Chapter 372: The Weight of a Name (continued)
Nyra didn't move from the table. She let the silence sit between them like a third person in the room, uninvited but unavoidable. The lamp's flame made her eyes look darker, the gold light failing to soften the sharpness in them. She had built her life on reading rooms, reading people. Right now she was reading him like a document she hated needing.
Soren kept his fist closed around the sparrow.
"You came to tell me what I already know," he said finally, voice flat. "That I should have said less. That I should have taken the insult and smiled. That I should have played the hero for the sake of unity."
Nyra's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "If I wanted a puppet, I'd have kept one of my old informants alive."
That earned him the smallest movement in his expression. Not relief. Not amusement. Just a crack in the stone.
"I came," she continued, "because you're about to do something stupid."
He stared at the floorboards. "I already did."
"No," Nyra said. "This would be worse. You're going to leave."
His head lifted. The lamp caught the grey of his Cinder-Tattoos, the dead-ember lines crawling across his wrists. "If I go, it stops being a debate in a war room," he said quietly. "It stops being Elara looking at me like I'm an executioner. It stops being Caine trying to keep people from splitting into factions. It stops being my name poisoning everything it touches."
Nyra's gaze flicked, just once, to his hand. The bone sparrow. Recognition sharpened in her eyes, then faded behind calculation again. "Your name isn't the poison," she said. "Your name is the well. Everyone is drinking from it, whether they admit it or not. That's why it's heavy."
He laughed under his breath, but it wasn't humor. "You have a talent for making misery sound noble."
"I have a talent for surviving," Nyra corrected. "And for knowing when a narrative is being engineered."
That made him look at her properly.
Nyra stepped closer to the table and placed a folded strip of parchment beside the lamp. It wasn't sealed. It wasn't adorned. It was the kind of note that traveled fast because it didn't look important.
"Before you locked yourself in here," she said, "I had three scouts and two couriers working the border towns. Not the ones waving flags. The ones that matter. The ones with wells."
Soren's eyes narrowed. "Wells?"
Nyra didn't answer immediately. She turned the note over with one finger. The ink on it was thin, hurried. A message written by someone who didn't want to be caught holding it.
"Greywatch," she said instead. "A neutral town on the borderlands. Governor who prides himself on never choosing a side. The kind of man who believes neutrality is a wall he can hide behind."
Soren's jaw tightened. "Greywatch is weeks east. Why does it matter?"
Nyra's voice lowered. "Because someone is about to make it matter."
She finally picked up the note and slid it toward him.
Soren hesitated, then reached out. His fingers brushed the parchment. For a heartbeat, he expected to feel heat, to feel the faint thrum of a Gift through the fibers. There was nothing. Just paper. Just ink. Just the cold reality of being ordinary again.
He unfolded it.
A single line, scrawled in a rough hand:
Reservoir. Before dawn. Bodies. Synod fire.
Soren's eyes flicked back up. "Synod fire?"
Nyra's face was calm, but her shoulders were tight. "If the Remnant is involved, the Synod will spin it. If the League is involved, they'll bury it. If you're involved," she said, and the pause was deliberate, "they'll hang it on you."
He stared at the note again, hearing the rhythm of the words like a drumbeat.
Bodies. Fire. Reservoir.
A story waiting to be told.
He closed the parchment slowly. "You think Valerius is doing this."
"I don't think," Nyra said, and there it was, the spymaster's true voice, cold and precise. "I see patterns. And this is the pattern: isolate you. Make neutral towns fear you. Turn your coalition into a pariah. Starve you of supplies and goodwill until the only places that will shelter you are traps and ruins."
Soren's knuckles whitened around the bone sparrow. "That still doesn't explain Elara."
Nyra held his gaze. "Elara is… complicated."
"That's a polite word."
Nyra didn't flinch. "She's not wrong to be angry. She's wrong to be useful." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "And right now, she's useful to Valerius whether she wants to be or not. He doesn't need her loyalty. He just needs her rage pointed in the right direction."
Soren's breath came out slow, controlled. "So what do you want from me?"
Nyra's answer was immediate. "To stop thinking like a condemned man."
He scoffed. "I am condemned."
"No," Nyra said, stepping closer, the lamp-light gilding the edges of her hair. "You're necessary. There's a difference. Condemned men accept their fate. Necessary men endure being hated because the alternative is everyone else being dead."
The words hit him in a place he didn't like to admit existed. He looked down at his hands again. Empty hands. Not a weapon, not a flame, not even the simple comfort of power under his skin.
"I can't fix Greywatch," he said, voice quieter now. "I can't ride out and stop a sabotage. I can't—"
Nyra cut him off. "You don't need to burn anything to stop a lie."
