Eyes of Fire: Chapter 18

Chapter 20

The Prisoner

             “If Darren Ephram has captured one of the e’nethaine,” Cale said slowly, “this is no longer a matter of rebellion against the king. It is an international incident that could easily lead to open conflict—between us and an enemy we cannot see or track. An enemy no doubt armed with weapons we also cannot see or track. Any conflict with the e’nethaine would likely be confined to the coastal regions and any area with water, but that means we would lose all access to our coastline. And every well within the kingdom. We would have no water within a period of days.”

             Breathing a sigh, Lord Rhyan said fervently, “Idiot.”

             The sitting room was already noticeably warm, and yet Hamal still felt the heat of that single word brush across his face.

             “This whole thing is incredibly foolish on Ephram’s part,” Masly said. “No one wonder he packed up and left. We are not the ones he has to worry about.”

             A moment passed in silence.

             And then—

             Cale smiled. “Amber Rassone has plans to take Ephram’s gold. Let’s sidestep a war and, on behalf of our king, take Ephram’s other treasure.”

             Hamal was not a seer, clearly. He couldn’t predict things the way Cale and Masly could, but he knew his friend Cale well enough to guess what he was thinking. He recognized the spark in those silver eyes. Cale was about to do something rash, because he could. Hamal didn’t want him to do anything rash. More importantly, Satha wouldn’t want him to do anything rash. So, if one of them was going to be rash, it should probably be Hamal.

             “I say, Cale…” he said and drew the attention of both seers and the flamemaker at the same time. “Are they bad men? The men on the other side of this wall?”

             “I can tell you only that Darren Ephram appears to trust them, which means they are deeply involved in whatever he is doing.”

            “Well, you said we are here to observe. So it is important no one knows we are here, right?”

             “Yes.”

            Hamal nodded. “Then I will go into the next room, and I will make certain no one knows we’re here.”

             “How are you going to do that?” Masly asked.

             “Ten flamemakers,” Lord Rhyan said. “What are you going to do—ask them politely to look away while you take their things?”

             Hamal looked at Lord Rhyan in surprise. “I’m not going to take their things. I’m going to take something that does not belong to them.” He looked at Cale. “Do you want me to do it? You know what I mean.”

             A flicker went through Cale’s expression. A glimmer of emotion, there and gone. Hamal frowned when he saw it. Was that disappointment? Internally, he sighed.

             “Do it,” Cale said.

             “Do what…?” Rhyan began.

            Hamal lifted his hand and snapped his fingers. On the other side of the door came a series of metallic clangs, one after another. “Was that ten?”

             Rhyan’s head swung around. He stared at the door.

             “Yes. Exactly,” Masly said.

            “Good. The room is ready, Cale. We can go in now.”

             The second room was definitely an office. Stacks of papers covered the desk and tables, and uneven boxes with bulging lids filled the shelves on the walls. More boxes sat stacked against the wall. The only clean space in the entire room was a table in the room’s center. On the table sat a large tank, like a fish tank found in a rich man’s house, but this one was dirty, and the water had not been changed in a while. Most of it had evaporated, and something green and thick was growing along the glass.

             Ten men lay scattered around the room, each one unconscious and snoring. They wore trousers and armor from the waist down but very little else, which Hamal could understand. He started peeling off his gloves. This was ridiculous. The room was an oven. The air smelled sharp and smoky, and it burned Hamal’s eyes.

             “What did you do to them?” Rhyan asked, his voice oddly reserved.

             “They’re just asleep,” Hamal replied.

             “I have a question,” Masly said as he scanned the multitude of papers on top of Darren Ephram’s desk. He didn’t look at Hamal as he asked, “Is it easier to put a man to sleep than it is to give him a temporary paralysis, as you’ve done before?”

             “No. But they won’t remember this, and they would remember if I did anything else. They will wake up delirious and tired and think they fell asleep on their own. Cale, I don’t see a prisoner anywhere in this room.”

             Cale looked through the room twice in quick succession. “Do you hear his heartbeat?”

             Oh, that was a good idea. Cale was smart. Cocking his head, Hamal listened. After a few moments, he began to walk around the room slowly, putting each heartbeat he heard to a man on the floor.

             In the end, he had one heartbeat extra. Quietly he said, “I found the prisoner.”

             Cale and Masly both looked around the room, trying to find the person he meant. “Where?”

             Hamal pointed at the fish tank. “There.”

             In the silence that followed, Rhyan whispered, “By the gods.”

             Stepping up to the table carefully, Cale leaned forward and peered down into the dirty water.

             Rhyan said, “Hamal, I don’t… I’m not sure how to believe you in this moment. I mean, I do believe you; I will always believe you. But how is there a person in that tank?”

             “Well, you know the story of the birth of the world. The creator made two types of people: One type he created out of the earth, from the soil, and the other type he created out of the sea. The e’nethaine are those who came from the sea.”

             “I know the stories, but I…cannot say they make it any easier when discovering a person trapped in a fish tank.”

             “Darren Ephram went and found an e’nethaine,” Cale said quietly. “And helped himself without thought of king or kingdom.”

             Hamal paused, listening to the heartbeat in the fish tank. “We need to get the e’nethaine out of here.”

             “Can we just…take him with us?” Masly asked.

             Hamal glanced through the room and reached up to rub his head. “We’re going to need some sort of container.”

             “How about a helmet?”

             The flamemaker guards had stripped off a good portion of their armor. Metal gloves rested in piles around the room. Helmets had been removed and left to collect dust. The men had obviously been camped here for a while. Hamal looked around at the mess and nodded. “That would work. But we need to keep our presence here a secret, right?”

             Cale nodded.

             “So we’ll need to replace the water somehow—we shouldn’t leave the tank empty. That would give us away. Do you see drinking water somewhere? If they’ve been living down here, there must be a way to access clean water. Flamemakers dry up, you know. They can be very thirsty.”

             “I think the door over there leads to a water closet,” Masly said.

             “Good. That will work.”

             Grabbing a helmet that had rolled under the table, Hamal approached the fish tank with care. He was listening, and he heard the heartbeat quicken as he neared. The water was covered with a thin layer of slime. He couldn’t see the e’nethaine or hear him, other than the sound of his heart, yet the e’nethaine seemed to be able to see him.

             “It’s all right,” Hamal told the water. “You’ll see. We’re here to help you. We are going to get you out of here.”

             They began their work. Cale and Masly took hold of the tank. It wasn’t bolted to the table, as some tanks were, but it must have been heavy because sweat immediately broke out across their foreheads, and their hands shook as they carefully poured the tank’s murky contents into the helmet Hamal held out for them.

             The entire time, Hamal directed a soft, one-sided conversation toward the water. It was good to speak to patients. Sometimes they needed to be calmed. He could hear the e’nethaine’s heartbeat, and he knew the man wasn’t calm.

             “My name is Hamal,” he told the water. “We are going to take you out of here. Two of your friends are waiting for you out in the hallway. I think they are concerned about you, because they followed us here. Can you hear me?” The tone was probably more important than the words themselves. The man needed calm conversation. “It’s going to be all right. We are going to take care of you.”

             As the last of the water flowed into the helmet, Masly’s arm twitched and a few drops landed on the table. He glanced at Hamal. “I hope that wasn’t important,” he whispered.

             “He’s fine,” Hamal answered. “I think he’s nervous—he doesn’t know who we are, and he is used to bad men. But he can lose a little water. It’s like a house for him. It isn’t actually him, no more than the air we breathe is who we are. We aren’t air. We just breathe air.”

             “Hamal, your wisdom shines like the sun and moon, neither of which I could ever fully understand.”

             Hamal looked at him, suspecting a joke, but Masly only grabbed another discarded helmet and slipped into the water closet. He refilled the tank on the table, used his gift to situate it exactly as it had been before, and then returned the helmet to the floor. Scanning the room with a critical eye, he asked, “Good? Other than the helmet we are taking with us?”

             “I think so,” Hamal replied.

             “Yes,” Cale said.

             Walking slowly, Hamal carried the helmet out of the office, through the sitting room, and out into the cool darkness of the hallway. For the first time in his life, he welcomed the cooler air and gladly left the warmth behind. He felt he could breathe again as the sweat began to cool on his face.

 – H –

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Eyes of Fire: Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Visible or Otherwise

            Two hours later, the passage remained much the same. The black walls sparkled when the blue glow of the light shaft hit them just right. The air felt heavy and wet and old. The path carried them upward slowly.

            However, Hamal could hear Cale’s heartbeat and knew his friend was growing more and more restless. Hamal kept looking around, wondering what was bothering Cale.

            When Cale spoke, Hamal nearly sighed in relief.  

            “How many heartbeats?” Cale whispered.

            Hamal counted. “Six,” he whispered back.

            “And you are counting them at regular intervals?”

            Hamal wasn’t used to the word intervals, but he figured he knew what Cale meant. “Yes.”

            The seer nodded. “Good.”

            They continued for another half-hour. Cale did not relax during that time.

            Masly murmured, “The office should be directly above us.”

            “Should be?” Cale whispered.

            “Is,” Masly amended.

            “Better.”

            “Thank you.”

            Cale said softly to the rest of the team, “In a short distance, the passage turns and runs into a door. A door to which we have no key. But I trust that will not be a problem.” He looked over at Rhyan, who brought up the line directly behind Hamal.

            Rhyan held up one hand. Everything about the movement seemed tired, like he was trying to move with weights strapped to his arms. “No. No problem.”

            “Excellent.”

            In another few minutes, they came to the door: a solid piece of iron wedged deeply into the tunnel on all sides. The top of the door was etched with an ancient blessing Hamal hadn’t seen in years. The words curled almost like flowers and ivy. May the gods bless your passage. You could still find random blessings like this but usually only in Theraine. Carving a blessing into doors this way had been popular maybe five hundred years ago. Was the mine really that old? And if so, how long had it been since this door was opened? The middle of the door was covered with black, slimy growth and the door’s bottom half had turned completely green. The surrounding walls were covered with the same mixture of black and green slime. It almost seemed like a cave’s version of plant growth.

            Rhyan knelt in front of the door and put his fingers to the lock. Not in it, as if he were a human key, but on it.

            “Better try it first,” Masly whispered. When Cale gave him a look, he shrugged. “Years of experience suggest trying a door before breaking it down.”

            “We have no plans to break it down,” Cale replied.

            Rhyan tried the door, easing his weight against the handle. It was indeed locked.

            “As I said…” Masly began.

            Rhyan returned his fingers to the lock and there he stayed, his hand on the door, as the rest of them waited.

            One minute gradually turned into five. Hamal couldn’t smell anything burning, couldn’t hear anything, but gradually he noticed he felt warmer than he had a short time ago.

            “Might take a while,” Rhyan murmured. “The slower I go, the less likely I am to alert anyone on the other side.”

            “Take your time,” Cale said.

            Another five minutes crawled past.

            As they waited, Hamal counted heartbeats again. There were six: Cale, Masly, Rhyan, Ermond, Vincent, and himself. He couldn’t hear anyone on the other side of the door, and judging by the mold or whatever plant life that was, he guessed the door hadn’t been opened in years. Did it open up directly into the office? Or would it be some sort of side passage? What if someone was stationed there?

            Lord Rhyan was a man of talent. He leaned back and pulled lightly on the handle, and the big old door opened silently, just as he had promised. Hamal held his breath as Ermond’s light fell through the darkness, and a waft of different air—less moist, more earthy—swept across them.

On the other side of the door stood another dark passage. The walls were immediately different over there. In the lava tunnel, they were relatively flat and porous, but in the mine itself, they clearly had been hacked and pounded into being by hammers and axes. The ceiling was slightly lower than the lava tunnel’s, and the floor was much dustier.

No workers revealed themselves to Ermond’s light. No one stood guard against intruders, visible or otherwise.

            Cale eased through the door and followed the passage as it curved left. The rest of the team followed him. When they came upon a second passage—this one a large black hole to their right—he bypassed it. He walked past two more such openings until, finally, they came to a second door. This one was several years younger than the first door, the one Rhyan had opened. The metal looked fairly clean, and the door was plain, without any decorative etching along the top.

            Cale motioned to Rhyan.

            This time Rhyan tried the handle on his own, and when this door was locked as well, he took a knee beside it and put his fingers to the locking mechanism.

            Three minutes.

            Four.

            “Hamal,” Cale whispered in the quiet.

            Hamal knew what he was going to ask and counted heartbeats again. Unexpectedly—well, somewhat unexpectedly—he lost count and had to start over. In close quarters like this, squeezed up around a door, he found distinguishing each man’s heart to be more difficult. It was easier when people were spread out, as they had been in the tunnel.

            Rhyan conquered this door more quickly than the first. As he wrapped his hand around the handle and prepared to pull it open, Cale stopped him.

            “Save the light,” Cale ordered in a whisper.

            The shaft in Ermond’s hand disappeared without sound.

            Darkness dropped through the tunnel. Complete, deep darkness. And Hamal lost count. He started over again, and then counted another time, just to be sure. His heart jumped. That can’t be right, he thought and counted again. How hard was it to count to a number less than ten? It should not be this difficult.

            Cale reached for the door.

            “Cale,” Hamal whispered, trying to sound calm.

            The seer paused. “What is it?”

            “There are seven.”

            “What?”

            “There are seven of us in the passage.”

            Every sound dropped away except the heartbeats, suddenly rapid, which Hamal had been counting. But one of the beats did not sound alarmed. One of them was calm. Hamal’s mind began to tell him he felt the sensation of eyes in the dark. Chill bumps lifted on his arms.

            “Light,” Cale said.

            Lightning sparked on Ermond’s hands. It wasn’t a light shaft this time, just the light flickering across his palms. Masly drew his sword, and the blade gleamed bluish green.

            They were alone. The six of them. No one else was there.

            “I know you are not good with numbers,” Cale whispered slowly.

            “I can count to seven,” Hamal replied.

            “Right now, you hear seven heartbeats in the passage?”

            Hamal counted again—two more times, in fact, for the number had changed. “Now I count eight!”

            Cale and Masly looked at one another. Masly shook his head.

            “Where?” Cale asked.

            Hamal pointed down the tunnel, away from the door. “That way. Down there. They are close by.”

            Quickly Cale asked, “Coming or going?”

            “They are not moving. They’re just standing there.”

            The tunnel was empty. Standing at the door, they could see about fifteen paces behind them until the darkness consumed all light. No one was there—and yet Hamal could hear the heartbeats. It was the strangest sensation. He knew people were there and yet couldn’t see them.

            Cale drew a deep, slow breath.

            Masly said, “You are certain of what you hear, Hamal? We are hundreds of feet below the surface of the sea. This land is riddled with old passages and potentially heated waterways. It would not surprise me to discover that something earthy and quite natural could produce sound on its own. Are you certain you hear heartbeats and not something else?”

            Hamal began to describe them. “We are being watched by two men. They do not seem disturbed by our presence. They are just observing. For now.”

            Near silence fell through the passage. The heartbeats remained the same. Eight in total. Six rapid, two calm.

            “I have the door,” Rhyan whispered behind them. “We could go.”

            Cale stared at Hamal with silver eyes. “Any change at Rhyan’s suggestion?”

            “No,” Hamal answered.

            Cale’s look intensified. Quite seriously he asked, “Do you believe it is the e’nethaine?”

            Hamal considered. “They sound like men,” he said slowly, “and yet we cannot see them.”

            Masly leaned back on his heels. “But why would the e’nethaine—who, I might add, have not stepped foot in King’s Barrow in hundreds of years—inhabit a mine that is known to harass healers? It makes no sense.”

            “No,” Cale said darkly. “It does not.”

            “I don’t have any reason to be afraid of the e’nethaine,” Hamal insisted.

