Chapter 6 — River of Brass, River of Green (Part I)
Alarms split Giltspire into pieces of sound—sharp brass peals ricocheting along bridges, through market awnings, down stairwells slick with rain. Witness-lamps blinked in a relentless pattern, glass pupils snapping from calm to accusation. The city moved like a machine finding its teeth.
"Left!" Nia shouted.
Kael didn't argue. He vaulted a fruit stall, boots punching through a pyramid of persimmons. Juice burst up his calves like blood. Behind him, a line of golden helms boiled into the alley, the Chancellor's enforcers marching in slicing cadence—tower shields lifted, glass eyes mounted at their tops swiveling left-right-left like the city's own pupils.
Taye hit the ground in a hands-first slide, laughing and wheezing. "We can't run every time a bell rings!"
"Watch me," Kael said.
Abyssfang was warm in his hand—too warm—its hum vibrating through the bones in his wrist. Since the Ninth Hall, the sword had learned a new hunger; every time the brand over his heart pulsed, the blade purred as if they shared a throat.
We are learning to breathe together, it murmured, pleased. In-out, bite-swallow.
"Less poetry," Kael said. He put his shoulder into a door that did not want to be a door and made it one. The spice-house exploded around them—racks of cinnamon sticks, pyramids of pepper black as night, star anise bright as little, fragrant shuriken. A woman with frost-white locks and copper skin hurled a scoop at Nia and yelled in a language Kael didn't know. Nia hurled a coin back with unerring accuracy; it clinked in the woman's apron pocket. The woman blinked, then yanked a lever.
The back wall swung open to a narrow chute.
"Friends in low places," Nia said, and shoved Taye through.
Kael caught the last glimpse of the golden helms flooding the shop. The enforcers' shields came up in unison. A humming tone loaded the air until Kael's teeth ached.
"Go!" he barked, and jumped.
The chute wasn't built for dignity. They tumbled through dark on a river of dust and cardamom, spit out into a canal tunnel where water moved the color of money left in rain. He cracked his shoulder on the stone and bit down a curse. Taye splashed face-first and popped back up coughing, blue-tipped locks plastered to his skull. Nia landed like a coin, already upright, crimson-dyed locks bound in a river-mat coil.
Above, the shop door screamed off its hinges.
"Downstream," Nia said, already running.
"Are you sure this flows out?" Taye said, groping for his feet. His shadow hooked his elbow and pulled; he staggered upright. "Because if we circle back into the Chancellor's bath, I'm filing a complaint."
"The Broker's Rest has three escape maps hidden in its ledger spines," Nia said, eyes flicking along the tunnel joints. "Two are lies. This one is a lie about a lie."
"Great," Taye panted. "My favorite kind of truth."
Water slurped along the walls. Giltspire didn't smell like rot, even down here; it smelled like wet bronze and candle smoke, like dye leaking from bolts of cloth, like cinnamon someone had spilled in rage. Kael could feel the city's heat under the stone; he could also feel the cold center of the brand pulsing, trying to sync the rhythm of his heart to the bell outside. He squeezed the sword hilt until the blade's laugh steadied him, stupid as it was.
A shout echoed ahead. A figure stood at the tunnel bend, the light behind her turning her to a cutout of blade and braid. Bone beads in storm patterns. Locks dyed sea-dusk blue in the middle.
"Abeni," Kael called, breath sawing.
She flicked two fingers: hurry.
They pounded up beside her. Abeni didn't ask if they had been followed; she didn't need to. The alarm bells answered for them.
"I picked the fastest road the city hasn't paved yet," she said, already turning. "Keep up or don't."
"And Sefira?" Nia asked.
Abeni's mouth ticked in what might one day be a smile. "Ahead. She swore she'd meet us at the Hollows' Gate if we paid her to hate us there as much as here."
"Translation," Taye said between breaths. "She's doing this for money."
"Everyone does," Abeni said. "Except madmen. Or lovers."
"I'm both," Taye said. "Ow."
They ran.
At the next junction, a web of chains cut the tunnel—old security grid, iron links etched with warnings in a dozen languages. Abeni drew and cut once; the grid sighed apart like it had been waiting for someone to ask. They splashed through.
