Maertyn Blackfire lay on his back, held down by thick chains. He felt the cold sting of metal against bone with each breath from where the links dug into the wound on his chest. When he shifted his jaw, he felt an iron band beneath his chin that formed the base of a hood covering his entire head. Shrouded in darkness, he had nothing to do but feel pain.

The Lightning King’s sword had found its mark just below his heart, piercing Maertyn all the way through to his back. Its smaller, shallower twin nestled between old scars on his shoulderblades — nine long lines of mage’s words written in flesh. The magic there pulsed in time to his heart as it worked, prickling and stinging every so often. For the days, weeks, even months he lay in the endless dark, it knit him back together.

He had no idea where he was, nor how much time had passed. Whenever Maertyn tried to reckon it up, digging through his memories to find where they left off, he thought of the Lightning King and his mind dissolved into horror. Maertyn could only remember the blade in his gut, the scream in his throat, and how the old man’s hair fell from his head when the spell on the king broke. He had looked so happy when he died.

I did it. I found him. Can you believe it, the dying king had asked his lady. Maertyn still did not understand that the King of Ammar had been looking for him all those long years he’d spent alone on the mountain.

Sour bile roiled in his stomach, threatening to fill the iron hood. Maertyn’s tongue felt heavy and thick in his mouth as he stuck it out to taste the bitter iron covering his face. A scant half-inch separated his skin from the hood, leaving his mouth room to move.

“I need a drink,” he complained to the darkness.

His voice in his ears sounded hoarse and cracked as if he’d screamed for hours. He couldn’t remember screaming inside the hood, but he guessed that he must have when they put it on. Maertyn wondered whether his captors bothered to feed him — if the hood came off during the times when he wasn’t awake.

Dimly, Maertyn thought that someone might be tending his wound. Left on its own, it would heal, but with spell and salt, a mage could close it more quickly. When he could feel his legs again, he tested them, shifting against a stone slab that ended just under his calves. Maertyn was tall even for an Ammarish man — he was used to his legs sticking out of every bed. Especially the ones in prisons.

More iron weighed him down at the ankles. Maertyn wiggled his toes and felt one brush against something hot and soft. He guessed the mages had placed spell candles on the ground around the slab. The white tapers trapped witches’ shadows beneath them, pinning their magic in place.

It will not be enough. Whether they had a hundred candles or a thousand, nothing the mages could do would keep a witch from their magic. Since the day he’d awoken in a bed of ash surrounding his wife’s casket, Maertyn had known it would be with him always, like his taste for whiskey inherited from his father and grandfather before him. Even chained to a slab with enchantments etched into the stone, Maertyn’s curse went right on mending his wound. When he tested his toe on the flames again, he felt no pain, drawing on the fire in his own blood to keep himself from burning.

Hands moved through the dark somewhere near him. Maertyn felt stiff, questing fingers prod the flesh around the puckering cicatrix beneath the iron chains. A bright sting of salt in the wound dragged a fresh scream from him, loud and close inside the hood. In the fog of pain, he almost did not notice the hand worm beneath him to press against the scars on his back.

“Cool to the touch. The cycle resets,” a dim, distant voice said over him. “Has it always been this way with him?”

The words fumbled around in his mind, fitting themselves to memories Maertyn did not have. He’d never learned the mage’s tongue even though he’d dwelled among them for three years as their slave. What he knew came from the spells and secrets he’d stolen — memories snatched out of the minds of every mage he’d ever killed.

He used them now to piece together what his captors said.

“When he came up the Steps, they called him Blackfire. The only said he had a Weaver’s gift that became a bane of fire,” said a second man’s voice. Louder, closer.

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Maertyn groaned beneath the iron hood and the hard hand against his back left him. The voices near him fell silent. The longer Maertyn waited, the less sure he was that he’d heard them at all.

He flexed his hands against the chains. The feel of metal against his skin reminded him of the silver cuff he’d once worn as their slave. They told him the words on it spelled his name, but Maertyn had never learned to read.

