The giant lifted Jack like a lantern from a hook. Boots off the floor, wind cut short, the world narrowed to the cold ring of metal at his throat and the impossible quiet where his Perception should have found a man.

  He pushed farther. Nothing. The figure existed to his eyes, seven feet of plate, visor slit black as a well, but to Mage's sight it was a hole in the room: no heat, no pulse, no weight in the weave.

  Marcus smoothed his coat, the tremor gone from his hands by the time he reached them. He patted the giant’s lower back; he couldn’t get the shoulder, and smiled up at Jack’s dangling calm.

  “God armor,” he said, savoring the words. “A relic of the old pantheon. Any mortal within it wields a god’s strength.”

  The gauntlet tightened. Pain compressed to a point. Jack let it be information. He stopped hunting for the man and listened to the room, the candle draft around the visor, the way sound slipped off the plates instead of through them, the slight deflection in the dust around mailed feet. Absence had a shape. He traced it.

  Marcus kept talking. “We were going to be… gentle. Absorb your little town, sift out the Aerothanians.” He spat the word, a boy tasting spinach. “But now? We take it and break it. We’ll string your ‘mayor’ in my dungeons and teach her the order of things, ”

  Jack lifted one hand and set his palm against the breastplate.

  He didn’t bother with flourish. He let Fire flow, slow and exact, into the metal. The plate drank it like winter stone meeting the sun. The blue-white edge turned orange, then to a color that heat shouldn’t produce. The air around his hand shimmered.

  Marcus laughed. “Did I not mention indestructible?”

  Jack’s mouth turned, not quite a smile. “The armor, perhaps.”

  “And the man inside?” Jack asked and pushed.

  The scream was immediate and pure. The giant’s grip spasmed open; Jack dropped, landed light, and slid aside as the armored mass staggered, both hands clawing at its own chest. The figure lurched, caught the edge of a shattered slab, and went down hard.

  Jack flicked his fingers. Stone answered. The floor softened, parted, and then cinched again like a trap. When it held firm, the giant was sunk to the hips, shoulders and helm still above the floor, chest-plate glowing dull and ugly. The screams cut off all at once; the labored drag of breath remained, rattling under the visor.

  Silence fell in layers. Jack stood over the pinned figure, eyes on the rise and fall that said alive.

  He listened to the breath.

  Marcus spun for a seam in the paneling at the back of the hall. He didn’t make it two steps.

  Jack was there, no sound, no rush, just there, fisting the front of Marcus’s coat and slinging him across the chamber. Stone met spine with a thud that would have folded a lesser man. Marcus slid down the wall, breath sawed thin, eyes wide and wet. Decent level or not, he was a housecat in a storm against Jack.

  From Marcus’s vantage, Jack crossed the distance in a single, unhurried stride and put a boot squarely to his chest, pinning him with the kind of pressure that suggested how much worse it could be.

  “I was going to be polite,” Jack said, voice mild. “I’m just the messenger.”

  He leaned in a fraction, eyes steady.

  “It’s Asil you need to fear. Try to take Anjelica, and she will end you and level your city by herself.”

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  Jack’s head tipped, listening, that faraway focus sliding past Marcus to the wreckage of the room. Now that he had the measure of the armored giant, he could hear what the absence had tried to hide: ragged breath inside steel and a slight, involuntary sound a proud man makes when pain won’t be swallowed.

  “Your pet’s awake,” Jack added, almost conversational. “You’ll want a healer. Burns like that turn ugly.”

  And then Jack was gone, no door, no apology, only the faint ozone lift of Wind and Lightning in his wake.

  Guards burst through the shattered entry a heartbeat later. Marcus dragged himself upright by the edge of the toppled table, blinked hard until the water in his eyes obeyed him, and pressed his coat flat to hide the dark shame blooming at his crotch. He lifted his chin as if none of them had seen anything at all.