            “Still…” Masly said.

            Cale looked at the door. “Let’s go.”

 – H –

Author’s note: When I first wrote this book six years ago, I was single—and had been for a while. But today as I prepare to post this chapter, my son is playing out on the porch. ❤️ He’s also sticking things in his mouth. Please excuse me.

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Under the Water

            This was the Dursen Head Mine? Out here, in the ocean?

            Hamal blinked and rubbed the top of his head. All three of his hats, especially the top one, were damp from the wild drop through the water tunnel. “How can this be the mine? We aren’t on shore.”

            In fact, they were a long distance away from the shore—in the middle of the sea. He knew mines were like caves, which could run deep into the earth, but how could this stray opening at the bottom of the sea be part of the same mine back on land?

            Cale sounded quite pleased with himself as he explained, “We are making good use of a mistake. This tunnel was carved with fire and liquid stone by a volcano in the last age. About a mile from here, the miners accidently dug into it, connecting the Ephram Mine with the open sea. Do you remember the afternoon we spent with the Elortons, Hamal? Well, this was what we were doing—studying the maps they had of this area. The element of surprise is a handy tool in certain cases.”

            Hamal remembered their visit to the Elortons’ library and wished he had paid more attention at the time.

            “The mine itself was carved by the hands of men, with pickax and hammer,” Cale went on. “This passage, however, was not carved by men. It will take us into the heart of the mine, just below a large cavern that Ephram uses as an office. We shall have the element of surprise.”

            “We aren’t leaving the same way we came in, are we?” Hamal asked.

            Masly snickered.

            “It is unlikely the boat survived,” Cale answered.

            “Does that mean no?”

            “That means no.”

            “Then,” Hamal said, “carry on.”

            Light flashed through the cave. Hamal jumped and looked back to see that Ermond had lengthened the light shaft. The weathermaker held the glowing shard with ease, as if it were nothing more than a gardening tool.

            “I’ll take point,” he volunteered.  

            The tunnel they stood in sloped upward. All surfaces were pockmarked and rough, like an old sea sponge, and the color was dull gray-black except for patches that glistened in the light of Ermond’s lightning bolt. Hamal didn’t think the shiny patches were gold, but this was a gold mine. He supposed it was possible.

            Cale, Masly, and Lord Rhyan were standing in water that was ankle deep. Where Hamal stood, the water came to his knees, and then behind him down the slope, Vincent and Ermond waded through water nearly as deep as their belts.

            “Don’t drop that,” Masly commanded, frowning at the bolt in Ermond’s hand as the weathermaker shuffled through the water. “The water would carry the current, and it would be the last breath the rest of us took.”

            “I’ll save you if you die,” Hamal reassured him.

            “Yes, but who will save me if you die?” Masly replied.

            Hamal shrugged. “I’ll be fine.”

            “How do you know?”

            “Well, I’ve always been fine before.”

            Cale chuckled.

            They continued on. An alert Lord Rhyan meant heat, and the undersea passage soon began to warm. Rhyan’s clothes dried immediately, which made Hamal a little wistful, but an hour into their uphill journey, he realized his own clothes were dry as well. It was good to be friends with a flamemaker. They really were quite helpful with wet clothing.

            “I say, Cale?”

            “Yes, Hamal?”

            “Do we need to be quiet?”

            “Not yet,” the seer answered. “Guards patrol the mine, but we won’t need to worry about running into any of those for at least two hours. The goal is to observe, make note of anything that does not align with what Amber Rassone told us, and leave without contact.”

            “But leave by a different way,” Hamal reminded him.

            In the bobbing shadows, Cale nodded. “Yes. A different way.”

            “So, if we don’t need to be quiet yet, then I have a question.”

            “Yes?”

            Hamal glanced at Masly and Lord Rhyan, who walked between him and Cale. He thought about how Rhyan reacted when he learned about Cale’s secret marriage to the king’s cousin and wondered if, perhaps, this question should wait. But it wasn’t as if this was a secret. Not like Cale and Satha’s marriage. It was a fact, not a secret.

            So eventually Hamal said, “You do know Vincent is not a weathermaker, don’t you? He works for you, so you must know that—right?”

            Masly and Rhyan stopped. Hamal bumped into Masly’s back and apologized.

            Ahead of them, Cale turned around and gave Hamal his full attention, silver eyes sharp. “Please explain what you mean. How is Vincent…not a weathermaker?”

            Oh. Hamal twitched, and then he twitched again as he realized everyone else had stopped as well—especially Vincent. The volcano tunnel was nearly silent now. No one made a sound.

            “Well,” Hamal said, “everybody has been saying he’s a weathermaker, but he can’t be a weathermaker, not if he’s moving water. Weathermakers can make lightning and wind and thunder; that’s easy enough, if you’re a weathermaker. But making water move? Or making it change its mind and go a different direction, like he did to get us down here? Only a waterman can do that.”

            “A waterman,” Cale said.

            “Yes. A waterman. It’s an interesting gift—it can do unique things, which is probably why you hired him. A waterman is like a weathermaker. The two gifts are very close together, but they’re—well, they’re different, with different strengths. Also, you don’t find many watermen living in the city. Mostly, you find them in coastal places, like up in King’s Bay. And only men can be watermen. Isn’t that interesting? Daughters born to watermen are weathermakers.”

            Cale lifted his head and glanced down the line at Vincent. “You are certain of this, Hamal?”

            “Oh yes. Vincent can do almost anything a weathermaker can, but he probably has trouble with lightning, doesn’t he? And he probably can’t talk with thunder, the way most weathermakers can. But it would be easy for him to push a boat on the ocean, like he did today. He probably didn’t use wind. It was probably water. Any water found anywhere, even in the air—Vincent can use it. He can make it do whatever he wants it to do. It looks like he’s using wind, when he actually is using water.”

            Hamal pulled off his hats and rubbed the top of his head because everyone was still looking at him. “Anyway, I thought you knew about Vincent, but then you also called him a weathermaker. So that’s why I’m asking.”

            “How many watermen have you met?” Cale asked.

            Hamal shrugged. “Well, I’ve known lots but not any in the city. I’ve known them in other places. Does Vincent’s family come from the coast? Watermen always live near water, because it feels more comfortable to them. You won’t find any in dry places like Dasken. They’re kind of like the e’nethaine in that way—they like the water—and Dasken is mostly desert, you know.”

            Cale stood there a moment longer, considering. And then with a nod, he said, “Very well; Vincent is a waterman,” and turned and started up the slope again.

            They walked for several minutes before conversations quietly began again—mostly in front of him, between Masly and Rhyan—and Hamal wondered what Vincent was thinking. Perhaps, if he was bothered at what he felt were shortcomings in his gifting, he could realize now they were not shortcomings after all. He just wasn’t what he thought he was.

            “Hamal,” Cale said.

            “Yes?”

            “Do you remember our conversation with the Elortons?”

            “A little. Why?”

            “Do you remember how they mentioned hearing stories about strange things happening in this mine with healers and that some believe the Ephram Mine is haunted? Whatever lives here, if something lives here, it does not like healers.”

            Hamal scoffed.

            No one else joined in.

            “It can’t be the e’nethaine,” Hamal said, just like he had before. “They have their own healers. They wouldn’t have a reason to hurt me. If they wanted to, they could just talk to me and tell me what was wrong.”

            Somebody ahead of him—it sounded like Rhyan—made a strange noise, almost like he was choking.

            “I do not believe it is the e’nethaine,” Cale said. “I agree with your assessment. However, I do want you to begin counting heartbeats. The path is smooth and clear from this point forward; we will be able to make our observations and leave without distress. Both Masly and I have seen this. Yet, until we know exactly what is happening within the mine and how it involves your gifting, I would like you to count heartbeats.” Cale hesitated. “To make certain we truly are alone in the dark.”  

 – H –

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Under the Sea

            “Yes,” Cale stated and gestured toward the watery surface below their feet. “Here.”

            Again Hamal looked over the edge of the boat, and again he saw nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. The shore was several miles away—a dark line behind them. Over the last hour, their course had slowly turned north, keeping the shore to their right; this meant they were closer to Dursen Head than before, but what did it matter? This was still the open sea.

            “You gentlemen may want to sit,” Vincent said.

            The seers sat. Cale grabbed the edge of the bench under him with both hands, as did Masly. Watching them, Hamal quickly did the same, but Rhyan for some reason did not, so he thoroughly and completely lost his seat when the boat dropped. It fell as if the sea had been ripped away.

            They cut through darkness and salty, wet air, and Hamal’s stomach felt like it stayed on the surface. With his eyes tightly squeezed shut, he had no idea what was happening, except that it was loud. The wind roared. Cold water sprayed him in the face and quickly soaked through his coat.

            When he finally managed to pry his eyes open, he saw dark walls that moved. The boat seemed to be sliding down a tube made of water, and as droplets whipped his skin, Hamal thought, Wait a moment—is Vincent doing this? But Vincent was a weathermaker, and weathermakers couldn’t move water. They could make storms and lightning and thunder and rain, but they couldn’t make water move from one place to another.

            The boat slammed into something solid. The impact ripped Hamal’s hands off the seat and knocked him to the floorboards. As his brain stopped spinning, he dragged in a deep breath—he could breathe down here—and discovered the wet air smelled like old shells. He could hear rushing water. It was as if he were lying next to a waterfall.

            He pushed himself into a sitting position and tilted his head back. Far, far above them, a small circle of light constantly changed shape, a little like flames moving around in a strong wind. It began as a circle, then it stretched to an oval and then shortened into something that didn’t seem to have a shape at all. It was the beginning of the tube, Hamal realized. They were at one end, and the surface of the sea was at the other. How far down had they fallen? Was this the bottom of the sea?

            And Vincent did this, he thought.

            “Hamal!” someone shouted in the blackness.

            “Cale?” Hamal stood to his feet cautiously and had to fling up his arms as the boat rocked beneath his boots. He couldn’t see a thing other than the shifting point of daylight above his head. It could be fifty feet away, or it could be a mile. He had no idea.

            In the darkness Cale found him. Hamal felt a hand on his shoulder and knew immediately who touched him because the blood started talking, like it always did.

Cale leaned close to him and shouted in his ear, “Hamal, how many men are in the boat?”

            Hamal knew what Cale was asking for, but it wasn’t going to work. He would never be able to hear a man’s heartbeat in all this noise. He could barely hear Cale shouting at him.

            “I don’t know,” he shouted back.

            “Where’s Rhyan? Can you find Rhyan?”

            Cale was concerned about the flamemaker who had been unprepared for the boat to drop.

            Before Hamal could respond, silver-blue light flickered in the darkness. It was sudden and swift—a short, jagged burst. For just a moment, Hamal could see Cale’s face, and the seer stopped talking, his head swinging toward the light.

            What was that? Hamal thought.

            Somewhere behind him, Ermond shouted a few words that were sucked away in the roar of moving water. The silver-blue light reappeared in between his hands—a fierce, violent storm that twisted from palm to palm.

            Lightning! Hamal realized. He’s making lightning!

            The light flared and left splotches before his eyes, and when he could see clearly again, Ermond was holding a light shaft: a piece of lightning that was hard and solid, like glass. People often put them in transparent jars and used them for lanterns outside their houses. It wasn’t a bright light, and it somehow matched the chill in the air, but it was steady now.

            “There!” Masly yelled and pointed.

            In the pale light, Hamal saw they had landed on a pointy outcropping of black stone. The boat sat at an angle, the prow extending over nothing. Oh, he thought. That was why the boat had shifted when he stood up. The rocks were wet and slippery looking, and the boat appeared ready to fall off the side into…nothing. Exactly how deep did that chasm go?

            Then Hamal saw Rhyan. The flamemaker was on his back on a flat area of rock just below them. He looked asleep but with blood on his forehead.

            The water howled like an angry animal. Cale shouted, “Ermond! Hold that light! Hamal, we need you.”

            Cale and Masly studied the rocks leading to Rhyan’s ledge and then cautiously crawled over the boat’s side, choosing their steps and handholds with care. The boat slipped down an inch or two, and Hamal gripped the edge with both hands until the movement halted. Breath in his throat, he slowly climbed out. The rock under his boots was wet and dark, and he could barely see it in the glow of the light shaft.

            Vincent hollered behind him, “I told him to sit down.”

            Ermond replied, “You should have been more insistent! He might have died—and he’s a second lord! What were you thinking?”

            It took five minutes to get to Rhyan. The distance was not far, but the path was almost nonexistent, with the chasm right there to receive them if they took a wrong step. When they finally reached the lord’s body, Hamal dropped to his knees on the rock and set one hand on Rhyan’s bloody forehead and the other on the man’s chest. Rhyan’s lips parted at the touch. If he groaned, Hamal didn’t hear it.

            “Is he all right?” Cale asked, shouting to be heard over the roar of the water walls.

            Hamal finished his survey and replied, also shouting, “He has a split skull, broken ribs, and every bone in his right arm is shattered. But nothing serious.”

            With Cale and Masly looking on, he healed all the bones—bones were easy. You just had to melt them and then reform them. He climbed to his feet. “All right. He is good to be moved now.”

            Cale and Masly hefted the lord’s unconscious body, one in charge of Rhyan’s legs and the other in charge of his arms. Cale looked calm even in the middle of the sea, with cold water raging all around them. The watery walls boiled, from top to bottom, and yet the water did not approach them.

            Vincent and Ermond had crawled out of the boat, and they waited for them now on another part of the rock. Even from here, Hamal could see the gleam on Vincent’s forehead. It was cold down here, cold and wet and windy, but Vincent was sweating. He wondered how long the man could hold back the sea. Retrieving Rhyan and then healing him—that had taken time. Cale and Vincent probably hadn’t planned for about ten extra minutes.

            “How much longer can you hold this?” Cale asked Vincent.

            Vincent wiped his forehead. “Another five minutes. Maybe a little longer.”

            Cale nodded. “That will be enough time.”

            Vincent shifted his weight and touched his forehead again. “I still suggest we hurry, my lord.”

            “Yes. Which direction, Masly?”

            Masly gestured with his chin toward the rocks to the right. “That way. Twenty paces. On the other side of a…slight rise.”

            “Twenty paces over these rocks will take longer than five minutes,” Vincent warned.

            “It will be enough time,” Cale repeated and then had the nerve to smile.

            You’re doing it again, Hamal thought and frowned at his friend. Cale didn’t want to be safe. He wanted to be dangerous.

            Hamal had no idea where they could possibly be going in the sea, surrounded by water.

            Vincent was right. Traveling across twenty paces of wet, slippery black stone required more than five minutes. It felt like an hour to Hamal. Poor Vincent stopped talking. The sweat rolled down his forehead, and he started slipping more often and cutting his hands on the stones. Gradually, the roar of the water began to sound different too. It became wetter than it had before, more like a growl from an open throat. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

            Twenty paces.

            Twenty long, nearly invisible paces that reminded Hamal of trying to climb over ice.

            But at the end was a cave.

            The entrance was narrow and low, and Ermond’s light didn’t make a scratch on this new level of darkness. Hamal looked at the mouth of the cave and shivered, his clothes dripping like he had just climbed out of a pool. Why was there a cave at the bottom of the sea?

            Cale walked inside without hesitation. Rhyan was somewhat awake now and squinting, even though the light was poor at best and couldn’t possibly be hurting his eyes. Masly helped the flamemaker into the cave, supporting him with a strong arm wrapped around his ribs, and Hamal scrambled in after them.

            The inside of the underwater cave was wet and dripping but surprisingly empty. It made Hamal think of the spout of a giant kettle that had just been drained. Hands out, back bent, he followed Cale carefully, and the deeper into the cave they went, the quieter the sea grew behind them. He started to be able to hear Cale moving in front of him. He began to hear the others too—scrapes of boots on stones, labored breathing.

