Sleep eluded him.

Try as he might, even rest refused to find him. It would be easy enough to blame it on this place. Fia sheltered no fond memories of it, the months that had passed within that cell, the hours they spent bleeding him, trying to make his magic work without his consent. They never could, but it didn’t stop their continued attempts. 

He met Mikko here for the first time. Isak came later at the capital, as did Simo and Toivo. But Mikko saw the end of the empire’s experiments upon him here. And Fia had nearly died trying to take his head for it. They had already forced their contract on him before his arrival at the Mausoleum, but Fia was still new to it then. Still thought himself beyond breaking, the one still capable of the breaking. 

Two days spent gasping for breath on the stone floors of this prison. That was what his efforts had earned him. 

Never in his life had he ached like that. 

And now, he was here again. 

Fia didn't know why the emperor had issued such an order. Something must have transpired while they were at Syehnäki, while he was out chasing down Eli. Ithíofan had nothing to offer him on that matter, but the wolf had spent as much time inside the shadows of the inn as he had outside. 

Mikko was no fool either. He was as adept in magic as any in Aurinon's armies and had ways of concealment that Fia would need more time than he had to pick apart. 

What was there to do about it now, though? 

Upstairs, the guardsmen had put themselves up in one of the old rooms used for deliberation, where they chewed on dried meat and day-old bread around a small fire that barely bled smoke thanks to Mikko's magic. Fia had made his report, and Mikko had chased him out of the room, stating nothing further was needed from him, to find some other place nearby to rest in quiet. Something Fia hadn't argued against. Being around them in this place left his nerves raw and drained him of any desire to stay within their vicinity. A feeling he had thought himself beyond at this point, but he knew as well as any that old wounds had a habit of aching when least expected. 

He had left them, Ithíofan trailing in his wake, and taken up in one of the old magisterial offices. Molding books lined the shelves along the walls here, gaps in places where some had been taken. Either pilfered or deemed important enough to take to the new capital building. A table stood at the center of the room with the same sort of dignity found in ancient ruins, heavy with dust and history, things not to be spoken of but lived through nonetheless.

But no matter where he sat, whether on the floor, a table, or the windowsill, Fia could not quiet the restlessness gnawing away at him with a relentless voraciousness usually saved for starvation. He paced the room. Wrote apologies in the dust on the table only to erase them with a swipe of his hand. He looked out the window and counted the flowers that burst like new love along the crumbling wall. Traced the line of the Ärmeppo River as it ran beneath the Mausoleum and out toward the capital. Sunlight tried its best to penetrate the grime on the windows but failed and left only a burnished gold, dim and dirty, on the chamber floor. 

It was obvious now that the Guard was waiting for nightfall. 

A fact that did nothing to calm the unease coiling up tight within his gut. 

Fia exhaled. Ithíofan wagged his tail in the doorway, then trotted out into the shadows of the hallway. 

“Ilo?”

The crow flew into the room and settled herself on the table. She hopped left, then right before finally stretching her wings and clacking her beak in her characteristic laugh. And as quickly as she had entered the room, she left. Back out into the hall, where Fia could still sense Ithíofan waiting in the darkness. 

“This is a lot of nonsense for the mood I am currently in,” Fia said to the shadows. 

More clacking.

“Very funny,” Fia muttered. But he followed the crow out into the hallway nonetheless. 

She flew circles around the ceiling as she waited for him. When he appeared, she dove in front of him, swooped back up, and set off down the hall. The firelight from the guardsmen’s room set the shadows dancing on the wall across from it. He walked forward, slowed by Ithíofan swerving in and out of the darkness, bouncing from one wall to another, all in some game being played between him and his fellow wolves. Fia could feel the rest of the pack racing in the shadows, teasing both him and Ithíofan. 

“So, that’s the plan then?”

Toivo.

“It is,” Mikko said, a heaviness to his voice that made Fia pause. Ithíofan stood still as death before him, ears pricked toward the room.

“And you think he’s going to go along with it?” Isak, his mouth full.

“No, I don’t,” Mikko replied. “Not if he were given any choice. But he will follow orders whether he likes them or not. Just as he's always done.”

“We could just ask the thieving bastard,” Simo said.

A grunt from Mikko. “Men like him don’t talk.”

“Neither do the dead,” Toivo laughed.

“They do when you have someone who can control them.”

“Right nasty business, Mikko. Even for a blood knight,” Toivo said.

“It’s the emperor’s orders. A dead thief and an egg found. We don’t return until we have both.”

Ilo perched on his shoulder. She pecked at Fia’s hair, delicately pulling on the strands. He let her. 

So, that was it. That was why they waited for nightfall.

Fia turned and walked back down the hall, drawing the shadows up and around him with a few flicks of his fingers. He went past the debate room where sleep denied him, down to the far end, where the hall curved around the inside of the building and swung its way back up along the opposite side. He moved without hesitation, purpose defining his every step, the shadows soaking up every sound he made. They couldn’t know what he was about to attempt. 

That he valued a thief’s life more than a dragon’s egg. 

More than the emperor’s wishes. 

He took the stairs that sank into the Mausoleum's abyss, where memories waited to torment him. He opened the door to them and breathed in the staleness of the air as though it were five years ago and not three hours. 

Ilo launched herself from his shoulder and flew into the thief's cell, her body no more than mist as it passed through the iron bars. She landed on the floor beside him and stared up at Fia. All around the room, the butterflies still danced. 

Eli stood at the cell's door, Athairólthain still wrapped around his wrists. Waiting there like he had expected this moment.

“How did you contact her?” Fia asked. 

