Hunger woke me.
It twisted beneath my ribs and hauled me out of the dark. Black stone waited above me. Torn silk hung from the ceiling. The slowburn torch had died into a puddle of wax, and the Queen’s nest lay open around a body too large to understand from the floor.
Nothing crawled over me. Nothing clicked beyond the ruined web.
The dark offered no measure of how long I’d been gone.
My fingers had locked around the hilt. I eased them open one by one and studied the blade as feeling returned to my palm. Its dark steel drank what little gray reached it. The Queen’s blood had dried almost black along the guard.
I remembered Kade’s blade breaking. I remembered every cut that followed, but not at the right distance: anchors within reach, the Queen moving slowly, my own laughter sounding like a stranger’s. I’d chosen every target. The choices felt as if they belonged to someone with my hands and none of my fear. I remembered reaching for the sword buried in the nest after the power left me.
The Queen hadn’t survived any of it.
“Splendid,” I rasped. “I’ve become mysterious to myself.”
Astarra didn’t answer. The absence of her voice made the chamber larger.
I took stock once. The right hand remained crooked in its rough splint. A puncture below my knee had soaked the trouser leg. Two black-rimmed fang holes marked my left palm, and breathing deeply was an ambition for later. None of that had killed me yet. Hunger had earned the next decision.
I found the waterskin by touch. The leather was cool and, by some mercy, still heavy. The first swallow became a cough and ran down my chin. I waited, tried again, and kept the second one.
Food lay among the scattered gear. I drew a wrapped ration close with Duskfang’s point and worried the binding open with my teeth. Dried meat released a trace of salt and smoke. My stomach clenched hard enough to mistake smell for abundance.
“Easy,” I told it. “You’ve waited this long. Try not to embarrass us now.”
I ate two small pieces, slowly. Brookhaven meals had appeared at hours so reliable I’d treated them like weather: porridge, bread, whatever Maren could turn into supper while insisting it’d always been the plan. I’d complained about onions. Somewhere between home and this cavern, an onion had become wealth.
I wrapped the remaining meat before appetite could make me foolish.
I laid Duskfang beside my hip. The last healing draught took longer to find. My left hand passed over Kade’s broken hilt and lower blade, sealed clay pots, and waxed antidote before closing around glass. I pulled the stopper with my teeth and drank.
Bitter roots and metal gave way to warmth. The open cut at my shoulder drew together beneath the dried blood, leaving a new pink seam. Swelling receded around the splint without straightening the broken fingers. The puncture in my leg closed to a hot, tender knot. The two fang holes in my left palm drew shut around a sick green heat. My next breath reached deeper than the last.
Not whole. Noticeably closer.
I opened one waxed antidote dose and worked the sharp-smelling paste into the two pits in my left palm. The medicine burned hard enough to curl my fingers. Then the green heat retreated from my wrist and the skin cooled. Two doses remained. No healing draughts.
My hand found the strip of Maren’s red shawl that had torn free in the falling road. The cloth belonged beside flour on a table, not Queen’s blood and a sword stolen from a nest. Before the dark swallowed time, I’d crossed Brookhaven for water and worried about which girl had seen me looking.
Now a dead monster filled the chamber because I’d killed it.
Satisfaction arrived before I could forbid it. Shame followed and sat beside it comfortably, which seemed unfair.
Astarra had given me the force. The targets, the laughter, and the wanting had been mine. I didn’t know what opening that wide had changed in me, or what she’d claim later. I only knew I was awake to resent the uncertainty.
“If you can hear me,” I said into the quiet, “that counts for something.”
No answer came. I rested Maren’s cloth across my knee and looked at the path out.
The route back through the nest was wreckage now. Silk bridges sagged under the Queen’s weight. Beyond them, old stairs climbed toward a break in the ceiling where air moved the loose strands. I hadn’t noticed the draft while trying not to die. It smelled of wet earth rather than stone.
I ate one more piece of meat, drank twice, and packed the shawl where I could reach it.
Then I planted Duskfang’s point against the floor and rose. The leg held when I leaned on the sword. I stayed upright.
The mark beneath the bindings on my left wrist warmed once, then again, like a coal remembering fire.
