They called it the Echoing Temple because things you said there came back to you altered, as if the stones had their own memory and could not resist the urge to embellish. Travelers told stories: that a vow shouted into its mouth returned as prophecy; that a secret whispered in one corner became a command in another. It sat in a low valley of reeds and black water, half-swallowed by bog and reeds, a ring of columns leaning inward like tired sentinels.
Kaelen rode in with a small company: Elara, bruised and quiet; Varin, face more lined than Kaelen remembered; and Cael, his hands bandaged and his eyes cautious. Bria had been needed at the southern muster and did not come. Harlan, having kept his promise at Coldridge, lingered at the edge of the road rather than ride into temples that liked to ask questions of one's soul.
The road to the temple smelled of old rot and the faint perfume of lilies that refused to be drowned. Birds avoided the place. Even the wind seemed to decide it did not want to linger.
"You smell it?" Elara asked, as if the question required permission.
Kaelen tightened the reins. The smell in the air was like dust and memory. "Old stones," he said. "And damp. And something else I don't have a word for."
Varin's eyes moved across the ruin as if reading a well-worn map. "These stones have listened to men pray to different names," he said. "That is why the echo changes the words. It keeps all the prayers and cannot decide which to return."
They dismounted and moved with the care of people stepping into a house where someone might still sleep. The columns were carved with glyphs so old they looked like scratches. At the threshold, Cael paused and pressed a hand to a stone. His fingers left a pale print that seemed oddly bright against the age-darkened rock.
"Do you hear it?" he whispered. "A hum. Like someone tuning a string."
Elara rolled her shoulders and reached for a blade tucked where her cloak met her belt. "I hear men muttering plans when they stand too long in a parlor," she said. "Not much comfort."
They crossed into the inner ring. The altar there was a shallow stone basin carved with overlapping suns and moons. It had been cleared of the moss that clung to everything else, as if someone — long ago — had kept it ready for a touch. Varin stepped forward and placed the bead they'd taken from the First Dragon ruin into the basin. For a second nothing happened but the smell of old things. Then the stone took the bead into itself like taking a coin and the air shifted.
Cael stepped closer and the light in his eyes flickered like a bad candle. "It—" he began, and then his voice went thin. He straightened as if someone had yanked him by the collar. "It speaks of meetings. Of a wheel turning. Of a crown that loses its teeth."
Elara muttered a curse. "Keep to a language that doesn't make it sound like the gods are gossiping."
Varin watched Cael with the quiet of a man tallying a dangerous ledger. "The bead remembers the kind of promises men make to gods and to one another. It remembers bargains. It does not care which side of the bargain is true."
Kaelen knelt and rested his hand on the altar. No voice came to him as it had to Cael; the temple did not prefer him. It did, however, return a phrase into his head — small, sharp: *bind the line or burn the house.* He frowned at it, seasoned enough to know that a phrase like a dagger could be turned both ways.
"We did not come to be prophesied to," he said aloud. "We came for useful things. To understand if this is a thing that can be used to hold people together or to tear them apart."
"You think there is such a clean dividing line?" Varin asked, but he did not sound cynical. He sounded tired, like someone who had been cutting roots from old trees for years.
They had been at the ruins only an hour when the sound started — a faint scuffling, like bare feet on wet reeds. Someone in the treeline laughed too high, too quick. A shadow slid between two columns and melted against the darker stone. Then a bowstring twanged and a bolt buried itself in the altar with a soft thunk.
Elara's blade was a movement that took the air in two. She crossed the clearing with a speed that made Kaelen realize he still had much to learn about the woman at his side. The attacker — a figure in a dark hood — tried to run and stumbled. Elara had him down in a breath, one hand at his throat, the other pressing a blade against the exposed skin at his temple. He tasted of smoke and riverweed and the faint tang of northern fur.
"Who sent you?" Kaelen demanded, stepping forward. In his chest a tight, cold pulse marked a new rule: when hands went for knives in the shadow of gods, names were currency.
The man coughed and spat blood into the dirt. "Garrin," he said. It was barely a word. "Garrin pays. He has the white coin."
The name landed like a stone. Garrin — the same name the boy had muttered after the crossbow attack. The threads were thin and frayed but they were beginning to knot.
Harlan, who had been watching by the treeline and had seemed smaller than the place he claimed, stepped forward and kicked the hooded man in the ribs. "Garrin? Then we have our merchant," he said. "He buys men and sells them to the highest knives. He likes fires and the smell of coin."
