CHAPTER 457: 457: WHEN THE VEIL THINS

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Evening does not fall in the forest; it climbs, one branch at a time, until even brave men decide the day is over.

The assassins did not care about brave men. They cared about roads and orders and the way blood moves when a heart is cut crooked. They moved like seven-star promises: quiet and fast and without kindness for themselves, which is the only kind of cruelty that never gets tired.

"I see three," Serit said, which meant he saw more. "And one shadow that should not be where shadows are."

Mia did not answer. She was too busy keeping her breath even through a tear in her ribs that made everything taste copper. She moved her line three paces left because three paces left was where the ground would make a wrong-footed step cost extra. Thea’s second made a clicking sound with her teeth that could have been disappointment or admiration. Thea held her blade low and let her mouth be busy with the kind of words that keep people standing when their knees want to go soft.

"Stay on me if you want to live," Thea said. "If you want to die, tell me first so I can look at you when you do it and decide if it was pretty."

"You are so kind," Mia said without looking at her, and then the forest stopped pretending.

They came out of the ground as much as out of the trees. Their plates were blacked, not oiled. Their edges did not gleam; they drank light. Knots were tied along their cords that would have told a careful reader which one of them liked to kill throats and which liked to kill legs and which did not care so long as someone else said now

.

Seven-star is not a number. It is a way of deciding you have no soft parts.

The first killed a tree because the tree had the bad grace to be between him and a target and the second slipped, quiet as a thought you are ashamed of, under Thea’s first parry and nicked the leather knot of her scabbard so her second draw would tangle. The third did not come at all, which meant he would be the most important later.

"What a pretty mess you’ve brought me to," Thea said, smiling in a way that made the smile a knife for someone else to walk into.

"You came yourself," Mia said, the world narrowed to three steps front and back and the way the ground tilts under your foot when someone wants you to fall. "Don’t blame me for your feet."

Blades clapped. Cord sang. Someone who had been nineteen an hour ago made the sound people make when their body realizes it is not whole anymore. The assassins did not shout. They breathed like carpenters.

Mia’s line bent the way a reed bends and did not break. Thea’s ten folded around the gap and handed it back like a debt paid in full. It was not enough. It would never be enough. Seven-star makes math easy.

They held anyway.

It was in the grip of that hold — the one that costs a thumb, then a little more, then the knowledge of how many men you started with — that the Ward sighed.

It did not crash. It did not flare. It came apart like a well-made knot under a patient hand. The sound it made was the kind stone makes when it decides to be honest about what it is. The forest stopped being a liar. The seam stopped being a conversation. The mountain stepped out of its own story and showed itself.

For a moment, everyone forgot they were busy trying not to die.

The assassins looked past their hands. Their heads cocked, almost amused, as if a door they had been told they could not open had politely held itself for them. Mia’s people looked too, because you cannot not look when a thing you have been looking for turns and says, Here I am, if you are clever enough to see.

On the mountain, Shadeclaw’s jaw lifted. Silvershadow’s hand closed, once, then let go, once. On the west ridge, Vexor nearly dropped his glass.

"Princess Mia," Vexor blurted, voice cracking into adulthood. "Princess—Mia—there!"

Needle grabbed his collar and pulled him down before the bow-shaped cut of the forest could decide to fill his chest with something new. "You yell like you’re on a porch," he hissed. "Shut—"

"—we have to help," Vexor spat, ferocious as an idiot with all the right loyalties. "Look at her."

Silvershadow’s eyes stayed on the lines, not the faces. A hundred drones moved when his finger turned. He did not look at Vexor. He did not look at the princess. He looked at the numbers and the time.

"Our lord will be out soon," he said. "He will decide. We do not know if those lines are friend or foe tonight."

"Foe?" Vexor said, wild. "You don’t know her. She is his. Maybe not his... his yet—but she is. She’s the princess of Scarlet. If she dies and he can’t stop it—"

"Enough," Shadeclaw grated. The world had taught Shadeclaw how to be a wall; it had not taught him to enjoy it. His eyes slid once to the high altar where the wind was the wrong sort of polite. Then to the hall where a shell burned like coal in winter. Then back to the forest where seven-star men were writing small lessons with other men’s bodies. He made a sound deep in his chest that meant decision.

"First ring forward," he said. "Five-star drones with me. We push. We don’t break. Silvershadow—hold the second ring at the ramp and watch the top. If this is a trick, it does not get through."

The lines moved like water under thought. The first cohort broke into tens and hundreds, then re-formed into a new mouth that bit in many places at once. They went down the slope at a trot that was not in a hurry and in a silence that said they were tired of the way the day had been going.