A lone soldier sprinted into the corridor, blade drawn, only to stumble to a halt as the scene before him bloomed into view. His face drained of all color.
Blood pooled beneath broken bodies. Two armored bound knights in silver-grey lay slumped like statues pulled from their pedestals, heads not attached. The suffocated soldier by the wall and young Derran's body not too far away.
Kell stood in the center, sword lowered but still bloody. Grent leaned over Derran as he held the body.
The soldier blinked. "By the first…"
"Get Highlady Ysara," Kell ordered without turning. His voice was quiet, but it carried like thunder. "Now."
The man obeyed, vanishing up the corridor.
Kell stepped toward the fallen. He knelt by the soldiers, yanked the silver pendants from around their necks, and studied the sigils burned into the metal. He murmured almost to himself:
"Fifty chains each to their families."
Grent raised his head. His jaw trembled, but his eyes were grateful. He nodded once.
Torik frowned. Fifty chains? His voice cut through the silence: "They're already dead. What do you owe them now?"
Kell looked over slowly, eyes like cold iron.
"They died under my command. Blood on their blades for me. The least I can do is make sure their kin don't starve." He paused. "You ever seen a rope bridge, boy?"
Torik didn't answer.
"You ever notice how the first step is always the strongest? Even after the others rot, that first plank holds."
Kell rose. "That's what those men were to their families. First planks. If I can't bring them home, I'll give their kin something to walk on."
Torik looked away, uncertain how to respond.
From the shadows, Varlon coughed weakly. "They live in a different world than us."
Torik's gaze drifted back to the Bound Knight's decapitated head. His brows furrowed. Something about the dead man's face, stretched skin, glassy eyes, the absence of breath and pain. It allfeltwrong.
"What… what are they?" Torik asked. "They sure don't look human."
Kell's expression darkened. He followed Torik's stare, then knelt briefly beside the body.
"You were born with the Bound art," Kell said. "It runs in you, natural as blood."
He tapped the corpse's forehead.
"But this… this is taken. Crafted. Made by rites and rituals they don't speak of in the open. You want to be the Bound's tool bad enough, they'll turn you into one."
He stood again, wiping his blade with the knight's cloak. "This is what they'll look like when they're done."
Footsteps thundered above, then down the stairs and into the corridor.
Highlady Ysara entered like a storm with steel behind her. Her guards spread into the hall, weapons ready, but froze at the sight.
Her eyes locked on the corpses. She gasped softly.
Kell turned to face her. "They killed Dorion who was on watch. He followed my orders, and they killed him for it. We repaid blood with blood."
"Gods below…" she whispered. "Kell, do you know what you've done?"
Before he could answer, a sharp voice echoed behind her.
"Heathens."
The Bound priest stormed into the chamber. His robes swirled as he crossed the bloodstained floor to kneel beside the fallen.
He didn't weep. He didn't pray.
His eyes burned with fury.
"You will pay for this," he spat. "You will all pay. They were chosen."
"They disobeyed her orders," Kell said evenly. "The boy was not for you. You knew that."
"I am the Bound," the priest snarled. "I have jurisdiction!"
"Not here," Kell said. "Not in her keep. Not in her city."
The priest turned toward the cell. His hand lifted, trembling with rage as he pointed at Torik.
"All of this. For him?"
Torik stared back. Then he smiled.
"Your dogs died whimpering."
"Heathen, I'll have your tongue!" He spat out.
The priest lunged, stopped only by Ysara's outstretched hand.
"Enough," she snapped. "You and yours are no longer welcome in my keep. You shed blood beneath my banners. Take your dead and leave before I see you join them."
The priest's eyes flicked between her and Kell. Hatred, deep and patient, filled every breath he took.
"You have declared war on the Bound, you will regret this." He whispered.
Then he turned and stomped out.
Ysara watched the retreating priest disappear. For a moment, no one spoke.
Then she turned to Kell, her voice low but firm.
"It's a blind threat. The Bound won't act. Not openly. They'd have to admit their prized fighters lost to regular men." She glanced down at the bodies. "This will be swept under the rug like all their messes."
Kell nodded once. "I hope so."
He didn't sound convinced.
Torik slept. Not well, but long.
He awoke in a room far removed from the prison cell, warm light through stone-slit windows, a proper bed, clean clothes, a small desk and a narrow side door leading to a tiled washroom. Beyond that, an open arch led into a small courtyard of worn stone ringed by ivy-covered walls. Scorched marks marred parts of the floor from training or worse, he couldn't tell.
A soldier waited outside the bedroom when he stirred. "He's ready for you," he said.
"For what?"
"Training."
Torik grunted. "I'm not going to be any good with a sword. That's not my thing."
"I know," Kell said from the other end of the courtyard, already seated on a stone bench with arms folded. "That's not what you're here to learn."
Torik blinked. "Then what?"
Kell gave a slight nod. "Your Veilbinding."
That made Torik stop.
"You… can train me on that?"
"By the last, no," Kell said. "I've got nothing I can teach you personally." He stood and motioned to the side. "But I brought someone who can."