  Jack was already past the gates by the time the first squad shouldered through the ruined doors of the throne room. The city’s alarm bell began with an uncertain clang, then found its panic.

  Dammit. Asil is going to tan my hide.

  He cut down the road at an easy lope that ate distance like a tide. Wind gathered to him the way it always did, familiar, eager, and he let it cradle his steps, not hurl them. No point in turning a retreat into a spectacle. He could already hear the lecture in Asil’s voice, calm as a blade laid flat across a table: You were supposed to drop the letter and come home. Nothing more, nothing less. Abby, in the background, pinching the bridge of her nose like she could squeeze the headache out before it bloomed.

  That’s a tomorrow problem, he told himself, and tasted copper as a bronze gem dissolved on his tongue. Today is deliver, breathe, and, if there’s any mercy left in the world, drinks with friends at Pendle.

  He bled off the last of his field so it wouldn’t set every dog in Freedom howling and slipped into the treeline. Once under green, he widened his Mage sight just enough to keep honest: the whisper of small life in brush, the thrum of Myriad in roots, the nervous eddies of men on the wall behind him. He refused the temptation to look back any further than that.

  The forest received him. He took the ridge path, drier, better sightlines, ghosting over a creek with a lazy step of Wind, then letting gravity and long practice pull him into a pace a horse would have envied. Twin moons silvered the leaves; the air smelled like damp bark and distance.

  Behind him, Freedom convulsed.

  Bells. Orders barked until they frayed. Runners pounding from the keep to the barracks, from the barracks to the gates. He let the noise fall to the hem of his perception and focused on the clean present: heel, toe, breath; the way the land itself seemed to lean him west toward Pendle.

  He thought about sending a note back by a farmer’s boy or a caravan turning east, just a line for Abby’s board: Delivered. Marcus is a problem. He didn’t. No half-truths over someone else’s ink. He’d tell Asil himself.

  A mile or so on, he passed a roadside shrine so old it had lost its god. Weathered stone, a bowl for offerings, gone to moss. Someone had tucked a braid of new grass into a crack anyway. Jack touched two fingers to the brim of his cap, a habit, respect, and kept moving.

  If he’d kept his senses behind him instead of on the trail ahead, he would have felt the patient weight on the city’s south wall.

  The hooded figure watched him slip into the trees and vanish. Even at this distance, the air around the staff smelled faintly of bitter herbs and old iron. The figure’s head tilted, as if tasting the last thread of ozone Jack’s field had left in the morning.

  “Soon,” said the voice inside the hood, dry, used to secrets. The figure turned and hobbled back along the parapet, the staff’s ferrule ticking against stone. A runner met him at the stairs; a few words were enough to spin fresh panic into motion. Down in the keep, men flooded the throne room with buckets and salves, the stench of scorched leather and blistered flesh crowding the air while the giant in the god-armor rasped like a bellows. Marcus barked orders too loudly to sound unafraid. A scribe scraped at parchment. Somewhere, the word Quirn rode a courier’s breath west.

  Jack didn’t hear it. He ran.

  He let the Wind strand lift and set him, lift and set, a rhythm that would carry him all the way to Pendle if he asked it nicely. He kept his field tight to his skin so passing wildlife wouldn’t bolt into trees, and he filed the hooded blind spot where it belonged: under Problems, Acute. Anger didn’t live there. A clean line did. You don’t threaten what’s mine. You don’t touch what’s hers.

  The forest opened by degrees, then closed again; the day warmed around him. He rolled his shoulders, checked the balance of the satchel where the message had been, and felt the world narrow to the next bend, the next rise, the next clean breath.

  If Freedom wanted to stew, let them stew. He had miles to make, a promise to keep, and a reunion on the far side of a city square where the Anchor slab sat runed and waiting.

  On the wall behind him, the hooded man paused at a crenel, laid a gloved palm to the stone as if listening to it answer, and then disappeared into the keep’s shadow like a bad idea nobody had said out loud yet.