Chapter 4

Clara's POV

The hidden door the man shoved open led down into the tavern's old wine cellar. The air was thick with the smell of rotting cork and the sharp, sour tang of evaporated spirits. He pushed me inside and leaned against the doorframe, breathing in ragged, heavy pulls. In the faint wash of moonlight filtering through a crack overhead, I could see that the blood soaking through his shirt had spread across nearly half his torso, and his face had gone the color of old ash.

"Listen to me," he rasped, his fist still clenched around the coin purse. "We can't get out. The Cinder Talons are everywhere out there — Silas's personal guard, his best men."

I pressed my back against one of the cold wine barrels and felt my legs go soft beneath me. Fear rolled over me in waves. I was a thief who stole flour to survive, not a revolutionary, not a spy.

"I'm done." My voice came out shaking, and I felt the tears starting to blur my vision. "I don't want to die. Take the money, take the letter — just let me go. I have a sister to find. I can't die here."

I wasn't entirely sure why I reached for that excuse. It came out on its own. Though, if I was being honest with myself, my sister had always been the tougher one between us — I'd never really believed she could be killed so easily. Why else would I still be carrying that mismatched half-coin? I hadn't thrown it away for a reason.

The man stared at me. His expression was complicated, the kind that meant he could see straight through both my fear and my lie. He didn't call me out on either.

"Clara," he said, using the name I'd given him in the chaos upstairs. "Listen. I'm a courier. Our network has reliable intelligence sources. On my name — Perrin Willsom — I can get you access to every survivor registry on the continent. If your sister is alive, I'm the only person who can help you find her."

I went still. "Who are you?"

"That doesn't matter right now." He staggered toward me and pulled something from inside his coat: a cheap tin badge, crudely made, stamped with the image of a saint carrying a lantern across a river — Saint Aldwyn.

"This is a Lantern Office identification token." His words came fast. He pressed his thumb hard against the handle of the stamped lantern, showing me where a corner of the metal had been deliberately filed away. "You can't get out of here on your own, and I have to stay behind to draw their attention. But you — you have a chance to slip out with the refugees."

"What do you need me to do?"

"Sew this into your cuff." He grabbed my hand and pressed the badge into my palm. "Once you're clear, find the House Karrow relief tent. There's a church donation box beside it, marked 'lamp oil.' Drop this inside. Whoever collects the box will see the filed corner and know that the Raven's Perch contact failed."

"Why me?"

"Because your odds of surviving this are better than mine." He smiled at that, a hollow, desperate thing. "The Valley Kingdom's fate depends on what happens next. If I die without anyone knowing our plan has been compromised, it's over. But if you get that badge out—"

The cellar door exploded inward.

Torchlight tore through the dark. Several soldiers in black plate armor poured through the entrance, spears leveled at our throats.

"Don't move!"

I dropped to my knees immediately, both hands raised above my head. Perrin didn't resist either. He lifted his hands, and the badge still in his fingers slipped free and clinked against the stone floor. He didn't look at it. He looked at me — one long, unhurried look that carried too much inside it: an apology, a kind of resolve, and something else I didn't have a name for.

The main hall of the tavern was in ruins. Old Hale was pinned face-down across a table, beaten bloody. Several of the barkeep's boys knelt on the floor, shaking. Standing in the center of it all was a broad-shouldered general in heavy plate armor, thick-bearded, who turned to look at the two of us being hauled in with an expression of open puzzlement.

"General Conrad," an aide said, jogging up to report. "We have them. This is the woman."

Conrad's brow furrowed. He turned toward a figure standing in the shadows at the edge of the room. "Lord Silas — this is the thief you wanted? Whatever she took from you, was it really worth deploying half a company?"

The man in the shadows stepped forward.

Silas Veyne. The same black cloak, the same black gloves. He glanced at Perrin, and something flickered behind his eyes — brief, almost imperceptible surprise — before his face settled back into its usual stillness. He didn't look at me. He walked directly to Perrin and stopped in front of him.

"Perrin." Silas's voice was quiet, and the entire hall went quiet with it. "It's been a long time. I didn't expect to find you somewhere like this."

"Silas Veyne!" Perrin's composure broke all at once. He strained against the soldiers holding him, his eyes red, his voice raw. "You traitor. You're a monster. I curse the day I ever called you a brother — look at what you've become. The Empire's lapdog."

General Conrad's expression darkened. He raised his hand.

