The dead never looked peaceful.
That was a lie the living told themselves. Morgaine had watched a hundred thousand die. Had stood over fields so thick with bodies the earth bled under her boots.
The dead didn’t look peaceful. They looked interrupted.
She stood on Ashen Ridge, silver hair whipping in the wind screaming up from the valley, and looked at what remained of Veth Crossing.
The bridge her forces had held for sixty years. The only clean passage between the Verath lowlands and the highlands where her people clung to life with cracked fingers.
The bridge was gone.
Not destroyed — taken. Black and deep crimson banners snapped in the cold below. A broken sun, its rays fracturing like shattered bone. The sigil of the Karath Dominion.
His sigil.
Heat moved through her chest. Not fear. She’d burned fear out centuries ago. This was tighter. Faster.
Desire. To finally face the man who’d been her shadow for eleven years.
“My Lady.” Senna at her shoulder, voice neutral in the way that meant she was frightened. Eleven years at Morgaine’s side had taught her that visible fear was a luxury. “Scouts confirm it. Karath moved through Dusk Pass three nights ago. Took the Crossing before dawn. Our garrison—”
“Is dead.”
“Yes, my Lady.”
“How many of ours?”
“Four hundred.”
Four hundred.
“And theirs?”
Senna hesitated. “Forty.”
Forty to four hundred. Not a battle. A massacre.
Caelum’s work.
She’d never met him. In five hundred years of war their forces had clashed a hundred times, their names used to frighten children on both sides — Behave, or the Eternal Lady will come. Behave, or the Broken Sun will burn you.
She wasn’t sure if never meeting him was luck or failure.
Because the truth she didn’t say aloud, not even in the hours before dawn when she lay alone listening to an army at rest, was that she thought about him too much. How his mind worked. The elegant brutality of his strategies. What it would be like to face him across a table instead of a battlefield.
The thought made her breath hitch, and not from cold.
“Recall the Third and Fourth from the northern posting. Here by nightfall.”
“My Lady, the northern border—”
“Is less urgent than this. Caelum doesn’t need the Crossing. He has three better routes into the highlands. He took it because he wanted me to know he could. Because he wanted me to come to him.”
And will you? Senna didn’t ask it, but Morgaine answered anyway.
“I’m going to give him exactly what he wants. I’m going to come to him. And then I’m going to find out what kind of man he really is.”
Dangerous words. A door she wasn’t sure she could close. But she was Morgaine. She walked toward danger, head high, heart burning, and dared the world to stop her.
She was eight hundred years old, and she had never wanted anything the way she suddenly wanted to meet Caelum of the Broken Sun.
It should have frightened her.
Instead, it made her feel alive.