The notebook led me through two collapsed alleys and a courtyard full of dead campfires before I found them, and the first thing I noticed wasn’t Mavra at all.
It was my coat.
Rulven wore it like a man who’d been told it was armor and hadn’t been given time to ask why.
The collar was still crusted with whatever had killed the zombie officer I’d taken it off, and it hung wrong on him, a size too broad in the shoulders, but he moved like someone who’d made peace with wearing another man’s skin for the sake of the job.
His thigh was wrapped tight enough that I could see the discoloration through the fabric, old blood gone brown at the edges.
“You’re the one from the notebook,” he said, not quite a question.
“Veyr.” I nodded at the coat.
“That’s mine, technically.”
“Mavra gave it to me when I swapped in. Said you wouldn’t mind, since you weren’t using it.” He shifted his weight off the bad leg, wincing in a way he clearly didn’t want me to catch.
“Didn’t have much else on me that wouldn’t get me shot on sight in this district.”
“I don’t mind.” And I didn’t, not really, though there was something faintly absurd about watching a stranger wear my dead man’s coat while I stood there in whatever I’d swapped in with, feeling like the coat’s actual owner and its current tenant simultaneously.
Ownership got complicated fast in a place where your body was the only thing guaranteed to still be yours from one swap to the next.
Mavra was crouched over a slab of stone someone had scratched into a crude map, and she looked up at me with the particular tired relief of someone who’d been running a two-person operation and had just gained a third body to distribute the workload across.
“You got my ping.”
“Kelz left me the route. You left him better handwriting than the network ever gives us.” I crouched next to the map.
“Tell me the board’s moved since I was here.”
“It’s moved.” She tapped two marks on the stone, then a third.
“Teams out of the east district confirmed relay two dead an hour ago. Relay three went down maybe twenty minutes back, some crew working out of the tanner’s quarter—we don’t have names. That’s two of three.”
I looked at the marks for a second longer than I needed to, because the arithmetic bothered me more than it should have.
Two relays down while I was carrying a stretcher in a different city entirely, learning that strap tension mattered more than muscle I didn’t have.
The city hadn’t waited on me.
It hadn’t needed to.
Whatever role I imagined myself playing in this, the actual mission had a dozen other hands on it, and mine were replaceable enough that an afternoon spent elsewhere hadn’t cost anyone anything measurable.
“Third relay’s the one that matters now,” Rulven said, easing himself down against the wall.
“Last one’s rumored to be inside the palace proper, or somewhere under the archive grounds. Nobody’s cracked that yet.”
“And the king?” I asked.
Mavra’s mouth flattened.
“That’s the other thing you missed. They’re doing it in the square. Public execution, been building for days apparently, and the crowd’s been told this is the one that sticks.”
“Sticks how?” You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“Take his head off in front of enough witnesses and the curse breaks. That’s the theory going around.” She stood, wiping her palms on her trousers, a habit I was starting to recognize as her version of bracing for something she didn’t want to do.
“We should see it. If it works, that’s the whole mission solved without a third relay. If it doesn’t, we need to know exactly how it doesn’t.”
We moved through backstreets that emptied out the closer we got to the square, the whole district funneling itself toward one open space the way water finds a drain.
By the time we reached the edge of the crowd, the press of bodies was thick enough that I had to use my shoulder to make room for Mavra and Rulven, who couldn’t manage his own path with the leg the way it was.
The scaffold in the center was new lumber, pale against the older slate-gray stone around it, built fast and built plain.
Orsane knelt on it in ceremonial chains that were probably decorative more than functional, given what I’d already heard about what his body could do.
A woman beside me was crying in a way that looked like relief already, like she’d spent it all in advance.
The executioner raised the blade.
I found myself doing math I didn’t want to do, the kind where you weigh what happens if the crowd’s theory is right against what happens if it isn’t, and neither answer gave me anywhere useful to put my hands.
The blade came down.
It landed clean.
I saw that much, the arc finishing where it was supposed to finish, and for one full second the crowd made a sound like a held breath being spent all at once, a mixture of a cheer and a sob that didn’t know yet which one it was going to become.
Then the man standing three feet from the scaffold’s base collapsed.