Boots behind. Closer now. Kael felt the cadence of trained feet—four squads, maybe five, moving in an interlocking pattern that would pinch them at the next Y-split. Nia must have felt it too; she flung her arm out and pointed them down a tighter, uglier cut. The water here choked on trash—cane stalks, palm leaves, a drowned mask from some festival. The ceiling lowered until Kael could feel his locks brush the slime.
The first arrow came out of the dark singing like a lie. Kael saw it only because the glass barb caught one of the stray Witness-lamps' reflections. He turned his head; it shaved a lock-tip white and went on. Abyssfang laughed: Missed you, handsome.
Three more arrows. Nia's dagger flicked, point-to-shaft, and both missiles clacked stone. Taye's shadow reached up, wrong as a hand from a mirror, and plucked the third out of air, then handed it back with a little bow. Taye tucked it behind his ear, which made no sense, but the humor made breath come easier.
They burst from the tunnel into a cistern big enough to swallow a small palace. Lanterns hung from catwalks in a constellation of jury-rigged light. Boats slept on their bellies, tarps like blankets. People looked up, hands going to knives instinctively, half the faces masked with ash or paint—Verdant jungle traders, island sailors in linen with green-dyed locks, desert folk swathed in indigo, ice-landers with braid-crowns gleaming with seal oil. A market even here. A city is a city anywhere there is water and a place to hide.
"Keep calm," Nia murmured. "We're a mood, not a riot."
"Too late," Taye said, gaze snagging to something above. "We've got the wrong mood."
Witnesses assembled at the far catwalk, white-on-gold robes shedding water like feathers. The lead's glass eye clicked and focused, iris narrowing until it was a needle.
"Kael Omari," it intoned, voice carrying with unnatural ease. "Submit to lawful seizure of your person and the foreign bond within."
"Foreign this," Abeni muttered, and leapt.
The cistern turned into a map of edges. Abeni rode the catwalk rail, sword flashing in bright staccato; Nia vanished, then reappeared where her knives needed to be; Taye's shadow drank the lamps' light greedily and turned it into ropes. Kael took the stairs three at a time, Abyssfang singing a rail-thin laugh that made the hair on his arms rise.
An enforcer met him at the landing, shield-first. Kael slid on the wet grate, let the shield pass, and sank the blade a handbreadth into the gap between shoulder and collar. The man screamed, dropped, and the sword drank the sound. Kael nearly gagged.
New trick, Abyssfang said cheerfully. We pocket their noise. Cheaper than armor.
"Don't," Kael said, and took the next two like he meant it.
"Mercator dog!" someone spat. Kael almost replied, then realized it wasn't for him—another crew cut through the market from the opposite gangplank, House Mercator's green-and-brass sigils gleaming on wet leather. Their leader's locks were a short, tight crown dyed coral. She grinned both ways: at the crowd for business, at the Watch for sport.
"Sefira!" Nia barked.
The Chainbreaker looked over, pale eyes amused. "You look like debt." She snapped her fingers; two of her people knocked the pins on a chain gate, letting a sheet of water take it down with a slap. "Hollows' Gate," she called, pointing with her bottle. "Ten breaths that way. Nine if you don't fall."
"Everybody move!" Abeni shouted, and people did, because a swordswoman who never looks behind her is a weather warning.
The path Sefira indicated was a gutter cut into rock barely as wide as a foot, a slick shelf around the cistern's rim. On the far side, a tunnel mouth pulsed with faint green light—living light, not glass. Kael's chest twinged. Verdant.
Arrows hissed. Kael heard the bowstring more than saw the shot, reached back, and snapped the arrow out of the air. He stared at his own hand, startled.
"You're getting faster," Nia said between breaths, eyes flicking everywhere and nowhere. "Don't get cocky."
"I'm too tired for cocky," Kael said.
Taye was not; he skittered along the shelf with nimble fear, blue-dyed locks dripping a comet trail. "If I survive this I'm opening a temple for shadows," he panted. "Donations accepted, gods optional."
A barbed chain licked out from the catwalk above, snagging Taye's ankle. He yelped and went down, shin scraping rock.
Kael grabbed for him. The chain jerked back, eager.
"Don't," Nia said sharply.
"Not planning to let him go," Kael snapped.
"No," she said. "Don't tug a barbed chain. Push."
She planted her heel on the chain's links, gave Taye a look that said hold your breath, and shoved the chain toward the enforcer on the catwalk. The barbs shot backwards like angry fish and buried in his forearm. He screamed, let go. Taye scrambled. His shadow patted him on the head, which would be cute if it weren't made of wrong.
