Chapter 41 · Cleaning House

The smoke hit my throat before I got my knees under me.

I was on the courtyard stone with my palms flat, and there was blood in the grooves between the flagstones. Not mine. I checked twice.

Around me Kaelen's guard lay flat like dropped coats. Twelve of them, hands over their skulls. One was crying, and he wasn't a young man.

The bond was still ringing in my chest, hot and bright, and every time it pulsed another man groaned into the stone.

Torin stood in the middle of it. Barefoot, shirt gone somewhere in the last ten minutes, blood on his knuckles and none of it his.

"Get up," he said.

Not to me.

Kaelen got up. Slowly. One knee, then the other, and his mouth kept trying to smile and couldn't find the muscle for it.

"You felt that," Torin said.

"I felt it."

"Say what it was."

Kaelen looked at me. Once, quick, like touching a hot pan. Then back to Torin. Something in his face had gone quiet — the way a man goes quiet when the ground under him turns out to be ice.

"A true bond," he said. "Reopened.