            “We’re about to get wet,” Masly said from somewhere behind him.

            A moment later, Vincent shouted and water thundered. Hamal sucked in his breath as the air pressure shifted abruptly. He felt the change like fingers in his ears. Cold foam sprayed. Water slammed against his legs, and he nearly lost his footing. He thought for a moment he had lost it.

            “Lord Rhyan!” he shouted, concerned for his recovering patient.  

            There was no answer.

            The roar slowly lessened into a rumble, then an angry murmur. The sea came up to his calves, just below the tops of his boots. He stood there—arms out for balance, breathing hard, heart racing—and listened as the cave grew quiet. He could hear heartbeats in the darkness, and he began to count them, just to be certain. There should be six, including his own. Six. Cale was at the beginning of the line, following by Masly with Rhyan. Then Hamal, and behind him were Vincent and Ermond. Six heartbeats. He found them all.

            “Cale?” he called.

            “Here,” the seer replied, his voice loud and rather aggressive in the dark. Hamal could hear the excitement, all the adrenaline pumping through him. Cale took a deep breath and said, “Report, team.”

            “Here,” Masly replied.

            “Here,” Ermond said.

            A moment later: “Here.” Vincent’s voice sounded rough. His heart throbbed like that of a man who had just finished a long race.

            Hamal looked around in the dark. It seemed they had made it to their destination, but he still didn’t know what that destination was. He shivered. “Where are we?”

            “This is the Dursen Head Mine,” Cale replied.

 – H –

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Cale Buys a Boat

            Cale waited until four o’clock in the morning—the coldest part of the night. Hamal dressed as warmly as he could, layer upon layer, and he smiled encouragingly at Rosy, who was awake and sitting up in her bed. Blankets covered her head, her shoulders, everything. Only her face was visible.

            “Cold, Rosy?” he asked.

            A slight delay, and then the blankets moved as she nodded.

            “Well, we’ll have you warm in a minute. My grandfather and Chestirad are going to stay with you. Chestirad is a flamemaker, you know. He can heat the air, so the room will be nice and warm.” Hamal grinned. “I hope you want to stay with us, Rosy—with Cale and me, even though we’re cold people. We’re not flamemakers.”

            She smiled back shyly.

            When he was ready to go, with his coat and gloves and hats and scarves in place, he went over to the bed and kissed Rosy’s forehead. She actually let him do it, though she looked as stiff as a fence post. “We will be back in a few hours. You can sleep. You can eat. And then you can sleep again, if you want to, and then you’ll see us. All right?”

            She stared up at him with dark eyes, her smile completely gone. He didn’t know what this look was, not exactly, but it made his heart dip toward his boots. She had been much happier the last couple of days, but now she looked scared again. He could hear her heartbeat, and it wasn’t calm.

            “It will be all right, Rosy,” he said. “We will see each other again tomorrow.”

            He felt awful leaving her.

            Outside the inn, there were no stars. The clouds had rolled in like smoke from a monstrous fire. Hamal took a big breath of the cold air and immediately regretted it. He hunkered down, pulling up his scarves and adjusting his coat as he squinted through the darkness. How could people live in a place that was always this cold?

            Lord Rhyan stepped closer to him, and the bitter night air began to forget itself.

            “Thank you,” Hamal whispered.

            “You’re welcome,” the flamemaker whispered back.

            Cale had chosen only a few men for this early morning venture. There was Rhyan, of course, and also Vincent and Ermond, who were both weathermakers, as well as Masly. To Hamal’s surprise, they didn’t head straight for the mine. Instead, they saddled their horses and went southwest, paralleling the beach. Aren’t we headed the wrong direction? Hamal wanted to ask, but it was too cold for him to do anything but try to stay in the saddle.

            An hour later, the beach road turned inland, away from the sea, and followed a river that twisted through a small forest of pines trees and scraggly bushes before suddenly depositing them at a shipping yard. Lanterns revealed men at work, most of them flamemakers or weathermakers, judging by the lack of coats. In fact, most wore only breeches and boots, leaving their chests and arms bare.

            Cale dismounted. “We are going to buy a boat,” he told Hamal.

            A boat? For the mine they had left back in Dursen Head?

            The seer said to Rhyan, “Make sure Hamal stays warm.” Then he, Vincent, and Masly took the wooden walkway down to the office—an old, rickety structure built over both land and water. Half of it hung across the river on poles, and the other half sat on the shore. A lamp burned in one window.

            Rhyan urged his horse next to Hamal’s, and the shivering slowly released Hamal’s shoulders.

            “Thank you,” Hamal said again. His wished for ten more scarves.

            Rhyan nodded. He wasn’t wearing a coat.

            When Cale and the others returned, they had with them a man with a large white beard and a hat that said “Watercress” across the front. He wasn’t a flamemaker; Hamal could tell by the thickness of his coat. The man seemed flustered, but perhaps it was just the cold.

            “This way,” Cale directed the rest of them, taking the reins of his horse from Ermond.

            Multiple small boats waited along the docks. They chose the dock that was the farthest away, and as they approached, the man with the white beard pointed to a small boat with a triangular sail. Hamal wasn’t good with boats, but he thought this one might be called a sloop. He remembered that word from a conversation he’d had a long time ago with his father, who liked boats.

            They left their horses with the dock manager, raised the small sail, and set off. The river carried them back toward the coast. Vincent the weathermaker provided a wind that was good and steady but uncommonly wet, so wherever they were going, Hamal reasoned they would get there quickly. But where were they going? They were supposed to be headed to a mine. Instead, they were headed out to sea.

            Despite the clouds, the sky was slowly lightening, and right when Hamal started to think about breakfast, Cale said Ermond’s name, and the weathermaker slid his pack off his shoulder. He took out a long, narrow tin from under his cloak and handed it politely to Lord Rhyan, who wrapped his hands around it. The skin of his hands reddened until they seemed almost to glow—in fact, Hamal thought his hands did glow—as he warmed the contents.

            “Here you go, Hamal,” the flamemaker said and twisted off the cap for him. “Something to keep you warm.”

            Steam rose from the tin’s mouth. It smelled like beef broth and spices, and Hamal grinned across the boat at Cale, who smiled in reply.

            Ermond dug out several more tins, and Rhyan acted as their campfire and heated them. Everyone had breakfast as they continued on their strange journey.

            Two hours later, Masly looked up from the map he was studying. That was the only signal he gave, but Cale saw it and responded.

            “Hold, Vincent,” Cale said.

            Vincent held up his hand and the wet, icy wind dropped away. Hamal didn’t realize how loud the wind had been until the sound disappeared, and the sea grew calm. The sloop slowed in the water.

            “Here, my lord?” Vincent asked.

            Cale and Masly stood up both together and stared over the side of the boat into the sea. Hamal looked too, but he didn’t see anything important. The water was dark and murky, and it made him wonder what sort of interesting things were stirring beneath the boat at that very moment. Several years had passed since he last traveled through the sea.

            They had some very fine roads down there.

 – H –

Author’s note: I am fond of the last sentence in this chapter. “They had some very fine roads down there.” How random and curious. ❤️

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 13

Chapter 13

King’s Lantern

            They arrived at the mining town of Dursen Head in the evening.

            The inn called King’s Lantern was a long, two-story building made from black stone and iron. They handed their horses off to the weathermakers who worked in the stable and hurried toward the inn. Chestirad heaved open the heavy oak doors, and heat rolled out like the first breath of a massive oven. Once inside, Hamal began to breathe a little more easily. He pulled the scarfs off his face and bent down to help Rosy with hers, readjusting the bear hat so the ears sat evenly.  

            The innkeeper’s name was Sully, and he was a flamemaker who liked to cook. His clothes smelled like sugar and bread dough. He must have been bent over a pot in the kitchen before their arrival, because his forehead was wet, and he wiped at it with a blue handkerchief as he greeted them. They took rooms at the back of the inn near the kitchen, which was pleasant because all the heat from the kitchen rolled down the hallway and into their rooms, and Hamal thought they had finally found a decent place at last. It even seemed peaceful.

            The peace, however, didn’t last long.

            They were just getting settled when a knock sounded on the door, and when Shel Galen jumped up to open it, they found Sully standing there. The man still had the blue handkerchief in his hand, and his face was flushed nearly scarlet. The hand with the handkerchief was shaking a bit.

            “Ah,” the innkeeper said, looking down at Shel. “I say, I’ve come to speak to the, erm, the seer. The one in charge. Is he here?”

            Cale stepped up behind Shel. “Yes, he is. What is it?”

            The innkeeper blew out his breath and said, “Forgive me for the interruption, my lord. I do apologize, but due to circumstances completely out of my control, a party waits for you in the front dining room. She said you would know what it’s about.”

            She? Hamal wondered.

            Cale didn’t hesitate. “Yes, thank you. We will be there shortly.”

            As the door closed, Hamal looked up at Cale in surprise. “You knew somebody would meet us here?”

            “I arranged it,” Cale answered.

            Hamal’s jaw dropped. “You did?”

            Shel laughed quietly. “Seers.”

            Cale shrugged and said simply, “We know what kind of man Darren Ephram is. He is willing to enslave free men and women, the king’s own people, to further his purposes. We are not obligated to deal directly with Darren Ephram. To shut down his mining operation, we need to deal with someone who is willing to work with us. Someone of a certain rank in his operation who knows exactly what kind of man he is. Masly and I both saw that something curious waits for us in this town. Something unexpected, but it involves Ephram’s men.”

            “Should we go get Masly?” Hamal asked. Masly seemed like a wise choice. So did Chestirad, whose size alone could silence protests.

            “He’s on his way,” Cale replied.

            And he was.

            There was another knock on the door, and Masly stepped in with Lord Rhyan, Kolling, Ermond, and Chestirad behind him.

            “Ready?” Masly asked Cale.

            “Indeed. Hamal and Ermond, wait here with Rosy, if you would. We will be back shortly.”

            Hamal’s grandfather went with Cale.

            Ermond spoke to a servant and ordered supper, and the three of them ate together sitting on the floor. Ermond kept the fire going strongly, and the room grew so pleasant and warm that Hamal actually took off his coat, for what seemed like the first time in weeks. Joy filled him at the thought of sleeping inside tonight.

            Half an hour passed before Chestirad returned. He was alone. “Hamal, there’s a case in the dining room, and they want you to look at it.”

            “All right,” Hamal said and stood up, setting his plate on the bed.

            Rosy stood up too, as if her name had been called. She daintily wiped her fingers on the blanket covering the bed and then stood next to Hamal, looking up at him expectantly.

            “Oh, so you’re ready to go now, are you?” he teased her.

            She nodded.

            “Why don’t you stay here with Ermond?”

            But no, that wasn’t what she wanted. She shook her head.

            Remembering how the others hadn’t wanted to bring Rosy with them because of the potential danger, Hamal tried again: “Look, you’d better stay, Rosy. I don’t think Cale would say it’s safe for you. We don’t know what’s about to happen.”

            “I will not argue with an oracle,” Chestirad said, and Hamal glanced at him. Chestirad shrugged his massive shoulders. “If she wishes to come, no one here will stop her.”

            “Oh,” Hamal said. “Well, fine.”

            Hamal and Rosy followed Chestirad, who took them through a dark hallway down the length of the building until they reached a set of large double doors. Hainn stood guard, his arms folded. When he saw Rosy, his eyes widened.

            The weathermaker didn’t often speak, and yet he spoke now. “You brought her?”

            “She brought herself,” Chestirad rumbled in reply.

            Hainn blew out a breath that contained a bit of weathermaker energy. The air whipped through Hamal’s hair and pulled at his clothes. But Hainn said nothing more. He just leaned over and opened the door on the left.

            The dining room held a long table set with various dinner things. Everything was unexpectedly elegant. The blue dishes were painted with little white flowers, like something you would see on a fine table in the city. Hamal had already eaten, but the room smelled so good that his stomach thought about rumbling.

            Seated at the table was a woman.

            The first thing Hamal noticed was her gifting. She had to be a weathermaker or a flamemaker. Those were the only two possibilities because she was wearing a tunic without any sleeves and the collar was open. Not covering yourself would be foolish in Dursen Head for anyone who wasn’t a weathermaker or a flamemaker. Just thinking about it, Hamal shivered.

            Then he noticed her hair.

            He had never seen such gloriously red hair. It was like looking at a sunset but one that didn’t burn your eyes. This can’t be the real color, he thought. She had propped her fur-lined boots lazily in the chair next to her, and there was a glass of wine in her hand.

            She smiled at Hamal slyly, rather reminding him of a cat looking at a mouse. “So, you’re the mighty healer who works for the king,” she said and her dark, laughing eyes roamed over him. “Surprising, I must say. How old are you?”

            Hamal wasn’t a mighty healer. That joke was funny only when Cale told it. Or maybe Masly. He heard Cale’s voice and looked up to see him standing near the end of the table. His arms were folded, his feet braced, and he looked like a soldier.

            “If you are not interested in his services, he can leave as easily as he came.” It wasn’t Cale’s normal voice. This voice sounded like a bear. A bear with knives and crossbows and other weapons. Cale sounded dangerous.

            The redheaded woman sighed. “Fine. But I don’t see what a child could do that other healers could not.”

            She motioned to someone standing behind her, and a man stepped away from the wall. He was tall, much taller than Hamal, and wiry like a tree. Hamal could tell he was someone who worked hard every day. The man’s hands were stained black, and a jagged scar stretched across the right side of his face. Hamal had seen plenty of scars that looked like this one—this man had gotten into a fight with a weathermaker. Was he from South Barrow? Hamal didn’t recognize him, but maybe this fellow knew Francis, Cally’s husband.

            “Hamal,” Cale said. “Do you remember the body we examined in the king’s palace?”

            “Yes,” Hamal replied cautiously. “The flamemaker.”

            The man with the scar on his face came around the table and held up his right hand, palm open. An angry wound blistered across the heel of his hand. Hamal’s trained eyes knew exactly what it was: a burn. A bad one. Slowly, understanding began to come to him.

            He looked up at the man’s face. “Are you a flamemaker too?”

            The man nodded stiffly. As a flamemaker, he should have been immune to fire. Completely immune to it. Fire couldn’t burn him, and yet here was an impossible thing: a raw, angry burn on his hand.

            “And you want me to fix this?”

            “If you can,” the woman at the table said smoothly.

            Cale just smiled.

            Releasing Rosy’s hand, Hamal put one hand under the flamemaker’s and, as gently as he could, touched the flamemaker’s palm with one finger—near the wound but not actually on it.

            The man’s blood instantly began to tell him many things, as if it had just been waiting for someone to talk to. The man was a widower who had one child. A girl. And this was not the only burn he suffered from. There was another burn, a bigger one, on his chest that he hadn’t told anyone about because he was afraid.

            But there was one thing Hamal didn’t find, which surprised him.

            “I say,” Hamal started, “does this cause you pain?”

            The man shook his head.

            “Cale, isn’t that interesting?” Hamal called over to him. “He’s a flamemaker—he shouldn’t have burns, so it doesn’t actually hurt him when he does have one. That’s interesting.” To the flamemaker he said, “What’s your name?”

            The man spoke with a rigid mouth, as if he didn’t use it very often. “Taim.”

            “Well, Taim, you don’t have to worry anymore. You aren’t going to die any sooner than the gods predict.”

            Hamal healed the wound. The blisters began to shrink first, and then the skin closed, and then the redness went away, leaving behind a shiny white line—a scar that looked a little like a caterpillar. Hamal sighed when he saw it. He always left scars, no matter how hard he tried not to. It was as if he signed every healing he did, which was ridiculous, because healers shouldn’t do that.

