The message reached the Vigil at midnight.
It was carried by a boy too winded to speak clearly.
Another burning.
Three streets over.
Already underway.
Ethan was moving before Alistair finished reading the note.
"That's not your fight," Marguerite said, falling into step beside him anyway.
Which told Ethan she didn't believe her own sentence any more than he did.
"I was on that pole a week ago."
"Which is precisely why it isn't your fight."
Marguerite kept pace with him.
"You're not stable enough to"
They rounded the corner.
The argument died in both their throats.
The pyre in the square wasn't burning yet.
A small mercy.
The crowd was still gathering wood, still shouting the same ugly words Ethan remembered from the other side of the flames.
But the girl tied to the pole wasn't screaming.
She wasn't struggling.
She wasn't doing anything at all.
She simply stared straight ahead with eyes that had already gone the wrong shade of green.
Ethan felt the coal in his chest sit up.
Not rage this time.
Recognition.
Kin.
The word came in that same wordless copper taste that was becoming almost a language between them.
Kin.
Again.
Kin. Kin. Let me out. Let me
"Ethan."
Alistair's hand closed around his shoulder.
His voice had dropped every trace of dry performance.
No wit.
No amusement.
Just a man doing very careful mathematics about what might happen next.
"Whatever you're about to do, do it with your eyes open."
His grip tightened slightly.
"Because if that girl's passenger is anything like yours, this isn't a rescue."
He looked toward the girl.
"It's a negotiation with something that has spent its entire existence learning exactly what a desperate man will agree to."
Ethan looked at the girl.
At the crowd.
At the torches already burning.
At the men carrying more wood toward the pyre.
The coal in his chest strained toward the pole like a compass needle finding north.
Some part of him, colder than he liked, was already counting.
The crowd.
The distance to the pole.
The number of torches already lit.
How many men were carrying weapons.
How long it would take Alistair and Marguerite to reach the girl.
And underneath all of it, louder than the counting, was something far simpler.
He couldn't stand there and watch this happen to someone else the way it had happened to him.
No amount of careful calculation had accounted for that.
"Then let's find out what it wants," he said.
And stepped into the square.