Beneath The Blood Moon

The Message

"Read it," Sofia said.

Zayn's jaw was tight enough that a muscle jumped beneath his ear. "You don't need to hear it."

"I watched them pin it to a dead man's chest. Read it."

He unfolded the parchment slowly, and his voice, when he finally spoke it aloud, carried none of its usual command, stripped down to something flatter and colder.

"The vessel can unmake an army. The anchor is easier. One iron blade in the right corridor. Think about that tonight."

The words settled over the gate like a physical weight. Sera's hand had gone to the blade at her hip without her seeming to notice she'd moved it. Eli stood very still, his glasses catching the grey pre-dawn light, saying nothing because there was nothing useful yet to say.

"He's not in the palace," Zayn said, before Sofia could speak. "Getting a body to a gate requires one person and three hours of darkness. It doesn't require being inside the walls."

"That's not the point," Sofia said. "The point is he knows exactly where the walls are, and exactly which corridor to name, and he's telling you he's already thinking about how to get to you specifically."

"I'm aware of what he's telling me."

"Are you afraid?"

He looked at her, and for a moment the careful architecture of his face nearly cracked. "I've been afraid since the winery," he said. "The blades weren't the thing that frightened me. Watching you tear your dress into bandages with your hands shaking, that was the thing that frightened me. Voss knows that. He's using it deliberately. He wants me distracted, second-guessing every corridor, every door, every moment I'm not standing exactly where you are."

"Then don't let him have that."

"I don't have a mechanism for not letting him have that," Zayn said, quieter now. "The anchor bond doesn't come with an off switch for fear. If it did, I imagine I would have found it by now."

Sera cleared her throat, deliberately breaking the moment before it could go somewhere neither of them had time for. "We move the timeline up," she said. "The road to the palace was meant to take three days. We can do it in two if we push, and we post double watches every night instead of standard rotation."

"Agreed," Zayn said, grateful for the redirection, though Sofia caught the flicker of something else behind his eyes before he mastered it.

They left within the hour. Twenty-three rebels formed the travelling column, Varen remaining behind with thirty more to manage the freed wolves and the logistics of a broken army finding its way back into the world. The road was not a road so much as a deer trail Eli had identified in the archive maps, a historical supply route that had been a road three hundred years earlier and was currently a suggestion through overgrown forest.

Sofia walked beside Zayn for the first four miles without either of them speaking, which had become, over the last week, its own particular kind of comfortable. The silver thread between them hummed at a low, settled frequency, and she found she could track his breathing without trying, could feel the places where tension gathered in his shoulders before it showed on his face.

At mile five, the trail dropped into a ravine, and Zayn's hand found the small of her back to steady her descent, not a grab, a placement, deliberate and no longer self-conscious about being there.

"You're doing that thing," she said.

"What thing."

"Touching me like you're bracing for me to object."

His hand didn't move, but the pressure shifted, firmer, more certain. "I was not aware I was doing a thing."

"You're always aware."

"Fine. I was aware." A pause, longer than his pauses usually ran. "I'm calibrating."

"Calibrating what, exactly."

He stopped walking entirely, which she had learned by now meant something real was about to be said. "The appropriate degree of, " he started, and then stopped again, an actual full stop mid-sentence, something she had never once seen him do except when physically interrupted. "I don't have practice at this. Being a person, with someone, in a way that isn't tactical."

Sofia felt something in her chest go soft and dangerous at the same time. Before she could answer, a shout came from the front of the column, sharp, urgent, cutting the moment cleanly in half.

"Movement," one of Sera's scouts called back. "West ridge. Coming fast."

Zayn's hand left her back instantly, his whole posture reorganizing itself around the threat before she'd even turned to look. Through the trees, she caught the first flash of dark tactical gear, the same insignia the men at the terrace had worn.

"Voss's people," Sera said, already moving. "He's not waiting for the palace."

"How many," Zayn said.

The scout's face, when he answered, told them the number before the word did.

"Too many to count from here," he said. "And they're not approaching the column. They're circling around it. Toward the ravine behind us."

Sofia turned. The ravine they'd just descended into had narrowed into exactly the kind of trap the gorge had been, walls close on both sides, one way forward, one way back, and Voss's men, she understood in the same instant Zayn did, were closing both ends at once.