Page 124 of Of Iron and Moonlight

Lyra straightened sharply. “Yaoaya? What does that mean?”

Isander shook his head, empty of an answer. Rensaya did the same.

Duncan surged to his feet so abruptly a chair toppled behind him. “Griff!” he thundered. “The fastest mount. To Marrowgate. Kora’s nursemaid. Bring her here. I do not care what laws must be broken to do it.”

Griff bolted instantly.

Outside, a horse screamed and tore away, hooves striking sparks from packed earth.

Duncan sank beside Koraleise again and gathered her hand back into his. His thumb traced slow, anxious circles over the faint pulse at her wrist. “Breathe,” he murmured, as if coaxing a wild creature ready to bolt. “Please.”

Chapter 59

Gavriel

“Ihave told you everything,” Gavriel rasped, the words breaking in his throat as a cough tore through his cracked ribs. “No one sent me.”

Movement burned. His lips were split. Manacles had rubbed his wrists raw, carving deep welts that stung with every tremor. He wanted to curl in on himself, to protect what fragments of unbroken body he still possessed, but the chains holding him upright denied even that mercy. His weight sagged against them, metal biting deeper with each shallow breath. “I am nobody,” he managed to add, the words nearly swallowed by the dark.

The scar along Damlor’s cheek bent as his fist slammed into Gavriel’s stomach again.

The blow emptied his lungs. Gavriel’s shoulders screamed as he folded as far as the chains allowed, choking on a wet gasp before blood filled his mouth.

Time thinned and thickened until waking and dreaming blurred into the same dreary fog. Sometimes Gavriel wondered if he had already died and this was the moons’ chosen punishment for some sin he had long forgotten. Other times he stopped wondering at all.

I am nobody. He had said it a hundred times. A thousand. There was nothing left to protect, nothing left to withhold. With each broken whisper the words carved themselves deeper, hollowing him from within. His name. His past. His sense of self. All of it slipped further away until he no longer remembered why he kept saying it.

Damlor crouched before him, impatient. “You cannot expect me to believe that,” he said, faintly amused. “A commonborn man, by chance clad in a baron’s armor?” His fist snapped into Gavriel’s jaw. “Tell me who you spy for. Is it the Duke of Lemierre?”

The blow rattled through Gavriel’s skull. He blinked against the spinning dark.

At least today Damlor used his bare fists, not the runed gauntlet that burned flesh with cold fire, or the knives they pressed into his ribs when fists bored them. At least he would never have to endure Drifah’s hands on him again.

“Nobody,” Gavriel whispered. Confession. Condemnation.

“Oorlon will gut me if I fail to drag the truth from you.” Damlor rose slowly, shadow stretching over him. “Let us see how well you hide it when your mind is flayed, nobody.”

Cold gathered without wind. It seeped behind Gavriel’s eyes, slid through his skull.

Memories twisted under Damlor’s will.

Gavriel reached for something gentle. His mother’s laughter as she leaned over the kitchen table in their Vaelstrom townhouse, flour dusting her wrists as she shaped bread. His father standing behind her, ink-stained fingers resting on her shoulder, leaving faint smudges. Golden light poured through the shutters of the memory, and the scent of books filled the chamber until it felt like the heart of the world.

The sun thinned. The warmth shattered.

His father lay on the floor, blood spreading through his tunic. The walls drained of color and collapsed. The ruin of his great-uncle’s cracked cottage in Netherfen Hallows rose around him in their place. Plaster cracked. Wind hissed through gaps in the stone. His mother screamed as Great-Uncle dragged her by the hair across the floor.

“Stop—” Gavriel choked, begging as the frost gnawed deeper. “Please.”

Drifah appeared. Beautiful. Smiling. The first time he saw her, he had forgotten how to breathe. Her laughter followed. Her breath brushed his ear. Her hands were on him. “Smile, my darling,” she murmured, sweetness rotting. “No fae satisfies me the way you do.” The magic forced him to watch, trapped inside the burning humiliation.

“I told you the truth,” Gavriel whimpered, tears cutting through grime. Scenes tangled together, no longer coming in sequence but as a single suffocating surge. Iron rang. Sparks burst. His great-uncle’s slurred voice. He was a boy again, fists split and bleeding from fighting apprentices who mocked the orphan living with a drunk. Drifah’s face in moonlight. Soot clogged his lungs. Hunger. The snap of a belt across his back. His first love smiling at him from across the market. Ice devouring a battlefield. A billet on an anvil. “I am nobody.”

When the compulsion finally receded, Gavriel sagged in his chains. It was more than exhaustion. More than pain. Something inside him had been scraped raw, and whatever remained had been left exposed to a merciless blizzard.

“Who taught you to resist Norrelian magic?” Damlor snarled.

Gavriel lacked the strength to summon a reply.