"Don't." Silas stopped him without looking away from Perrin. He stepped closer, looking down at the wounded man with something almost like patience. "Anger won't get you anywhere. Tell me where your kingdom's heir is hiding. Tell me, and I'll make it quick."

Perrin spat directly onto the toe of Silas's polished boot.

Silas didn't flinch. He didn't wipe it off. He simply turned his head and looked at me, where I was crouched against the wall.

"Bring her here."

Two soldiers dragged me to the center of the hall. Silas studied me for a moment, his gaze measured and unhurried. "You stole from me."

My mind went white. I was shaking so badly I could barely form a thought, but somewhere underneath the panic, Perrin's words were still there, and I could feel the hard edge of the tin badge pressing against my wrist through the fabric of my sleeve.

"I didn't — I didn't know anything—" I let the tears spill over and pointed at Perrin with a trembling hand. "It was him! He grabbed me and said he'd kill me if I didn't help him! I'm just a thief, I swear, I don't want to die—" I flung the coin purse onto the floor between us and kept talking, kept crying, doing everything I could to put as much distance as possible between myself and any of it. "He said he was with something called the Lantern Office — he tried to bribe me into working for him!"

Silas paused. Then, almost to himself, he let out a short, humorless laugh.

He didn't expose me. Instead, he turned back to Perrin with a thin, mocking smile. "Did you hear that? This is the kind of subject your rotting kingdom produces. When it comes down to survival, dignity is the first thing to go."

Perrin didn't rise to it. He just kept staring at Silas, jaw set, eyes burning. Silas seemed to lose interest in the exchange. He turned and gestured toward Old Hale and the remaining tavern boys, who were shoved to the front of the room.

"You know how I work, Perrin." His voice had gone flat and cold. "You don't talk, I start killing. One at a time, until you do."

"They're civilians!" Perrin lunged against the soldiers restraining him, tearing his wound wider, blood dripping freely onto the floorboards now. "You can't—"

"Kill one."

The sword came down. The heavyset boy who used to save me leftover scraps from the kitchen — his head hit the floor before the rest of him did.

I screamed without sound, both hands pressed over my eyes.

"Next one."

"Stop — Silas — you animal!" Perrin's voice had gone ragged and wild. "Is this your war? Killing every innocent person who gets in your way?"

"This is the cost of resistance," Silas said, without inflection. "Next."

The blade flashed again. Old Hale's scream cut off abruptly. I collapsed to my knees on the floorboards, every part of me gone cold. It was the first time I had ever watched someone die at arm's length, and the shock of it, the smell of it, turned my stomach so violently I had to press my hand over my mouth to keep from retching.

"Please — please stop—" I was crying openly now, but my voice was lost beneath the soldiers' shouting. Some of them were laughing, raising their weapons, making a spectacle of it.

Perrin looked at the bodies on the floor. Then he looked at me, still crumpled and shaking on the ground. And something in him went quiet. The wild, furious energy left him all at once, replaced by a stillness that was worse somehow — the stillness of a man who has made a decision he cannot take back. He raised his head and looked at Silas, and his mouth curved into a smile that held nothing but grief.

"Silas," he said softly. "You win. You always do."

Silas's eyes narrowed slightly. Something had shifted in the room, and he seemed to feel it without knowing yet what it was.

"But I won't give you what you want." Perrin threw himself forward.

The movement was shockingly fast for a man half-dead from blood loss. He wasn't going for the door. He wasn't going for Silas's throat. He lunged straight for the sword hanging at Silas's hip — the one that had already been drawn — and drove himself onto it.

The sound of the blade going through him was very clear in the silence of the hall.

Silas froze. He reached instinctively to pull the sword back, but Perrin had seized the blade with both bare hands, holding it in place. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped from his knuckles. He pulled himself close and said something directly into Silas's ear — something too quiet for anyone else to catch.

Then he turned his head and looked at me.

The light in his eyes was going out fast, but he held on long enough to find my face. He smiled. Not with blame, not with fear — with something that looked almost like relief.

His lips moved without sound: Live.

Then his body dropped.

The hall was absolutely silent.

Silas stood over the body, the bloodied sword still in his hand, and for the first time since I had laid eyes on him, his face showed something unguarded — something that looked, unmistakably, like shock.

I knelt on the floor and stared at Perrin's body, and the tears ran down my face without any sound at all.

The tin badge inside my cuff pressed hard against the bone of my wrist.

He had bought me a way out with his death. I understood that now. And so I had no choice — I had to use it. I had to live. For the badge, and for that damned sister of mine, wherever she was.