Page 26

The afternoon wore on beneath a sky that seemed too low.

The air felt inexplicably tight, and Maia felt a strange pressure behind her ears. The horses were reacting to it, too. Their ears flattened, their steps faltering against the straight line they’d been holding.

“Caelith?” she whispered, as the ground wobbled beneath her.

“Hold tight,” Caelith said, his horse pulling up close beside hers. He caught her reins and drew her mare in against his own, close enough that his knee pressed against hers, anchoring her against the stone wall of the cliffside and away from the outer edge.

Suddenly, the path groaned, the sound splitting the world in two.

Stone fractured with a violent crack that echoed up the cliffside. The ground pitched sideways. Rhelas shouted as his horse’s forelegs slid, hooves scraping against crumbling stone, sliding toward the open drop.

Caelith let her reins fall. Maia barely registered the release before he was already moving and out of his saddle.

Caelith seized Rhelas by the collar and wrenched him backward with brutal, unyielding force. Man and horse crashed against solid ground just as the ledge tore free and plummeted into the river below.

The roar swallowed everything, debris filling the air. When it cleared, the path was several feet narrower.

Rhelas lay on his back, gasping, his boots inches from the new edge. Caelith released him and stepped away once he knew he was safe.

Deyar stared at the missing section of road. Then at Caelith.

“We need to go,” he said quietly.

Rhelas did not meet Caelith’s eyes as he climbed shakily back into the saddle. “Thank you, Guardian,” he muttered, barely audible. Caelith nodded in acknowledgment.

Deyar’s jaw was clenched, his knuckles white on his reins. “We move before the rest of the path decides to follow.”

They obeyed. None of them spoke as they guided their horses along the narrower ridge. Only the wind filled the silence, whistling through the broken rock.

Rhelas kept glancing back at Caelith, half awe, half terror. Julen, riding close beside Maia, finally muttered under his breath, “We should’ve left him behind.”

The words struck her like a lash. She turned sharply, ready to speak, to remind Julen who had just risked his life to save one of their own. But Deyar was within earshot, and something about his rigid back warned her off. The captain would hear only insubordination, not truth.

So she said nothing. Again.

Caelith, again, didn’t look back, didn’t defend himself, didn’t even flinch. He rode in silence, eyes fixed on the horizon. His profile sharp in the dust and light, the faint gleam at his wrists against his skin.

Maia inhaled deeply as she wondered where his silence had really come from.

***

They made camp on higher ground that night, fires flickering against the dark.

There wasn’t much to say. The horses shifted restlessly, hooves clicking on rock. Deyar sat apart, oiling his blade with slow, deliberate strokes. Rhelas and Julen shared a canteen, their voices low but strained, still shaken from the fall. Maia tried to write, but the words refused to take shape.

Caelith sat beyond the circle of firelight, his chains pooled like spilled ink beside him. He might as well have been carved from the night itself.

Maia tried to focus on her notes. The crack in the stone. The angle of collapse. The way the horses had reacted seconds before. But the image that returned, over and over, was his hand closing on Rhelas’s collar. The choice in it. Eventually, she set her quill aside.

“You didn’t have to,” she said.

The words felt too loud in the quiet. Across the fire, Caelith looked up. “Have to what?”

“Save him.”

He paused. “Yes,” he said evenly. “I did.”

She frowned slightly. “Why?”