            He went ahead and healed the burn on Taim’s chest as well, even though that one was a secret, and he removed the arthritis from his knuckles and wrists, because Taim was a hard worker and hard workers shouldn’t have to work with pain.

            “There you are,” Hamal said and let go of Taim’s hand. “You’re all better now. Do you know a flamemaker named Francis? Or maybe a feeler named Steadfast?”

            The woman at the table stood up, her chair screeching across the floor. “You healed him?” she demanded. She came around the table and examined the white scar on Taim’s hand.

            “We do not need Darren Ephram if you are willing to act in his place,” Cale said quietly. “The king will deliver on his word.”

            A moment passed in silence—or near silence. Hamal heard tiny scratches and realized Gregory was sitting in the corner writing in his notebook as fast as he could. Hamal recalled what Cale had said about readers always attending to the king’s business, writing everything down so the king could read it later.

            “And we will deliver on ours,” the woman replied. “We will return for you in two days.”

            Cale nodded once.

            Apparently, the meeting was over.

            “What was that about?” Hamal whispered to Cale on their way back to their rooms.

            Cale didn’t answer until all of them were back in the room, with the door shut after them. Rosy curled up on the bed and watched them with eyes that were clear and looked wide awake, even after a long day of travel. Dark eyes. No fire.

            “We’ve stumbled into a coup,” Masly said.

            “A coo? Do you mean a songbird?”

            Lord Rhyan explained, “A coup, Hamal. It means the men and women who work for the House of Ephram already had a plan to overthrow him and take his gold for themselves.” His brows rose. “A very interesting plan it is too. That Amber Rassone is a very…intelligent person.”

            “Who’s Amber Rassone?” Hamal asked.

            “The woman we just met,” Cale answered. “The flamemaker with the red hair. She’s been setting her plans in motion since Darren Ephram killed the king’s men.”

            “And we’re going to listen to her?”

            Cale and Masly traded a silver look.

            “We’re considering it,” Rhyan said, and as the seers turned to look at him, he shrugged and said, “Well, we are. Aren’t we? You told her Hamal could heal her men who are dying from Ephram’s brew, and she seemed interested.”

            Hamal greatly wished he knew what was going on. “What brew?”

            With a sigh, Cale sat down at the small table and said, “Here’s what we know, Hamal. If you recall, Darren Ephram is the second lord of the House of Ephram.”

            Second lord meant he was the firstborn son who would inherit after his father’s death. It was confusing sometimes, trying to keep up with people’s numbers. The father was the first lord, and then his sons were numbered after him.

            “Yes,” Hamal said. “I remember him.”

            Cale continued, “The first lord, the father, has decided to obey the king’s edict, but the second lord, the son, has launched a full-scale rebellion. Rassone confirmed what Harper, the flamemaker scout who burned to death, reported just before his death: that Darren Ephram is responsible for the death of the king’s men. He is a jeweler, like his father, but he has an alchemist who works for him—a very talented, dark sort of individual who invented a concoction that will kill a man slowly. It burns people alive. Given enough time, it will do what it did to Harper. It didn’t matter that he was a flamemaker; the brew burned through him like a slow-moving fire. The mine workers have been living in terror because the few healers they have can’t do what you did just now. They can’t heal anyone who’s come in contact with the brew. Subsequently they’ve lost many men. Because of their master.”

            Cale sighed again. His voice lowered as he said, “Rassone says the brew is like water, so it soaks through clothing, and it is possible to use it on many people at once. Ephram will occasionally hurl it at entire groups, which is what occurred with Taim, the man you just healed. He was standing in an unfortunate place when Ephram was angry.”

            “So, the bad Lord Ephram just wants to keep the mine?” Hamal asked.

            Cale nodded. “Yes.” He focused on Hamal. “They are going to start bringing their injured to you. Was it fairly easy for you to heal Taim?”

            “Yes.”

            “Good, because you’ll see many more just like him.”

            Cale sounded tired. Sometimes Hamal thought it must be hard for Cale to be in charge of things, because when Cale met sad people, he tried to help them, and there were a lot of sad people at the mine. Taim had lost his wife. And Justice Ashby’s servant, Steadfast—a feeler—was here. And somewhere in this cold place, Francis was here as well and missing Cally and his little girls. How could Cale take care of so many sad people all at the same time?

            Hamal asked, “But if there are injured people, why are we waiting? Why does Amber Rassone want us to wait two more days? Some of those people might die.”

            “That’s the fun part,” Rhyan replied, his eyes gleaming. “It’s because they’re moving a large shipment of gold—Ephram’s gold. He and his bodyguards aren’t due back to the mine for another three days, and when they arrive, they will find the house empty and swept clean, so to speak. Everything will be gone.” Rhyan sounded quite pleased about it. “Darren Ephram will lose everything.”

            Hamal traded a look with his grandfather. Then he turned and looked at Cale. “Are we going to do what she says? Are we going to wait for two days before we try to get into the mine?”

            Cale smiled. “Of course not.”

 – H –

Author’s note: I like including little notes at the end of each chapter so readers can get a glimpse into either this book or my life that they otherwise might not ever see. This week’s glimpse is that I cannot think of anything to put here except to mention that I need more coffee. Coffee. Coffee is the glimpse. 😂

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 12

Chapter 12

A Sign of Good Things

            Hamal didn’t know what was about to happen. At the inn in Redsprin, he’d had a dream—a bad dream—the very first night with Rosy. Tonight, outside the small town of Gallank Tree, he, Rosy, and Will were sitting around the campfire staring awkwardly at one another.

            Something was about to happen.

            Something was supposed to happen.

            Would he have another dream, but this time perhaps it would be a good dream—or at least a better dream? Would he have no dream at all, but Rosy would see the Creator, and her eyes would fill with fire, and this time that fire would be a sign of good things and not bad things?  

            Hamal had no idea. But he hoped, for Rosy’s sake, that the Creator made things easy for her. This little child was only a few years old—just six—and already sorrow had marked her bones. That wasn’t right, for such a small child to have experienced this much pain and suffering. Perhaps…

            Hamal looked down at the child. She was seated next to him on the blanket with the argumentative gray kitten in her lap. The same kitten that liked sitting on people’s heads. The kitten’s huge blue eyes were focused on Mercy the sand wolf, lying next to Will on the other side of the fire.

            Perhaps, Hamal thought again, tonight will be good for her heart.

            “Hamal,” Will said.

            Hamal looked at him over the flames.

            “I confess I do not entirely know what is expected of me tonight.”

            Hamal didn’t know either. He lifted both shoulders in a shrug. Rosy shuffled around beside him, gripping the gray kitten and gently running her fingers over its head. Hamal thought this was a good sign. Just a few days ago, he’d had a difficult time imagining little Rosy responding positively to anything, even a cuddly kitten.

            “I think,” Hamal said slowly, “my grandfather wants you to do just…what you would normally do. What do you normally do at night? I know you like to sleep on the ground and speak to the Creator about the earth, but what does that mean at night?”

            Will took his time answering. He lifted his tea and, for the first time, actually took a sip. Hamal’s cup was nearly empty, sitting in the soil near his feet. Rosy hadn’t touched hers yet. Did she even like tea? Hamal wasn’t certain, but it had seemed good to give her a cup anyway.

            “Most nights,” Will said quietly, “I listen to the story of the ground, and where it is hurting, I make repairs.”

            “Oh,” Hamal said, leaning forward a bit. “That sounds exciting.”

            “I am afraid you would likely find it dull.” Will’s eyes narrowed. “Or maybe not. You are a sage after all. But most people would find what I do to be rather slow and uneventful. I speak to the Creator, and he shows me where the ground has been wounded and how to heal it. Much of the time, the healing is minimal and cannot be seen on the surface. This is not my land. I have no relationship with this town or any of its people; there is only so much I can do.”

            Hamal looked at Will closely. “You have never mentioned this to me. About healing the earth. That’s very interesting. I don’t know anything about healing the earth, but I would like to know about it.”

            Will’s face darkened. Even in the moving lights of the fire, Hamal could see the change. The charter glanced down at Rosy, who had picked up her tea and was trying to offer it to the kitten.

            Will reached up and rubbed his face. His hand was dirty, and he increased the smudge marks on his skin. “My clan doesn’t discuss the earth with outsiders. We don’t tell other clans what we can do with it. We don’t find employment with a seer who works for the throne. We don’t help that seer accomplish tasks assigned to him by that throne. And we do not ever leave the land we were born on.”

            The night fell quiet. The fire crackled.

            “But, Will,” Hamal said carefully, “you have done all those things.”

            The charter laughed once, but it wasn’t an overly happy sound. “I know.”

            Hamal remembered the feel of Will’s bones. Every time he touched the charter, his bones tried to talk about sadness. It was an old sadness, something that had happened long ago. Was this the reason they were sad? Why did charters never leave the land they were born on, and yet Will had traveled up here into the North Territory with Cale? Hamal didn’t know anything about Will’s history. Nobody did. Well, maybe Cale did, but he knew only what his gifting had shown him.

            Will took a deep breath. “Yes, Hamal. I will tell you a little about healing the earth—or, as you and your grandfather have asked, I will show you.” He looked pointedly at Rosy.

            Rosy didn’t seem to notice.

            Will stretched out face down on the ground. He avoided the patches of long, straggly grass and put his body directly onto the cold soil. As interested as he was in what Will was doing, Hamal kept one eye on Rosy. This was about her too. The little girl looked at Will curiously as he set himself on the ground, without a bedroll or blankets or anything else, but then she returned to playing with her kitten, which had quite loudly decided it did not want any tea. 

            What would it be like to watch a charter heal part of the earth? Hamal remembered what it was like to travel with Will under the earth, when they had been trying to arrest Lord Masgrave and escape his dragons. He had seen Will do extraordinary things with the ground then. He could move it and make it change.

            Hamal set his hand on the ground, the same way Will often did, and wondered if he would be able to feel what Will was doing. The ground was chilly and damp, and he pulled his hat down over his ears and scooted a little closer to the fire.

            Will didn’t move. For someone who was praying, he seemed oddly quiet. The moon rose higher above their heads, coating the land outside Gallank Tree with silvery, mysterious light. A wolf howled off to the west somewhere, and Mercy the sand wolf lifted her head and looked toward the sound. Rosy’s head began tipping toward her chest, and Hamal spread out her bedroll and helped tuck her in. Tonight she let him do it. The kitten went into the bedroll too. It accepted the bedroll much more easily than it had accepted the tea.

            “Good night, Rosy,” Hamal whispered, giving her a warm smile.

            She stared up at him with dark eyes and didn’t speak, nor did she smile in return. He breathed a sigh. He knew they were making progress—he could wait.

            He sat back on his bedroll and studied Will’s prone form on the other side of the fire. Healing the earth. He rubbed his hand against the dirt and then looked at the dark grains left behind on his palm.

            An hour later, when nothing noticeable had occurred, Hamal finally gave in to the pull of sleep and lay down, his arms under his head as he stared up at the moon. He thought of the Creator, who had made that moon, and wondered what he and Will were talking about. His eyes closed, and when he opened them, it was morning. He had not dreamed, not even a tiny bit.

            For the next three days, they stayed in Gallank Tree.

            Hamal, Rosy, and Will slept outside under the stars with Mercy the sand wolf and the little gray kitten. Each morning they would head to the inn for breakfast, where Shel Galen would look at Hamal and ask, “Well?”

            And Hamal would shrug helplessly and reply, “I cannot tell that anything has happened. We are still waiting.”

“Well then, keep at it,” his grandfather would answer.

            Finally, on the fourth night spent out-of-doors, Hamal asked Will quietly, “Do you think he’s going to come?”

            Will seemed genuinely confused by the question. “Who?”

            “Why, the Creator, of course,” Hamal said. “The one called Ruwok. The one you pray to.”

            Will looked at him in surprise. “Yes. He has been here. I have heard his voice.”

            Hamal felt his eyebrows crawl up toward his hair. “He has? Do you think Rosy saw him? I can’t tell that anything has happened with her.” He hadn’t seen her fire eyes in at least two days.

            Will rubbed his face with a dirty hand as he thought about it. The two of them looked at the little girl asleep by the fire.

            “Is it possible something has happened, but it just wasn’t the way it was before?” Will asked. “With that other god, I mean.”

            “Oh,” Hamal said. “Oh, that’s an interesting idea. Maybe you’re right. I think she’s been going to sleep more easily these past few nights.”

            The next morning at breakfast, Shel asked, “Well?”

            Hamal shrugged again, just like all the other mornings, but this time he said, “Maybe something has happened. Maybe.”

            Shel nodded. “Excellent.”

            They left Gallank Tree a few hours later.

            Unexpectedly, Shel went with them.

– H –

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Eyes of Fire: Chapter 11

Chapter 11

The Charter 

            Hainn returned with Will, who was covered with the signs of his gifting. Dirt clung to his trousers and tunic and the toes of his boots. He had attempted to clean his face with a damp rag that was still clutched in his hand, but he had mostly just spread the dirt around and left streaks across his cheeks and forehead.

            His gaze met that of Hamal, who was sitting next to Rosy on the floor and, when necessary, helping her corral the kitten that remembered well its former throne of glory and kept trying to crawl over to Shel, also seated on the floor.

            Will’s dark gaze went to Hamal’s grandfather, who was staring at Will like the charter was an interesting book he couldn’t wait to read. Will’s brows drew together, and his steps slowed as he entered the room.

            As far as Hamal could tell, his friend Cale had not stopped using his gift since this entire episode began. He wondered what Cale was seeing. No doubt, there were many interesting things that could be seen about his grandfather, always and continually, and yet Hamal thought he himself was more curious about what could be seen concerning the child beside him. Just now, her eyes were brown. But somehow, for good or for bad, he doubted they would stay that color.

            Will had not been present when they met Hamal’s grandfather out in the courtyard, so Hamal thought it might be a good idea if he made introductions now. From his position on the floor, he gestured and said, “Will, this is my grandfather, Shel Galen. He thought you might be good for Rosy because of how much you pray.”

            Shel climbed to his feet. “So, you are Will Chiodo,” he said, folding his thick arms as he studied the charter.

            Will leaned back slightly, as if pushed by his gaze. “Yes, sir.”

            “And you are twenty-three years old?” Shel asked.

            Even Hamal thought that was a strange question, and he was very used to his grandfather’s ways. He frowned up at Shel, trying to understand, and he never did.

            But Cale did, or so it seemed. The seer took a slow, deep breath, and Hamal looked over at him in time to see the silver eyes grow wide in shock. Cale blinked, and then he blinked again, and his eyes did not get any smaller.

            What in the world did Cale just see with a single question about Will’s age? Hamal couldn’t wait to ask him, but he knew he probably should wait, at least a little bit. There was the “more important thing” his grandfather kept mentioning.

            “And you’re a charter,” Shel said, shaking his head slowly as he murmured, “What a marvel. I say now, what a strange thing.”

            Everyone was staring at Shel, brows raised, the fingerprints of confusion all over their faces. Everyone, that is, except Cale. His look was not one of confusion. His eyes were too wide, his brows too close to his hairline. It was like he had found a dragon where he’d expected a nice, mild-mannered pony.

            Shel grinned. “Oh well,” he said cheerfully. “That little mystery is not why we are here today. Thank you for joining us, Mr. Chiodo. As you know, members of your party recently discovered the presence of an oracle in King’s Barrow. Highly irregular. Unfortunately, the only god this little child has seen is one that delights in disease, particularly madness. It has become imperative for her to see a different god. She needs the opportunity to see something good, not something bad. And you, as a charter…”

            Shel’s face twitched. And then he began laughing like a little boy watching a stumbling puppy learn how to walk. It was such a wonderful, joy-filled sound that Hamal laughed too, even though he had no idea what his grandfather thought was funny.