My hand moved toward it.
The skin beneath the bindings felt cold, though sweat slid between my shoulder blades. I waited for the Flood to surge again, for that vast and hungry strength to rise with another promise hidden in its teeth.
Nothing came.
The mark pressed once against my wrist, precise as a fingertip testing a bruise.
You’re lucid. The ordinary power remains yours, though your body can’t carry it yet.
“That’s generous.” My throat scraped around the words. “I was hoping for music.”
The mark cooled against my wrist.
I looked at Duskfang. The dark steel rested against the stone, dull except where old blood had dried along the guard. No spirit waited inside it. No secret fire belonged to the metal. The sword had drawn my attention because the pact had, but the blade wasn’t the source. Once I healed, my hand would open the door.
“And the Flood?”
The mark warmed, then cooled.
The claim was made when you opened. I choose its shape and when to call it. You’ll know neither until then.
The chamber tightened around my ribs. My right hand hung uselessly in its rough splint, and fresh blood touched my upper lip beneath the crust already there. I wiped it away with my left thumb.
“What claim?”
If I named it, it’d stop being a claim and become a bargain. The shape is mine. So is the hour.
That was an elegant way to describe handing someone a knife and promising to decide later where to put it.
“You might choose something harmless.”
I might.
Nothing followed it. Her voice had lost its silk, and I supplied the smile myself, imagining that impossible face and the patient attention of eyes that had watched empires become dust.
“Poor bargain.”
You were falling into the world below when you struck it.
“I was busy. Negotiation suffered.”
The mark pulsed once. I took it for amusement, or the nearest thing she intended to offer.
My stomach cramped around the food I’d kept down. Fear and hunger had hollowed me out, leaving every thought room to echo. I’d wanted power because I couldn’t bear being helpless again. I’d wanted it badly enough to open the door while the Queen tore me apart.
No demon had forced my hand. When the Queen came down, I’d opened the bond myself.
“One claim,” I said. “That’s all?”
One claim. I won’t improve the wording to make you sleep.
“You saved my life. I know what I accepted. I still don’t trust you.”
Good.
The word landed colder than approval.
“You say that like I’ve passed a test.”
You’ve separated the blade from the bargain. Most never manage it.
That struck close enough to hurt. I lowered myself against the stone with Duskfang across my knees. The sealed puncture pulled when I bent the leg. Every sensible part of me wanted a healer, a full meal, and a bed that didn’t threaten to collapse.
The foolish part wanted to know what I could still do.
I closed my left hand around Duskfang’s hilt and reached inward, not toward the Flood but beneath it. The narrow current remained there, familiar in a way that frightened me, but the wreckage inside my body stood between it and my hand. Strangeness would’ve been easier. At least then I could blame surprise.
I tried to draw out no more than a hair-thin thread.
My mark went cold. Every muscle from wrist to shoulder clenched around the attempt, and Duskfang remained dark steel across my knees. The power hadn’t abandoned me. My body simply had no room left to carry it.
“Not yet,” I whispered.
No answer followed. None was needed.
I let the attempt go and set my teeth against the disappointment. Until I recovered, I had the blade, my training, and whatever judgment the Flood had failed to burn out of me.
I tried to stand.
My right leg buckled. Duskfang’s point struck stone with a hard ring, and I caught myself against the hilt before the floor could take me.
Standing took three attempts. The sealed puncture held, but the leg had forgotten how to trust my weight. I got Duskfang into Kade’s old scabbard, cinched the rest of the gear close, and waited until the chamber stopped tilting.
The Queen’s chamber held its dead and its silence. I wasn’t leaving while food, medicine, or coin might carry me farther.
When the ration settled, I lowered myself beside the nearest cocoon. The leg had stiffened around its new pink seam. I laid Duskfang across my thighs and cut through the silk.
A body dropped with a soft, final thump.
I searched the dead one by one. One traveler’s pouch had been ruined by damp. Another held a sour waterskin and tools rusted beyond saving. The third carried three days of preserved trail rations sealed in waxed cloth.
My stomach clenched at the smell. I opened one packet, tested a strip of dried meat, and chewed until my mouth remembered what food was for. Salt, smoke, and the long road. Fine dining.
