Chapter 05
17 min read
The world had split in two.
One half was still the festival—lanterns swinging, the bonfire roaring, the echo of fiddle music caught in the smoke like a ghost that hadn’t realised it was dead. The other half was screaming.
Vael was on his knees, Dareth’s blood between his fingers, the stones warm and wet beneath his palms. The arrows had stopped—or he’d stopped hearing them. The square was a stampede of bodies, people crashing into each other, falling, crawling. A woman ran past clutching a child to her chest, her mouth open in a scream he couldn’t hear.
He couldn’t move.
His body was locked. Every muscle seized, every thought jammed like a wheel in mud. He stared at Dareth’s face—the open eyes, the black-fletched shaft, the blood still spreading—and his mind refused to assemble the pieces into something that made sense.
Then a hand grabbed his collar and wrenched him sideways.
He hit the ground behind the overturned bench, the impact jarring his teeth. Tamiel was above him—face streaked with Dareth’s blood, dark and wet across his cheek and jaw. His eyes were wide but focused. Not panicked. Locked.
“Move,” Tamiel said.
One word. It broke through.
Vael’s lungs unlocked. He sucked in a breath that tasted of smoke and copper and something sour—fear, maybe. His own or someone else’s.
“Bandits,” Tamiel said. “North edge. Twenty, maybe more. They’re coming through the market row.”
Vael could hear them now—not as individual sounds, but as a wave. Shouts. The crash of stalls being kicked apart. The heavy thud of boots on cobblestone.
“Where are the others?”
“I don’t know.”
Those three words were the worst thing Vael had ever heard.
They found Rheon first.
He came out of the smoke like something thrown—stumbling, wild-eyed, a split lip bleeding freely down his chin. He’d been near the bonfire when the arrows hit and had thrown himself into a knot of fleeing villagers, carried by the tide until he’d broken free against the baker’s wall.
“I’m here,” he panted, hands on his knees. “I’m—gods. Dareth—“ “I know,” Vael said.
“He was right there. He was right—“ “I know. We need weapons.”
Rheon looked at his empty hands. Then at the chaos. Then at Vael.
Something hardened behind his eyes. Not courage, exactly. Something more desperate. The understanding that standing still was dying.
“The stalls,” he said. “Butcher’s row.”
They ran.
The butcher’s stall was half-collapsed, its awning torn, meats scattered across the stones. Vael grabbed a cleaver from the block—heavy, single-edged, designed for joints and bone. Rheon found a carving knife with a nine-inch blade. Tamiel pulled a fence stake from the wreckage of a collapsed stall and tested its weight. Ash wood. Dense. It would do.
They were arming themselves with kitchen tools to fight men with swords.
Vael’s hands were shaking. He gripped the cleaver harder and told himself it was the cold.
Then Lyric appeared.
She came from the south side of the square, low and fast, dragging Aerys by the wrist. Lyric’s silver hair was wild around her face, her festival tunic torn at the shoulder. In her free hand she held a blade—short, curved, snatched from somewhere. Her eyes found Vael and in them was something he recognised because he felt it too: terror pressed into a shape that looked like focus.
Aerys was pale but upright. She had a wooden staff—the storyteller’s walking stick, maybe—gripped in both hands. Her flower crowns were gone. There was a scratch across her forehead, thin and bleeding.
“How many?” Lyric asked. No greeting. No wasted breath.
“Twenty or more,” Tamiel said.
“Weapons?”
“Swords. Axes. Bows—that’s where the arrows came from.”
Lyric looked at the carving knife in Rheon’s hand. At the cleaver in Vael’s. At the fence stake in Tamiel’s.
She didn’t say what they were all thinking.
“Stay together,” Vael said. “Don’t split up. Don’t—“ The first bandit came around the corner of the tavern at a run.
He was big—human, broad-chested, wearing a leather jerkin stained dark with old blood. He carried a short sword in one hand and a hatchet in the other, and when he saw the five of them standing in the wreckage of the butcher’s stall, he grinned.
He actually grinned.
Tamiel stepped forward and swung the fence stake into his knee.
