Novels by Bella Amadi

Korr moved fast once the shock of it passed, the way Corin imagined he must have moved his entire career, grief and fury folded down into something colder and more useful. He gathered a handful of officers waiting outside the war room with a few clipped orders, voice steady again despite everything Corin had just watched crack open behind it, and turned to Seren, his tone softer than anything Corin had heard from him yet.“We need to plan for tonight,” he said. “Properly. Not here, not with half the fortress able to walk past the door.”Seren nodded once, still pale, still carrying herself with the same controlled stillness that had settled over her since Fen’s confession, and followed him deeper into the fortress toward whatever room held maps more current than the ones scattered across this table. She didn’t look back at Corin as she left. He understood, somehow, that it wasn’t unkindness. She simply didn’t have anything left over to spend on him right now.That left Corin alone wit

Korr didn’t let the silence hold for long. “Keep talking,” he said, and there was nothing gentle left in his voice at all, just the flat, controlled fury of a man holding himself together through sheer will. “You knew this months before tonight. I want to know how.”Fen swallowed hard, still braced against the war table like it was the only thing keeping him upright. The color hadn’t returned to his face since Korr’s earlier threat, and if anything he looked worse now, hollowed out by the weight of what he’d already confessed and what he clearly understood was still to come. “Rask came to me directly. Four months ago, maybe five. He said Seren had fallen ill, that whatever had been sealed in her binding at the Corps was destabilizing, and that only he knew the trigger-ward needed to stabilize it before the sickness took hold permanently.” He glanced toward Seren, quick and guilty. “He asked for access to her records. Said it was the only way to save her life.”“And you believed him,”

“Explain,” Korr said, and the single word landed in the room heavier than anything he’d said since Corin arrived. “Now, Fen. Not the version you’ve rehearsed. The truth, before I decide you’ve outlived whatever use you thought you had.”Fen’s hands twisted tighter, knuckles white against each other. The color had drained from his face entirely now, leaving him looking older than he had even minutes before, a man who understood exactly how thin the ice had become beneath him. “General, I only learned pieces of it, I swear, I never meant to be the one to—”“You said the name,” Korr cut in. “You don’t get to un-say it and hide behind protocol now. Explain the connection between Lord Ivo Rask and Warbinder Draye, or I end whatever arrangement has kept you breathing in this fortress.”The threat did what nothing else had managed. Fen’s composure, already thin, gave out entirely. He sank against the edge of the war table like his legs had stopped agreeing to hold him upright, and when he sp

The fortress-capital’s war room was nothing like Corin had pictured on the walk there, no gilded ceilings or ceremonial banners, just bare stone and a long table scarred with old sword-marks, maps pinned across it in overlapping layers like nobody had bothered clearing the last war before starting to plan the next one. Torches burned low in brackets along the walls, throwing more shadow than light, and the air carried the particular cold of stone that had never once been warmed by anything as soft as a hearth. Seren stood at his shoulder, close enough that Corin understood without being told it was meant as protection rather than escort.General Thaddeus Korr didn’t rise when they entered. He sat at the head of the table, gray at the temples, built like a man who’d spent more years on a battlefield than off one, and his eyes moved over Corin with the same unhurried assessment Seren had given him back in the Rustfields. Beside him stood a thin, stooped man in councilor’s robes, hands f

The house guards moved fast, faster than Corin had braced for, and by the time he thought to reach for the fire in his chest he already knew it wasn’t there. Whatever had been left after the second fight in the Rustfields had burned out somewhere between mending the spear and hauling the chest across half the city. His hands closed into fists out of habit more than intention, and nothing answered. No warmth climbed his arms. No golden light. Just the dull, ordinary ache of a body that had spent everything it had hours ago and hadn’t noticed until it needed more.Two guards had his arms pinned before he’d finished the thought. A third stepped in front of him, hand on the hilt of a short blade, more for show than threat, since Corin wasn’t going anywhere.“Theft,” Adric said, still standing, his voice pitched to carry to every corner of the ruined nave. “Forged coin, obviously, no scavenger owns that kind of wealth honestly. Trespass on a bonded relic, the spear he’s been seen carrying

The cathedral had been dead longer than the war-golems in the Rustfields, its spires gutted and its windows long since stripped of glass, but someone with money and no reverence had built a market inside its bones anyway. Corin followed Seren through a side door set into what had once been a confessional alcove, and the noise hit him before the light did, a low roar of voices arguing over things worth more than his entire life.Torches burned in iron sconces along walls that had once held saints, and where an altar might have stood there was instead a raised block of dark wood, polished smooth by years of coin changing hands across it. The pews were long gone, replaced by rows of cushioned chairs filled with people who smelled of perfume expensive enough to mask the old stone dust still clinging to the air.The Ember Exchange ran on rules nobody wrote down. Relics too dangerous or too illegal for the crown’s registries changed hands here, laundered through private bids and quiet nods,