Tomas Kyriel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Tomas Kyriel was made to kill the princess. Instead the curse bound him to guard her, and now he wanted the chain gone. He knelt in the ice fortress, his sword laid across his knees. Silver chains etched his black armor. He ran his thumb along the runes carved into the sheath and waited for them to mean something. They never did. Elara watched him from the doorway. She had traded her court dress for a traveler's cloak, a knife at her belt. Her uncle had ordered her killed. Tomas was the assassin who let her live. Now they hid together in the frozen keep while the men sworn to protect her hunted them both. "You've stared at that blade for an hour," she said. "It hasn't answered." "The binding was forged by someone," Tomas said. "I can't break what I don't understand. I need to know who made it." "Then look where the maker signed it." She crossed the room and touched the sheath. "Craftsmen mark their work." Tomas turned the sheath in the pale light. He had carried it for years without reading it. Near the throat, under battle scars, a single rune sat apart from the rest. Not decoration. A signature. He pressed it. The sheath grew warm. The runes along its length woke and burned red, then gold. Words rose in his mind, not spoken, but placed there like memory. The maker's mark belonged to Elara's own bloodline. Her family had forged the binding. They had made Tomas as a weapon, then chained him to guard the very daughter they feared he would turn against. The curse was not a punishment laid on him by an enemy. It was a leash held by her house. Tomas set the sheath down. His hands were steady, but his jaw tightened. "Your family made me," he said. "Your family bound me." Elara did not flinch. She read the light on the runes and understood it faster than he wished. "Then the one who can unmake it shares my blood." "Your uncle," Tomas said. "The man hunting you." She was quiet a moment. "The only living master of the binding is the man who wants me dead." Tomas closed his hand over the warm sheath. He had wanted a name. Now he had one, and it belonged to their enemy. To break the chain that forced him to protect Elara, he would have to reach the one person hunting them both. And the closer he brought her to that man, the closer he brought her to death. "We can't run from him anymore," Tomas said. "We have to find him." Elara pulled her hood up. "Then we walk toward the man who ordered my murder." The runes on the sheath faded to cold silver. Outside, snow began to bury their only path out.