The crossing of the Silver River felt less like an invasion and more like a funeral march for an empire built on ice.
Behind them, the Red Ferry garrison had finished their grim work. Alpha Torian’s severed head now sat spiked atop his own broken iron standard, his pale, sightless eyes staring out over the waters he had choked for twenty winters. The two hundred thawed warriors, their chests wrapped in strips of red flannel to warm their newly beating hearts, had formed the rearguard, falling in behind the Ember guard with silent, fanatical devotion.
Ahead lay the Western Timber.
Here, the trees were ancient, towering redwood pines whose trunks were wide enough to hollow out into battlements. The needle-strewn earth was damp, rich, and dark, smelling of crushed moss, cold resin, and wild game.
It was Gideon’s ancestral home.
And as the vanguard moved deeper into the shadowed canopy, the colossal warlord grew increasingly still.
He walked his warhorse by the bridle, letting Lyra ride the high saddle. His gauntleted left hand rested against her booted calf, anchoring her through the forest gloom, his thumb absentmindedly smoothing over the leather. His amber-gold eyes flicked constantly between the massive pine trunks, reading broken branches, moss patterns, and wind currents that only a native hunter could understand.
"You're tense," Lyra murmured, leaning down slightly from the saddle. Her fingers brushed the scarred side of his neck, feeling the heavy, rigid cords of muscle drawn tight as bowstrings.
Gideon didn't look up, but his grip on her calf tightened possessively.
"The Timber never forgets a kin slayer," he rumbled, his deep bass scraping low against the quiet rustle of the needles. "When I opened my father's throat twelve winters ago, I didn't stay to claim the seat. I took his blades, burned his hall, and walked into the Iron Wastes because I was disgusted by the rot in our bloodline. My younger brother took the mantle."
Lyra’s breath hitched. "Your brother?"
"Eamon," Gideon said, spitting the name into the dirt like a mouthful of bitter gall. "A coward who hides behind diplomacy and foreign silver. When the Alliance declared an extermination crusade against your kin, Eamon didn't send warriors to fight. He sent wagon-trains of cedar timber to build the pyres that burned your mother's citadel."
A cold, diamond-hard fury sparked behind Lyra’s ribs.
Another one. Another high lord who traded the ashes of her people for wealth and safety.
"Does he still hold the ancestral keep?" she asked.
"He holds the Great Hearth at Oak haven," Gideon said, pausing at the crest of a ridge. "Or whatever is left of it."
He pointed down through a break in the massive pines.
Nestled in a wide, circular clearing below was Oak haven—a fortress-city built entirely from petrified red timber and dark granite. Massive wooden palisades thirty feet high ringed the settlement, but the watchtowers were quiet. No war-horns blew. No archers took the parapets.
Instead, rising from the center of the city was a colossal column of thick, oily white smoke.
Lyra’s nostrils flared as she tested the breeze.
The scent hit her like a punch: burning sweetgrass, melted beeswax, and the thick, suffocating stench of sacred blood-tithes.
"They're not preparing for a siege," Lyra whispered, her violet eye flaring with sudden, sharp warning. "They're performing a binding ritual. Right now. In the Great Hearth."
Varis stepped up beside the horse, her executioner's blades already drawn and resting against her forearms. "The High Coven's coastal envoys fled south after Morgana fell. They didn't retreat to the sea, Gideon. They came here."
Gideon’s jaw set into iron.
He didn't waste time with a command. He reached up, his massive hands closing around Lyra’s waist to lift her down from the saddle. He set her on her feet in the soft needles, his face inches from hers, his breath hot, ragged, and thick with that intoxicating scent of burning cedar and iron that had become the only sanctuary she trusted.
"Stay with Varis and the vanguard," Gideon rumbled, his knuckles brushing her bruised cheek with uncharacteristic, aching gentleness. "Clear the outer stockade. If my brother has surrendered our hearth to Coven witches... he dies by my hand."
Lyra caught his wrist, her small, calloused fingers digging into the boiled leather of his gauntlet.
"We go together, warlord," she said, her voice brooking no argument. "You take your brother's head. I take the witches who pull his strings."
A savage, dark grin curved Gideon’s scarred lips. He didn't argue. He leaned down, his mouth crashing against hers in a hard, bruising kiss that stole the breath from her lungs and ignited the silver-red cord between their hearts into an inferno.
"Together, then," he growled against her lips.
They breached the outer gates of Oak haven without a single arrow fired in defense. The common guards at the timber stockade had been put into a magical trance, their bodies slumped against the wooden walls like discarded dolls, dreaming under a haze of Coven night-smoke.
Gideon kicked open the heavy iron-reinforced doors of the Great Hearth.
The cavernous hall was bathed in an eerie, pale-green twilight.
Standing around a massive, circular hearth of roaring green fire were four High Coven priestesses, draped in cascading robes of sea-serpent scales, their bone daggers raised over an altar of petrified wood.
Kneeling before the altar, stripped to the waist, was a tall, handsome male with Gideon’s broad shoulders and dark hair—but none of his scars.
Alpha Eamon.
And kneeling beside him, chained by her wrists with cold-iron shackles, was a young, wild-eyed she-wolf with fiery auburn hair and tears of pure rage streaming down her bloodied cheeks.
"Bind the marrow!" one of the priestesses chanted, her voice a screeching, dissonant hiss. "Bind the heir of the Timber to the daughter of the Southern Marsh! Secure the southern border against the Ashhound!"
Eamon looked up as the heavy doors slammed against the stone walls.
His golden eyes widened in sheer, breathless horror as his gaze locked onto the colossal, scarred figure standing in the doorway—and the two star-iron claymores humming with violet starlight in his brother's hands.
"G-Gideon?" Eamon choked out, scrambling backward on the stone floor.
Gideon stepped into the green light of the hall, his boots ringing like the bells of an executioner's cart.
"You always were a weak little whelp, Eamon," Gideon rumbled, the darkness in his voice promising absolute ruin. "You took our father's seat... and now you let sea-snakes tell you which woman to rape in your bed."
The four priestesses spun, their bone daggers crackling with necrotic lightning.
"Kill them!" the lead witch shrieked.
Lyra stepped past Gideon’s flank, her fangs fully bared, her violet eyes blazing with the wrath of the Ash Throne.
"Wrong answer," Lyra whispered.
And she closed her fist.