They walked west for two days.
The road carried carts toward the capital and refugees away from it.
Some had been turned back at the city gates.
Some had lost homes to the storm.
A few carried royal papers stamped with the sunburst seal.
Every person they met had a different explanation for the Crown’s war and the same expression when they spoke of it: fear wearing the mask of hope.
On the third morning, they found a wagon overturned beside a stream.
A woman struggled to free a boy from beneath one wheel.
Two soldiers stood nearby, arguing over whether the family had paid a border toll.
Elias moved first.
He lifted the wagon with one hand.
Mara pulled the boy free.
The woman clutched him to her chest and sobbed into his hair.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“You should get off the road,” Mara said.
“The Crown is searching for us.”
“Everyone is searching for someone.” The woman glanced toward the storm.
“We’re going to Lowmere. My sister lives there.”
The soldiers had stopped arguing.
One recognized the twins’ eyes.
“You’re the escaped champions.”
“We’re people,” Mara said.
“People don’t lift wagons like that.”
Elias let the wagon drop back onto its axle.
“Now we’re people holding a wagon. Move along.”
The soldiers drew their swords.
Mara noticed a carved sun on each blade.
The metal hummed with the same command as the collar.
She took a step toward them.
The soldiers flinched.
She stopped.
“We don’t want to hurt you.”
“That’s not what the proclamation says,” one answered.
“Then the proclamation lies.”
The second soldier charged.
Elias knocked his blade aside.
The soldier’s sword bounced from Elias’s forearm as if it had struck a stone pillar.
The first soldier swung at Mara.
The blow never landed.
A thin sheet of violet light formed between them and folded the blade gently toward the ground.
“Go,” Mara said.
They went.
The woman watched the twins until they vanished into the trees.
“If you’re going to Lowmere,” she called after them, “tell my sister Nella that Tamsin is alive.”
Mara nodded, though she had no promise to offer.
They found Lowmere at sunset: a cluster of timber houses beside a river, hemmed in by a wall of pale light.
The barrier rose from a stone tower at the village center and curved over the rooftops.
It was bright enough to make the dusk look like noon.
People queued in front of the tower with baskets of food, sacks of grain, and small glass bottles of something blue.
A child carried a bundle of firewood twice her size.
“Toll?” Elias asked.
“For the ward,” said a woman selling bread.
“The Crown keeps the storm away. We pay what we can.”
“And if you can’t?”
“Then they take the light from the tower.”
The woman turned away before Mara could ask what that meant.
A shout rose from the queue.
A thin old man had dropped his basket.
Two guards pushed him down and took the food.
A girl, perhaps sixteen, stood behind him with her hands clenched.
“That was all we had,” she cried.
One guard shoved her aside.
Elias was already moving.
Mara caught his sleeve.
“Not here. Not yet.”
“They’re taking food from an old man.”
“I see it.”
“Then why are we standing here?”
Because we don’t know what the tower does, she thought.
Because if we start a fight in the middle of a crowd, people will get hurt.
Because I don’t want to become the person they say I am.
She let go of his sleeve.
Elias crossed the square and took the old man’s basket back from the guard.
He did not strike him.
He did not raise his voice.
He simply held the basket against his chest and looked at the guard.
The guard reached for it.
The basket did not move.
“Leave,” Elias said.
The guard’s gaze flicked to the silver-violet eyes.
His hand lowered.
The girl collected the fallen food.
Mara watched her shoulders shake—not with fear, but fury.
“What is the tower doing?” Mara asked her.
The girl looked up at the pale shield.
“Keeping us safe,” she said.
“That’s what they tell us.”
Mara saw the girl’s hands were blistered from the firewood.
“What’s your name?”
“Lio.”
“You live here?”
“My brother does. Arden. I was at the palace.” Lio looked toward the western road.
“They said I could serve the Crown and help people. They never said the help would have a price.”
“What did they have you do?”
“Carry messages. Bring food to the soldiers. Smile when the villagers came to pay.” Her chin lifted.
“I stopped smiling.”
Elias looked at the tower again.
“Then we find out what they’re paying for.”
Lio moved aside to let them pass.
“You’d better hurry. The light has been flickering all week.”