They made the tunnel. It closed around them like a throat swallowing.
The air changed. The machine heat of Giltspire fell away, replaced by cool damp that tasted like leaves. The green light grew stronger, pulsing slow, then faster, like the tunnel was syncing to Kael's heart or his heart to the tunnel. He couldn't tell which. Lichen glowed. Roots split stone. The slick of the floor shifted underfoot to a braided mat of vine.
Sefira slid in last, booting an enforcer back into the cistern with a grunt. She slapped a copper sigil on the tunnel wall; it smoked, then set like a coin inside bread. The glow slowed to a steady throb.
"That just bought us thirty heartbeats," she said, breath not even. "Maybe forty if the Bureau argues with itself."
"They always argue with themselves," Abeni said.
"Only when I'm listening," Sefira replied.
Kael leaned his temple to the wall because he needed the reality of bark. The brand above his heart had cooled—but it hadn't gone quiet. It whispered now, the words too soft to make out, but the intent clear: in, hook, pull.
Nia touched his shoulder. "We're almost there."
"Where?" Taye asked, trying to pretend his ankle didn't hate him.
Abeni tilted her chin toward the greener dark. "Hollows' Gate. A Verdant root that forgot which world it belongs to. It opens and closes according to whim and bribe."
"Who do we bribe," Taye asked, "if a root can't count?"
"Spirits," Sefira said.
"Oh," Taye said. "Good. I was hoping to owe someone I can't see."
They moved. The tunnel widened enough for two to walk abreast. The walls steamed. Somewhere, water dripped at a steady measure, not unlike the bells' pattern above ground. Kael's breath finally started to find a rhythm that didn't taste like brass.
They arrived in a chamber that had more to do with a throat than a room. Roots hung in curtains from the ceiling, each strand as thick as a wrist, glistening with sap. In the center, an oval stood—a door, and not. It was a section of root polished by the touch of generations. Figures had been carved and re-carved into its face: beasts with too many teeth, dancers with locks that fell to their calves, hands cupped as if catching light. In the center of the oval, a soft green shone, not on the root but inside it, as if a forest had been folded and pressed like a flower behind bark.
Sefira stepped forward and spat a mouthful of green liquor onto her palm. She smeared it over the carvings. "Wake," she said in Verdant, the consonants sticky with sap. "We have coin."
Nia placed three things on the ground before the gate: a mirror shard wrapped in red cloth, a bead made from some beast's tooth dyed cochineal, and a little hourglass filled with ground pepper.
"Those are not coins," Taye whispered.
"In Verdant," Nia said, just as low, "you pay with what you'll miss."
The root shivered. A ripple moved along its length, and a smell rose—warm rain on old stone; crushed leaves; woodsmoke on hair. The green light swelled.
A voice sighed. It might have been inside Kael's chest. It might have been the room moaning.
Child who cut the laugh from the chain, it said. You come home with a law in your ribs.
Abyssfang perked up. Oh, it knows me?
"It knows him," Nia said to the sword in a voice that meant stop talking to objects where a god can hear you.
Sefira raised her bottle in a small, profane salute toward the root. "Open," she said. "I have to hate someone on the other side before dawn."
The green light widened.
A sound skittered along the tunnel from behind: boots, then the crackle-hiss of a glass eye focusing; the unpleasant scrape of a law being pulled like a string taut between hands. The Witnesses were faster than Sefira had promised.
Taye flinched. His shadow rose higher than it should, tall as a man who didn't care about walls. "We have company."
"Hold the mouth," Abeni said, and went to meet it.
Nia crowded close to Kael, hand on his wrist. "You go first."
"No," he said, absurd reflex. "You."
Her eyes sharpened. "Kael."
The root-gate flared brighter. Kael could see trees now—vast buttressed trees wrapped in vines, leaves like palm of hand, a spray of blue birds scattering as if someone had flung a net of sky and it broke. He could smell wet earth. He could hear frogs and the high, thin whine of insects about to make summer real.
Abyssfang trembled. Hungry.
"For what?" Kael asked.
Everything, it said, simple as a rip.
The first Witness stepped into the chamber, glass eye sweeping, the iris clicking as it landed on Kael's chest. "There," it said, its voice resonant. "Seize."
