Page 140 of The Shadow Orc's Bride

“Containment!” Azfar yelled. “Now!”

Light lines lanced from the staff’s bone rings into the stones around them, the way lightning pretends it’s a root system when it wants to be beautiful. The court floor learned sigils it had not earned. Runes that had served Thalorin unhooked themselves and turned like fish at a new current. A net rose—not to strangle, to cradle. Eliza leaned forward and let the ring’s cold press through Rakhal’s tunic into the hollow above his heart.

It felt like a door closing in winter to keep heat in. The Shadow bucked. It hated being made into a household thing. It hated the domestic. It hated blankets. It wanted a sky. It wanted an ocean. It wanted a world wider than the one love can feed.

“Rakhal,” she whispered. The ring dimmed as if hearing that it was no longer needed to be bright for what words could do without it.

He collapsed.

Not dramatically. He went over sideways, like a man who has stayed awake through three nights to finish a thing and has finally taught his body the trick of sleeping in any chair. Eliza and Shazi both moved without consulting one another and took his weight. Azfar held the net humming with a sound like bees told to be quiet in a library.

The counter-sigil’s light guttered. Not gone—waiting. It hung at Eliza’s throat like a spent ember that remembered fire not with longing, with commitment.

Around them, the Ketheri lay in a ruin that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with recognition. Some stumbled away carrying their enamel like broken pottery. Some knelt to gods who did not live here. Some wept because they had been brave for the wrong man. The Maidaners didn’t cheer. They didn’t know if cheering would wake the part of the world that had just fallen asleep in the old man’s hands.

The dead remained.

They stood as a congregation stands when the hymn ends and they are waiting for the part where the priest tells them what to do with their hands. Rakhal, through the linen of unconsciousness, felt their attention like moonlight: cool, exact, non-judgmental, too honest to warm.

He could see them even with his eyes closed, as fishermen can see the shape of the weir after the tide goes out. The dead of Maidan—those who had been devoured, enlisted, erased; those who had been named; those who had not—turned to face the keep and bowed.

It wasn’t worship but recognition.

The living froze, throats tight with awe. A dockwright crossed himself with a motion that spoofed religion and then decided to keep it. A scholar picked up his broken glasses and looked through them anyway and found that the world still blurred at the edges and was grateful. A child not long off a noose put his hands on the stone and pressed, as if steadying everything.

Eliza held Rakhal and felt the thready stubbornness of his pulse hunt for regularity under her palm. Azfar lowered the staff an inch and then lifted it again because the Shadow shifted, testing the mesh like a clever animal learning the fence. Shaziat last allowed herself to sit down hard on the steps and swear because sitting made her limbs honest.

Overhead, the patched window stopped pretending and let the cloth go. Daylight fell into the hall like judgment. Dust motes rose and turned into constellations that had never mattered to anyone who was hungry. The ring at Eliza’s throat cooled to iron and stayed there, inert, as if it had outlived its story and was content to be jewelry.

And all across Maidan—in courtyards and kitchens and workshops and drains—men and women and the ghosts they carried in their bodies stood very still while the city learned, in a single long breath, how to be itself again.

Chapter

Seventy-One

Smoke clung to the keep’s broken ribs and drifted through the carved lions above the hall. After the roar and the breaking came silence. Even the crows on the parapets were quiet, heads tilted, watching.

Eliza stood in the ruined doorway, dried blood tightening on her gauntlet. The city stretched open beyond her—roofs and alleys, people hesitating at their doors, afraid to believe the war was truly ending. She tasted ash and iron. Somewhere close, a child sobbed once and then laughed, the sound of a body that had forgotten how to choose between the two.

Behind her, Azfar’s staff hummed as the net of light he’d woven faded to a soft glow.

“Hold,” Eliza said. The word steadied her own breath. The counter-sigil still burned faintly, a shard of winter resting where warmth didn’t belong. It had flared when she’d shoutedstop. Now it only waited.

A shift in the air made her turn.

Rakhal stepped through the arch.

Alive—and wrong. His eyes were all pupil, dark and endless. Lines of red-black light ran beneath his skin, pulsing like veinsthat had forgotten how to rest. The men nearest him drew back without orders. No one knew what to call him now.

He lifted a hand—a quiet act of control—and the room flinched. Azfar’s web trembled; the old man’s jaw locked.

Don’t,Eliza thought, moving before the word finished forming.

Rakhal’s voice carried. “The war is done.”

The words sounded final, stripped of mercy. The Shadow spoke through him, using his mouth like fire uses air.

Eliza stepped forward. Her fingers found the chain under her armor. The ring was cold as stone. She freed it and held it tight.