The mountain's grief was a silent, heavy thing.
In a cold, limestone alcove that served as a mortuary, two bodies lay on biers of rough-hewn stone. Arthur's, cleaned and straightened, the terrible mark around his neck hidden by a high-collared shroud. Becky's, placed beside him hours later, a small, neat hole in the center of her chest where a guard's pike had found its mark.
Mildred—"Mills"—worked with a numb, mechanical precision. Her tears fell silently onto the cloth she used to wipe Arthur's pale face. Her mother had been here just moments ago, her hand on Mills's shoulder, a steady, grounding presence in the whirlpool of horror. "I'll fetch the myrrh and lavender from the stillroom, love," Becky had whispered. "It will help with the… scent. For the pyre."
She had never returned.
Erik stood in the archway, a silent sentinel. He didn't offer words. Words were useless, broken things. He simply existed within her orbit, a steady, warm presence against the crushing cold of the chamber. When a tremor ran through her hands, he was there to steady the basin of water. When her breath hitched, he would meet her eyes, his own holding a shared, desolate understanding.
Kaitlyn stood across the room, a statue of frozen rage. She didn't weep. Her tears had crystallized into something hard and sharp behind her eyes. She watched her brother's quiet ministrations, watched Mills's shoulders shake, and felt the bond hum with Erik's profound sorrow. But her own heart was a blacksmith's forge, pounding with a single, white-hot purpose: David. Bertram. The Mountain.
When the guards came, their faces grim, to report the healer's death in the lower dungeons—"Interfering with a maximum-security prisoner, the Witch Morwen. The guard was forced to act."—the news didn't land like a blow. It settled like a final, inevitable layer of frost.
Mills stopped moving. She stared at the guard, her face blank, as if the words were in a language she no longer spoke. Then, a sound escaped her—a small, wounded animal noise. She dropped her cloth and ran.
Erik was after her in an instant. Kaitlyn moved to follow, but her father's hand on her arm stopped her. Jonas's face was etched with a deep, weary fury. "Let him. This one… this one is his to bear."
They found Mills in the lower access corridor, on her knees beside her mother's body, which had been unceremoniously covered with a rough wool blanket. She wasn't screaming. She was keening, a low, continuous sound of pure, shattered loss, her hands pressed to the stone floor as if she could pull the life back into it through sheer will.
Erik knelt beside her. He didn't touch her. He just knelt, sharing the space of her devastation, his own grief for Arthur, for Alistair, for the burning world, a silent echo to hers. Kaitlyn watched from a distance, her fingernails digging crescent moons into her palms. Arthur. Becky. Alistair. The gentle souls, always the first to be crushed. The mountain didn't just cage people; it consumed them.
---
The throne room felt different. The air, usually still and cold, now vibrated with a tense, volatile energy. The grandeur was a gilded shell over a festering wound.
Jonas and Maria stood before the dais. Jonas's burns were healing into pink, ropey scars. Maria stood straight, but shadows haunted her eyes, the ghosts of her friends whispering just behind her sight.
"Your Majesty," Jonas began, his voice stripped of all deference, leaving only blunt fact. "The terms of our agreement have been voided. The training is torture. The safety is an illusion. Our children are traumatized. A boy is dead. A healer is dead. We are leaving. Today."
King Bertram leaned back in his throne of basalt and fossilized wood. He looked from Jonas to Maria, his pale eyes calculating. The public humiliation with Morgan, the ghost-attack, the simmering unrest—he needed to reassert control, not lose his most potent symbols.
"Mr. Kelsey," he said, his tone one of patient, condescending reason. "We had an accord. One year of sanctuary and tutelage. It has been… five months. The recent tragedies are regrettable, but they are the harsh realities of the world you have stepped into. Would you take the Dyad back into the wilderness, where the next Morwen—or a dozen like her—waits? Here, they have structure. Purpose."
"Their purpose is not to be your weapons!" Maria's voice cut through the hall, sharp with a mother's fury. "Their purpose is to live. Arthur's purpose was to live! Becky's purpose was to heal! You have perverted everything you touch!"
Rhys, from his post by the throne, stirred. "The healer died attempting to free a genocidal witch. The ward was executed for treasonous affection and sedition. These are internal matters of kingdom security. Not breaches of your contract."
Bertram raised a hand, silencing his Chamberlain. "Your emotional distress is understandable. But the contract stands. The Dyad remains. You remain. For their own good. For the stability of the realm." He said the last word while looking directly at Maria, a silent threat. Your new power is noted. Do not make me define it as a threat to our stability.
They were dismissed. Not as guests, not as allies. As recalcitrant assets.
The gilded cage had just announced it had no door.