The crack was louder than it should have been. The bandit’s leg buckled sideways at an angle that legs were not meant to go, and he screamed—a high, shocked sound, more surprise than pain—and went down hard. Tamiel hit him again. Across the temple. The screaming stopped.
They stood there, breathing.
That was the first.
The village was fighting back.
Not organised, not tactical—just people defending what was theirs with whatever they could reach. The blacksmith had come out of his forge with a hammer in each hand and was swinging them with the blind fury of a man whose livelihood was burning around him. The baker’s wife stood in her doorway with a cleaver, screaming at anyone who came near. Old Maren—the apothecary, who Vael had haggled with two days ago—was dragging a wounded teenager behind her counter with one hand while brandishing a fire iron with the other.
They were fae. Stronger than humans, faster, with reflexes that came from blood and bone. The farmers and traders and craftspeople of this village were not warriors, but they were not helpless either.
But they were not trained.
And the difference showed.
A man Vael recognised—Torren, the goat farmer Dareth had told stories about—charged a bandit with a pitchfork. He was brave and strong and forty years too old to be fighting. He overextended on the lunge, left his right side open, and the bandit stepped inside the reach and opened his belly with a short sword.
Torren looked down at himself. At the red mess of his own insides pushing through the gap in his shirt. His mouth moved, shaping a word that never came.
He sat down on the cobblestones, very carefully, and didn’t get back up.
Vael saw it happen from thirty feet away. Every detail. The angle of the blade. The look on Torren’s face. The way his hands tried to hold himself together.
And then there was no more time to watch, because two bandits were coming straight at them.
The first one was fast.
He came at Vael with an axe—overhead, committed, the kind of blow that would split a skull if it connected. Vael moved without deciding to. His body read the arc the way it had read a thousand practice swings, and he stepped left, inside the reach, the way Ardyn had drilled into him until the movement was bone-deep.
The axe missed his shoulder by an inch. He felt the wind of it on his neck.
He swung the cleaver.
It caught the bandit across the forearm. Not clean. The blade bit into leather and flesh and stuck, and the man howled and wrenched back, taking the cleaver with him. Vael was suddenly empty-handed, the bandit bleeding but upright, reaching for a knife at his belt with his good hand.
Training. Ardyn’s voice, a thousand mornings deep: When you lose your weapon, close the distance. Make them fight in your space, not theirs.
Vael stepped in. Grabbed the man’s knife-hand by the wrist. Drove his knee into his groin. The bandit doubled over and Vael tore the knife free and stabbed him.
He didn’t aim. There was no technique. He just drove the blade into the first piece of body he could reach—the junction of neck and shoulder—and shoved it in until he felt it stop against something hard.
The bandit made a sound.
Not a scream. A gurgle. Wet and thick and intimate, like the last air being squeezed from a bellows. His body sagged against Vael’s, heavy and hot, and his breath came once more—rattling, broken—and then didn’t come again.
Vael let go.
The body fell.
He stood over it, the knife in his hand slicked red to the grip, and something inside him rearranged itself. Not shattered. Not broken. Just shifted, the way a bone resets after a fracture—the same shape, but never quite the same.
He’d killed a man.
The thought arrived without emotion. Flat. Factual. Like noting the weather.
Then his stomach heaved, and he turned and vomited against the base of the fountain.
He wiped his mouth. Straightened. The second bandit was already dead—Tamiel had taken him with the fence stake while Vael was busy. Tamiel stood over the body with his jaw set and his eyes somewhere else entirely. Not blank. Just removed. As if he’d stepped back from himself to do what needed doing and hadn’t come back yet.
“You all right?” Vael asked.
“Yes,” Tamiel said.
It was the most obvious lie either of them had ever told.
Rheon fought like a fire given legs.
He was everywhere—ducking, lunging, improvising. The carving knife was too short for proper swordwork, so he used it like a dagger: close, fast, dirty. He fought with instinct and fury and a recklessness that would have made Ardyn furious.
He killed a man by driving the blade up under his ribs while the bandit was mid-swing. It was textbook—angle, timing, commitment. Ardyn would have approved of the technique.
Ardyn would not have approved of what happened after.
