Chapter 19 Traitors In The Blood

• Dawn showed us the true cost of the night.
• Riven and I walked the fortress together, both of us still moving stiffly from the mark, and the damage stretched further than either of us had understood from inside the chaos of it. Collapsed corridors. Scorched courtyards where witch-fire had burned hot enough to blacken stone. And the dead, laid out in rows in the same hall where they'd once mocked me as a trophy, far too many of them for a single night's fighting to explain.
• "Thirty-one," Riven said, voice flat, walking the line of bodies with the particular stillness of a man counting losses he'd carry the rest of his life. "Thirty-one wolves. And the cells."