Soren frowned.
Nyra tapped the note with a finger. "You have eyes. You have legs. You have a mind that survived the Bloom-Wastes. You have a reputation so loud it drowns out common sense." Her mouth tightened. "Use it. If Greywatch gets poisoned, it won't be poison that kills you. It will be the story that follows."
Soren's throat worked. The sparrow bit into his palm.
"Elara said I was a murderer," he whispered, and the way his voice cracked on the word was the closest thing to defeat he allowed himself. "That I'm becoming the thing we ran from."
Nyra's gaze softened, just a fraction. "Elara is looking at you through a wound," she said. "And wounds don't see clearly. They see blood."
Soren swallowed, hard.
Nyra moved then, slowly, as if approaching a cornered animal. She held out her hand, palm up, not reaching for him, not touching. Just offering.
"Show me," she said quietly.
Soren stared at her palm for a long time. Then, with a stiffness that looked like pride trying to stay upright, he opened his fist.
The bone sparrow lay there, pale in the lamplight. Small. Worn. The kind of thing that should have been meaningless.
Nyra's breath caught just slightly. "Elara made that."
He nodded once.
Nyra looked at him again, and for once her gaze wasn't unreadable. It was sharp with understanding and something like grief.
"She told you to fly away," Nyra said. "And now you're thinking of doing exactly that."
Soren's voice was almost inaudible. "She told me to never let them clip my wings."
Nyra's hand lowered, not taking the sparrow. "They didn't clip your wings, Soren," she said. "They made you believe you don't have any."
Silence stretched.
Outside, somewhere beyond the walls of his quarters, laughter rose and fell. The sound of people trying to pretend the world wasn't ending.
Soren closed his fist again, but gentler now. Like he was protecting something instead of punishing himself with it.
"What's the play?" he asked.
Nyra's shoulders eased. Just a little. "We don't let Valerius write the next chapter," she said. "We get ahead of the lie."
Soren lifted his eyes. "How?"
Nyra's expression sharpened into purpose. "We send someone to Greywatch now. Quiet. Fast. Before dawn." She held his gaze. "And we send a second message to Elder Caine. Not about Elara. Not about war room politics. About water."
Soren's mind clicked into motion, the old instincts resurfacing like a blade drawn from a sheath. "If a neutral town's reservoir is compromised, they'll call in outside help," he muttered. "Crownlands garrisons. Synod Inquisitors."
Nyra nodded. "Exactly."
Soren's jaw tightened. "Then Greywatch becomes a fuse."
"And you," Nyra said softly, "become the match they blame."
He exhaled, slow. "Then we put our hand over the flame."
Nyra's eyes gleamed faintly. "That's my Soren."
He almost laughed at that, but it died before it reached his lips.
"I'm not your Soren," he said.
Nyra's expression didn't change. "No. You're worse."
Soren blinked.
"You're a man who still cares," Nyra continued, voice like steel wrapped in velvet. "That makes you predictable. It makes you exploitable. And it makes you the only kind of leader worth following."
Soren looked past her, to the lamp, to the shadows, to the cold room that felt like a cell. Then he pushed himself to his feet.
The movement was slow, painful, honest. Not the rise of a godslayer. The rise of a man deciding to carry something heavy anyway.
"Send your fastest runner," he said. "And wake Caine."
Nyra didn't smile. She didn't need to. She turned toward the door with the efficiency of someone who had already been moving in her head for hours.
At the threshold, she paused.
"Valerius wants you to disappear," she said without turning. "Whether by exile or death. Don't give him either."
Soren's fingers tightened around the sparrow.
"Tell me something," he said, voice low.
Nyra glanced back.
"If I can't burn them," Soren asked, "how do I fight?"
Nyra's gaze held his for a long moment.
"By not letting them decide what you are," she said. "They want you to be a monster because monsters are easy to kill. Be something messier."
She left then, the door closing softly behind her.
Soren stood alone in the lamplight, staring at the bone sparrow in his fist.
So you always remember to fly away.
He opened his hand again and set it on the table beside the lamp, letting it rest in the warm glow like a fragile promise. Then he began to gear up, not with armor and blade, but with smaller things: a worn cloak, a knife he'd almost forgotten he owned, a coil of rope, a pouch of dried food.
A common man's kit.
A leader's burden.
When he stepped out into the cold night, the wind hit him hard, carrying ash and pine and distant laughter. The camp lights flickered like low stars scattered across the earth.
Soren looked toward the eastern horizon, toward Greywatch and its reservoir and the lie waiting to be told.
And he walked.