PROLOGUE

The cage jolted over a rut in the road, and the iron bars shivered with it.

Cold rode in the gaps, thin as wire. It slid under his nails, into the seams of his boots, into the bruises that ringed his wrists where the manacles had been. Southern winter was not the clean knife of the north. It was damp and patient. It crept. It waited. It learned you.

He kept his arms wrapped tight around himself anyway. Not for warmth. For the feeling of holding something that was still his.

Outside the bars, torchlight bobbed and smeared through drifting snow. Beyond that, the silhouettes of people moved in a disciplined line—guards in orderly ranks, officials in their neat furs, witnesses who had been told where to stand and when to breathe. A Spire procession. A ceremony of ending.

Raspear had dressed the road for it.

Black stone markers rose at measured intervals, their edges polished by wind and years. Between them, the land spread low and open—reeds flattened under frost, stretches of pale sand that took on a dull gold where the weak sun touched it, and dark rock that drank the light. Banners snapped from tall poles along the approach to the keep: black cloth edged in gold thread, the color of warning and wealth braided together. Even in winter, Raspear insisted on looking rich.

The cage itself had an open face, a mouth that would not close. Iron all around him, except the front, where the road ran forward into whiteness and the beacons thinned into nothing.

He tried not to look there.

It was easier to look backward, into memory.

Her hands, for instance—small, always cold, always stained with ink because she liked to copy old verse when she could steal time from duty. She had laughed once at the idea that ink ever truly left the skin, and held her fingertips up to his face like proof. He remembered the smell of the page she’d been writing on—dry paper, old binding glue, and something faintly sweet from the lamp oil she stole from the kitchen so no one would ask why she needed more.

He remembered her mouth forming his name like it was a secret only she was allowed to keep.

He did not laugh anymore.

A bell rang somewhere ahead. Not the harsh alarm of danger, but a clear, measured chime—signal for a halt. The wheels creaked, then slowed. The cage rocked once and settled.

Boots crunched on packed snow. Rope creaked as it was tightened. The low murmur of the crowd pressed back behind a line of cord grew thinner, as if the sound itself had learned where it was permitted.

Then a voice rose, crisp as parchment.

“Attend.”

He lifted his head.

A clerk stood before the cage with a bound register in his hands, thick enough to stop a blade. His cheeks were red with cold; his expression was not. He read as if the words were only words.

The charge was read once, formally, and would not be read again.

“…rape and murder,” the clerk said, and the crowd made the small sound crowds made when they were given permission to despise.

The clerk did not name the other thing. The thing people stared at as if it were rot. The thing they whispered about as if whispers could scrub it clean. It was not illegal—not in Haldrim. Not anymore. The old bloodlines had done worse and written poems about it. That had been then. This was now.

Now it was a disgust.

Now it was the kind of stain people wanted removed, whether the law had a word for it or not.

He had loved her anyway.

That was the part no clerk could read.

He had loved her first as a boy loves the only person who never laughs when he stumbles. Then as a man loves the one person who knows his thoughts before he speaks them. Then as a fool loves fire when he has lived too long in cold.

He had been sorry even before the end—sorry for the taboo, sorry for the hunger that had made them both reckless, sorry for every time he held her and felt, beneath her breath, the tremble of fear she refused to give a name.

The fear had named itself in time.

A child.

A secret that would not stay secret.

He had promised her—I won’t tell. I won’t let them hurt you. He had meant it with everything he had.

He had failed anyway.

She had chosen her own ending. He knew that as surely as he knew his own heartbeat. She had not died with his hands on her throat, not with a blade between her ribs. She had died with panic in her belly and shame on her tongue, because she could not bear the thought of the world looking at her the way it looked at him now.

He could not make anyone believe that. He could not even make himself forgive it.

A figure stepped forward through the orderly press of people, and the air seemed to tighten around her the way it tightened before lightning.

Nyxa Amunet did not wear a crown. Keepresses in the Spires did not need them. Her authority sat on her shoulders the way her cloak did—heavy, certain, perfectly placed. Black fur at the collar, gold clasp at the throat. Snow clung to the edge of her mantle and melted there, as if even winter knew better than to linger.

She looked at him as one might look at a door left open in a storm: with distaste, not rage.

The clerk lowered the register. Guards tightened their grips on spear shafts. The crowd leaned forward as one creature.

Nyxa Amunet spoke, and the words fell into the silence with practiced weight.

“By my seat and sworn order, I—Nyxa Amunet, Keepress of Raspear—sentence you to death by Nightwalk.”

No flourish. No shout. A sentence in every sense of the word.

Nightwalk.

They called it that in the south because it sounded clean. A walk. A choice. Something a person did with their own feet.

In the Holds, he’d heard, they called it the Sending and didn’t pretend it was anything else.

Nyxa turned her head slightly.