Never in his immortal life did he believe he would return to Nynomath, the mage’s kingdom. Now that he heard their voices, he knew where he was — back beneath their Dome, the place where they had first cursed him.

“Bane of fire. Bane of fate. Our Unlucky Star returns to us.”

The voices were real and they were now. Maertyn knew at least three stood in the same room as him, whispering to one another. One woman and two men arguing.

“Mind the words or they will bite. I will not write it down a hundred times only to strike it ninety-nine more.”

“Write it down. Weep in ink,” the woman argued. “Eva of Ammar named him Winze and none — not even this man himself — has denied it.”

The more his captors argued, the more familiar the language sounded to his ears. Soon, Maertyn’s thoughts took the rigid shape of the words. Echoes of his first imprisonment crowded their way into his thoughts and he remembered kneeling at the feet of nine archmage who held their glittering blades over his heads.

He balled up his fists as he listened to these new mages argue his fate just as the dead ones had.

“That name stays out of the Emperor’s ears,” the second man argued. “If He believes this man is the Winze, that’s the end of our peace. He won’t rest until he’s pulled the entire temple down piece by piece.”

“You’d have to kill half of Ammar to keep such a secret,” said the woman. “Everyone at the Massacre saw the flames. They saw this man. Look — he’s even stick-thin like the dolls they make for him.”

Winze. Unlucky Star. Of all the words the mages cursed him with, these were the ones that had not made it onto his skin. Those glittering blades stopped before they finished when Maertyn broke free of the mages the first time, his black flames burning hotter and darker than they ever had to swallow up their Seer’s Tower.

He thought of doing it again. The tangle of secrets held spells that could unlock the cuffs, rust the metal, or even dislocate all his bones to wriggle out. He didn’t even need to burn anything this time. Unless they gave him no choice.

“So he’s an arsonist. Doesn’t mean he’s immortal,” sniffed the first man. He had a voice as deep as a barrel with a mean laugh between his words. “Tell His Blessed Eminence the truth: The Lightning King got himself killed by a witch. No less than the murdering fuck deserved.”

“A truth told too late kills more slowly than a lie, but still it kills,” said a new voice, rasping and old. “We may give whatever story we like to the Emperor and it will still be Ammar’s word against Nymaut’s. The Witch King knows the truth of this man, and we know it, too.”

The woman made some small sound of warning. A second later, Maertyn felt sharp, cold fingers dug into his chest. He twisted and hissed as they dug around the wound beneath the chains.

“Witness” said the old man. “This bone was shattered when Kaltevus brought him up the Ascension, and now it is whole. He should have died forty times already from thirst, and he still breathes. That is why King Anryniel continually demands his release — we all know he cannot die.”

Maertyn blinked through tears of pain. Hearing Anryn’s name said aloud reminded him where he was and why. He’d come back to Nynomath to take her place as their prisoner. That was why he could not melt his chains, tear off his mask, and bash open the head of the mage who stood over him.

“We know what we know,” said a second woman with a soft voice. “We cannot return to a time when we did not know. Let us resolve to use truth as weapon and shield. One for the Witch King and the other for the Emperor.”

The flames by his feet stirred. Maertyn felt his shadow pinned beneath him quiver as it tried to escape. One twist sideways and he could get a spell into the hand that held him down. The old rage roared to life inside his heart as he pictured these new faces glaring down at him, their faces full of judgment. His throat closed against a fresh scream forming inside.

“Joachim… don’t stand so close to him,” Leigh said. “I don’t like the look of his shoulders. See how tight they are? He is awake, and he Hears you.”

The hand left his wound. The voices ceased and their owners withdrew, letting the spell candles settle back into place with Maertyn’s shadow firmly beneath him.

Alone again, his rage burned itself out. Maertyn let go of the spells that crowded his mind, insisting on the best ways to break a lock or rust a chain. He stayed where he was even when fresh pangs of hunger and thirst gnawed at him. He lay on his back in a dungeon he allowed them to put him in, and filled his head with thoughts of his last days in Ammar. At Anryniel’s side, guarding her life.