I ate another strip, then drank sparingly from my waterskin. The food sat heavily beneath my ribs, but it stayed there. That counted as a victory these days.
“You won’t be needing these,” I told the bodies. “I promise to complain about them properly.”
The dead kept their opinions. I kept chewing.
The merchant was wrapped more tightly than the others. His clothing had torn in several places, but his belt remained buckled. I cut through the silk around his chest and searched the outer pockets first. A broken comb. A brass key. A little pouch of dried herbs. Nothing explained why a merchant had carried a lockbox into a nest of enormous spiders.
The lockbox rested beneath his shoulder, iron-banded and black with grime. The key fit.
Inside lay gold coins, bright in the pale crystal’s weak light. I counted them once, then again, then a third time because disbelief was cheaper than arithmetic.
Ninety-six.
I tied the coins into a tight bundle and tucked them beneath the cleanest silk. The weight settled against my side with unpleasant finality. A fortune was a fine thing to find, though it became less impressive when it had to be dragged through a crack narrower than a miser’s smile.
“You’d object,” I told the merchant. “I understand. I object to nearly everything too.”
Under the coins sat six cut gems wrapped in wool. Green, blue, red, and colors that shifted when I turned them toward the crystal. I wrapped each one again and placed them together in a padded fold of cloth. Six pieces of captured light, and not one could tell me whether I’d stolen treasure or merely six beautiful stones.
The jewelry had been hidden beneath a false bottom. A necklace of linked silver, two rings, and a brooch set with a dark stone. I wrapped those separately and secured the parcel against my ribs. If I fell, I wanted to know which burden had broken open.
Getting the Queen’s silk free took longer. Much of it was fouled with dust, blood, and things I decided not to identify. I cut away the cleanest lengths, rolled them tightly, and bound them with strips of the damaged material. The bundle was awkward but light. It could serve as padding, binding, or shelter if I kept it dry.
I left the plated limbs where they lay. I had no wish to drag half a monster upward because it looked as though someone might pay for it. Whatever else the Queen had been, she wasn’t becoming my pack animal.
The rune-marked axe I dug out of the collapsed nest with my one good hand, because a man who leaves a working weapon underground has confused grief for sense. Its runes stayed dull under the dust. I hung it at my belt anyway.
Two swollen venom glands rested beneath her abdomen. I nearly left them. Then I pictured food, shelter, bandages, and the long climb ahead.
I emptied two stoppered jars from the merchant’s pack, packed the glands inside, and sealed them with wax. The jars went deep into my pack, cushioned by folded silk. I checked the seals twice. A broken gland would turn my belongings into a second grave.
I couldn’t make that thought sit right. The dead had no use for possessions. It simply wasn’t the same as clean.
“If this is the part where I become a grave robber,” I muttered, “I’d like it known that I’m doing it with considerable reluctance.”
You’re doing it with considerable thoroughness.
“I’m a practical man,” I muttered. The lie sounded like something Lysa would’ve enjoyed taking apart.
You’re a thorough thief.
“That too.”
I stripped the lockbox of anything practical that wouldn’t betray me by breaking. The brass key joined the herbs in my belt pouch. Sound tools and spare cord went with the tinder. The three days of rations went where I could reach them without unloading the rest of my gear. I wrapped Kade’s broken hilt and lower blade in spare cloth and slid them along the pack’s rigid side; the upper length remained lost in the web. I protected the damaged bow beneath the silk and kept the arrows dry. The wrapped crystal settled into a hollow between the jars and the food.
Then I closed the pack, pulled the straps tight, and leaned my weight onto the nearest length of stone. The Queen’s chamber waited behind me with its silk, its bodies, and the fortune I’d taken from both. Ahead, the upward passage opened between the roots.
I kept my hand on the stone until its tremor passed, then entered the upward passage.
The pack dragged at my shoulders before the passage steepened. Coins pressed into my back through the cloth.
I’d left home with a waterskin. I was climbing back toward the world carrying wealth that could alter a life that no longer existed.
The first steps ran with cold water. Behind me, the Cocoon Gallery shrank into gray strands and blue crystal light. Several sealed shapes sagged along the wall.
