The walls shook with fists. Plaster dust drifted from the lintel. Amara stood very still, spoon raised like a weapon made for a different kind of war. The obsidian flame seared against her skin, hot enough to thrum with her pulse.
Elyon’s hand hovered near the latch, not to open it, but to brace it against the next blow. His ink-stained knuckles were pale, jaw set.
“Back way?” he breathed.
“They’ll have it covered,” Amara said.
The shouts outside sharpened into commands—torches, boots scraping stone, the splinter of a bench dragged against her door to bar the street. The captain’s voice rose above it all, calm and merciless.
“Find the fire. Drag it into the square.”
Amara’s mind ticked—routes, cupboards, the mortar where she hid her herbs. Every shadow in the house seemed suddenly thin. She thought of Garron, of how he used to say that fear is a blade: if you grip it wrong, it cuts you before the enemy. She tightened her hold on the spoon.
Elyon leaned close, voice sharp in her ear. “If they break through, you go. Don’t argue.”
“And leave you?”
He didn’t answer. He only pressed the strip of vellum—the one with the seven-marked flame—into her hand. “They’ll look for me first. Writers always die before healers. Words frighten them more.”
A crash shook the shutters. One gave way, slamming inward with a gust of cold night air. A soldier’s spear jutted through, groping like an insect’s leg.
Amara dropped the spoon into the kettle, seized the flame, and wrapped it tight in cloth. The sound outside was swelling, a tide of boots and iron.
“They think they’ve cornered us,” Elyon said, eyes like coals. “Let them think it.”
Another crash. Wood splintered.
Amara drew in a slow breath, steady as a stitch, and whispered to herself—
“Let them find fire.”
The door held—for the moment—but the night itself was already split.
Outside, Davenrock throbbed with noise not of defiance but of boots and orders, the scrape of shields drawn into a wall. The bell tower’s shadow cut long across the square, and beneath it the Council’s banners unfurled, black-threaded warnings glinting like oil in the torchlight.
The noise of the pots and spoons still clung to the air, an echo the guards could not beat back. But fear moved faster than courage. People shuttered windows, doused lamps. Doors slammed, bolts fell. The streets began to empty themselves of witnesses—except for those dragged into them.
The scar-jawed captain strode at the front of the cordon, his face unreadable, but his eyes sweeping for sparks. His men fanned out in fours, spears upright, voices sharp. A boy too slow to scurry inside was shoved into the mud. A merchant’s stall was overturned, figs scattering like stones across the cobbles. Every sound that wasn’t sanctioned was smothered under iron.
By the well, Sera stood. Not because she chose to. Two soldiers had pulled her from the temple’s steps, her shawl slipping, her hands empty but steady. She did not fight them. She only lifted her chin. The hymn still clung to her lips like the taste of salt.
The scaffold had been raised quick, crude timber hammered in haste. A rope swung from its crossbeam, black against the torchlight.
The crowd gathered slow, pressed by spear points and fear, faces pale in the fireglow. Amara came with them, not from her house but folded into the tide of neighbors—because no one could refuse, and because refusal would mean suspicion. Elyon had vanished into the night, or been taken already. She didn’t know. Her hands still smelled of feverleaf and smoke.
A herald mounted the scaffold, scroll in hand, voice high enough to cut the air.
“Treason in song,” he read. “Conspiracy in whisper. Death to the flame.”
He pointed to Sera. “This woman is named guilty.”
A murmur shivered through the crowd. Not outrage—something smaller, something that could be crushed. Amara’s nails dug crescents into her palms.
Sera closed her eyes, then opened them again, gaze sweeping the faces below. For a heartbeat, she found Amara. No words passed. Just recognition—the kind that binds one ember to another.
The captain gestured. The rope was lowered.
The rope swung like a question.
Sera did not flinch when the soldiers seized her arms. She did not beg. She did not speak—not to the captain, not to the herald, not even to the crowd. Her silence was its own defiance, sharper than any cry.
The herald lifted his voice again, as if louder words could smother what the people had already heard in the night:
“Order must be kept. The Law of Silence must be obeyed.”
The captain’s gaze swept the square, searching for tremors, for the twitch of rebellion. Amara lowered her eyes, but inside her chest something hammered—rage and grief stitched together so tightly she could barely breathe.
The soldiers fitted the rope. A hush fell, thick and choking. Someone in the crowd sobbed once, a sound quickly swallowed by the press of bodies.
Sera drew in a final breath. And then—soft, almost inaudible—she let the song slip again:
Hush, little ember, don’t you cry…
The captain’s jaw clenched. He nodded.
The rope snapped taut.
The song broke on the air, unfinished.
Gasps rippled outward, then silence crushed everything flat. Not even the torch flames dared crackle. The scaffold creaked as her body stilled.
The herald raised his scroll high. “Let this be the end of whispers. Let this be the end of flame.”
But Amara knew the lie in his words. Everyone did. Because in the hush that followed, the unfinished lullaby clung in their ears—unfinished, which meant unended.
Amara pressed her fist against her chest, feeling the obsidian flame warm against her skin.
“They think silence is death,” she whispered, low enough for no one to hear. “They’ve forgotten silence can also be seed.”
And in the stillness of Davenrock’s square, grief rooted itself deep.
The kingdom of ashes had spoken.
Now it would learn to burn.
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