“Me contact her?” the thief retorted. “She approached me. Had some marvelous stories to tell about you, how you saved her nest from a group of boys too rich and too bored to know the difference between cruelty and fun. She’s quite fond of you, you know, Fia.”

His heart raced. Every second ate at him, tiny teeth digging into his flesh, telling him that time mattered. Time had always mattered. 

He pulled to a halt before the thief, a set of iron bars all that separated them. The key burned in his pocket. His chest filled with ice. 

“Tell me you know where the egg is,” Fia said. Desperate. 

Eli smiled at him. “Whatever are you —”

“Tell me you know!”

The thief blinked, caught somewhere between surprise and caution. 

“Please,” Fia pleaded quietly. 

Eli took a breath, weighing the honesty of Fia's words, then said, “I can take you there."

The whole world stopped burning. 

Fia pressed his head against the bars and exhaled heavily. “We don’t have time.”

“Naturally,” Eli responded, far too light-hearted for the situation. 

All Fia could do was laugh. A miserable thing that burned its way out of his chest and into the air.

“Gods damn you,” he muttered as he fished the key out of his pocket and shoved it into the lock. “Athairólthain, enough.”

Before Eli could comment, the snake dropped from his wrists into the shadows without even a splash, and Fia pulled open the door. He grabbed Eli by the forearm and dragged him out of the cell. Everything in him ached. But he needed to get the egg. That was his last command. His overarching command.

The egg, not death. 

They hadn’t forced that on him yet. 

“We’re leaving, and you’re taking me to the egg,” Fia said.

“Right, about that —”

“Not another word.”

“Is this the door?”

“Something like it.”

“All right, the egg then.”

“The egg.”

He led Eli to the other end of the jailer’s room and pressed his hand to a stone with several scratches upon it. Not much different from any number of other stones in the wall, but beneath Fia’s touch, a lock unlatched itself somewhere deeper down the hall. 

“You have been here before,” Eli commented.

“We’re not talking about this.”

The thief laughed. “All right. We won’t talk about it. But what shall we talk about then?”

“About how you are going to lead me to this egg so I’m not forced to pull your soul from Death’s hands.”’

“Ah, so that’s what this is all about.”

“Would you prefer I killed you?”

At the end of another hallway, saturated in shadow and smelling of salt and rot, a door with an iron rose embedded in its wood stood guard. 

“Not really,” Eli admitted. 

“Good,” Fia muttered, wrapping his free hand around the door's handle and wrenching it open. 

On the other side, the Ärmeppo River cut through a wide tunnel and fed into the open air not more than a hundred meters to the left. Along the narrow walkway rising above its banks, another line of cells, iron rusted and refuse piled within them. More death. More endings. He led Eli toward the opening. 

Ilo darted in front of him. She squawked, beating her wings in his face and forcing him to halt. A growl tore itself out of Fia's chest, full of frustration, as he batted at the crow.

"That's enough, Ilo!"

Around him, the shadows bubbled. Ithíofan paced just outside the tunnel, his paws leaving not a single print along the river's edge. 

His foot caught on something. Fia glanced down to see several black tendrils curling around his boot. He immediately looked at Eli, who grinned at him without a lick of shame. 

“You and I have something we both want,” the thief said as the shadows climbed higher. They were already threading themselves through the fabric of his pants. 

“What are you doing?” 

It wasn’t ice in his chest but fury. Here he was, trying to save them both, and how did Eli see fit to repay him? 

His fingers tightened around Eli’s arm, but the thief only smiled serenely at him. The shadows kept climbing. Ilo circled around him, cawing. 

“Do you trust me?” Eli asked. 

An honest question. Fia’s heart stumbled as he looked into Eli’s eyes. No deception waited for him there. And it would have been so easy to convince himself something like it existed. That all of this was the result of his own folly, that he really was no more than a fool, the empire’s puppet. And yet, Eli looked at him with nothing more than a stalwart belief in what they both were. 

Alive.

“What are you going to do?” 

Eli shrugged as the shadows slipped beneath Fia’s hand and peeled his fingers away, one by one. It felt like a loss. Not in the way a battle could be, but a heart. He glanced at his wrist as the black tendrils coiled around him, around the bars of the cell behind him, tethering him in place. The wolves had gone silent. Fia reached into the darkness and found only regret and apologies brushing up against him. 

“I’m saving you, and then you are going to help me return the egg,” Eli replied as he leaned in, far too close. Ilo cried out again and shot toward the forest as the sun began its slow descent toward the earth. His fingers skimmed Fia’s cheek, gentle enough to break the hardest of intentions. “I’ve woven a piece of my own shadow in those threads.”

Everything Fia wanted to say died on his tongue. Something told him to fight. Something else told him to listen. 

Eli’s mouth moved against Fia’s. Not quite a kiss. Not yet. 

“You will know where I am,” he whispered. 

His heart hammered desperately. The shadows consumed him. This was child’s play. A trap Fia could escape easily, yet he chose to listen even as his lungs froze. 

“I will hunt you down,” Fia said. And it hurt to say it. Because Fia knew every word of it to be true.

Eli smiled against his mouth, and Fia felt the full curve of it and all of its amusement. Oh, how sweet it tasted, how badly Fia wished this wasn’t a declaration of war. 

“Have a little faith, Fiarac Basdlan,” Eli murmured as he kissed him. 

It was soft, and it was honest, and it was more than enough to make Fia ache in ways he hadn't thought possible yet.

When Eli drew back, the smile lingered on his lips. He brushed the hair from Fia’s eyes as the shadows pulled him back toward the cell.

“Until I see you again, my dear knight.”