The bandit didn’t die immediately. He grabbed Rheon’s shirt and pulled him close, and for three terrible seconds they were face to face, close enough to share breath. The man was young. Rheon’s age. Maybe younger. Dark-haired, pockmarked, with a scar across his nose that someone had given him years ago.
His eyes were brown.
Rheon watched the light leave them.
Not all at once. In stages. Like a candle guttering. A flicker, a dim, and then—nothing.
The body dropped. Rheon’s hands were shaking so badly the knife nearly fell from his grip.
He didn’t have time to stop. Another was coming. He turned and fought and blocked a blow that rattled his teeth and took a cut across his left forearm—a hot, bright line of pain that he didn’t feel until later—and kept going because stopping meant dying and he was not going to die in a village square holding a kitchen knife.
But the boy’s face stayed with him.
Brown eyes. Pockmarked. Young.
It would stay with him for a long time.
Lyric fought the way she trained—precise, efficient, cold.
Every movement stripped to its essential purpose. No wasted motion. No flourish. She read the bandits the way she read sparring partners, finding the gaps in their guard, exploiting the half-second of hesitation that came from fighting someone faster than they expected.
She killed a woman.
That was the part she hadn’t expected. Not the killing—she’d known, in the abstract, that she could. But the bandit who came at her from behind the collapsed cider stall was a woman. Tall, lean, with braided hair and a scar that bisected her eyebrow. She fought well—better than the men—and she nearly took Lyric’s head off with a hand-axe that whistled past her ear close enough to clip hair.
Lyric dropped low, cut the woman’s hamstring with the curved blade, and when she fell, drove the point into the base of her skull.
It was quick. It was clean. It was the most efficient kill any of them made that night.
And Lyric felt nothing.
That was the part that frightened her. Not the violence. Not the blood. The absence. The hollow where a feeling should have been. She’d just ended a life and her hands were steady and her breathing was even and her mind was already scanning for the next threat.
She should feel something.
She couldn’t.
She filed it away in the place where she kept the things she’d deal with later, and turned to face the next one.
A blade caught her across the hip—shallow but long, slicing through the fabric of her tunic and opening a line of fire across her side. She gasped, twisted, and buried her knife in the attacker’s shoulder. He screamed and swung wild. She ducked. His fist clipped her jaw and the world rang like a struck bell. She stumbled, tasted blood, and cut him again—across the wrist this time—and he dropped his weapon and ran.
She let him.
Her side was bleeding freely, soaking through the dark blue tunic, and her jaw throbbed with a deep, nauseating ache. She pressed her hand to the wound and kept moving.
Aerys fought to protect.
Not herself—everyone else. She’d positioned herself near the mouth of the alley where the wounded were being dragged, and she stood there with the storyteller’s walking stick and a fury that nobody who knew her gentle nature would have believed.
She cracked a bandit’s wrist when he reached for a crawling child. Broke another’s nose when he tried to push past her into the alley. She wasn’t graceful. She wasn’t surgical. She was desperate and brave and fighting with the raw, graceless determination of someone who had decided that no one else was going to die behind her.
A man twice her size grabbed the staff and wrenched it from her hands. She stumbled. He raised a short sword.
And Aerys, who had never thrown a punch in her life, hit him in the throat with the heel of her palm.
It was a move Ardyn had taught them on the second day of hand-to-hand training. Basic. Brutal. She’d practiced it on padded targets hundreds of times. She’d never used it on a person.
The bandit’s windpipe compressed. He staggered backward, gagging, sword arm dropping. She grabbed the staff from the ground and hit him across the temple, and he went down hard and didn’t move.
She stood over him, panting, shaking, her flower-painted cheek smeared with dirt and someone else’s blood.
A child was crying in the alley behind her.
She turned and knelt and gathered the girl against her chest and held her, rocking gently, while the world burned.
She took a blow she didn’t see. Something hit her across the back—a fist, an elbow, a piece of debris—and pain detonated between her shoulder blades. She curled forward over the child, shielding her, teeth clenched, vision swimming. When she could breathe again, whoever had hit her was gone.