            “A charter,” Shel repeated. “Who would have thought? Who could have predicted this? And how is it going to work? I have no idea. Absolutely none. What a delightful turn of events.” And then he said again, “Oh well. Look, Mr. Chiodo. I am not asking you to climb a mountain for this child. I am asking, simply, that you would use your gift around her. Strongly. Repeatedly. Until the Creator takes an opportunity to reveal himself. That is what this child needs—just the opportunity to see something different. You speak with the Creator on a regular basis. You are the logical choice.”

            Then, like a cloud passing before the sun, signs of laughter fled Shel’s face. In a completely different tone, he said, “Your king cannot have an oracle who supports the will of madness in his nation. That would be quite unwise. But the will of a good god? The one who created the earth and knows how it is supposed to run? That, now, is a different matter. Are you willing to help in this endeavor?”

            Will didn’t spend very long thinking about it. “Of course, sir.”

            Shel clapped his hands together. “Excellent. Now, gentlemen, the hour grows late. I propose we find some supper, fill our bellies, and then send these three out to sleep beneath the stars while the rest of us exchange truly wild stories that sound quite unbelieve but are, in fact, true.”

            “You propose for them to sleep out-of-doors?” Cale asked.

            Shel looked surprised. “Of course I do. Isn’t that where Mr. Chiodo intends to sleep? Isn’t that…where the earth is? That is where they need to be.”

            Cale’s eyes narrowed. “You are aware of the difficulty that presents itself at night with this child. As a precaution, we have been positioning her and Hamal at some distance from everyone else at night. However, you are asking Will to ignore this precaution.”

            “Ah yes. The potential for dream entrapment,” Shel said, nodding. “Avoiding it has been wise until now. But I am not asking to put your entire team at risk, Commander. I am asking to put only two people at minimal risk—one who has already endured the entrapment and the other who very likely will not have to endure it at all. I say, Hamal.”

            Hamal straightened up. “Grandfather?”

            “Are you eighteen yet?”

            Hamal set his hand on his chest and checked his bones. He quickly scanned their history and how they were aging, and he noted with a good deal of pleasure how happy his bones were with Cale as his friend. “Not yet, but I believe I am closer now than I was the last time you asked.”

            And for some reason, this made Shel roar with laughter. The room rippled with the sound of it. Everyone stared at him in surprise. Cale, however, was looking at Will like he didn’t recognize him.

            “I imagine so, my boy,” Shel said, wiping his eyes. “I imagine so.”

            Hamal had no idea why this was funny either, but he was glad it somehow was.

– H –

Author’s note: True confession time! Last week I was trying to finish up a client’s book, and I didn’t remember to post here until Monday. Mom brain is a real thing, guys. 😱

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 10

Chapter 10
Simple, Like Healing

            The North Territory of King’s Barrow was a curious place. It was strangely cold all year round, and by every account Hamal had ever heard, it attracted men and women who were also strangely cold. After spending a night in Redsprin—and then getting attacked by thieves, Hamal understood that description better than before. He expected Gallank Tree to be much the same, unfortunately: muddy streets, dirty buildings, frustrated townsfolk, and a strong sense of heaviness in the air that made the town an impossibility for feelers.

            But riding through the gate of Gallank Tree was a completely different experience than riding through the gate of Redsprin. The guards at this gate greeted them as they entered and politely asked their business. They clearly did not feel threatened. The streets were paved with clean cobblestones. Hearty, cold-loving flowers grew in window boxes and in large planters positioned along the walkways. Cale’s party passed townsfolk who were actually smiling.

            Hamal looked around in surprise. Oh, he thought. Feelers live here.

            The town inn—a small, two-story building made of gray stone—stood in the center of town near one of the wells. As they rode into the quaint, little courtyard filled with pots of flowers and a sitting area made of benches surrounding a firepit, they spied a man sitting on the ground with a small girl next to him. An army of kittens crawled all over them. One kitten, a little gray fellow, was currently perched on top of the man’s head.

            Hamal grinned. “Grandfather!” he called.

            Exclamations rolled through the group.

            “—don’t believe it.”

            “He’s here?”

            “He arrived before us, but how—?”

            Why were they surprised? Hamal had written a note! His grandfather had known exactly where to meet them, and here he was.

            Shel returned his smile and began scooping the kittens off his lap and handing them to the little girl, who cooed at them and scratched their bellies with chubby fingers. The last kitten to leave was the one sitting like a king on Shel’s head, and it squeaked tremendously at being removed from its throne.

            Cale helped Rosy down, and then Hamal wiggled out of the saddle and ran over to greet his grandfather. Shel wrapped thick arms around him and lifted his feet off the ground, and Hamal started laughing and couldn’t stop. He was gasping for breath by the time Shel allowed his boots to return to the earth.

            Hamal thought his grandfather’s face was wonderful. It made him think about the interesting places they had visited and all the adventures they had gone on together. Shel Galen knew how the earth was—what it liked, what it disliked, what worked well, and what did not—and everything he did succeeded, because he knew how everything was supposed to go. Whenever he saw his grandfather, Hamal felt happy because he knew good things were coming.

            “Everyone,” Hamal said, when he could speak again, “this is my grandfather.”

            “I will never get used to this,” Lord Rhyan muttered.

            “Nor will I,” Gregory said. “And this is the second time it’s happened to me.”

            Hamal stepped over to the small, bear-eared child hiding behind Cale. “And this,” he said in the gentlest voice he possessed, “is Rosy, the child I told you about.”

            “Let us go inside first,” Cale said.  

            A short time later, several members of their party had gathered in a bedroom on the second floor. Hamal and Rosy were there, of course, along with Cale, Masly, Lord Rhyan, Hamal, Rosy, Shel, and finally Gregory, who had immediately taken the padded chair in the corner and was already scribbling pages of notes in his book. When his pencil snapped, he grabbed another and continued.

            Shel had secured one of the kittens—the gray one who liked his head—and offered the kitten to Rosy. She stared at him without moving, and so Hamal took the kitten first and then offered it again, and she immediately accepted it this time. She sat down on the floor with the fuzzy creature in her lap.

            “We found the oracle in a town called Redsprin,” Cale said and briefly described the circumstances: the illness threatening her life, the neglectful innkeeper, the way Hamal had made certain to give the innkeeper more money than he asked for to pay for Rosy’s expenses.

            Shel instantly began nodding. “Good, good. What else?”

            “That night, Hamal had a dream.”

            Shel’s head twisted around as he looked at Hamal carefully. “A dream, eh? I won’t say those are common with oracles, but they are known to happen. Tell me what you saw.”

            Hamal told Shel about his dream—the desert, the smells, the evil god counting coins that were somehow not coins. As he relayed these things, he kept a careful eye on Rosy, trying to see if the dream bothered her. He did not doubt she knew well the landscape he described, including the awful creature sitting at the desk.

            Shel grunted at Hamal’s description of the bad god.

            As if pulled by the sound, Masly leaned forward. “Do you know which god it is?”

            “Aye,” Shel replied. One word, firmly spoken. “But I will not speak his name here. Certain words, certain names, should not be spoken in good company. Not out of fear, like some believe, but because this god is not important. Other things are more important. I will say, however, that this particular god delights in madness, and he keeps tokens of those he has affected.”

            “Tokens?” Hamal asked and grimaced. “That’s what those coins were?”

            “Aye.” Shel looked up at Cale. “Tell me, Seer. Can you think of a jeweler in King’s Barrow who suffers from madness and is somehow associated with the royal family?”

            Silence fell like rocks.

            Hamal gasped as he realized what his grandfather meant. A jewel with a crown. A jeweler who had a crown—or would have a crown, if he were in his right mind. The coin’s riddle seemed so very obvious now.

            “Prince Alant.” Hamal spoke into the stunned quiet the name everyone was thinking. “The king’s older brother.”  

            Shel nodded slowly. “Aye. The one who lost his right to the throne because of madness that no one could cure. The one who attempted to take the throne anyway but failed.” He met Hamal’s gaze. “Because of you.”

            “Not because of me,” Hamal whispered and looked over at Masly, whose entire body had become like a block of ice. “Because of him.” Masly had committed treason by kidnapping the prince to stop him from killing people—specifically, the one brother he had left: the king.

            Hamal groaned as he realized what all of this meant. From the confines of his suite of rooms in the palace, Alant had arranged the death of Teiren, his brother. With that brother he had been successful. That was Cale’s prince—his friend who had died. Teiren was the reason Cale’s bones ached with guilt. He was the reason Cale sometimes acted unwisely because he knew Hamal would be there to heal him. Never would Hamal have thought that finding a little girl in a dirty town in the North Territory would have an impact on Cale’s bones. He looked over at his friend. Cale stood there much as Masly did. Everything about him was perfectly still, his face blank.

            Until, quite suddenly, it wasn’t. Cale’s brows twitched and he grimaced. In a tight voice, he asked, “What can be done about this? Hamal has been unable to heal Alant. He has tried.”

            Hamal did not like finding the boundary of his healing gift, and Prince Alant had been an especially painful finding.

            “Uncertain,” Shel replied. “And right now, that is unimportant.”

            Masly’s head tipped back as if Shel had struck him.

            Shel lifted his hand in a soothing gesture. “Please understand me, my lord. Prince Alant is not the reason we are here today. We are here because of a little girl who likes kittens and has found herself trapped in the custody of an evil god. Hamal, you wrote me because you want to know how to change gods. Correct?”

            Hamal nodded quickly. “Aye.”

            “Then let us discuss this more important topic—” Shel held up one finger. “Without neglecting the important associated topics. Now, how to change gods. King’s Barrow is not an overly religious nation. Not yet. You believe in the gods but are not devout. Is there anyone on your team who is devout? A person who is dedicated to a kindly god who would be helpful to King’s Barrow instead of harmful?”

            Hamal started laughing, and everyone looked at him in surprise. His grandfather was wise. He made everything sound as easy as breathing and simple, like healing. First, he’d done this with the coin that represented the prince, and now he did it with his instructions for how to help Rosy. The answer was so obvious that Hamal wondered why he hadn’t thought of this himself. “Aye! We have such a man!”

            Cale blinked. Surprise pushed at his stiff shoulders until they slowly lowered. “We do?”

            “It’s Will! Will is the man. He’s a charter.” The charter gift wouldn’t work without prayer. That was how charters used their gift—they spoke to the Creator, and he let them hear what the earth was saying. For this reason, the charter gifting was more religious than most other gifts.

            Hamal looked back to his grandfather and paused, seeing the sudden gleam in Shel’s eyes.

            “Will the charter, eh?” the older man said. He reached up and rubbed his jaw. “Would this happen to be Will Chiodo?”

            Hamal nodded eagerly. “Oh, you have heard of him? He works for Cale, and he came with us. He’s not here, though—staying at the inn, I mean. He likes sleeping outside. If I were a charter, I would like sleeping outside too. Also, he has a very large dog.”

            Somewhere behind Hamal, Lord Rhyan murmured just loud enough to be heard, “A large, scary dog.”

            Shel turned to Cale. “Could you send for Will Chiodo, Commander? He will be helpful in this matter.”

            Cale’s silver eyes narrowed. He stared in the general area of Shel’s face, his gaze unfocused as he used his gift. The moments passed, and Hamal began to feel like he was missing something. He reached up and scratched his head, wondering as he looked from Cale to Shel and back again. Was something happening? Why did it seem like talking about Will…was not exactly like talking about Will?

            “Yes,” Cale said finally, blinking as his gaze returned to normal. However, his eyes remained slightly narrowed. “I will send for him.”

            Hainn was sent to fetch the charter.

            They waited for Will to arrive.

– H –

Author’s note: The original draft of this book did not have Shel Galen. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I CANNOT. He obviously needs to be a part of this story, and I like this version so much better. ❤️

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Cale and the Archer

            As he finished healing the young man who’d said this was his first time being a thief, Hamal realized he was being watched.

            Rosy had turned around to stare as Hamal worked on the wounded man. Her fire-filled eyes followed Hamal’s movements. This was the first time he had seen her with fire in her eyes all day, and he wondered why. He smiled reassuringly at her, hoping she wasn’t alarmed by the sight of blood. She didn’t seem to be.

            When the wounded man was resting comfortably, Hamal crawled over to join Rosy at the fire. “Are you all right?”

            She nodded. It was a real nod, and it required no guessing on Hamal’s part.

            A water bucket sat beside the fire, and Hamal used the dipper to splash water across his dirty hands. If it were a warm night and this were a warm place, he would dry his hands on his trousers. But not here. Damp trousers would be awful on a night like this one. He rubbed his hands briskly and held them near the fire.

            “You don’t need to worry about that man, Rosy. He’ll be fine. Not even a bruise remains. Just because a man has an arrow in him—”

            “Two arrows,” Gild interrupted.

            Hamal nodded. “Just because a man has two arrows in him, it doesn’t mean bad things will happen to him. An arrow just slows a man down. You get him to a healer, and he’s fine.”

            “You’re a unique individual, Hamal,” Gild said and chuckled.

            A flash of light burst in the trees. Thunder rumbled from a clear, star-filled sky.

            “That’s Hainn,” Will Chiodo said. He was sitting on the ground near the fire, his bare hands pressed against the soil as he read the earth and, from a safe distance, observed what was happening upon the earth’s surface out in the woods. “Hainn has an odd kind of humor. He likes to scare the wits out of someone and then leave him to tell the story any way he pleases.”

            Gild muttered something unfit for children’s ears and ended with, “Annoying.”

            Will grinned and shifted position, quickly returning his hands to the ground. “Hainn’s victims tend to be men invested in protecting their reputation—you know the kind, Hamal. Bad men. Men who want to own what other men have worked for. That is likely what we’ll see happen here too. By tomorrow morning, all of Redsprin will have heard a hero’s tale, not that of a thief. ‘The evil seers attacked us!’ The man is…yes. He’s racing back to town on a horse that is nearly as frightened as he is.”

            Gild laughed.

            Hamal did not. “He will lie about Cale and Masly? Cale is the king’s own seer! And Masly used to be. They are the king’s men, not liars.”

            Masly grunted.

            Will looked over at Hamal, and his dark-eyed gaze softened. “Everyone lies about seers, Hamal, when they think they can get away with it. The justice gift is hard to find out here in the North Territory. Without that gift, there’s no way to tell when the truth is being spoken—other than relying on one’s own discernment, which does not seem to be a priority in a place like Redsprin.”

            “But I thought seers were respected,” Hamal said.

            “Oh, they are. Sometimes that is why they are lied about. However, this time…” Will’s voice faded. His brows snapped together as he stared down at the earth, like the ground was telling him something he didn’t like. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. “Hamal, prepare to receive Cale.”

            Hamal stiffened. “What happened? Is he—?”

            “He went against the archer.”

            “The archer?”

            “He succeeded in stopping him, but he took a substantial blow to his shoulder. Hainn is assisting him back to camp.” Will looked at Masly. “Sir, their progress would be swifter with your aid.”

            Masly held Will’s gaze. To Hamal, it looked like the seer heard words that had not been spoken. Then he nodded quickly and was off—jogging back into the woods.

            “Is Masly headed the right direction?” Hamal asked Will.

            The charter nodded. “Yes. He will reach them shortly.”

            A few minutes passed in tense quiet. Hamal fidgeted and remembered how Cale had been concerned about thieves. Rosy was looking at him, the fire flickering off and on in her eyes, and he patted her shoulder, even though he was the one who needed reassuring this time.

            At last Will said, “Here they are.”