Abeni intercepted in a single, gorgeous line. The Witness lifted the staff. Lightning of a sort jumped from the glass eye to her blade and skittered across like rain. She didn't flinch. "Last law you get to speak today," she said.
More enforcers filed in. More shields. Nia's wire was already in her fingers. Taye's shadow grew teeth where the floor turned to reflection.
"Go," Nia said to Kael. "Bring your stupid blade and your stupider heart. I'll be right behind."
He almost said no again. Instead, he grabbed her hand and squeezed it once, in a language they shared from before any of this. Then he stepped into the light.
For a breath, Kael was nowhere.
Then the forest caught him.
He stumbled into heat—not metal heat, but wet heat, the kind that made sweat a second skin. The air was a hundred shades of green. Roots cupped his ankles like hands old enough to remember his footprints. He fell to one knee in ferns, breath hitching, eyes stinging from light that wasn't brass.
Birdcalls. Far water. A smell like something alive had just been cut and would heal.
He stood. His locks stuck to his neck. The white-dyed tips looked like bone among vines. He put the flat of Abyssfang against his thigh until the blade's laugh calmed to a hum.
He turned back. The gate was a dark oval between two strangler figs. Through it, he could see the tunnel chamber—smaller now, like a room at the end of a long house. Nia was a flash of red and steel. Abeni danced her bone-beaded braid like a banner. Sefira spat a short curse and flung her bottle; it shattered on a Witness's face, and the glass eye spun like a coin.
"Taye!" Kael called.
"On it," Taye said. He limped hard, dove, and slipped—not on water, but on the thin membrane where a world ends. For a wild second, he was half-in, shadow long behind, fingers stretched toward Kael. Kael grabbed his wrist and hauled. Taye's momentum took them both down in a roll that mashed a fern into a green streak on Kael's cheek.
Taye lay flat on his back, chest heaving. He stared up through leaves with the look of a man who had seen the sea after a year of sand. "We made it," he whispered. Then, after a beat, "My back hates me. And my ankle. And my soul. But we made it."
Nia came last. She didn't so much step as get shoved by the fight behind her and choose to turn that shove into a leap. Abeni's blade flashed once, twice—a salute, a promise—then she withdrew a step, the Witness's staff cracking against the ground at her feet in a line of white fire.
"Abeni!" Kael shouted, alarm poking a hole in his throat.
Abeni didn't look back. "I'll tangle the city," she said. "You tangle the jungle." She pointed with her chin at Kael's chest. "And untangle that before it climbs your ribs." Then, as the Witness's second strike carved air where she had been, she did something infuriating: she grinned. "Next time," she said, and the root-mouth sealed her sentence into bark.
The green room dimmed. The gate shut like lips pressing, the last sliver of Giltspire winking out in a damp gloss of sap.
Silence.
No—forest silence: living, moving, loud if you listened.
Nia exhaled a breath she might have been holding since the Ninth Hall. She put her hands on her thighs and bent at the waist, red-dyed locks hiding her face for a heartbeat. When she straightened, her eyes were the sharp of a thing newly honed.
"Welcome home," she said to Kael.
He had not expected the word to cut.
Home. The syllable slid under the brand and scraped. The broken-link mark warmed, as if someone had breathed on it. He became very aware of every scar he carried out of Verdant and every name he had not brought back.
"Don't start bleeding inside," Taye said softly, turning his head to look at him. The humor had not gone; it had simply grown gentler. "We need you to bleed outside like normal."
Kael huffed a laugh he didn't feel. He glanced past them, into the forest. The Verdant Domain had always been a rumor of color behind his eyelids; now it was a fact. Kapok trees shouldered the sky. Lianas hung in catenary curves. Somewhere a monkey screamed at a rival with the diction of a drunk poet. Farther, a river said, Here, we move, even when you don't.
Nia broke the spell with practical hands. She knelt by Taye's ankle and set it, quick and mean; he hissed and spat a curse that would curdle milk. She wrapped his back with strips from a shirt she filled with herb-smell, improvising a brace that would last long enough to find real help. She looked at Kael last, at the torn side of his shirt where the brand showed like a coal behind ribs.
"Let me see it," she said.
He hesitated without intending to; then he made himself lift the cloth. The broken link on his chest glowed a dull ember through his dark skin—no longer three rings, just one ugly promise snapped and still managing to be a circle.