She stayed where she was. Holding the child. Guarding the alley.
She didn’t move until it was over.
Vael lost count.
Not of the dead—he never counted those. Of the minutes. Of the blows. Of the moments where he almost died and didn’t, where steel passed close enough to taste and his body responded with something faster than thought.
He was the best of them, and he knew it. Not with pride—with a cold, practical clarity that arrived without invitation and wouldn’t leave. Where Rheon fought with fire and Tamiel with control and Lyric with precision, Vael fought with something else. Something that read the battle like a language he’d always known but never spoken. He saw angles before they opened. Felt movement before it arrived. His body knew where to be before his mind decided.
He cut through two bandits who’d cornered the baker’s wife—one across the arm, turning the blade, driving him into his partner, then finishing the second with a blow to the knee that sent him down screaming. He disarmed a third who was twice his weight by stepping inside a wild swing and snapping the man’s elbow over his own forearm, a technique Ardyn had shown them once and told them they’d never need.
He needed it.
But he also bled.
A sword tip caught his side as he turned too slowly—not deep, but enough to part the skin along his ribs. He felt the heat of it before the pain, a spreading wetness that soaked into his shirt and made his left arm sluggish. A thrown stone—or was it a mace?—glanced off his shoulder and deadened the muscle. A bandit headbutted him during a grapple and the bridge of his nose crunched and blood poured down his face, blinding his left eye.
He kept fighting.
Not because he was brave. Because there was nothing else. Because stopping meant his people died. Because somewhere in the chaos were Rheon and Tamiel and Lyric and Aerys and Naia and every person in this village who’d ever waved at him on market day, and the only thing between them and the next blade was whatever he had left.
He was tiring. His arms were heavy. The knife in his hand felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. His ribs screamed every time he twisted. Blood and sweat stung his eyes and his breath came in ragged, burning gasps.
The bandits were tiring too. They’d expected a soft target—a village of farmers and traders, half of them drunk on festival cider. They hadn’t expected fae who fought back. Hadn’t expected the blacksmith’s hammer or the baker’s cleaver or the five young warriors with kitchen knives and fence stakes who moved like something trained by someone very serious about keeping them alive.
The numbers were thinning. Not fast enough, but thinning.
Vael dropped a man who’d gotten inside Lyric’s guard, caught another across the wrist as he swung an axe at Rheon’s back, and turned to find—for one brief moment—empty space in front of him. No one coming. A gap in the fight, the first he’d seen.
Across the square, someone was running. A bandit. Then two more. The arithmetic of it was changing—men who’d come here for an easy score adding up their dead and finding the number wrong. Their leader was down. Whoever had planned this hadn’t planned for this.
They broke.
Not all at once. First one, then a cluster, then a rout. The screaming changed pitch. Weapons clattered on cobblestones. The square’s centre was suddenly full of people running away from it instead of through it.
The companions held where they stood.
Then the horns.
They came from the east road at a canter—measured, purposeful, arriving the way professionals arrived: with formation and torchlight and the particular efficiency of soldiers who’d done this before.
Fae cavalry in the colours of the local lord. Armoured. Fresh. About thirty of them. They swept into the square and divided without orders—half pushing north to cut off the runners, half pulling up at the centre to assess.
The patrol commander’s horse stopped six feet from Vael.
He looked at the square. At the bodies. At the five young fae standing in the wreckage with kitchen knives and fence stakes and blood that was mostly not their own. His expression was difficult to read in the torchlight—something between professional surprise and the quiet respect a soldier gave to people who’d held a position they had no business holding.
He didn’t say anything for a moment.
Then: “Clear the runners. Tend the wounded.” To his soldiers. Then, to Vael: “Who commanded here?”
Vael looked at the cleaver in his hand. At Tamiel beside him, jaw set, eyes flat. At Rheon still breathing hard on the ground.
“No one,” he said. “We all did.”
The commander nodded once. That seemed to be enough.
The patrol cut down the runners with arrows, rounded up the surrendered with ropes and professional efficiency, and began the slow work of triage. Three soldiers dismounted and moved through the village checking the wounded—theirs and the village’s—calling healers forward with the brisk competence of people who understood aftermath.
