The Rustfields smelled like old rain and older blood, and Corin Vale had learned to breathe through his mouth so the copper tang wouldn’t stick to the back of his throat. He knelt beside the ribcage of a war-golem twice his height, its chest plates cracked open like a fruit rind, and worked a chisel under the last strip of conduit wire.The golem had been dead for eleven years. Most of the Reach’s war machines had. But copper didn’t care how long a thing had been dead, and neither did the apothecary in the Lower Warrens who paid for it by the pound.“Come on,” he muttered, wedging the chisel deeper. “Give it up.”The wire tore free with a shriek of rust, and Corin nearly lost his balance in the golem’s hollowed chest. He caught himself on a strut, breathing hard, and coiled the wire around his forearm before it could nick him. Three more golems and he’d have enough for the fever tonic. Maybe enough left over for the lung draught, if the apothecary wasn’t feeling greedy.Maren’s cough

She let him walk her as far as a sheltered gap between two fallen golems before her legs finally gave out on their own terms rather than his. Corin eased her down against the cold metal and crouched opposite her, the spear laid across his knees, watching the way her breathing had gone shallow and controlled, like she was managing pain rather than surrendering to it.“You should be flat on your back,” he said. “That wound’s not done bleeding.”“I’ve had worse.” She said it the way other people said good morning, an automatic courtesy rather than a claim she cared to defend. Her eyes moved over him again, the same cataloguing look from before, lingering longest on the spear across his knees. “You still haven’t told me your name.”“Corin.” He hesitated. “Corin Vale.”Something flickered behind her expression at the surname, there and gone too fast for him to read it. “Seren,” she offered back, clipped, giving him exactly one word and nothing that came before or after it. He noticed the g

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,

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

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,”