The sect master said nothing. His fingers had stopped tapping.
"One of your trained men against me,"
Kael said. "I win, you release her and this ends. If I lose, I hand over the ring willingly. Clean. No destruction."
"Give me a timeline of two months. The fight happens here, on your ground, at your chosen time. She will stay here until then." Kael held the man’s gaze. "You have nothing to lose. If I don’t show up, you keep her and come find me.
If I lose you get everything."
The ring pulsed sharp against his finger.
"How dare you," Seradhiel said, her voice low and precise and absolutely furious.
"You trade me like I am some ornament. Like I am a prize sitting on a shelf. Three thousand years sealed and now a mortal uses me as a bargaining chip."
The sect master laughed.
It was a real laugh, shoulders moving, head tilting back slightly. He lowered it and looked at Kael with something that wasn’t quite respect and was adjacent to it.
"You have nerve," he said. He uncrossed his arms, one hand dropping to his side. "I don’t sense a proper thread of Essence from you. You’re barely a cultivator." He took one step forward, studying Kael the way someone studies something they can’t immediately categorize. "And yet you walk into my compound and propose terms."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he turned and walked back to his chair. Sat down. Settled his weight into it with the ease of a man who had never once been uncomfortable in his own seat.
"Fine," he said. "Two months. Dawn on the agreed date. You face my chosen man."
He rested one elbow on the chair’s arm, chin on his knuckles. "You lose, you hand over the ring and I decide what happens after. You win..." the smile returned, thinner this time, "I release the girl. Both of you leave." He glanced at the men holding Mira. "Take her to the holding room."
His eyes moved back to Kael. Flat and final.
"If you do not appear at dawn on the agreed date," he said, "she does not see that morning."
Kael held his gaze. "Understood."
A hand wave. The circle of cultivators parted.
Kael walked back through the gate without looking at Mira.
He wanted to. He didn’t.
_ _
He was twenty meters into the treeline before Seradhiel spoke again.
The ring’s warmth had been running cold since the courtyard, not painful, just a particular quality of silence from inside it that felt like a held breath.
"Two months," she said. Quieter now. Still furious but contained, the way something is contained when it has decided to be dangerous about it rather than loud. "You have been in this world for nine days. You have one technique. A dead man’s sword. And you just agreed to fight a Gold Realm sect master’s chosen warrior."
"I know," Kael said.
"And...?"
"And I need to get significantly stronger," he said. "Fast."
A pause. The ring’s warmth shifted,that quality it took when she was thinking through something she hadn’t decided to share yet.
"You have two months," she said finally.
"Yes."
"Then stop walking slowly," she said. A pause. "You are partly in luck. Because you have me."
Kael glanced at the ring.
"Is that you offering to help?" he said.
"It is me stating a fact," she replied. "Do not inflate it into something sentimental."
He almost smiled and kept walking.
Dorin was exactly where Kael had left him.
Back against a tree, knees up, the face of a man who had been counting seconds for the past thirty minutes and had run out of things to distract himself with. He looked up when Kael came through the trees.
Looked behind him.
"Where is she?" he said, already knowing the answer that wasn’t there.
"They have her," Kael said. He picked Mira’s spear up from the road, turned it once in his hands, and slung it across his back. "She’ll be held there for two months."
Dorin got to his feet slowly. "Two months..."
He looked at Kael with the expression of a man trying to find the correct response to something that had no correct response.
"And you just...."
"I bought her two months," Kael said.
"That’s not the same as leaving her." He looked down the road toward Crestfall.
"We’re still completing the job. I need the pay."
He started walking.
Dorin stood beside the wagon for a moment, looking at the treeline where Kael had gone in and came back out of alone, looking at the road ahead, looking at the spear across Kael’s back that hadn’t been there before.
Then he clicked the horse forward and followed.
_ _
The relay station at Crestfall Pass was exactly what Dorin had described.
Small. Functional. The kind of place that existed because the road needed it to exist and for no other reason. Three buildings inside a low stone wall; a trader’s inn, a cultivator outpost with a notice board outside it, and a storage facility that took up more space than both of the other buildings combined.
The food smell coming from the inn hit them before they reached the gate.
Dorin inhaled deeply and made a sound of profound betrayal. "That smells significantly better than I told you it would," he said. He sounded personally offended by this.
"You said the food was terrible," Kael said.
"It was terrible. Last time." Dorin brought the wagon to a stop inside the gate and set the brake. "Perhaps they changed cooks." He climbed down from the bench, joints audibly objecting, and straightened up with a hand pressed to his lower back. "Or perhaps nearly dying on the road adjusted my standards."
He turned and looked at Kael properly for the first time since the treeline.