Chapter 13 Extra – The Circle of Stag's Blood
(Midnight, the day after the kneeling vow)
The ritual chamber lay beneath Caer Veyral's oldest keep, carved into living rock by hands that had died before the kingdom had a name.
No torches here. Light came from veins of pale crystal threading the walls and from the circle itself: thirteen standing stones of black basalt, each carved with a stag in a different stage of life and death.
The three master healers waited barefoot in white robes, hair unbound, eyes milk-blind from years of staring at raw magic.
They had not spoken since entering.
Evelyn and I were led in by Rowena. My arm had been unbound; the half-healed wound throbbed in time with my pulse, skin hot and tight.
The eldest healer (Maeve, voice like wind over ice) finally spoke.
"The wound was begun by iron and finished by a child's song. It remembers both. We must unmake the memory."
She gestured to the centre stone: a flat slab stained dark by centuries of blood.
I started forward.
Evelyn caught my wrist. "I'm staying."
Maeve inclined her head. "Blood calls to blood. The duchess may witness."
They stripped me to the waist. The cold bit deep, but Evelyn's hand in mine kept me steady.
I lay on the slab. The stone was warm (impossibly warm, as though the mountain itself breathed beneath me).
The circle began to sing.
Not words.
A low, rolling chord that started in the bones of the earth and climbed into my teeth.
Silver runes ignited across every standing stone. Light poured into the wound like molten metal.
Pain came first (white, blinding, tearing).
I screamed. Couldn't help it.
Evelyn dropped to her knees beside the slab, pressing our still-scarred palms together. Her blood from the vow the night before mingled with mine, dripping onto the stone.
The song changed.
I felt the axe again (the moment it bit, the moment flesh parted), but backwards. Time unravelled. Torn muscle rewove thread by thread. Severed nerves reached for each other like roots seeking water. Bone knit with a sound like glacier ice cracking.
The healers' voices rose higher, cracking with effort. Blood began to drip from their noses, their ears (payment for forcing a wound to forget its own history).
My back arched off the stone.
Evelyn leaned over me, tears falling onto my chest, whispering my name like a prayer.
Then (suddenly, mercifully) the pain flipped.
It became heat, then strength, then something that felt like sunrise inside my veins.
The song stopped.
Silence rang louder than any scream.
Maeve spoke, voice hoarse. "It is done."
I sat up slowly.
My arm was whole.
A raised scar ran from mid-forearm to elbow (silver-white, shaped unmistakably like a leaping stag). When I flexed my fingers, they answered instantly (stronger, somehow, than before).
Evelyn stared, eyes wide and shining.
I lifted the arm, turned it in the crystal light.
The stag seemed to move with the muscle beneath.
Maeve's blind eyes fixed on Evelyn.
"The mountain has marked its own," she rasped. "Your shield bears the stag now. No iron will ever break that arm again."
Evelyn's laugh was half sob. She threw her arms around my neck and held on like she would never let go.
I held her back with both arms (whole, unbreakable, hers).
Above us the standing stones dimmed, satisfied.
The circle had taken three lives' worth of magic and a drop of duchess's blood.
It had given me back my hand.
And it had branded me forever as the north's (and Evelyn's) own.
When we walked out at dawn, the scar caught the first light like living silver.
The army saw it and roared until the mountains themselves answered.
Seventeen days left.
And now nothing in this world or the next could take my sword arm from her again.