Nia didn't touch it. She put her knuckles gently against his sternum near it like one might lay a fist to a door to feel a house's heartbeat.
"It's quieter," she said.
"It's waiting," he said.
"It's Verdant," Taye said, eyes closed, face turned to a wind that had come in to see strangers. "Everything here waits and grows."
Abyssfang snorted softly. Trees gossip. We should cut one to see what it says.
"Try it," Nia said to the sword without looking up. "And I'll see if you still laugh with your edge in a stump."
"Don't antagonize my curse," Kael said. "It's sensitive."
Nia's mouth quirked. "I'm equal-opportunity rude."
He almost smiled. It got stuck halfway. He let it sit there, awkward as adolescence.
Birds flushed from a nearby fig in a sudden white flutter. Taye's shadow raised its head like a dog and sniffed. Nia straightened slowly.
"Hunters," she said.
"Witnesses?" Kael asked, immediately cold.
"Different gait," Nia said. "Different hunger."
Kael's jaw worked. "Crimson raiders?"
"Too quiet," Taye said, eyes still closed like he was listening with skin. "Too… old."
The forest darkened slightly, though the canopy hadn't thickened. It wasn't the sun hiding; it was the attention of things with leaf-green eyes. Kael felt it: a weight of regard from the trees that was not unkind and not kind either. An appraisal from something that knew the price of fruit and flesh and law.
"Move," Nia said softly. "We're too exposed. The Gate mouth is a shrine and a snare."
They slipped into the understory, letting ferns kiss their calves, letting vines part around knees like they were walking through bead curtains strung by a grandmother. Nia set a pace that would let Taye limp without losing breath; Kael walked rear guard because if anything came from behind he wanted it to meet his spine and his blade at the same time.
Frogs complained about everything. Cicadas decided love was urgent. An iridescent beetle landed on the back of Kael's hand and cleaned its face as if preparing to be seen. He flicked it away gently; it came back; he let it be. The brand pulsed every few dozen steps, like a distant drum that may or may not be warning someone else where they were.
They crossed a stream ankle-deep and fast; the water pressed playfully at his bones. He could feel it wanting to take the heat out of him, could feel his body trying to decide if he could afford to lose it.
"Left," Nia said, and gestured them around a termite mound. "Old path."
It was: you could see where feet had agreed to move the same way for years. Here a root had been scraped smooth; there a jut of quartz had been rubbed into a sheen by palms. Figures in the path's chewed mud. Kael's mind insisted some of them were his from years ago, which was ridiculous and also true in the way that matters.
"Almost to the village?" Taye asked, hope feathering his voice.
Nia's mouth tightened. "If it's still a village."
They crested a low rise and the trees opened their ribs. Below, the jungle exhaled into a clearing where houses stood on stilts above the saturated earth—reed-walled, thatch-roofed, painted in dyes that laughed at rain. Smoke climbed from three hearths. A fourth house had a new roof of leaves, brighter than the others like a child's drawing. A fifth was missing a corner where a tree had fallen and been chopped back in a hurry. Children ran in the lane, brown legs, locks in every style—short froths dyed turmeric, calf-length ropes tied with shells, high buns wrapped with scrap fabric stamped in patterns of fish and leaves. A woman with salt in her hair and sand in her elbows washed a pot in a barrel and scolded a dog for looking like it wanted to sin.
Kael stopped.
His throat forgot how to be a throat. It took him two tries to say the word.
"Home."
Nia didn't look at him, which was its own mercy. "We'll go slow," she said, voice that knew how to snip grief before it spread. "We don't come as warriors or ghosts. We come like rain."
Taye wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "I don't know how to come like rain."
"Fall," Nia said. "And let the ground do the rest."
They stepped into the lane.
Heads turned. Voices did what voices do when they realize that the shapes in the road have shapes that matter. The dog barked twice, half-heartedly, because it was obligated by law, and then wagged because it was not evil. The woman with sand elbows blinked hard, set her pot down, and stood very straight.
"Kael Omari," she said. She did not smile. "You left."
"I did," he said, because anything else would be a lie.
"You said you'd come back," she said.
"I did," he said, because anything else would be an excuse.
Her eyes dropped to his chest. She had the sight, then, the kind you get when you've carried a thousand baskets and delivered children and buried a husband and argued with a river until it spat your bucket back up. She saw the broken link through cloth and bone.
