make it vanish. To remove her from the light so the King would panic. A show… to make fear settle into their bones." The raider's voice was small; the words felt like apologies.
Kreg's eyes, which had been softened only by his ability to wait, hardened. "Assassination is an art." he said. "It is not a fool's scramble. It is the quiet taking of life when they do not know they have died." He smiled with no warmth. "You had the sound of it but not the touch. You left a trace."
The men shifted like shadows passing along a wall. They expected the blade. Some of them even bowed their heads to meet it. Kreg listened to the small confession, then gave a sound that might have been a laugh.
"To strike fear is not a single cut." he said. "It is a long illness. One failed attempt at daylight theatre will do what you did not imagine: it will be paid for in rumor, in accusation, in the whispering that breaks a cord of trust. The King will scramble; his men will point and shout; the Postknights will be moved like chaff."
He stood then — not in rage but with the slow certainty of a man who knows the geography of power. Around him the men straightened. "You have done well enough for now." he said. "The city will splinter. When the people look to the palace and find doubt, they will look for new hands to steady them. We will be the ones who press forward into that gap."
The raiders took the words like a reprieve and sagged in relief. Jorik dared to lift his head. "So… you forgive us?"
Kreg's smile widened. It was a grin that could be a trap. "Forgiveness is of two kinds." he said. "One opens a wound to let healing in. The other is the loosening of a leash so you may run your errands with renewed appetite. I am neither merciful nor cruel in the ways you imagine — I am careful. Guard yourselves. We have been granted an opening."
He turned then to his war table. Maps rolled like sleeping serpents across it, pins pricked into places that had names and also bruises. The commanders of the camp assembled — men in different armor, from the field-hardened to the scholarly tacticians Kreg liked to keep close — men who could measure time and appetite in a single glance.
"We will strike in three days," Kreg declared, voice like the closing of a door. "We will make that morning the one when all their small certainties snap. Prepare the flanks. Take the routes we learned from the sappers. Burn the signal posts the airknights rely on. Take the bridges. Cut the mid-ring lines. We will bring the pressure at dawn and do not let the day pass without a new map under our feet. The throne's men will be busy saving faces — they will not have the capacity to save cities."
Commands hurled like iron. Supplies were checked; riders bent low and took the orders with a speed that tasted like hunger.
Razille did not move from the shadow pocket where her form melted into dim fabric and smoke. From her vantage she had seen the men come, the plan spool, the way Kreg stacked intent like a deck of cards. She felt each instruction as a cold stone along her understanding. When the raiders' stories were told and found to be 'good enough' she walked out of the shingle of shadow like a wet thread.
Kreg's eyes found her without theatrics. For a moment a father's look softened the hard edge of the warlord's face — if only as a trick of the flesh. "You have returned." he said.
Razille's hands were cold. The Blazing Dragon Sword hung at her side like a promise she had not dared yet to accept had weight. "I did," she whispered.
Kreg rose and came down from his raised seat to meet her more closely than his courtiers liked. He put a hand on her shoulder, rough as rock. "You walked the market like a ghost again, huh?" he observed. "You may sit with me now, but you should know: this is the hour when we remind men what it costs to forget the order. We will not bargain for forgiveness. We will make it costly."
Razille swallowed. In the light of the fire she looked fragile and full of shadow. She wanted to argue; she wanted to say that there had been better ways. She wanted to tell him that the woman they had targeted — Lily — was not a symbol but a child like her who had more grief than politics contained. But the words scrabbled and turned to sand.
Kreg's palm tightened. "You speak to me of mercy? You carried a blade in a market and it took our chance. Do not waste my time. We will move in three days. Prepare."
Razille nodded, but her body was full of a quiet fracture.
---
The night that followed in Razille's small tent was not sleep so much as a struggle with the shape of her conscience. She sat, the Blazing Dragon Sword across her knees, its faint heat like something that had been left to cool. The camp's noises were far-off — men laughing, the low argument of men over meager ale, the thud of a far-off patrol.
