The Dog They BuriedThey called my name like a curse."Draven Kane. Murderer of the Kalu Clan. Defiler of their women. Enemy of Voldimore."The elder's voice carried across the execution ground and the crowd took it in the way crowds takethings when they have already decided how to feel.Hundreds of faces. One expression.My chains were pointless and everyone knew it. Three days in a windowless room had stripped myqi and drained my blood essence until there was nothing left worth taking.What knelt in this dirt was just a body. Twenty-seven years old. Waiting.I found Elara without looking for her.Front row. White dress. Hands folded at her waist like she was attending something she hadorganised.Her hazel gold eyes were on me the way someone watches a fire they started. Present. Patient.Already thinking about something else.She wore white. Of everything she could have worn, she wore white.The elder gestured. In Voldimore the betrothed of a condemned man gets final words. Old l

His name was Corren. I took it from his identification seal while he walked ahead of me and kept it without mentioning it, because names are useful things and I was collecting what was useful.He led me through back streets with his injured shoulder pressed carefully against his body and his mouth shut, which was the version of him I preferred. The city was quieter at this hour but not dead. Lanterns in upper windows. Voices leaking through walls. A dog somewhere three streets over arguing with something larger than itself.I had grown up on these streets. Trained in these yards. I had walked through this particular district on patrol seventeen times and I knew which corners had rats and which had eyes. Walking through it now felt wrong in a way I did not have a clean word for. Familiar in the shape of things and wrong in everything underneath, like reading your own name in someone else's handwriting.Corren stopped at a door with no markings. No lantern outside. Nothing that said any

Corren did not want to come and I did not give him a choice."My job was the message," he said, standing in the corner with his good shoulder pressed against the wall. "I delivered it. Whatever this is now, it is not what I signed up for.""Your job is whatever keeps you breathing," I said. "Right now that means staying close to me and being useful when I ask you to be useful. Those are simple rules."He looked at the Blood Sage for something more reasonable. She was already pulling a small travel pack from beneath a shelf and did not look up."He is correct," she said.Corren came.She led us through the back of the building and down a set of stairs I had not noticed when I entered. Stone steps worn smooth by a long time of use, ending at a door set into the base of the wall that opened onto a corridor so narrow we had to move through it one at a time. The smell was old stone and something I could not name. She produced a small glass jar from her pack that gave off just enough light

Below The Threshold The path behind the woodpile ran northeast through low brush and I took it fast with Corren behind me and the Blood Sage moving beside me in the grey morning light. The horse sound from the road had not multiplied yet. Just the one. That was worse in a way I did not explain to either of them, because a single rider moving fast toward a specific location was not a patrol. It was a message arriving ahead of something larger. "How much time," I said to the Blood Sage. "If that rider reports back and Elara has teams staged, an hour. Perhaps less." "Then we move and talk at the same time," I said. We moved. The brush thinned after a quarter mile into older trees, tall and close together, and the ground under them was soft enough to muffle our steps which helped. I was thinking about the sigil. More specifically I was thinking about what Vael had said and running the numbers the way I ran numbers after a fight. Every absorption since the operative had marke

We walked for twenty minutes before I said it.Not because I was deciding whether to say it. Because I needed those twenty minutes to be certain Ihad heard it correctly, that the voice inside my chest had said what I thought it had said and I hadnot filled in the gap with the name I feared most simply because I was looking for something topoint at.Twenty minutes of trees and cold morning air and Corren saying nothing and the Blood Sage sayingnothing and both of my arms reminding me steadily that the fight had happened.Then I was certain."Maren," I said.The Blood Sage did not stop walking but something in the quality of her movement changed theway a sound changes when it enters a different room."Say that again," she said."Maren. The clan voice that separated from the others. She said that name clearly enough that Icould not have invented it."The Blood Sage stopped walking.She did not turn around immediately. She stood between the trees with her back to me and Iwatched he