            Three men staggered out of the trees. Hainn supported Cale on one side, Masly on the other. In the firelight, Cale’ face looked as white as chalk, and the right sleeve of his coat was drenched with blood.

            “This was not one of your grander ideas,” Hamal told Cale, who groaned as the other two men helped him to the ground.

            Hamal set his hand on Cale’s bloody arm and used his gift. Cale’s skin leapt to follow Hamal’s urging, sealing together where it had been slashed apart. It was a deep cut; Cale had lost an unhealthy amount of blood.  

            As the color slowly returned to Cale’s face, he focused on Hamal’s expression and said, “I was curious.”

            “Curious? What does that mean?”

            “After you healed my hand, I began working with it. Running drills. Trying to strengthen it. I thought…” Cale paused. “I thought it was as good a time as any to test it. But the archer was good with a sword. Better than I expected him to be.”

            “Why did you go up against the archer? Archers never miss. Kolling could have taken care of this.”

            Cale had the nerve to smile like a boy who loved mischief. “You are my friend, Hamal. What reason have I to fear what other men fear? I feel better now. Thank you.”

            “What sort of logic is that?” Hamal frowned. “Cale, I don’t understand your thinking.”

            Cale started laughing, which just made it worse.

            Clenching his blood-covered hands, Hamal squatted down in front of his friend and waited until the seer looked at him. In a quiet voice, Hamal said, “This isn’t the first time I have seen you act this way. The night I met you, you let those bad men kill you—because you knew you were going to find me. You are very brave, the bravest man I know, but you are not acting with wisdom. This is not wisdom.”

            Cale stopped laughing. His head tilted, like he genuinely did not understand. “You are my friend, and I know I can rely on you. How is that not wisdom?”

            “Yes, yes,” Hamal replied. “All of that is true. I am your friend, and I will be a faithful friend. But I think there is a difference between being wise in battle times and taking risks you don’t actually need to take. I…”

            Hamal glanced at the others and lowered his voice even more. He spoke words he had never said, but he had thought them several times in the last few months. “I know what your bones say, Cale. I know your secrets—that you feel guilty. You blame yourself for the prince’s death, and I know you think you should have died too. It does not seem fair to you that you lived and he did not.”

            His face now blank, Cale stared at him.

            “I think you take risks that others would not take. Sometimes I even think you wouldn’t mind if you died again, and I wasn’t there to save you.”

            They looked at each other.

            Hamal shook his head slowly. “I cannot heal what your bones say. But…” Here he smiled slightly. “I can give you a reason to be interested in their healing.”

            The silver gaze narrowed. Eventually Cale whispered, “What reason?”

            “Your blood has conceived.”

            “I don’t understand.”

            Hamal grinned. “I mean you are a father now, so it would be good if nothing happened to you. And if something happened to you, Satha would be angry, and you know she scares me when she is angry.”

            Cale didn’t move. “A…father?”

            “Your wife is pregnant. The blood doesn’t measure time as man does. You aren’t going to be a father. You are a father. The moment the blood conceives, it knows, and it counts the child among the living—from that moment, as if he were already born. You are a father, so you need to act with wisdom. No more challenging archers with swords. Use Kolling. She could have stopped that bad man from a distance.”

            A long moment passed, during which Cale blinked several times. “Satha?”

            “Of course Satha. She’s your wife.”

            “How far along is she?”

            “Just a few days.” Hamal paused, thinking about it. “I don’t believe she knows yet. But I know—because your blood knows. Blood you just risked and spilled everywhere for no good reason.”

            Hamal became aware that Masly was standing beside them, his arms folded. Masly knew about Cale and Satha, his secret wife, and not because Cale had told him. Masly was a talented seer who didn’t often need to be told things.

            The other seer chuckled. “The king will be thrilled, I’m sure, to hear of the extension of his family. He’ll host a ball in your honor. Make you a prince.”

            Cale looked up at Masly, opened his mouth, and then froze. His calm demeanor rattled to pieces, and his eyes widened. “I’m going to have to tell the king.”

            Masly’s chuckle became a full-chested laugh. “Serves you right for marrying above you.”

            “It wasn’t my decision,” Cale replied.

            Masly laughed again. It pleased Hamal to hear him, and it pleased him further that Cale was the one who made the laughter start. Masly needed to laugh more. He had been very serious since his arrest.

            “Wait a moment,” Lord Rhyan said, coming up behind them. “Married above you? What does that mean?” Then his jaw dropped. “Satha? The king’s cousin? You married Satha?”

            Cale winced.

            Never tell a secret to a flamemaker.

            Within a few minutes, every person in their party knew what Cale and Satha had managed to keep hidden for three years, and by the next morning, Rhyan had started calling Cale Your Highness just to annoy him. Hamal thought it was funny. Cale did not.

            However, he responded calmly. “You, more than anyone, know the regulations of noble blood,” he told Rhyan, who was the firstborn son of the House of Kanyan. “It is likely I have cost my wife her heritage and the benefits of a noble house. I do not make light of this.”

            Rhyan didn’t argue with him, but he didn’t fully agree either. “The king would cut off his hand to keep you happy, Cale. You’re the seer, not I—you should already know his reliance upon you. In this matter, he may choose to look the other way. He could even choose to elevate you, and I predict he will do one or the other.”

            “And the predictions of a flamemaker can always be trusted,” Masly said.

            Rhyan rolled his eyes.

            Around ten o’clock that morning, Hamal began to smell wood smoke. The trees parted, and they saw in the distance a small, walled-up town built into the base of a large bluff. Cale and Masly drew their horses together and whispered back and forth, and then Cale turned back to speak to Hamal.

            “This would not be an appropriate place to leave the oracle,” he said, glancing at the child sitting in Hamal’s arms. “We will keep looking.”

            They passed three farms and one more small village, and Cale said similar words each time.

            That afternoon, a peddler wandered down the road with his brightly colored cart piled high with interesting things. Cale bought a fur-lined hat that had bear’s ears. He dropped it on top of Rosy’s head and said, “You sound like a bear when you sleep. Now you will look the part.”

            He was the first one to claim a shy smile from her. It was mostly in her eyes, which were brown today.

            Hours later as they approached Gallank Tree, Hamal overheard Masly telling Cale, “We are rapidly losing our opportunity to leave Rosy in a safe environment.”

            Cale replied, “Then perhaps it is wisdom to take her with us.”

            “That is not what Hamal said. He said we should leave her in a safe location and return for her later.”

            Cale nodded calmly. “Perhaps it is not our decision.”

            Both seers turned and looked at Rosy, who was tugging at the ears of her bear hat and staring off into the trees.

            Masly said quietly, “You suggest it is not coincidence that we have found no suitable place for her. You think the god she shadows—or a god, somewhere—might be doing this on purpose. This god might intend her to stay with us, all the way to our destination.”

            “Have you ever worked with gods before?”

            Masy did not hesitate. “No.”

            Cale shrugged. “Neither have I. But I suspect Shel Galen has. Let us wait and hear his wisdom on the matter.”

            They arrived at the gate of Gallank Tree.

– H –

Author’s note: I wrote the first draft of this book about six years ago. At least six, maybe seven. I decided I didn't like it and tried to redo certain parts, and at one point in the editing process, I decided to take out this chapter and the previous chapter. I DECIDED TO TAKE THEM OUT. Sigh. Maybe it was good that this book had to wait six years—so I would have greater writing wisdom. 😉

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Thieves on the Road

            They did not get an early start the next morning.

            Gild the healer had seven children, so he knew all about taking care of them, and he said Rosy’s coat wouldn’t keep her warm. It had holes in the elbows, and something with pointy teeth had tried to eat the collar.

            So they waited in town for the shops to open, and Cale bought Rosy a new coat. It was brown like Hamal’s, but hers had little red buttons. Following Gild’s suggestions, Cale bought Rosy many other things as well: two pairs of mittens, one pair blue and the other red; a new pair of boots; some thick stockings; and a big hat that covered nearly half her face.

            In the shop where they purchased the knitted items, Hamal knelt down in front of little Rosy and adjusted the hat on her head. It was a hat for a man, and she was just a girl.

            “No one will be able to see your eyes,” Hamal joked, and only later did he realize that was the point. Cale had done it on purpose, to hide her eyes that reflected the gods.

            When it was time to leave for Gallank Tree, Rosy didn’t want anyone to touch her, which made getting her up onto a horse rather difficult.

            Hamal held out his hand to her, and her eyes grew wide and she shied away. So, on the muddy street in front of the inn, he squatted down and tried to explain things. “Rosy, I am not going to hurt you. All I will ever do is heal you. That’s my job, and healing is all I know. I have very gentle hands, and you can trust me.”

            She shook her head, staring at him.

            He tried again. “Do you see this very fine horse right here? His name is Sill, like a windowsill. I don’t know why that’s his name—I didn’t name him. But he’s a nice horse, and he’ll take us where we need to go. The problem is, you will need to ride with me. We don’t have another horse for you, so you’ll need to go on my horse. Do you think you could do that? I won’t hurt you, Rosy,” he said again.

            Every time he looked at this child, he thought of the bad place from his dream and wanted to wrap his arms around her and make large promises. But certain things he couldn’t promise until his grandfather arrived and they talked about it.

            It took some coaxing, but eventually Hamal and Cale managed to get Rosy up onto Hamal’s horse with him, where she sat like a fabric-wrapped stone. Hamal tried to engage her in conversation, hoping to win at least a nod from her, but she didn’t do anything except sit there in an untouchable kind of silence.

            At the outskirts of town, he pointed to a muddy field full of cows—he liked cows—and told her everything he knew about them and how their horns worked. He thought maybe she would like to hear about their horns, because she was a child and children often liked poky things, but she didn’t respond at all.

            “I don’t know very much about children,” Hamal whispered to Cale when they stopped for a quick meal that afternoon in a quiet place off the road.

            Cale was watching the road, his hand on his sword hilt. Glancing down at the weapon, Hamal remembered what his friend had said about thieves in the North Territory.

            “Why do I doubt that?” Cale replied.

            “Well, sometimes they cry even when nothing is wrong. There’s nothing for me to heal. They aren’t in any pain, and still they’re crying.” He hesitated and then nodded toward Rosy, who was sitting on the ground a short distance away with her legs pulled up underneath her. Quietly he added, “And sometimes children should cry, but they don’t.”

            For the rest of the day, Rosy rode on Hamal’s horse with him, his arms around her, and he knew exactly how afraid she was.

            But gradually something started to shift. He began to feel the fear leaking out of her bones, growing less and less as the day continued. Every time he caught sight of her eyes, which wasn’t very often, they were ordinary and brown, the way most eyes were. Today she looked like just a child, so Hamal didn’t understand why Cale and Masly both shied away from her when they stopped that night and made camp.

            When Hamal asked, Cale replied, “You said she shadows a god, Hamal.”

            “Well, yes, but she’s just a child. I don’t think we need to be afraid of her.”

            Cale smiled a bit, but something about it was sad. “I saw many things today, Hamal. Many things about your friend Rosy, and many things involving her. As did Masly. There is a reason you are the one taking care of her. I think it is good for you to care for her, and I also think it is good for the rest of us to maintain our distance. At least until we know more.”

            Gregory had been listening nearby, and he came over to say, “That’s how it is in all the stories, Hamal. Oracles are separate from the other gifts. No one really knows what to expect from the gods anymore, and so they avoid the gift that represents them. Hellan, the oracle who traveled with your grandfather, was described as aloof and distant. She wasn’t cruel, but neither was she friendly. She did her job, and as soon as the Barrow Wars ended, she disappeared from the city. No one ever saw her again.”

            “Some people saw her again,” Hamal said.

            Gregory’s face twitched. “Well, yes, I suppose that someone, somewhere, did see her again. But my point is that she didn’t like people and left the city. We should assume Rosy is the same manner of person and allow her to be left alone, which she obviously wishes to be.”

            Hamal didn’t say anything. He frowned at Gregory for a long moment. Did Gregory not know the story? But he knew everything. “They got married.”

            Cale and Gregory looked at him.

            “Pardon?” said Cale.

            “Who?” said Gregory.

            They both answered at the same time, which was funny, and so Hamal laughed. “My grandfather and Hellan, of course. They liked each other, so they decided to get married, and they did, and then they left the city. Neither of them liked the city very much, so they went up to Fairs Gate, in the woods, and they lived up there for years and years. Did you know the North Woods are so big that you can travel for miles and miles and never find the other side? It’s amazing!”

            “He married her?” Gregory demanded.

            “Well, yes. Shel told me she knew about important things—that is, she knew what things were important and what things weren’t.” Hamal shrugged.

            “He…married her?” Gregory said again, fishing out his notepad and pencil. His hands were shaking for some reason.

            “Did they have children, Hamal?” Cale asked calmly.

            “Yes, two—a boy and a girl. Their names were Eshmal and Sallia. Readers, both of them, and Sallia liked to write books. She wrote many books.”

            Gregory swallowed hard. “Sallia Galen Sora,” he whispered. “She studied trees, and she wrote volumes about the bark and roots and tonics that could be made from the leaves. All her books are preserved in the King’s Library. I’ve read them. She was brilliant.” His voice cracked. “She was related to you, Hamal? Shel’s daughter?”

            Hamal nodded. “Sallia was my aunt.”

            Cale’s silver eyes blinked. “She was your aunt?”

            “Aye. She’s buried in the woods she loved.”

            “But was she not a sage?”

            “No, she was a reader. Didn’t I say that? Didn’t I say she and her brother were both readers?” Hamal groaned and rubbed his mittened hands over his ears. “All this coldness is making it hard for me to remember the things I said!”

            Gregory said slowly, “So the sage gift doesn’t always produce sages.”

            “It doesn’t always, no. My grandfather, you know—well, he’s been married many times. Many, many times. My father says he’s a rogue, and I think that means Shel likes being married.”

            The corner of Cale’s mouth tilted. “How many times has your grandfather been married?”

            Hamal lowered his voice as he said, “Three times, that I know of. Three times. The rest of us can’t believe it. He has quite a reputation, my grandfather.”

            Cale and Gregory traded a look.

            “Thousands of years,” Gregory said. “Shel Galen must be thousands of years old, and he gets married all of three times, and his family thinks he’s wild.”

            “Quite the rogue indeed,” Cale remarked dryly. “Hamal, how many children did Shel have altogether?”

            “I’m not sure. Eight, I think?”

            “And how many of those children are sages?”

            “Just one. My father.”

            Cale’s eyes narrowed. “How many children does your father have? How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

            “Four.”

            “And you are the only sage among them.”

            Hamal smiled. “You can see all my secrets, Cale. Because you’re a seer.”

            Cale returned his smile, laughing quietly. “I am just trying to understand you.”

            “What’s to understand? I can heal things. I like sweet meats and warm places to live, and I greatly enjoy the name Rosy.”

            Rosy looked over from the fire. Hamal waved to her.

            Cale laughed softly. “Go sit with your charge, Hamal.” His eyes narrowed. His expression darkened. “Keep her calm, if you can.”

            Hamal looked at him quickly. “What does that mean?”

            “We were followed from Redsprin. Tonight we expect thieves.” 

            Half an hour later, Hamal heard approaching hoof beats, and Will Chiodo came riding into camp, his sand wolf slinking into the circle of firelight behind him. 

            “We’re about to have company,” the charter told Cale. “Five men approach on the road. Three are flamemakers, and you’ve got an archer and a jeweler as well. The jeweler is leading them.”

            The thieves. Hamal’s heart took a wild leap up his throat.

            “Men from Redsprin?” Masly asked.

            Will nodded. “Yes, my lord.”

            “Did they see you?” Ermond the flamemaker asked.

            Hamal looked at Masly in surprise as the seer started laughing.

