Keiser lounged against the arched window of the princess's temple, one of those tall, narrow openings where Olga often stood with her sacred, beast-corded bow and a quiver of arrows, always ready to strike at any rats or worse that crept near the temple at night.

He fussed with his bandage, keeping it wrapped tight.

It was a small act of caution to hide that he had been healed, and to conceal the faint trace of blood scripting that still marred his skin beneath the linen.

The knights on the temple wall threw him the kind of looks you gave a man you suspected of carrying secrets, they watched the room more than the chapel, more than the princess, as if any one of them might be the first to notice the wrongness in him.

A slow, hot ache crawled along his wrist. He could still feel the princess's mana on him, a residue like fragrance, subtle and insistent.

The deal they had struck hung between them as if it were a thing he could touch, a death curse wrapped in velvet and promises.

It was not like the gnawing, deep burning Muzio had felt when he bled mana from his own bones and wrote rune lines across his body. That pain had been brutal and blunt, a furnace that ate from the inside.

This was different... cooler, a frost that bit deep and precise. It stung at the edges, numbing then flaring again, the same sick, pinch he remembered from the north when the cold had been so absolute his skin forgot how to be skin and the wind felt like knives.

Each tiny pulse of the curse at his wrist reminded him of the bargain's price. He had agreed to the terms to buy leverage and to demonstrate usefulness. The curse would bind him as surely as any chain. And yet, cold, clean, cruel, its presence told him the same thing his dread had been whispering for days... the hour it promised was coming.

It was a reminder that the curse was there. The price was set. The clock, whether he liked it or not, had begun to count down.

Keiser's gaze shifted, landing on Lenko.

The boy hadn't stopped talking since that first dinner in the temple. It was as if once the initial tension had snapped, after the blows, the arrows, the confessions, the almost got caught moment, Lenko's tongue could no longer be held still.

His words had spilled forth that evening and hadn't stopped since, running like an overfilled river eager to carve through every silence.

He spoke of everything, the strange characters they had met on the road, the indignities of dungeon cells, the ridiculous way Tyron snored, the food he'd missed from home, and the hundred small injustices he'd been holding onto.

It was uneven, clumsy chatter, bursts of laughter breaking mid-sentence, hands slicing the air, his voice cracking on old memories only for him to laugh them off with a forced grin.

But beneath it, Keiser heard what the boy himself probably didn't notice.

A softer undercurrent. Relief. Joy. That unmistakable warmth of a younger brother finally able to bask in his sister's presence again.

Even if the days ahead offered nothing but shadows, even if their time together was measured against the curse that gnawed unseen at his wrist, for this moment, Lenko seemed unwilling to waste a breath on silence.

Keiser kept his head bowed, pretending disinterest, but his ear never strayed far from the boy's voice. He waited for a slip, some careless word about bargains made in secret, about the sigil that tied him to elven death magic.

But Lenko surprised him.

The boy's tongue, though unbound, was careful. Quick-witted. He skirted the danger of truth with the same ease he danced around Olga's sharp eyes, drawing her attention instead to half-remembered pranks of their childhood, or to the exaggerated tales of their journey through Hinnom.

And it worked.

Olga laughed, even scolded him fondly when his jokes bordered on insolence. She didn't see the faint shimmer of mana at his wrist, didn't notice how the air near him sometimes carried that faint hum, that wrongness that marked an elven curse.

Keiser, however, saw it. Felt it. The boy's words might shield him from his sister's suspicion, but they did nothing to ease the gnawing truth... Lenko's time was running short.

Tyron, on the other hand, was still adrift in the strangeness of luxury.

He had described it in half-whispers before exhaustion took him, marveling like a child at how the bed seemed to swallow him whole. He said he felt like he was drowning, not in water, but in the sheer softness of feathered pillows and blankets piled higher than he'd ever seen. It had been enough to lull him into the deepest sleep he'd had in years.

Yet beneath the chatter and comfort, the morning held its weight.

It had been marked by something more solemn, by a gesture that showed why the temple still commanded loyalty even amidst the capital's turmoil.

The princess had granted mercy to Jim and Jill, the twin brothers who had borne them safely to the capital. Wagoners by trade, the pair were not warriors or nobles, only old men whose lives were tied to the road. For three days they had steered their wagon faithfully from Hinnom, through valleys and river crossings, guiding the Keiser, Lenko and Tyron with a precision only those seasoned by decades of travel could manage.

Their service ended not with thanks but with suspicion. Upon entering the capital, their wagon was broken and overturned by the knights, trampled into useless wood and splinters under the guise of 'investigation.' To men like Jim and Jill, it was more than a wagon destroyed, it was their livelihood stripped away.

The princess had heard them, and where others might have let the matter rot, she had answered.

With the temple's authority, she gifted the old wagoners a new cart, finer than the one they had lost, wheels banded with stronger steel and wood polished smooth. It was not just compensation, it was restoration, a lifeline cast to men who would otherwise have been left behind.

And so, when they departed, Jim and Jill bowed low, their eyes glistening as they promised the road would always remain open for her name. Keiser watched the exchange quietly. The gesture had cost the princess little, perhaps, yet the weight it carried lingered in the chamber long after the wagoners had gone.

Lenko's banter, Tyron's awe, the princess's mercy, all of it wove into a strange, uneasy calm. It was a fragile peace, enough that Keiser knew it could not last.

In a city readying itself for bloodshed, such kindness felt like a pause in the rhythm of doom.

A pause, that was easily broken.

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