I kept seeing Sera among them.
For three breaths, one sagging shape wore Sera’s braid. I knew better and went back anyway. I cut open every cocoon I could reach without climbing into the Queen’s nest. Bones. Torn cloth. Hair caught in webbing. A hand curled beneath a fold of silk. I uncovered faces until there were no more within reach.
None belonged to Sera.
I left the last cocoon open and climbed.
I ate against the wall while the opened cocoons watched with empty faces. Salt, grain, dust. The ration stayed down. That qualified as civilization by Shadowmaw’s standards.
Above the gallery, roots entered the ceiling in pale fingers. Water threaded around them and vanished through cracks below. The passage narrowed until I had to push the pack ahead, crawl after it, then pull the load back onto my shoulders.
The ascent stopped behaving like a passage and became weather.
Water marked the first stretch. It ran over my boots, dripped from the pack, and gave me clear places to refill the skin. I followed its direction upward until the stream divided into thin veins around packed roots.
Roots marked the next stretch. At first they were pale threads. Higher up they thickened into ropes, then limbs, each one belonging to a living tree I couldn’t see. I slept in the cages they made and wrapped myself in clean spider silk against the chill.
On waking, I ate, drank, checked the bindings, and moved. The damaged hand changed how I climbed; the leg decided how long I could keep at it. When either began to shake, I stopped.
I counted rests instead of hours. After the third, the Queen’s gallery felt like a story somebody else had told me. The mountain took a day from me, then another. By the fifth rest, I caught myself listening for Maren’s breakfast bell and heard only water inside the mountain.
Before Brookhaven fell, a day had possessed edges. Morning water. Work. Kade finding fault with my guard. Sera or Lysa finding new ways to make me aware of where my hands were. Dinner. Sleep.
Now the dark contained no hours, only tasks. Find the next hold. Spend a mouthful of water. Keep the treasure dry. Don’t say Sera’s name merely to hear it answered by stone.
I’d wanted a larger life. The thought returned while I shoved ninety-six gold through a gap that scraped both shoulders. Apparently the world had heard only the adjective.
Higher still, damp earth replaced limestone between the roots. The air began to move. At first it was a cool thread against my cheek. Later it carried the smell of wet leaves.
Again, Astarra said when the next breath reached us.
I stopped.
“The air?”
Yes.
The request followed six centuries of sensing pressure through stone. I closed my eyes and drew another breath of rain for her. Wet soil. Bark. Something green and sharp I couldn’t name. The scent hurt more gently than memory.
“Brookhaven smelled like this after storms,” I said.
The mark warmed once. Astarra said nothing more, but the warmth stayed while I climbed.
I climbed until birds replaced water as the measure of height. One called beyond the roots. Hours later, another answered so near that I heard the flutter at the end of its song.
A fork of roots caught the pack below the next shelf. I pulled. The left strap tore, the load dropped, and glass knocked once inside it before the roots caught it again.
I lay across the shelf with one arm hooked through a root and listened. No second knock. No hiss from a broken venom jar. I backed down, freed the pack, and lashed the strap with a strip of spider silk while daylight breathed through cracks somewhere above me. The fortune had become another thing the dark could take. I tied the knot twice.
Food dwindled. I broke the remaining ration into small portions and kept one wrapped against the possibility that the mountain had another day to steal. The pack grew lighter too slowly for me to notice.
Then green light appeared.
It trembled through a natural shaft no wider than my hand, caught on falling water, and painted the stone with a color Shadowmaw had forgotten. I stared until my eyes flooded.
The world was still there.
At the next rest, I touched Maren’s red cloth inside my coat and thought of the people I hadn’t found. Bram and the child had moved toward an outward route before dust divided us. Sera had been alive when the collapse split the chamber. Those memories promised nothing. They kept possibility from becoming a grave.
I kept climbing for them.
The final climb narrowed between packed earth and roots. I pushed the pack above me, followed it sideways, and stopped whenever the old structure of my body demanded patience. Outside, rain struck leaves in thousands of separate taps.
At the last rise, daylight showed as a narrow, blinding seam.