            “You have never worked with a charter, have you?” Masly said to Ermond.

            “They will be here in less than four minutes,” Will said.

            Masly looked over at Cale. “The archer could cause some difficulty.”

            Hamal winced. Archers never missed. He had healed several of them, and the inside of their ears was shaped differently. They could hear the heartbeat of a deer from a hundred paces and put an arrow through the creature while blindfolded. Cale said that when archers hunted other men, it was never very pleasant.

            Cale pointed at the team members he wanted. “Chestirad, Hainn, Kolling, Masly. Let’s head them off.”

            Kolling plucked the brace of rabbits from her saddle and tossed them to Gild, who was in charge of supper tonight. Then the two seers, the weathermaker, the flamemaker, and the archer disappeared into the early evening shadows. Hamal shivered as he watched them go.

            Their campsite was a bowshot from the road, and thick scrub brush trees stood guard around them. Each person was good at what they did; the moment Cale’s party stepped into the trees, Hamal lost track of them. The whisper of wind through the scrub brush masked most sounds.

             With a sigh, he turned back to Rosy and found her watching him. “Cold?” he asked. “I am. Let’s go sit with Gild.”

            She had ridden close to him all day, and she must be getting used to him because when they sat next to the fire, she sat down beside him. She set her blue-mittened hands in her lap and watched as Gild went about making supper.

            “Something you should know,” Hamal told her.

            Her brown gaze swung up to meet his.

            “I’m not a good cook,” he said as she stared at him. “I’m not. I’ve never been able to figure it out! I burn things. And I tend to think things would taste good together when they really wouldn’t. Burned bread and garlic aren’t good together, for instance. And adding tomatoes does not help. It just makes everything taste like tomatoes, and that’s not always a good idea. Do you know how to cook, Rosy?”

            He meant it in jest, and as he teased her, another thought occurred to him. “Do you like dolls? Most little girls like dolls, don’t they?”

            Something passed through her eyes. Good or bad, he couldn’t tell, but he waited, and slowly her head bent forward in a shallow, faint movement that could have been a nod. He decided it was, and he smiled. “Dolls are important, aren’t they? We will find you a doll. A good doll.”

            She stared at him.

            Shouts erupted in the trees behind them. Rosy jerked and looked over her shoulder, but Hamal leaned toward her until their shoulders touched and said, “Never mind that, Rosy. We don’t need to worry about that. Everything will be all right.”

            And so, they waited.

            The first man to return to camp was Chestirad. He had one unconscious body slung over his shoulder and was dragging a second through the dirt, his large hand wrapped around the man’s collar. 

            “They’re alive,” he said as Hamal stood up. “Just a little overcome, is all.” Laughing at his own joke, he dropped both bodies on top of each other and, with a lazy toss of his hand, made a second fire next to them to keep the men warm.

            Chestirad was one of the biggest, meanest-looking men Hamal knew. His normal expression was a scowl, and his nose had been smashed more than once. Probably ten times, Hamal decided. He carried more knives than a kitchen, and he was dangerous, but then he thought about things like keeping unconscious men warm. He had a good heart, buried somewhere in that hulking form.

            “Going back for their horses,” Chestirad announced to no one in particular and then lumbered off into the woods.

            The second man to return was Masly, followed closely by Kolling, who was grinning from ear to ear as if she had just won a contest. A man Hamal had never seen before stumbled along obediently behind Kolling, an arrow protruding from each shoulder. Blood soaked through his cloak, and he looked miserable.

            “I had everything under control,” Masly said.

            “Of course, you did,” Kolling answered, laughing. “My lord.”

            Hamal looked through the trees and asked, “Where is Cale?”

            “He’s coming,” Masly replied. He glanced through the trees himself, a faraway look in his eyes. Then he nodded. “Yes, he’s coming. Could you see to our friend here?” He pointed at the bleeding man.

            “Of course.”

            The injured man frowned as Hamal approached. It might have been a grimace of pain. He was young—younger than Cale.

            “You have no business being a thief,” Hamal told him.

            “First time,” the man replied through gritted teeth.

            “Well, let it be the last time. I’m going to put you to sleep to remove these. Can you sit down?”

            The man dropped like a log.

            Hamal put a hand to the man’s chest and removed the pain from his body. Relief rolled out of the bandit in a long sigh, and he sighed a second time as Hamal helped him lie flat.

            “Good night,” Hamal said and brushed two fingers across the man’s forehead. The man’s eyes rolled back, and he didn’t stir again, not even later when they dropped him belly first on his horse and sent him back to Redsprin.

–H– 

Author’s note: I love the part where they’re talking about Shel Galen getting married three times and the rest of the family thinks he’s a wild man. 😂😂

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Hamal Sends for Help

            Hamal sat down in the middle of Chestirad’s cramped room. He ignored all the stares—which was hard to do, given that two of the people in here were seers—as he considered his words and what he wanted to say. There were many things he could say: about the dream itself, the way the air smelled, the strange tar pits, the monster-god, the desk, all the coins. He shuddered as he thought about the coins.

            Adjusting his grip on the pencil, he began to write:

Grandfather, we have found an oracle in King’s Barrow. This oracle is not like Hellan, and I need your help. How can I save this little girl from a bad god? I don’t know what to do. In two days, we will be in— 

            Hamal looked up. “Where are we going to be two days from now?”

            Cale was standing next to the fireplace, his arms folded, his back against the wall. He was watching Hamal with a curious expression.

            “Gallank Tree,” the seer answered.

            “Good.” Hamal finished his letter. He didn’t bother to sign his name; his grandfather knew his handwriting. Closing the book, he climbed to his feet and offered both the book and the pencil back to Gregory, who took them. Slowly.

            “What would you like me to do with your note, Hamal?” Gregory asked. “I can deliver it to the post for you. Even in a town such as Redsprin, they surely have a way to communicate with the rest of the country.”

            But Hamal waved him away. “No, this is fine. Thank you for letting me borrow your things.”

            Gregory hovered there, arms still extended. “Did you write a note for me?”

            “A note for you? No. I wrote a note for my grandfather.”

            Cale and Gregory looked at one another. Cale appeared thoughtful but didn’t say a word.

            It was Masly who finally said, “Hamal, would you not like us to make certain Shel Galen receives the note you wrote him?”

            “No, that’s quite all right. He received it.”

            Gregory held up the closed book, with Hamal’s scrawled note inside it. Speaking more slowly than usual, he said, “I have your note here in my hand, Hamal. It has not been sent to Shel Galen. Wouldn’t you like it to be sent to him?”

            Hamal looked at Gregory. Then at Cale. Then at Masly. Eventually, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, he said, “I don’t understand.”

            “Neither do we,” Masly replied in his boyish voice, a smile twitching his lips. “You wrote a letter to your grandfather, but now you do not seem interested in sending it. Why would you write a letter and not send it?”

            They didn’t know, did they? How was it they didn’t know? Hamal turned to Cale and exclaimed, “Is this something you don’t know? I thought you knew.”

            Cale unexpectedly grinned, something he didn’t do very often. He smiled on a regular basis, but this movement of his mouth was far too grand to be just a regular smile. There was definite laughter somewhere inside it. “You thought we knew what, exactly?”

            “My grandfather is a reader. All of you know my grandfather is a reader. He reads things.”

            Gregory blew out his breath. “Yes, but how can Shel Galen read a letter that has not been sent to him? That is the question.”

            Hamal glanced around at all the faces turned toward him expectantly, even Rosy’s. “Well, he can do it because he’s a reader. This is how I always write him. I just write the words, and then he comes to wherever I’m going to be. Once I didn’t have paper or a pencil, and so I wrote with ashes on the side of a house. He showed up then too. And another time I scratched out the words in a riverbank, and he still came. It doesn’t matter how the words are written, and I don’t have to send any letters to him—he always reads them wherever he is.”

            For a long moment, no one in the room moved.

            Gregory began to sound like he was being strangled.

            Cale stared at Hamal. “What are you saying? If something is written—even in ashes on the side of a house or scrawled in the mud of a riverbank—Shel Galen can read it?”

            “Aye. He’s a reader. He reads things.”

            “But what are you saying?” Cale repeated. “That if something is written down…? That is to say, your grandfather has read the plans of kings because a scribe recorded them? The private matters of kingdoms and territories, secrets traded between seats of power—Shel Galen the sage has read all these things, simply because they were written down?”

            Hamal frowned at the seers and Gregory. “Why don’t you know this? He’s a reader. His gifting tells you exactly what he does. I don’t know why you are surprised. He reads things.”

            Cale blinked. And then blinked again. “No wonder the Theranians call him the most powerful gift on the continent.”

            “I need…I need to sit down,” Gregory said and collapsed onto the edge of the bed, where he cradled his head in his hands. Pushed against his skull, the book and the pencil stuck up out of his hands at odd angles that somehow made Hamal think of chicken feathers. “A reader. Shel Galen is a reader.”

            He did not speak again for a very long time, except to mutter things about plans he’d written, and outlines and books, and Hamal didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Yes, Shel was a reader—but so was Gregory, and Gregory knew Shel was a reader. Was Gregory confused because Shel was also a sage, and so his gift was a little different? Was that it?

            Sometimes readers could be quite mysterious—because of all the words. They remembered every word they saw with their eyes; their gift stored it up for them until they had entire books and even libraries in their heads. They carried around more words than Hamal knew or had even heard of.

            He looked down at Gregory, who was cradling his head full of libraries, and thought maybe this was a word problem, because Gregory knew so many of them.

–H– 

            Miles away in the throne room of another country, an argument was taking place.

            One contender spoke calmly, keeping his voice level and without accusation. He was confident in his position, and he had no doubts the king would do as he suggested.

            The other contender was not a man who fell to argument very often, but whenever he did, it was almost impossible for him to continue speaking rationally. This was why he had never been given a seat on the council. His ideas typically were sound, but he seemed incapable of solid, reasonable communication when anyone attempted to contradict him.

            Shel Galen, the first contender, sighed deeply. “Mecall, you are invisible again.”

            The torrent of words cut off.

            “Oh,” the other man said and reappeared. His face was flushed, the skin of his throat mottled. Sweat glistened on his forehead. “Forgive me.” He grimaced and looked through the large, heavily gilded room. “I suppose I’ve already lost, haven’t I?”

            “Several minutes ago,” the king confirmed.

            Mecall’s face reddened further. “Why, then, did you not spare me misery and put an end to the argument, sire?”

            “Because I am so easily entertained by it,” the king replied lightly. “Every time you realize your water has begun to boil, you become deeply red-faced and apologetic. And I am simply amused.”

            The red had spread to Mecall’s ears now. “Sire,” he said, drawing out the word.

            Some things did not change, no matter the time involved. Shel smiled. He had been listening to the two brothers bicker for years, and he, like the king, had become rather fond of it. Both were good men, but only one knew how to keep his peace, and the other comically did not.

            Taking pity on Mecall, Shel said, “There is a fact you do not know in this matter. Allow me to…”

            He never finished the sentence.

            He sat back in his chair and looked east, toward King’s Barrow. Beyond the palace walls hindering his sight, the sun had set several hours earlier, and a city wreathed in shadows and lantern light lay comfortably around the palace grounds.

            The king was familiar with this look. At once, the teasing stopped and he came alert. “What says the prophet?”

            Shel took a deep breath and seemed to come to himself. He blinked several times and focused on the king. “No, sire. It is not the prophet—fortunately. My grandson has sent for me. It seems they’ve found an oracle in King’s Barrow.”

            The king’s brows rose. “Oracles appear only in times of war, when the foundation of a nation is threatened.”

            “This is concerning,” said his brother, now calm and rational and slightly less red.

            “Sire, if I may…”

            The king waved at the door. “You are free to go. The rest of this conversation can wait.” He shot his brother a look. “As I’ve already made up my mind, you see.”

            Mecall, looking pained, gave a polite nod.

            Shel strode from the room, and a guard closed the door behind him. He departed the palace and, a few minutes later, stepped into the courtyard, where he made his way to the eastern corner and the large, ornate fountain that bubbled there. It was a glorious work, constructed by a glass artist of significant skill. The water mechanism looked like a young girl dancing with water spraying out of her fingers. She was constructed entirely of gold, with gemstones that glistened on her dress even now, beneath the warm blanket of a comfortable night. This fountain was one of the wonders of Theraine.

            Pulling a certain type of coin from his pocket, Shel tossed it into the reservoir. Then he waited.

            He did not have to wait long.

            A being shot from the water. Liquid cascaded off the head and shoulders, which rapidly revealed themselves as belonging to a man. He materialized into solid form in front of Shel and, in the warm glow of the courtyard, cast a faint shadow that hadn’t been there a moment before. He appeared young, about twenty years of age as a lander would measure them, and he wore the blue uniform of the transport system.

            “How may I serve you, sir?” he asked with a slight bow.

            “I need to travel to Gallank Tree in King’s Barrow as quickly as possible.”

            The man grew still as his gaze unfocused. It was like he was looking at a map that existed in his head. A moment later, his gaze grew sharp again. “I can get you there in two days.”

            A journey that would require two weeks for a lander, reduced to a mere two days. Shel grinned and shook his head. He liked this part.

            “That is what I expected,” Shel replied. “I am ready now.”

            The man set his dripping hand on Shel’s shoulder and shifted their forms.

            Their shadows disappeared. The area next to the fountain was suddenly empty.

–H– 

Author’s note: This Hamal book is on its way to being the longest volume in the series so far. 🎉

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The Bad Place

            Hamal knew he was asleep. Based on his breathing, heart rate, the way the blood moved through his body, and several other signs, he knew he was unconscious. That meant this had to be a dream. It existed but not the way the inn existed or the way the dirty town of Redsprin existed.

            And yet, as he turned around in a slow circle and gaped, his mouth open, the land around him seemed oddly…real. This was possibly the most realistic dream he’d ever had.

            He could smell the smoky air and feel the sand shifting under his boots as he turned. The sky was a strange shade of brown, almost like cinnamon, and the sun was a dull, orangey globe above his head. He didn’t need to squint or shade his eyes as he peered up at it, because the brightness that should have been there wasn’t.

            He was standing on top of a sand dune. As far as he could see in any direction lay other sand dunes and, in the small valleys in between them, large puddles of black wetness. They sort of reminded him of a swamp he’d seen once, but they didn’t appear to be filled with water or mud. He thought it might be tar. There was so much smoke in the air that his head was starting to feel tight. He lifted the collar of his tunic and held it over his nose. This dream was turning out to be stranger and stranger. Now it was trying to give him a headache, and it was very hard for most things to give him headaches.

            He stood there for a long time and waited for something to happen. That was usually how dreams began—someone came along, or something changed, or you realized you had to be somewhere.

            But nothing changed. The land around him stayed exactly the way it was, and Hamal’s head remained tight and achy, and he barely cast a shadow because the sky acted like it was trying to cover the sun with blankets.

            Shel Galen, his grandfather, had much to say about dreams and how the gods sometimes spoke through them. Hamal lifted his brows. Well, if this dream was a message from a god, it couldn’t be a good one.

            He froze.

            Rosy. The oracle.

            The little girl was asleep in the room with him, and she had a powerful gift that could peer into the realm where the gods lived and see what they were doing. Was this a Rosy dream? Did this place look and seem real to him not because of him—but because of her?

            Oh, you poor child. Was this horrible place what she saw whenever she used her gift? Hamal’s heart began to hurt. He almost reached up and rubbed his chest. This place was not a good place. No child should live here—or even visit here. It wasn’t safe and it wasn’t healthy. He had to find her.

            He took a deep breath, hoping the fabric of his tunic would help filter it, and then lowered his tunic and called out, “Where are you, Rosy? Where are you?”

