Razille woke before dawn, as if the world itself had sighed and decided the night was over. The camp was a tangle of slack ropes and smoking coals; sentries breathed in rhythm, feet set to paths worn into the dirt. She sat up on a low roll and felt the sword's absence as a hollow in her side — an ache no bandage would soothe. The Blazing Dragon Sword had left her hand hours ago. It had felt like giving away her own lungs.
For a long hour she watched the camp breathe. The thought the dragon had given her — "Do the right thing" — kept surfacing like a fish that would not be left alone. The phrase vibrated under her skin until she could not tell whether it was command or question. She had been Kreg's child and his agent for long enough to learn how to obey. But obedience had not prepared her for the question of what to do when the command on your tongue was an echo of someone else's hunger.
Memory came to her like a fevered stack of images. The dire wolves first — Solis lunging into a narrowing of fangs, his wooden sword raised, his laugh afterward when nurse Elizabeth accused him of being reckless. Phill kneeling beneath the ash of the old shrine, hands stained in old rune-ink as he intoned the words that bent magic into the shape of protection. Phill's face had been tired that night, devotional and resigned. "Some things," he had said quietly, "are not meant for a man to keep. They become a burden or a weapon. If it is to be carried, it must be by someone whose life is enough to hold it." He, at a first flance seemed like a troubled kid but that's not what it was: a descendant of the Aegles' guardians — part-blood, part-bonded — made to watch over artifacts born of both human craft and spirit. When he had given himself, the pull of the protection had flared and condensed into the sword: a thing of heat and will that reached for a hand and chose Solis.
Razille remembered Solis in that light: not simply the brash recruit who bled and learned, but the thin-beamed courage he carried — what the others called "heart for help" and she had been too artful to name. She remembered Hamad's face, the way power had carved ridges in his brow, the way his zeal had turned to obsession, and the way that obsession had been tethered to forces that were not his own. Hamad had been a puppet in a larger weave. No one except her knew it. Once, in a quieter hour, Razille had realized Hamad was a hinge and not the lock: when the hinge let go, something older would open.
She remembered too the first time she'd seen Solis without pretence — hands bruised, eyes wet and stunned after his father's funeral; Solis who laughed like a blade-singer to hide the tremble, who trusted the world anyway. How had she paid him back? By stealing the last thing that might have been his solace, the blade that carried not only a spirit but a promise from a friend's sacrifice. The thought of that theft sent a hot, vomitous bile up her throat. She had not planned to let her father torch up the world with the fire of that weapon. She had planned to free him. The paradox knotted so tight she could taste iron.
The decision came as a small, furious certainty: she would leave. She would go to Caldemount's inner ring. She would find something to do with the choices — either undo or make sense. She had no idea which, but remaining felt less like ongoing life and more like a continuing crime.
She packed lightly. Small things only: a length of shadow-thread (her own craft, for quick maneuvers), a smoked tongue of cured meat, a cloth, and a thimble-size tin filled with powder she had learned to make in childhood — ash and crushed moonstone and a pinch of salt. It smelled like the old world. She tucked the thread into the fold of her cloak and slid between tents like a ghost taught to walk.
Kreg's camp, for all its layered menace, was not careless. He did not allow freedom to stray too far from the web he'd woven. That morning he had been unforgivingly strategic. Razille knew, without a need to be told, that the moment she moved a hand toward leaving the camp an alert would lift like a bird. Kreg's eye — cold and patient — watched his field through men's movements. If she left, she would be followed. If she was followed, he would send men trained to kill shadows.
She stepped away anyway.
The first twenty paces were quiet because she wanted them to be. Shadow-folding was a practiced habit: a pull on the dark between one's heels and the thing seemed to fold around the body. She slipped under a low awning and let the world pass over her, the fabric of the tent warm against her cheek. Her breath smoothed. Her senses stretched outward, ears tuned for the small shift of soil that meant a boot was coming. The sun was a pale promise above the ragged horizon. Smoke drifted in a line like a lowered flag.
She had been a double agent. She had practiced lying so smoothly it had become a second language. Now she found herself whitening at the thought of deceiving the only people who had been kind to her in strange, pragmatic ways. The men and women of the Postknights had been kind with her; they had accepted her oddness, had called it "peculiar affection" and pulled her into the line of duty. Solis had saved her life in the wild.
To run was to also run from her own face.
She eased through the outer perimeter, using drains and the wash-ways that had grown into small roots of passage under the camp. Her shadow-thread curled into a gloved palm and pulled at the world's corners — she could borrow a shadow and ride it a moment like a hand on a rail. She moved fast and without noise until the first alarms snagged the air.
Then the countermeasures came.
Kreg's men were not surprised. They had been briefed, and Kreg — master of inward logic — had not guessed her flight; he had expected it. He'd given orders to counter the very craft she had been trained in. Razille's shadow-fold technique depended upon continuity: long swathes of uninterrupted dark, anchor points on which her folds could rest. Kreg had instructed his captains — "watch her ankles," he had said with a bitter almost-smile. "Cut the shadow at its root."
From the ridges came the first flare-lanterns. They burst in a white bloom and pushed the night away like a hand sweeping a floor. Men who carried them moved like a carving machine; where the light touched the ground the shadows retreated, and Razille felt her cloak go heavy as if night refused to travel with her. Men with strapped mirrors — polished bronze kept for things like this — turned plates toward the ground, catching and slicing the lean shapes the night made.
"Sprinkle the salt." a commander barked. "Make a line where the shadow tries to hold."
Razille cursed under her breath and ran a step faster. Her first instinct was to call a folded shadow at her feet and step into it, but the light had coiled lines like wires across her path. The salt crackled; it ate the shadow-thread and left a powder-smoke where her technique had hoped to take hold.
