[Evelyn’s POV]

The compound hums with the particular energy of people who might die tomorrow.

It lives in the air like static — sharpened edges, a strange tenderness in the way warriors check each other’s armor and clasp shoulders a beat longer than necessary. In the barracks, someone is singing. In the armory, blades ring against whetstones.

I walk the grounds. Dorian is in the armory, working a blade’s edge with long, steady strokes. His face carries the focused calm of a man who has decided to be ready.

“Tomorrow,” I say from the doorway.

He looks up and studies my face the way he studied it the day I told him who I was — direct, unhurried, measuring what’s real against what isn’t.

“See you on the other side,” he says and goes back to his blade.

The simplicity steadies something inside me. No speeches, just the confidence that we’ll both be standing, spoken like fact.

Mira is in the supply corridor outside the eastern gate, checking inventory for Riven’s flanking force: crates of arrows, water skins, bandage rolls.

She’s counting with a pencil behind her ear, and when she sees me, she stops.

She crosses the corridor in three steps and grabs me in a hug so fierce my ribs compress.

Her arms lock around my shoulders, her red hair pressing against my cheek, and she holds on with the desperate strength of someone who has already imagined what tomorrow costs and is refusing to let it take this moment.

I hold her back with nothing that needs to be said.

She releases me, wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, and picks up her pencil. I leave her to her counting.

The training wall is quiet. Most warriors have retreated to barracks or the mess hall, where the kitchen staff has opened the wine stores without being asked. But Finn stands alone on the wall where he once turned his back on me.

He hears my footsteps and turns.

“I figured it out,” he says.

I wait.

“You’re still you. The person who sparred with me when nobody else would partner with a loudmouth from the lower ranks. That person didn’t change because a name did.”

He pauses, and his jaw works once.

“And my uncle would’ve wanted me to fight beside the people who fight for this house, no matter where they came from.”

My throat closes. The heat behind my eyes is sudden and fierce, and I blink it back because if I start crying on this wall I won’t stop.

I nod, and he nods back. The circuit closes — with acceptance, which was always his to give.

Sera’s intelligence quarters smell like lamp oil and cold tea. The spymaster hasn’t slept in two days, and I can see it in the hollows beneath her cheekbones and the particular sharpness of her movements, every gesture stripped to maximum efficiency because her body has nothing left to waste.

“You should sleep,” I tell her.

“I’ll sleep when Aldric is dead or retreating. Until then, I have deployments to verify.”

“Sera.”

She looks up. Her dark eyes are bloodshot and alert, and the ghost of something almost warm flickers across her face before she buries it under professional composure.

“Don’t die tomorrow,” she says. “I’ve invested too much in you.”

The humor is dry as bone, and it cracks my composure more than tears would have. I laugh — short, sharp, wet at the edges — and Sera’s mouth twitches in what might be the first genuine smile I’ve ever seen from her.

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