Chapter 13 · free to read
Eleven days east with a cracked anvil, a wounded swordmaiden and a wet clay gourd. The gate was open. It had been open for four hundred years.
The abbess had been blind for forty years. She found me before my foot touched the yard.
Four hundred years of ruined steel, held and never once devoured. It was the quietest room I had ever stood in.
The first lesson was to hold a broken blade and do nothing at all. It was the hardest thing anyone had ever asked of me.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.