---
The cremation was a swift, brutal affair on a wind-scoured ledge high on the mountain's shoulder. There was no ceremony fit for a knight and a healer. Just two pyres, lit by Gareth himself with a torch dipped in eternal flame. The wind snatched the smoke and ashes, carrying them east, towards the rising sun they would never see again.
Mills stood like a wraith, clutching two simple urns. She had asked one thing: to take the ashes to Lake Seren, a hidden, spring-fed pool deep in a wooded cleft within the mountain's magical veil. It was a place Becky had taken her as a child, a place of quiet.
The family went with her. An honor guard, not of the kingdom, but of the broken.
The lake was a mirror of perfect, still black, reflecting the moss-draped rocks and the sliver of grey sky above. The silence here was soft, not oppressive.
Mills knelt at the water's edge. She didn't speak. She simply upturned the urns. Two plumes of fine grey ash spiraled into the dark water, spreading, mingling, disappearing into the depths.
A single, racking sob finally escaped her. Erik was beside her in an instant, his hand on her back. "They're at peace, Mills," he murmured, the words feeling inadequate even as he said them. "They're together. No more cages. No more commands."
She turned into him, burying her face in his shoulder, her body trembling with the force of her silent crying. He held her, his own eyes closed, sharing the weight of her emptiness. He whispered not of magic or war, but of small things. Of her mother's kindness, of Arthur's steadfastness. Of a future where such things wouldn't be so casually destroyed.
"I have no one," she gasped against his tunic. "They took everyone."
"You have me," Erik said, the words a vow, simple and absolute. "You're not alone. I promise."
In that moment of absolute vulnerability and profound comfort, something shifted in Mills. The warmth of his words, the solid reality of his presence, cut through the numbness. It was an anchor in a sea of annihilation. Before thought, before reason, she lifted her head, her tear-streaked face tilted up to his, and kissed him.
It was not a gentle kiss. It was desperate, a lifeline seized in a storm. It was salt and ash and a furious, clinging need.
Erik stiffened for a fraction of a second, surprised, then his arms tightened around her, returning the kiss with a tenderness that was its own kind of shelter.
From the shore, Jonas and Maria exchanged a complex, troubled look. Their son, comforting a girl whose bloodline was a tapestry of curses and stolen magic, whose heart was a fresh wound. It was a vulnerability they could ill afford.
Kaitlyn watched, and for the first time since the gallery, a ghost of a smile touched her lips. It didn't reach her eyes, which remained frozen lakes, but it was there. Her brother had found a sliver of light in the dark. It was the only good thing left.
Then her senses, stretched wire-taut, twanged.
A flicker of movement in the dense bracken across the lake. A snapped twig. Not an animal.
Her smile vanished. In a blur of motion, she was around the lake's edge, her shifting weapon forming into a sleek short-sword in her hand. She crashed into the undergrowth.
There was a brief scuffle, a muffled curse, and Kaitlyn reappeared, dragging a figure by the arm.
Morgan.
She looked feral. Her fine training clothes were torn and smeared with dirt and soot. A long, fresh burn traced her jawline. Her eyes, once full of competitive fire, were hollowed out with grief and a desperate exhaustion.
"Let me go!" Morgan hissed, trying to wrench free. "I just had to see…"
"See what?" Kaitlyn snarled, shoving her against a tree. "See your handiwork? Was this part of your grand rebellion? Getting people killed?"
"Arthur was my friend!" Morgan shot back, her voice breaking. "The only one who didn't see me as a rival or a tool! I had to know it was real…" She sagged, the fight leaving her. "Please. The knights… if they find me…"
Kaitlyn studied her. The raw pain was real. The hatred for the king was a tangible force. She loosened her grip, but didn't let go. "Why are you here, Morgan? Really?"
"To say goodbye," Morgan whispered, looking past her to the still lake, to the mourning figures. "And to give you this." With a lightning-fast move, she pressed a small, folded square of parchment into Kaitlyn's palm. "If you wanna talk. When you're ready to stop being his prized pets and start being the avalanche that buries him."
She met Kaitlyn's gaze, and in it was not a challenge, but an offer. An alliance forged in mutual loss.
Then she was gone, melting back into the mountain's shadows with a ward's intimate knowledge of its hidden paths.
Kaitlyn unfolded the parchment. Not words. A series of intricate, magical symbols and numerical notations—celestial coordinates, keyed to the mountain's own latent magical fields. A location. A rendezvous.
She looked back at the lake. At her brother, holding Mills. At her parents, standing guard. At the water that held the ashes of the good.
The grief was still there, a cold stone in her gut. The rage was there, a banked furnace.
But now, for the first time, there was also a path.
She closed her fist over the coordinates, the paper crinkling in her grip.
Talk.
When you're ready.
She was ready.