He went down without a sound, the way a puppet goes down when someone finally lets go of the strings, and the brand on his forearm, the one I hadn’t even clocked until his sleeve rode up in the fall, went dark and then darker, like something had been drawn out of it and burned off in the process.
He didn’t move again.
Around him, the crowd’s noise didn’t stop so much as it changed shape, confusion working its way through faster than the relief had.
On the scaffold, Orsane’s head was already back where it belonged.
I watched the seam of it close, watched flesh find flesh the way a wound closes in the fast, wrong footage the network liked to run during its highlight reels, except this wasn’t footage, this was five meters away from me in real time, and the king lifted his own chin to test it before the blood had even finished running down his collarbone.
Somewhere above us, on a screen bolted to the side of a guild hall that had no business surviving this long into the games without getting looted, Vassago’s face resolved out of static.
CASTING ERROR, the banner beneath her read, cheerful yellow letters against a black band, the kind of font you’d expect on a network that had run out of better words for what had just happened.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Please enjoy this brief interstitial while our production team sorts out the paperwork.
The stream didn’t cut.
It never cut.
It just kept running, the crowd’s confusion and the dead man on the cobblestones and the king testing his own throat all still visible, all still monetized, while Vassago’s banner sat there insisting nothing worth stopping the broadcast for had occurred.
That was when the gates started moving.
Iron, tall as a two-story building, swinging shut around the square’s northern exits with a grinding weight that told me the palace had been ready for this contingency a lot longer than the crowd had been ready for the execution to fail.
People were already running, and running people in a closing space turn into something worse than a crowd quickly.
It was slower than the others, its hinge fighting rust that had probably been building since before Orsane took the throne.
“Mavra—”
“I’ve got it.” She pressed both palms flat against the iron, and I watched her jaw set the way it does right before someone commits to something they already know is going to cost them.
The metal under her hands started to glow, dull orange spreading out from her fingers, and for a second it looked like it was working, the gap widening as the iron softened enough to bend.
Then her knees buckled.
She didn’t make a sound about it, which was somehow worse than if she had.
Sweat broke across her face all at once, and when I got a hand on her shoulder to keep her upright, her skin was radiating heat like she’d swallowed the gate whole instead of absorbing its thermal mass.
“Mavra, talk to me.”
“Fine,” she said, in the voice of someone who was very clearly not fine.
“It doesn’t just move the heat. It puts it in me. I forgot how much a whole gate holds.”
The gap she’d opened was maybe half a meter wide, enough for a person turned sideways, not enough for the three of us plus whatever was still trying to squeeze through behind us.
Her hands had stopped glowing, and the metal was cooling again, the softness she’d bought us starting to firm back up before we’d finished using it.
“No time for finesse.” I got my shoulder against the gate on the side she’d weakened and put my whole weight into it, and Rulven, bad leg and all, planted himself against the same section and pushed.
Iron that had been softened but not melted groaned and gave another few centimeters, enough that between the three of us we forced a gap wide enough to shove a body through without shearing anything off.
I got Mavra’s arm over my shoulders and hauled her through first, her fever bleeding through her sleeve into my palm, her feet barely finding the ground on the other side.
Rulven came through next, favoring the leg, cursing in a way that sounded more tired than angry.
We didn’t stop moving once we were clear.
Behind us the square was still a mess of noise and closing iron, and none of it was our problem to solve, not with Mavra burning up against my side and Rulven limping hard enough that our pace kept dropping no matter how much I wanted to push it.
The alley we ducked into narrowed fast, brick walls close enough on both sides that Rulven’s shoulders brushed them, and it dead-ended against a door someone had barricaded from the inside with what sounded like furniture and at least one heavy chain.
I knocked anyway, because the alternative was standing in the open with a feverish teammate and a man in an executioner’s coat, waiting for palace guards to decide we looked interesting.
“Please,” I said, low, “we need somewhere to sit her down.”
Silence fell, followed by the scrape of someone approaching the other side, then a voice thick with the particular fear of people who’d just watched their king’s head reattach itself in front of a public square.
“Get away from the door.”
“We’re not with the palace—”
“You’re wearing his coat.” The voice cracked, more accusation than fear now.
“That’s an officer’s coat. Get away from the door or I start yelling for the guard myself.”
Rulven looked down at his collar.