I lowered the pack onto damp soil beyond the fissure, but kept myself below. The final thing the mountain owed me was sky.
I set my left palm against the last tangle of roots.
They held.
I closed my left hand around the roots and pulled.
They flexed beneath my palm. Soil crumbled against my sleeve. My crushed hand was bound against my chest, so I hauled myself forward with one arm, one knee, and the stubborn conviction that the mountain had already taken enough from me. Duskfang went first, its point biting into the earth whenever my strength failed. The mended puncture pulled beneath its wrap.
Then the roots tore loose.
I spilled onto wet grass beneath a white blaze of spring daylight.
The mark along my wrist flared hard enough that I thought I’d torn it open.
Wind.
One word, and underneath it something enormous and entirely undefended, the way a starving man says bread.
For several breaths I could do nothing but lie there with my cheek pressed to the ground, eyes screwed shut. After days of dead light and narrow stone, the sky felt less like freedom than an assault. Tears leaked from my eyes. I blamed the sun because the alternative had too much dignity in it.
“You could’ve warned me.”
You would’ve complained.
“I would’ve complained with preparation.”
The pact mark warmed beneath its bindings and steadied my breathing, though it did nothing for my leg or the stiffness locking my shoulders. I had Duskfang, Silkward beneath the pack straps, the pact, and everything I’d taken from the dead.
None of that made standing sensible.
I stood anyway.
The first attempt ended with one knee in the mud. On the second, I got upright and stayed there, bent over Duskfang while my shoulders shook. The blade’s colorless edge remained politely unimpressed.
“Don’t get proud.”
My sword offered no opinion, which put its manners ahead of most men I’d met.
When the white flecks cleared, I looked back at the fissure. Leaves already hid most of it. Roots crossed the broken stone. Nothing marked where the galleries had folded in on themselves, where cocoons and bodies lay beneath the mountain, or where the Queen’s remains had yielded silk, venom, coins, and jewels.
The haul knocked and shifted when I moved. A fortune, perhaps. I knew its weight and shape, not what it’d buy. Hunger had no patience for imagined prices.
I searched the trees for anything I recognized. There was nothing. Even if Brookhaven lay beyond the nearest rise, my leg could barely carry me across open ground. My hand throbbed beneath its bindings. The mountain had buried the route I knew, and my body had no strength left to dig another.
I hated turning away.
Hatred had carried me through worse places, but it wasn’t a ladder. It couldn’t lift stone, mend bone, or make a starving man strong. For now, returning was impossible.
I started downhill.
The first dozen steps were less walking than negotiation. My right boot slid, and Duskfang caught my weight before the leg folded. I reset my grip and kept moving downhill.
At a fallen trunk, I lowered myself against it before my leg chose the matter for me. The pack settled heavily across my shoulders. Coins clicked inside one parcel. The sound was absurdly cheerful.
I took out a piece of ration bread with my good hand and bit down. It scraped my throat. I chewed slowly, then faster when my stomach recognized food and objected to moderation. Before I made myself ill, I stopped, drank from the water skin, and waited.
The food settled warm and heavy inside me. I kept it there.
Below, wheel ruts cut through wet earth. Hoofprints overlapped them, softened by rain. A wagon had gone toward the distant ridge.
A road meant people eventually. People meant a healer, a bed, and a hot meal prepared by someone who knew what a pot was for. More importantly, someone might be able to tell me where I was.
In Brookhaven, trouble had worn familiar faces: Sera angry with me; Lysa catching me looking at her at the bathhouse; Kade calling me boy; Maren waiting for me to prove I was ready for more. Each had once filled whatever day contained it. Brookhaven had waited at the end of every one.
Now I had a dead man’s broken sword in my pack, an unfamiliar blade at my hip, a demon inside my thoughts, and a fortune taken from corpses pulling at my shoulders. I’d have traded every piece of it to be embarrassed over breakfast again.
I returned the waterskin to the pack and looked once more toward the trees concealing the fissure.
“I’m coming back,” I said. I had no idea from which direction.
I planted Duskfang beside the nearest wheel rut and lowered my right foot into the mud. Pain climbed the leg, stopped below my hip, and left me standing. Then I followed the wagon tracks toward whoever had made them.