She thought of the market. She thought of the girl — Princess Lily — who had looked at her with an expression that had briefly created the impossible: pity. For a moment then, a wrenching empathy had opened and Razille had felt the tug between two worlds: the one she had known as a child with a father who craved power and revenge, and the other where a boy like Solis would take a cut of iron for a stranger's life and call it nothing.
Her palm closed around the sword's hilt. She pressed the blade into a mat of woven cloth and felt the metal's hum answer, as if the weapon itself carried a memory of what it had meant to be made. There had been times — fewer than she admitted — when she had believed that freeing the prisoners would be mercy. There had been times when the world had been reduced to the debate of rightness and wrongness had been a blank stare. Tonight those lines shifted, like soldiers changing rank.
She could feel the small, lethal satisfaction Kreg took in the city's unraveling. He spoke of setting the world right by hammering it hard enough until its bones fit his mold. He had taken everything from him, he said: honor, name, home. He had promised a rebalancing. Razille had once believed such promises; a child does not see the cost of a revolution until it is counting dead relatives like stamps.
Her shadow magic — gifted, trained, and also a chain — had been her cloak. She had used it to slip through the market, to keep close to the abyss without falling in. Now that shadow felt like a second skin that pulsed with a life she no longer fully controlled. She had loved her father in the way daughters sometimes do: not for the shape of his cruelty but for the quiet of his favor. She had wanted to be able to meet with him even if there's no chance. In that wanting she had become complicit.
The restlessness in her chest had a shape: the memory of those freed prisoners' faces, some of them weeping, some of them already growling with hunger. The chain of causality tightened: release led to riot, which led to suspicion of Postknights, which led to Orsic's public flourish. Kreg's plan was not about chaos — it was a needle threaded through the city's power structure, tugging and watching the fabric pucker. The question rang constant and sharp: had she been a hand in this weaving or a strand? If she had been a strand, could she pull out now without un-aliving someone else?
That night Razille lay down and thought of the word "right." It seemed both ridiculous and vast, as if picking the right thing required a compass not meant for mortals. She dreamed then — not the market but a landscape of ice under a low grey sun. In the dream a dragon's silhouette drifted across the sky: not a monster but a weight, its wings folding like slow doors. It came down until the world was shadowed by heat and its throat opened.
"Do the right thing," it said. It was not a voice but a thunder that translated itself into sound in the dream.
She woke with a gasp. For a second she thought the dream was a memory rather than a symbol. The sword at her side seemed to answer with a faint, indifferent warmth.
Was the right thing to stand with her father and burn the world's lies to ash? Or to turn back the path she had walked? The dragon's words were an order and a question. She did not know which was heavier.
---
Beyond the camp and the fractured market, the kingdom rearranged itself in quiet ways. In the palace the king stayed close to his maps and advisers; he did not know the thinking of the enemy beyond the reports that came wrapped in venom. The Postknight halls counted their losses and tried to patch the nets. Orsic's smile had teeth now: he had public applause in the wake of the market's rescue to add to his portfolio; yet in the dark he moved soldiers like chess pieces to cover gaps and watch those he did not trust.
In that uneasy pause, Razille stared at the tent's flap and thought about what the dragon had said. In a world that favored brute answers, "Do the right thing" felt like a difficult prayer. It did not show her a path. It gave her a single demand: choose. The sword at her side vibrated like a heartbeat, and she realized ruefully that a single blade could be both a key and a scorch.
Outside the camp the sentries took their rounds. Kreg's men prepared. The city held its breath.
For Razille, for Solis, for Lily, and for everyone in between, the true contest was not the taking of walls or fields. It was the taking of hearts — of memory and of the stories the people told themselves as a way to keep the day from turning utterly dark. The dragon's whisper threaded through Razille's sleep like a thin rope. In the morning it would feel either like a chain or a lifeline.
She did not yet know which one it will be.