Elara hauled the man to his feet and looked him in the face until he shivered. "Why the temple?" she asked.
"Because you came in with things," the man said. "Things people want to hide. Garrin says the Valtra are digging up old debts. Garrin wants debts left buried."
"You mean Garrin will kill to keep an old bargain secret," Varin said. He looked at Kaelen and Cael both with an expression that suggested he would have preferred a simpler garden and fewer curses.
They bound the man's hands and dragged him back toward the road. The beaten path they took was slick with mud and full of the tiny, stinging flies that bit like questions. It felt less like they were carrying a prisoner and more like they were bringing a warning back into daylight.
By the time they reached camp, dusk had wrapped the world in a velvet that made guards clang together like the closing of a box. The man would talk, if men like Garrin had a trade. Garrin might lead them to a trader at the south gate. Or Garrin might be a man whose list of friends included far stronger things: lords with cold beards and envoys whose soft voices carried orders.
That night the camp smelled of stew and wood smoke and the kind of fatigue that sat like a stone in one's chest. Kaelen found a small fire and sat with Cael and Varin, not speaking until the stew had been eaten and some of the silence had dried like a scab.
"You put your hand where it dragged a current," Varin said, eyes studying the dark. "The bead chose you. Or you chose it. Either way, it has a pull."
"It chose Cael," Cael said. His voice was not easy. "I touched it, and it showed me things I do not know how to carry."
"Do you regret it?" Kaelen asked.
Cael looked at him with a young man's blunt honesty. "I regret the pieces it took from me. I would not take them back if it meant what I saw didn't happen. But that is a poor consolation when your stomach empties at night."
Varin made a dismissive sound that was not unkind. "Magic is always paid for. You should be ready to pay more. The old temples take in coin and give out consequences."
Kaelen thought of the soldier with the crossbow back at the palace, of Alric's head, of the men who had died at Coldridge. He felt the world like a ledger with his name on the side of what it owed.
"You think the temples will help us hold the realm?" he asked. It was a question he had not been sure he wanted to voice.
Varin's laugh was short and brittle. "Help? They will provide leverage to those who can use it and doom to those who cannot. They are not charities."
The night tasted of questions. Cael slept fitfully by the embers, and Kaelen found his own rest shallow and fragmented by dreams of stone grins and low fires. In the dark, he woke once and found Elara watching him, eyes like knives and something else — worry, maybe, or not. She did not turn herself into a different woman to soothe him. She simply sat with him until dawn pressed a finger across the sky.
When morning came they dragged the hooded man's confession from him in the blunt way people do with people who think their throats are safe because of coin. Garrin had been paid by a hand that smelled of north smoke but whose seal was clean: a merchant's ledger, he whispered, and a seal that matched Roderin Morvannis' house in a way that did not satisfy but worried.
"Coins and signatures can lie," Varin said. "But the presence of coin matters. It means someone decided to pay the price."
Kaelen's jaw tightened. The world was making itself spiteful in the neatest of patterns: merchants who traded in secrets, lords who bought men's hands, beads that remembered bargains. The Echoing Temple had given them a scrap of knowledge, and the scrap fit into a pattern that smelled like war.
"Send a rider," Kaelen said. "Inform Bria and Jorund. Tell them the north moves and that Garrin's name is in this web. We need every eye that will look."
Elara leaned her weight on the altar's lip and let out a long breath. "And we need to be ready for the fact that the gods like to make messes when men pull at them."
"Then we will make sure the mess works to our advantage," Kaelen said. He felt older than yesterday and not entirely better.
They left the Echoing Temple with the smell of old prayers sticking to them. The man Garrin would lead them to might be a merchant or a lie or a straight thread to the heart of a plot. Whatever it was, the path no longer ran along a single road. Threads braided. Men who had once been friends were being priced. The beads and the ruins were a kind of map that asked difficult things: did you trade your honor for a promise, and if you did, could you ever get it back?
Harlan rode at their flank like a loose thought, and Cael walked with the slow, hollow step of a man who had given something and not yet understood the bill. Kaelen watched them all and understood that the empire he had been born into and the one he would rule — or let burn — were not the same thing. They were braided with old debts and newer knives.
When they reached the road, the reed beds closed behind them like a mouth. The Echoing Temple swallowed its echoes and began, once more, to be only a ruin. The questions they carried did not shrink with distance. They grew.