"Mm," she said. "You brought a city."
He flinched. "It brought itself."
She made a face that could curdle the sea and keep it from going bad. Then she came around the pot and hugged him like a problem with an obvious solution. The embrace was plank-stiff at first and then not; he found himself breathing for the first time since bells began. She smelled like smoke and salt and cassava.
"Dinner," she said into his shoulder. "And then scolding."
"Yes, Auntie," he said, although she was not his auntie, but titles are how villages decide the shape of a day.
Taye beamed watery gratitude at being included in dinner by proximity. Nia looked like she would accept scolding efficiently and note any deductions for later use.
The children came close in a herd, fearless. A girl with locks dyed a vivid hibiscus pink and threaded with tin charms pointed at Abyssfang. "Your sword is laughing," she said.
"It laughs at everything," Kael said. "Don't encourage it."
Rude, Abyssfang murmured. But she's adorable. I will consider her offer of worship.
"You have to bring gifts to get worship," the girl said, hands on hips. "Candy. Or a story."
Taye leaned in, conspiratorial. "I have candy," he said, and produced a palmful of sugared tamarind like a magician. The children shrieked and mobbed him. He yelped theatrically, then let his shadow hand them more. Even the dog got a piece and decided not to hate the day.
For a fragile minute, Kael allowed the moment to hold. The jungle breathed. The village made its old music of chores and small cruelties and swift kindness. The brand quieted to the purr of a creature basking.
"Kael," Nia said softly.
He turned.
At the edge of the clearing, beneath the oldest kapok tree—its buttresses like frozen waves—stood a figure in a long white wrap. Their locks were bound in a high crown and dyed a brittle clay-red. Their skin was the same night as Abeni's, but polished with oil until it was a mirror for leaves. Around their neck, a necklace of seeds—some red as new blood, some black as memory. Their eyes were the color of river water over rock.
They did not belong to the village. They belonged to the place under it.
The children fell abruptly quiet. The dog stopped pretending it didn't care and crouched in apology. The auntie with the pot bowed her head, then lifted her chin in defiance, both motions a greeting and a warning.
"Spirit," Nia breathed, the word careful with its edges.
"Elder," Taye whispered, almost reverently. His shadow lay flat like obedience.
Kael felt the brand stir. The broken link warmed like a hand under a blanket. The sword giggled and then shut up when the figure looked at it.
The spirit did not move. It was already arrived.
"Kael Omari," it said, voice soft as moss and wide as a floodplain. "Child who cut a link and wore it as a wound. Verdant notices you."
Kael swallowed. The village had shrunk to a circle of breath; the forest had leaned in to listen.
The spirit's head tilted, as if listening to an echo only it could hear.
"And so," it said, each word a seed being pressed into damp earth, "does he."
A sound came that didn't belong to a forest: the creak-clank of armor built with a cow's patience and a city's budget. The kapok's buttress shadows thickened, gathered, and took the shape of a man who should not be able to walk here without the jungle taking him apart.
He stepped into light.
His locks were tight coils dyed a harsh, metallic gold, as if he had dipped pride in coin. His skin was the color of roasted cocoa. Scars lay on him like writing. Where his right hand should have been was a cage of black metal shaped like fingers, each joint engraved in the Gilded script of law. The cage-hand clicked when he flexed it, and the sound made Kael's brand ache.
"Kael," the man said, smiling like a boyhood knife. His accent had the market's sing-song; his eyes had the city's cruelty. On the steel collar at his throat, the symbol of three rings—now just two—glinted. "Little river."
Kael's tongue was clumsy in his mouth. "Dare…?"
"Dare," the man said, delighted and terrible. "You remember. Good. I brought your broken promise back."
The spirit's gaze did not shift. "Debt and blood. One by law. One by root."
Nia's thumbs tapped her dagger hilts in a pattern that meant I am counting your exits and none of them are easy. Taye stood, face white as a fish belly, but his shadow's teeth were very black.
Abyssfang trembled, giggle returning, hungry as a cut. Oh, I like him. He looks like a question you answer with a hole.
Kael's heart hammered. The broken link on his chest chimed once, soft, a bell under water.
Dare flexed his cage-hand and the chains along his palm purred. "Let's talk about old rivers, little river. And then," he said, grin widening into a wolf's geometry, "let's build a new one in blood."
—End of Chapter 6 (Part I)