She shifted tactics. If she could not steal the night away, she would borrow from people's shapes. She darted between two tent rows where a group of sleeping men lay; their combined shadows would be clumsy but vast enough to bring her across a stretch. She leapt, tucked, and had almost made it when a man — a guard on a sweep — turned and threw a chain at her feet. The chain wrapped, heavy, designed by a man who knew how to catch a rolling invisibility.
She rolled. The chain took her cloak and jerked. Razille used its pull to fling herself into a drain. Water pooled but it was dark and the sound was a perfect cloak. Men called out, boots chested down. A beam of light found her as she crawled under a grate. Her thumbs worked quickly as she drove shadow-threads into the metal seams and threaded them through like a spider repairing its net. The grate stuck; a boot hammered it. A soldier leaned to peer — his breath fogging the iron.
Razille's lips made the old half-chant. A ribbon of shadow unspooled from the drain wall and reached for the man's reflection on the bronze mirror. The reflection stilled as if someone had switched off water. The soldier blinked, and in that blink Razille's shadow-thread looped his ankle and tugged. He stumbled forward, and she slipped like a cat between his boots, leaving the man's shadow to sink unanchored and murmur. It was a small theft; a skilled trick learned in countless nights where she had to pretend to be nothing.
There were more men coming — riders, now, voices clipped by training. Kreg had trained them well. They had been taught to watch for the small traces: displaced ash, a crushed blade flower in the dirt, a hoof print that ended on a stone rather than in the soft. Razille's breathing thinned into a razor. Her legs lengthened. She moved like someone who had been running all her life.
She took a roofline when she could, stepping along beams like a wary stranger. Roofs here were low and simpatico, and she knew the pattern of garden trellises that made for a perfect spider's course. Below, men flashed light and called warnings. A volley of arrows took down a far tent and set a small bonfire racing. Razille's fingers burned with adrenaline, and for a second her heart forgot the guilt that pressed against it and only answered with motion.
Kreg's men had learned to use more than mere light. They had devices that hissed a violet scent into the air — salts mixed with powdered sunstone that, when burned, twisted shadows in impossible directions. Even those tricks could be beat — if one had imagination enough.
She had imagination. She had more than she'd allowed herself to use in the camp. She reached the midpoint between two watch lines —a narrow alley the size of a cart — and dropped into the alley's darkest pocket. She knew the alley's breathing pattern: vendors who rose late to shift crates, a sleeping dog with a throat like a string. She took the dog's scent as armor, wrapped the shadow about herself and let the animal's presence stand as a shield. Dogs were honest creatures; men did not search beneath their paws for ghosts.
Two guards passed close and tugged on a line. The dog yawned. Razille's shadow thread stretched and made a tiny phantom where her form would be so that the men doubted their levers and kicked at air. They did not search the dog. Razille moved while they argued about nothing.
At the city wall she found another line of resistance — a patrol with bright halberds and mirrors angled like spearheads. They had learned the trick of letting light leap, a coordinated sweep designed to make shapeshifters look like racks of metal. Kreg had thought of everything. Razille thought even faster.
There was a market stall with a pile of fine oil drums and lacquered combs. She ducked into the trader's lean-to and lifted a bowl of lamp oil, then tipped it through her fingers and painted a narrow arc of slick on the ground. The light still struck, but the oil reflected in a puddle as liquid glass. Her reflection — a false, shimmering twin — shifted wrong and the men's eyes blinked. A reflection is a kind of shadow in its own right; it responded to the halberds like a small argument of light. Razille let the reflected image slip away, took the alley, and ran.
For the last quarter mile she used a trick she had kept secret until then: shadow folding into syllables. It was a dangerous move — she folded the dark into the cadence of speech and commanded it to make a single gesture: to become a living cloak that ate sound and replaced it with another. The result was silence that muffled not only her feet but also the ring of her small metal boot, the impossible creak of her cloak. It was a spell of theft that used language itself to disguise the shape of noise.
She reached the outer bobbin of the inner ring near dawn, when the city's gold light was just deciding whether to be a pronouncement or an apology. There, she collapsed into an unremarkable shadow behind a merchant's cart and breathed like a person who had run through war. Her lungs were raw. Her hands quivered with the effort of containment.
Razille had been taught to read situations as if they were people. The city's inner ring was tighter, stone set close and shoulders turned inward. It breathed differently; it protected. She had to be clever now — get into its seams without asking for help. She had allies, though none she dared name as hers: old contacts from her double-agent days, men and women she had fed favors to. There were safe rooms in the inner ring — places where those who had once been dispossessed could find a bowl and a whisper. But it would be costly to find them. She did not have money enough to bribe every person.
She kept moving anyway.
It was not a clean victory. The wound of theft did not close by distance. She had escaped the camp but not the consequence. Her father's soldiers would mark the lines where she passed. Kreg would either be furious or pleased; he would see the escape either as a test that failed or a manipulation that needed correction. Either way, she had left a bright scratch across his plan. That might cost lives.
On a rooftop behind a closed apothecary, she paused. The city spread before her — roofs like a scored ocean. She could see, faint, the place where the Prism Grand Army's banner still flew thinly: a white line in a sea of darker flags. Caldemount's inner ring lay ahead like a promised problem. Razille felt hollow at the heart and full at the edges — guilt and purpose braided into a single rope. She carried no sword. She carried only a small tin, a little ash in her palm, a memory of Phill's sacrifice, and the knowledge of a wrong she might not be able to undo.
A child in the plaza below laughed, casually, a small human sound, and for a second Razille felt a fissure of something like hope. Then footsteps sounded on the stones behind her — heavy and careful. She had not much time to choose: keep running deeper into the ring and risk crossing K.P.P. patrols, or find a place to hide and wait for shadows to return to her.