A second figure stepped forward, smaller than the Keepress and somehow heavier for it. Cloaked in black that drank torchlight, face half-hidden beneath a hood, hands bare in the cold. A thin cord of gold lay across the chest like a quiet warning. A Nott.

In Raspear, people lowered their eyes for a Nott the way they lowered their voices in a sickroom. Not out of love. Out of caution. Out of the old fear of Lilith’s attention—fear dressed up as devotion so it could be carried in public without shame.

The Nott spoke in no other tongue.

“Ljosvorn med ther,” the Nott said.

The crowd answered at once, like a blade drawn from its sheath.

“Myrkur tekur allt.”

The words rolled over him like a cold wave, familiar and terrible. He had heard them as greetings. As farewells. As a shouted thing before brawls in taverns when men wanted to feel brave. Here, on this road, with this cage and this open mouth of iron, they sounded like something else entirely.

Nyxa Amunet watched him for the length of a breath, as if measuring whether his fear was proper. Then she nodded once to the guards.

“Begin,” she said.

The wheels started again.

The procession moved.

The Spire road ran straight, because Spires believed straight lines were a kind of virtue. Beacon-posts stood at intervals, iron baskets on stone pedestals, built for flame. In daylight they looked harmless. In daylight, most things looked harmless.

He watched the beacons pass and thought, absurdly, of her finger tracing the carved marks on one of the stones the last time they’d ridden this way. Old hands, she’d said. Old words. They wanted the road to remember them.

He wondered if the road would remember him.

As they went, the crowd thinned. Witnesses dropped away in pairs and knots, their duty done, their curiosity satisfied. Officials rode behind in clean silence. Guards stayed, because guards always stayed until the end.

The Nott stayed too, cloak trailing like a shadow.

No one spoke to him.

No one needed to.

The closer they came to the border, the fewer trees there were. Snow drifted in broad smooth sheets, broken only by the road and the posts and the occasional low marker half-buried in ice. The sky grew flatter. The wind grew meaner. The beacons grew farther apart.

It was nothing he could point to and say here is where it changes.

And yet it changed.

The last beacon before the border stood taller than the rest, its iron basket empty, its stone pedestal carved with symbols worn soft by time. Men had once believed those marks mattered. Men still carved them anyway, because some habits were too old to kill.

The cage slowed. The wheels stopped.

Ahead, the world ended in a line that was not a line.

They called it the Nightline. The border of knowing. The edge beyond which maps became prayers and stories became warnings. For thousands of years, nothing came out of it. That was what everyone said with the satisfied certainty of people repeating something they’d never tested.

They treated it like a superstition and used it like a tool.

Still, the guards did not cross the final marker with their boots.

The Nott stepped closer to the open face of the cage.

He could see nothing beyond. Not trees, not snow, not even darkness the way night was dark. It was as if the world had been cut clean away and no one had bothered to stitch it back.

The Nott said nothing more. Lilith did not bargain, and neither did those who served her.

A guard reached into the cage with a key and unlocked the last shackle at his ankle. The metal fell away, heavy, final. The guard’s hand lingered an instant, as if he might touch the condemned and decided against it.

Nyxa Amunet watched from a measured distance, untouched by wind, untouched by need. Her justice did not require her to look away.

He stood.

His legs shook. He hated them for it. He wanted to be steady for her—for the dead girl in his mind, for the ink-stained fingers that would never touch him again.

He stepped to the edge of the cage.

The open face waited.

Behind him, the crowd—smaller now, only the necessary people—held its breath.

He thought, wildly, of turning back. Of throwing himself at Nyxa’s feet. Of shouting until his voice broke, until the truth was louder than their certainty.

She chose it. She chose it. I loved her. I am sorry.

He could already hear the answer. It would not matter. It would never matter. The law did not sort love from rot. It only cut away what offended it.

He looked into the Nightline.

For a heartbeat, he imagined warmth there. The warmth of her skin, the warmth of her breath against his throat as she whispered his name as if it were a prayer.

Then the cold returned, sharp and real.

His feet moved.

One step down from iron to snow.

One step forward into absence.

The world swallowed him as neatly as a book closing.

There was no scream.

There was no sound at all.

The guards waited, spears angled toward nothing. The Nott stood motionless, black against white. Nyxa Amunet watched as if she expected the ending to perform itself properly.

Nothing came out.

At last, Nyxa turned away. The ceremony was complete. The stain was gone. Raspear could pretend to be clean again.

Behind her, the Nott lifted a hand one final time, marking the empty air where a person had been.

“Ljosvorn med ther,” the Nott said.

The guards, the officials, the few remaining witnesses answered because answering was what people did when they did not want to think.

“Myrkur tekur allt.”

The wheels creaked as the cage was turned back toward Raspear.

Its open mouth faced the road again.

It was empty.