Read Chapter 28: The Debt Repaid

The morning light was thin and gray when Kael appeared at the infirmary door, a travel pack slung over one shoulder and a sword at his hip that I’d never seen him carry before. His jaw was set, his eyes clear, and he looked at me like he’d already made peace with something I hadn’t been told.

“You’re not coming,” I said before he could speak.

“I am.”

“Kael, your arm—” Cedric started, gesturing with his own still-slung limb.

“My arm is fine.” Kael flexed the fingers of his right hand, the one that had been shattered in the altar chamber. I’d watched him wince through every bandage change. I’d seen the way he favored it when he thought no one was looking. “It’s healed enough.”

“That’s a lie,” Sera said flatly from the corner where she was sorting dried meat into waxed cloth. “And you’re a terrible liar.”

“Then I’ll be a terrible liar who’s alive,” Kael said. He turned to me, and something in his expression softened. “Elara. I owe you my life.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I was in the Wardens,” he said quietly. “Before the academy. Before Voss bought my loyalty with promises he never kept. I did things I’m not proud of. And when I tried to walk away, he sent hunters after me. I was bleeding out in a ditch when you found me. Do you remember?”

I did. It was the first time I’d ever seen him—not at the academy, not at a feast or a trial, but broken and desperate and human. I’d hidden him in the stables, fed him scraps, and never asked what he’d done to earn the knives at his back.

“I remember,” I said.

“Then you know I’ve been running from that debt ever since.” He stepped closer, and I caught the faint smell of leather and horses on him—the smell of my own childhood, of hay and honest work. “Let me repay it now.”

There was no arguing with him. I’d learned that much about Kael in the weeks we’d spent fighting side by side. When he decided something was his responsibility, he carried it to the grave.

So I nodded, and he smiled—a real smile, rare and quick as a summer storm—and then we were moving.

The proving ground lay beyond the eastern ridge, a place Aldric had marked on our maps with a single trembling finger. “No human rider has walked that path,” he’d warned. “The markers will test you. The land itself will test you. And if Ignis is truly wild, he may not know you when you find him.”

I’d told him I understood. I hadn’t.

The first two days were quiet. Cedric and Sera took point, clearing branches and scouting ahead, while Kael stayed close to my side. My ribs still ached from the altar chamber, and every step sent a dull pulse of pain through my chest, but I didn’t complain. I couldn’t afford to slow us down.

On the third day, the forest changed.

The trees grew taller, older, their bark marked with spirals and runes that seemed to shift when I looked at them directly. Aldric’s lessons echoed in my head—*read the markers, don’t fight them, let them guide you*—but the markings weren’t like anything he’d shown me. They weren’t warnings. They were names.

Hundreds of names, carved deep into the wood. Rider names, I realized. Dragon names. A history of everyone who had ever walked this path before us.

“They’re all dead,” Sera said softly, running her fingers over a cluster of carved letters. “Every single one.”

“They walked so we could walk,” Kael said. “That’s not death. That’s a road.”

I wanted to believe him.

The attack came at dusk.

We were crossing a narrow ravine, a rope bridge swaying over a drop that disappeared into darkness, when the first arrow whistled past my ear and embedded itself in Cedric’s pack. He swore, grabbing the rope with his good hand, and then the forest around us erupted with movement.

Figures in gray—Voss’s remaining loyalists, the ones who’d scattered after his fall—poured from the treeline on both sides of the gorge. There were at least a dozen of them, armed with bows and blades, and they had us pinned.

“Ambush!” Sera shouted, already drawing her short sword. “They knew we’d come this way!”

I didn’t have time to wonder how. A woman lunged at me from the bridge’s far end, her blade gleaming in the dying light, and I met her with my own steel. The clang rang out across the ravine, and suddenly the bridge was a storm of metal and motion.

We fought our way forward, Cedric cursing as his sling caught on a rope, Sera moving like water between our enemies, Kael at my back covering every opening. But there were too many. I saw one of the gray-clad figures reach the anchor point of the bridge and raise his axe.

“No!” I screamed.

The axe fell. The ropes snapped.

The bridge lurched beneath us, and the world tilted sideways.

I remember falling—the wind screaming past my ears, the dark gorge rushing up to meet me—and then a hand closed around my wrist.

Kael.

He was hanging from a broken rope length, his other hand wrapped around my arm with a grip that should have been impossible for a man with his wounds. His teeth were gritted, his face purple with strain, and below us the ravine waited like an open mouth.

“Climb!” he shouted. “Climb, Elara!”

I tried to find a handhold, but the rope was frayed, the rock wall smooth and slick with mist. I couldn’t. I couldn’t climb.

“Let go,” I said. “You’ll fall too.”

“I know.”

“Kael, let go!”

His eyes met mine, and I saw something there I’d never seen before. Peace. A terrible, quiet peace.

“I told you,” he said, his voice barely a rasp. “I owe you my life. Let me pay the debt.”

“No—” I started, but he was already moving.

With a strength that must have come from somewhere beyond his broken body, he swung his legs up, hooking them around the rope, and then he pushed me—shoved me hard against the rock face, where a narrow ledge caught my boots and held me.

I looked up in time to see the rope give way.

Kael fell.

I screamed his name until my throat tore, until the gray figures above faded into the dark, until there was no sound left in the world except the wind and the distant, terrible silence where he should have been.

They found me an hour later, Sera and Cedric, having climbed down a safer path after cutting their way through the remnants of the ambush. They pulled me up, wrapped me in a blanket, and said nothing about the tears I couldn’t stop.

“He paid his debt,” Sera said finally, her voice gentle. “Elara. He chose this.”

I wanted to be angry at her for saying it. But she was right. Kael had chosen. He’d walked onto that bridge knowing what he was going to do.

And now he was gone.

I sat on the edge of the ravine as the stars came out, clutching the only thing I had left of him—the sword he’d carried, which had somehow survived the fall, tangled in the broken ropes at the cliff’s edge.

The markers on the trees glowed faintly in the dark, and I realized one of them had changed. A new name had been carved into the bark, fresh and bright as a wound.

*Kael.*

He was part of this place now. Part of the road.

I rose to my feet, sword in hand, and looked toward the proving ground. Ignis was out there, wild and free and waiting. The ritual was incomplete. The dragons were dying.

And I still had a promise to keep.

I sheathed Kael’s sword at my hip beside my own, and I started walking.