From the hallway emerged a woman dressed in a sharp, layered black gown trimmed with violet stitching. Her sleeves flared at the cuffs like petals, and atop her head sat a puffy, violet hat adorned with a single ivory feather. She looked like someone who'd stolen a noble's wardrobe and stitched it together wrong on purpose… yet she moved with the grace of someone used to being watched.
"Miss Maribel," Kell said with a nod. "A court… acquaintance. And notably a Veilbinder."
Torik stared. "She doesn't look like a thief."
Maribel arched a brow at him. "That's because Veilbinders aren't thieves, darling." Her voice was melodic, laced with amusement and just a hint of danger. "We're artists of the mind. We steal nothing. We convince people to give."
Torik raised an eyebrow.
Maribel side-eyed Kell. "Are you sure this one is half as good as you told me."
Torik shrugged and looked at Kell. "Are you sure this one hasn't just raided the costume closet and fooled you into thinking she was special."
She gave a theatrical scoff. "This is a persona, sweetling. A whisper of identity wrapped in silk and stitched in charm. Every Veilbinder wears one. Or ten."
Torik squinted. "So… you play dress-up?"
She rolled her eyes and turned to Kell. "He's going to be difficult."
"I did warn you."
"Then let's begin. I'm already exhausted."
They moved to the courtyard floor. Maribel paced slowly as she spoke.
"First rule of Veilbinding," she said, spinning on one heel and pointing at Torik. "Never tell anyone you are one. The moment they know, things get harder."
"But you told Kell," he said.
Her smile vanished as she looked at Kell. "He is insufferably good at spotting us."
Kell raised his brows slightly, saying nothing.
Torik frowned. "You said harder, how?"
"The veil thins." She tapped her temple. "Our art dances along the edge of thought. If someone doesn't know what to look for, their mind fills in the blanks for you. But if they're focused, if they're expecting you to twist something then it's like trying to steal a ring off a man's finger."
Torik nodded slowly. "I've done that before, it's not impossible. Just a pain in the ass." As he thought about the time he did that very thing, not a fun experience. Waited till he was three cups in and laughing at his own jokes. Took half the night and a fake stumble to pull it off.
"Still, much trickier. And the more clever the mind, the more knots you must untie before yours can slip through."
She gave him a sly smile. "But that's why we train. Because the best Veilbinders can still make the ring disappear and leave the man wondering if it was ever there at all."
Torik looked between them. "So… we change what people see then?"
"More than that," she said. "We make them forget. We slip between thoughts. We borrow belief. A true Veilbinder doesn't just walk past a guard, they convince the guard there was never anyone there."
Torik scratched his head. "I've done stuff like that. I've snuck through markets, bent shadows, made people turn away-"
"And you thought it was instinct," Maribel said. "But instinct is just talent waiting for training."
She stepped closer and raised a gloved hand.
"Close your eyes."
Torik hesitated.
"Do you want to learn or not, brat."
He sighed and closed his eyes.
Her fingers touched his forehead with just enough pressure to center his attention.
"You've used Veilbinding before," she said. "Let's bring it back, but this time you'll notice what's happening."
A warmth spread behind his eyes like the pressure before a headache, but not painful. Just… there. His breathing slowed without meaning to.
"Now open."
He did.
Maribel was pacing across the room, muttering. But something was off, for a split second, she seemed to step twice, like a shadow lagging behind her body. Her voice doubled. Not echoing but more like two different versions of the same sentence overlapping.
Then it stopped.
She turned to him, and everything was normal again.
Torik frowned. "What was that?"
"A ripple," she said, clearly pleased. "You shifted your focus and broke through. That's the start of real control."
"It looked like there were two of you."
"Because for a second, your mind was reading two versions of what it expected to see... my Veil, and the reality in which you managed to catch."
Torik blinked. "So… one of those was fake and the other real?"
"No," she said. "It's misdirection. A Veilbinder doesn't create something fake, rather we push people's attention where we want it. If they expect one thing, and you nudge them just right, they'll believe it. Even yourself."
She of course offered no further explanation.
Later, after a short rest, Maribel gave him a second challenge.
"Take a memory," she said. "Something fresh. Now, change a detail. A sound. A smell. Change it in your mind so strongly that even you forget what it truly was."
Torik frowned. "That sounds like lying to myself."
"It is lying to yourself. But here's the trick…" she leaned in, "If you lie well enough, the Veil believes it."
She had him repeat the exercise again and again, turning memories inside out like folded cloth. The color of a man's cloak. The number of soldiers in a hallway. The way someone walked. It was dizzying.
Exhausting. His head throbbed and he had some cloth up his nose to stop the blood.
At one point, he forgot his own name for ten seconds.
Maribel only smiled wider.
By the end of the day, Torik sat on the edge of the training courtyard, hands shaking slightly.
"This is nothing like a sword," he said.
"No," Maribel said gently. "But one day, someone will raise a sword at you, and they won't even see you're standing behind them."
She gave him a wink, plucked her hat from her head, and walked off humming a song that he swore came from three directions.