And then it was quiet.
Not silent. The quiet of aftermath—moaning, weeping, the crackle of fires still burning, the distant whinny of patrol horses being reined in. Someone was shouting names. Someone else was praying. A dog barked, high and frantic, at nothing anyone could see.
But the fighting was done.
The five of them found each other by the fountain.
Not by arrangement. By gravity. The same force that had pulled them together every evening in the library, every morning in the sparring yard, every walk to the village and every climb back up the hill. They came from different corners of the square—bloodied, limping, wrecked—and they converged on the same spot as if drawn by something older than decision.
Vael arrived first. He sat on the fountain’s edge because his legs wouldn’t hold him anymore. His right side was soaked dark from the wound along his ribs. His nose was broken, his shoulder half-dead, and his hands—still gripping the stolen knife—were shaking in a way he couldn’t control.
Tamiel came next. Walking upright, but barely. A gash across his thigh bled through a makeshift bandage he’d tied with a strip of his own shirt. His knuckles were split open. His face was still covered in Dareth’s blood, now dried to a dark crust. He sat beside Vael and said nothing.
Rheon limped in from the south side of the square. The cut on his forearm had opened wider—a flap of skin hung loose, glistening, and blood dripped steadily from his fingertips. He had a bruise forming across the left side of his face that would be spectacular by morning. He lowered himself to the ground at Vael’s feet, put his head between his knees, and breathed.
Lyric came from the alley, one hand pressed to her hip where the blade had caught her. The wound was still bleeding—a steady, insistent red that darkened the fabric of her tunic and ran down her leg. Her jaw was swelling. She walked to the fountain, leaned against it, and slid down until she was sitting on the stones.
Aerys was last. She walked slowly, one arm wrapped around her own torso where the blow to her back had landed. She moved like someone whose body had declared a ceasefire with her will—functional, but barely. A child’s blue paint was still visible on her cheek, smeared now with blood and grime.
She sat down beside Lyric.
Their shoulders touched.
No one spoke.
Around them, the patrol was working. Soldiers moved through the square with torches and purpose, separating the dead from the wounded, the wounded from the frightened. Healers arrived from somewhere—the lord’s household, maybe—and began the slow work of stitching and binding. The dead were being laid in a row near the temple wall, covered with whatever cloth could be found.
The bonfire was still burning.
It didn’t know what had happened. It just burned.
Vael looked at his hands. They were crusted with blood—his own, the bandit’s, Dareth’s. It had dried in the creases of his palms and under his nails and in the lines that fortune-tellers claimed could tell you your future. He turned them over and stared at them and didn’t recognise them.
Rheon lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed and glassy.
“Is everyone—“ His voice cracked. He swallowed. Tried again. “Is everyone here?”
“We’re here,” Aerys whispered.
“All of us?”
“All of us.”
He nodded. Dropped his head again.
A patrol soldier approached—young, efficient, a healer’s kit on his belt. He looked at the five of them and his expression shifted. Not pity. Something closer to recognition. The look of a man who had seen his own first battle in the faces of others.
“Let me see your wounds,” he said.
Tamiel extended his leg without a word. The soldier knelt and began to work.
The night moved around them in slow, heavy currents. Names were called across the square. Some were answered. Some weren’t. A woman keened near the temple wall—a sound so raw and high it didn’t sound human. The smell was everywhere now—blood and smoke and the sweet-sick undertone of things that shouldn’t be open to the air.
Vael looked across the square. The butcher’s stall where he’d found the cleaver. The patch of cobblestones where Dareth had fallen—someone had covered him with a cloak, but the blood was still there, black in the firelight.
The stall where Naia had bought her cider.
She wasn’t at the fountain. She wasn’t in the alley. She wasn’t among the faces he could see in the torchlight.
He stood. His ribs howled. He sat back down.
“Naia,” he said. To no one. To the dark.
No one answered.
The bonfire crackled. The patrol worked. The dead lay in their row.
And the five of them sat at the fountain—broken, bleeding, alive—and held the silence together, because it was the only thing left to hold.
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