The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 98: Volume 4: Chapter 90 – The Capital

Read chapter 98 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 4: Chapter 90 – The Capital Day 71 Eldania waited in the gray between night and dawn, a shadow with teeth. From the last rise, the city filled the horizon: stone walls forty feet high, layered in tiers like someone had tried to build a mountain flat. Towers rose at intervals, some round, some square, all bristling with murder-holes and crenellations. Pennants hung limp in the still air, crown colors, not Ferric, washed out to ash by distance. The army stopped on Yara’s signal. The sound of it settling, the clank of armor, the creak of leather, the low snorts of beasts rolled down the slope and never quite reached the city. Too far. Too big. “Looks like a place that thinks it can’t fall,” Bruno muttered at her shoulder. “Everything falls,” Yara said. Harry stood a pace ahead and to the right, scales catching the first thread of light at the rim of the world. The shard’s glow under his skin was brighter now, yellow-green pushing at the seams like something trying to claw out. His hands were steady. His jaw was not. A tremor ran through its teeth, grinding, barely visible but constant, like his body was trying to walk north without him. “Feels closer,” he said. “It is,” Yara replied. He huffed a humorless breath. “Not what I meant.” Sam loomed to her left, just behind the line, silent, massive, a patient ridge of flesh and iron. The bears formed their familiar guard around her boots: Graveclaw to the left, Stonehide to the right, Shadowfang behind, eyes on everything. At the column’s midline, Jonas and Marin Calder stood side by side, looking at Eldania with the strange, open expression of people who had never expected to see the capital except as rumor. Jonas’s regained shoulders squared. Marin’s hand found his; they didn’t speak. “Big,” Daryl observed, because Daryl filled the silence when he didn’t have anything to stab. He paced a little, knife flipping around his fingers. “That’s… excessively big. Overcompensating, if you ask me.” “Nobody asked you,” Bruno said. Daryl grinned. “Yet.” Raptor knelt on the ridge’s lip, eyes narrowed, Horizon Pull turning the distant walls into something sharp and close. “Counting towers,” he said. “Four on the main curtain, three inner, at least two stand-alone keeps.” He shifted his gaze. “There. And there. Gatehouses. Reinforced. Fresh stone on both.” Spark crouched beside him, fingers tracing lines in the dirt. “See the color difference? The mortar’s a newer mix. They’ve been patching seams, thickening the footings. You can feel the paranoia from here.” Scythe folded his arms, watching the city as if it were a puzzle someone had left half-finished. “It’s not paranoia if we’re real,” he said. Weaver’s presence touched Yara’s mind like a hand through cloth. Sightline at your feet, came the thread, dry and efficient: one rat, three sparrows, two cats inside the walls. Report follows. Yara let her breath out slowly. Go on. Images and impressions flickered: the smell of densely packed bodies; the rhythm of boots on stone; the metallic tang of Theodric’s workings clinging to the air like a sour taste. Weaver’s voice braided in. “Queen Regent Meredith Ashcourt walks the walls each dawn and dusk. She speaks to the soldiers. She watches the streets. She’s afraid, but she hasn’t broken.” A quick flash: a woman on the battlements, cloak whipped by wind, hair threaded back in a soldier’s braid, one hand on the parapet, the other on the hilt of a plain sword. Not ornamental. Worn. “And Theodric?” Yara asked aloud. Scythe glanced at her. He knew who she was listening to. “His tower sits over the eastern ward,” Weaver said through the rat on the inside of Yara’s skull. “No windows below the fourth level. Wards are layered thick. He goes days without leaving. When he does, the air bends around him.” Sapphire showed a brief, unwelcome image: a man-shaped absence wrapped in formulas, twisting the space he walked through like a slug through wet earth. “Queen and Crown Mage are not aligned,” Weaver added