            She did not appear. The land lay empty and still.

            He had no idea where he would find a small child in this smoke-filled place filled with rolling dunes, but he couldn’t just stand here and do nothing. Eventually he picked a direction and started walking. Really, there weren’t many directions he could go. He had to pick his way around the tar puddles.

            He climbed down the sandy slope and then clambered up the slope on the other side, the sand sucking on his boots with each step. Once on the ridge of the second slope, he looked around again and saw only the same things—rolling dunes, puddles of black stuff, brown sky, quiet sun. A hot wind came by and told him more about this place and how it wasn’t good for children. Something had died nearby. The smoke mixed with the eerie stench of decay and death.

            He kept walking. Up and down. Hill after hill. One time he paused and cocked his head, listening as an animal howled somewhere in the distance. He didn’t recognize the cry and—considering the rest of the dream so far—thought he probably wouldn’t like the animal, whatever it happened to be.

            Step after sandy step. He repeatedly called Rosy’s name and wondered what his grandfather would say about the dark, sticky-looking puddles that lay like dozens and dozens of traps in his path.

            “Oh, Rosy,” he murmured as the dry, fiery wind swept over him, blowing sand. “I am so sorry about all of this. This is not a good place, and this is not the work of a good god. I promise you. I promise, Rosy—I am going to show you what a good god looks like. You will get to see what a good god is doing, and you will get to be a child again.”

            He sighed deeply and then continued trudging, trapped in a little girl’s nightmare.

            Tracking through the brown sky, the sun shifted in color, darkening to red-brown as it approached the horizon. Evening was approaching—night. Hamal could not imagine being in a place like this after dark. Who knew what prowled these slopes when the sun was gone?

            How many times had Rosy been to this place?

            What horrors had she seen here?

            The wind began to change. The stench of something dead returned, stronger this time, until Hamal doubled up his tunic so he could keep breathing. He was used to dead things and dead smells. All healers were. But this wind carried despair he could feel pushing against his skin. He tripped as he climbed up the next dune, landing on his knees, one hand, and one elbow. Struggling up to his feet again, he completed the climb and stopped at the top of the rise, every muscle in his body going still.

            On the other side of the dune was a long, wide area that was sandy and completely flat, with more dunes rising on the far side. A large black desk stood in the exact center of the clearing. It was the size of the king’s dining table. Stacks of coins covered the desk’s surface—it was a towering forest of coins—and someone was counting them. The man seated behind the desk matched the desk length for length. His bare shoulders were like the shoulders of a mountain, and his arms were twice as long as Hamal’s entire body. A black crown encircled his bald head, and his skin changed colors, washing gray and then black-purple, then a sickly kind of yellow, like an old bruise no one had bothered to heal.

            Hamal dropped into a crouch, his heart thundering.

            He watched as the man counted the wealth on his desk. He would pick up a coin, hold it in his palm, and then move it to the next pile. Every ten coins, he picked up a quill pen and scribbled something in a huge ledger in front of him. Then he would lay the quill aside and resume counting.

            Hamal released his breath slowly. Something was wrong with those coins. Those looked like real coins, but even from this distance, he could feel them, the same way he could feel another healer.

            Why, he thought desperately, is this terrible thing in Rosy’s dream?

            He knew he hadn’t spoken aloud. But the large head with the black crown lifted, and a dark, vile gaze met Hamal’s. The man—no, Hamal didn’t think this was a man. This was a disease that had taken human form.

            The monster-god did not rise from his chair. He didn’t see an intruder and move to attack. Instead, his lips pulled back, revealing multiple rows of teeth, and the creature reached over to a random stack and picked up a single coin from the desk’s vast treasure. Between powerful-looking fingers, he lifted the coin and turned it so Hamal could see its face.

            Hamal was a long distance away, still crouched on top of the sand dune. But somehow in Rosy’s dream, distance didn’t matter. He could easily see the image embedded in the coin’s surface.

            A crown on top of a jewel.

            Confusion rushed through Hamal’s system as he looked at the coin and tried to understand. A crown and a jewel? This was Rosy’s dream—did that mean this was her coin? Did it represent her in some way? He couldn’t understand how either of those two images might go with an oracle. She was not a jeweler. Nor was she a queen, a princess, or any other type of ruler. She was just a little girl without any family.

            The wicked smile widened. Hamal had the stomach-turning sense that he had given the monster-god exactly what he wanted, though what that was Hamal couldn’t imagine.

            The monster-god set the coin back on its towering stack and resumed counting, marking the ledger every ten coins. He did not look up again.

            The acidic wind grew more severe, sweeping over the dunes and across the flat land. The monster-god’s stench became choking. All breathable air disappeared from Rosy’s dream, and Hamal jerked backward and—

            —and sat straight up on the bed.

            The old frame creaked beneath the sudden change in his position. His heart was shouting in his chest and in his ears. A fire gleamed on the hearth, and a lamp burned on the small table next to the bed, but the light barely reached beyond the corners of the bed. It wasn’t enough light. The room remained horribly dark.

            A hand landed on Hamal’s arm. A strong grip held him. “Hamal.” Cale’s voice. “Are you all right?”

            Gasping for breath, Hamal told his heart to calm, and it obeyed. His breathing quieted, and he scanned the room again, searching for a small pair of fire-filled eyes gleaming in the darkness. He did not find them. “Where’s Rosy?”

            “Peace, Hamal,” Cale said. “She’s fine. She’s in the next room with Chestirad, who seems to think he’s good with children.” Cale shook his head like he did not fully trust this assessment.

            Hamal felt the seer’s eyes.

            Cale’s voice grew tight. “What happened? We could not wake you, no matter what we tried. Rosy awakened easily, but you we could not bring back to consciousness. It is now the evening of the second day. What happened?” he repeated.

            Hamal groaned and rubbed his face with both hands. “I think I saw the god Rosy is shadowing.”

            Cale grew still. “Yes?”

            Hamal nodded sadly. “Oh, Cale. This is not a god we want in King’s Barrow. This is a bad god. I don’t know who it is, but I think it might be the one in charge of diseases. Plagues and horrible things like that. It had a desk full of coins—hundreds of coins—and I think they’re all people who are sick. He was proud of his coins, and he was counting them. He showed me one, and I thought it might be Rosy’s coin, but…that doesn’t make any sense. She isn’t a jeweler.”

            Cale slowly leaned back in his chair. He stared at Hamal and did not speak. A log cracked on the hearth. A small cloud of sparks rose up around the base of the chimney.

            “You were wise, I think,” Hamal said at last, “to sleep in a different room last night! Was this what you foresaw, that she would dream?”

            Cale grimaced slightly. “I saw there would be complications and that we wouldn’t be able to leave in the morning, the way we intended. I didn’t know what the complications would be.”

            “I want to see Rosy. I want to make sure she’s all right.” Hamal felt like the dream still stood in the room with him, holding on. He wanted the image of that strange, terrible god to leave him, but more than this, he wanted to go and comfort Rosy, if she would let him. He wanted to hold this little girl who had known only pain and found herself shadowing a god of disease. After that dream, he knew more about Rosy than even what her bones had told him, and he wanted to comfort all the fear from her.

            The chair scraped across the floor as Cale stood. “Let us go now.”

            They stepped out into the hallway and crossed to the next room, which held a few more people than was naturally comfortable for such a small space. Chestirad was pacing back and forth by the fireplace; Masly Hawl was pacing by the window. Lord Rhyan, seated on one of the two beds, was trying to read a book, but it didn’t seem to be going very well. He was scowling.

            Gregory Almes was seated on the edge of the other bed, writing a slew of words in his notebook. Hamal could hear the pencil as it scraped the page, and this gave him an idea, a good idea, but it needed to wait for a few minutes. Right now, there was a little girl who needed kindness.

            Voices erupted as the men saw Cale with Hamal right behind him, but at a gesture from the seer, they all fell silent.

            Hamal saw the one he sought. Rosy was sitting on the floor in the corner. Again she had returned to the corner, Hamal noticed with sorrow. She watched him with dark eyes as he walked up to her slowly and crouched down.

            He wanted to touch her, but he remembered what her bones had felt like and every detail of the place he’d seen in her dream. So he just squatted there and didn’t try to lay his hands on her. “Rosy.”

            If possible, the room grew even quieter.

            “I know what you see when you use your gift,” Hamal said, speaking slowly so he wouldn’t scare her more than she was. “You see a large, terrible land filled with sand and smoke and a monster-god who sits at a desk and counts coins.”

            When he heard her heart jump, he wanted to put his arms around her even more. She was used to hiding, to revealing nothing to those who might cause her pain, but her heartbeat gave her away.

             “There, there, Rosy,” he said, lifting his hand in what he hoped was a soothing gesture. “It is going to be all right. I don’t know how to do this yet, but I am going to find a way to save you. One day, I promise, you will never have to see that horrible god again.”

            She didn’t move.

            He waited, giving her time to respond. When she did nothing, he nodded and stood up. He turned around and looked at Gregory, who was also staring at him.

            Hamal pointed to Gregory’s notebook. “May I borrow that?”

– H –

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Rabbit in the Fox Den

            “Hamal,” Cale said, “in a place like Redsprin, a little gold can walk a long road. A fortnight’s salary in the city would be three month’s salary here. You have more than enough. In all likelihood, the innkeeper would feel he had struck an excellent bargain with a single sovereign.”

            Masly made a face.

            Cale wasn’t even looking at him, yet Cale still shrugged and amended, “Two sovereigns.”

            “Better,” Masly said.

            “Thank you.”

            They watched Hamal.

            Hamal reached up and rubbed the top of his head. He had taken off his knit cap, and his hair felt rumpled beneath his fingers. After thinking about things for a while, he asked, “Can I have four sovereigns?”

            Cale’s head cocked to the side. “That is twice the amount Masly and I recommend. Why have you picked that number?”

            “Well, she’s watching, isn’t she?”

            They all turned and looked at the little girl in the corner. She was, indeed, watching.

            “She’s just a child,” Hamal said. “I don’t know all that can be known about children, but I think it’s easy for them to start thinking things that aren’t true. I want her to think good thoughts instead. If I give the innkeeper only two sovereigns, she will think she’s worth only two sovereigns. Well, that’s not right, is it? Two sovereigns would do it, but she needs to think better than what the innkeeper would demand. She doesn’t have parents. She’s alone… She needs to think better than just two sovereigns.”

            At a table near the door, men started shouting at one another. The innkeeper roared a threat at them and started stomping their direction. The shouting instantly quieted, and every man at the table seemed to shrink down as the massive innkeeper drew closer.  

            “The number isn’t important,” Hamal insisted. “It just needs to be more than the innkeeper says.”

            Gregory scribbled madly in his notebook.

            Rhyan stared at Hamal. “How did you manage to survive for hundreds of years on your own? How are you older than I am?”

            Hamal frowned. “I wasn’t on my own. And I’m seventeen.”

            Cale smiled. “Of course you are. Your bones tell you so.”

            “They do.”

            “Of that I have no doubt. Very well, Sage. You will have the amount you desire. And I won’t tell you to spend it wisely, because I know you will.”

            Hamal always let Cale handle the money. He felt this was very wise of him. Discreetly, the seer retrieved four coins from the purse he kept on his person and, beneath the table’s edge, slipped the coins into Hamal’s waiting hand.

            “Here you are. I suggest you wait for an hour or two for the crowd to dissipate.”

            “Dissipate?”

            “Grow smaller.”

            “But I don’t want to lose her.”

            “Hamal, she’s been living at the inn for several months. You heard the innkeeper. I don’t think she will suddenly wander off in an hour.”

            “But, Cale…”

            The seer held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It is up to you, of course. Do as you like. I won’t argue with wisdom.”

            Lord Rhyan scowled. “Is this a good decision? Are we certain of this course? Sending Hamal, I mean. Forgive me, but you must admit, this is a little like sending a rabbit into a fox den.”

            “But a very wise rabbit,” Masly said. “He’s wily.”

            Hamal gripped the coins and grinned. “Tell me what to say, Cale. I don’t know what to say.”

            Cale gave him some ideas, and Hamal squirmed off the bench and weaved around the tables to where the innkeeper stood. Rosy’s gaze followed Hamal’s movements. She sat with the bucket in her lap as she shoved food she had picked up off the floor into her mouth.

            The innkeeper saw Hamal coming and muttered something that made everyone around him laugh. “How can I help you, boy?”

            The top of Hamal’s head barely came to the center of the innkeeper’s chest. Taking a deep breath, Hamal said, “You don’t have to look after Rosy anymore. I’m going to take her with me.”

            The innkeeper frowned. “Who?”

            “The child you call Rose.” Hamal pointed at the girl in the corner. Her hand had stopped halfway to her mouth. She looked as stiff as a stone wall. “Her. I know you have been looking after her, and I am going to cover the cost of her care. You won’t need to look after her anymore.”

            “Rose, eh?” The innkeeper glanced at the men at the table and then, concealing a grin, reached up and rubbed his jaw. “She’s been work. Hard work. She’s sickly, you know. Can’t earn her own keep.”

            “I understand,” Hamal said politely.

            “I put two kip in her easy.”

            “Kip? What’s that? Is that like sovereigns?”

            The innkeeper looked at Hamal as if he—Hamal—had left his mind back at the table. “Yes. Like sovereigns.”

            A few of the men began to snicker.

            “Thank you for explaining,” Hamal said. “How much is two kip in sovereigns?”

            More snickers.

            “Two,” the innkeeper said, drawing out the word. He stared down at Hamal and, speaking slowly and with strong pronunciation, explained, “Kips are sovereigns. The king’s money, used for buying and selling things.”

            “Well, here are four kip for you.” Hamal held out the coins. “Four, not two.”

            The large man’s hand appeared, and the coins clinked in his palm.

            At the sight of all that gold, the laughter cut off. Hamal felt the change in the room and glanced around.

            No one said anything, so he said, nodding toward the innkeeper’s hand, “That should cover all your hard work.”

            The innkeeper’s mouth worked for half a minute before words came out. “Done. Thank you.” A strange look passed over his face. “Sir.”

            Cale had spoken to Hamal about what he should ask for—certain things they would need for a little girl who had been living on the floor and eating food scraps. “I need a clean washtub delivered up to our room. You know, one for bathing in. And clean towels too. And another bed for her. And whatever she has—shoes and a coat and other things. Oh! And I need another bowl of whatever stew that was. That was good. Rosy is going to eat like a real person instead of off the floor.”

            “Whatever you require,” the innkeeper said agreeably.

            Hamal grinned. “Yes, I know.”

            Rosy didn’t want to go upstairs. She didn’t even want to leave her corner. Not at first.

            Hamal had to coax her, speaking with great kindness and slowness, and eventually she allowed him to take her hand and lead her out of the corner and then out of the dining room. She balked again at the base of the stairs. He thought she might be afraid of getting in trouble with the innkeeper, so Hamal crouched down and explained the situation to her again.

            “Rosy,” he said, his hand on her shoulder. “I know the dining room is where you used to live. I know that was your life for a while, but Cale and I—we’re going to take care of you now. You don’t have to stay downstairs anymore because now you’re with us. Do you understand?”

            Large, dark eyes fixed tightly on his face. He looked into them and thought about fire. Until they figured out which god she was shadowing—well, perhaps it was good there was no fire just now.

            “Do you understand?” he repeated.

            She did nothing. But when he stood up and gently tugged on her hand, she followed him up the steps and into the room Hamal and Cale planned on sharing that night.

            Cale, however, had changed his mind. “I will stay next door. With Masly and Chestirad.”

            “But why?” Hamal asked. “She’s just a little girl. She’s not scary.”

            “She is an oracle,” Cale replied, as if that would answer all arguments and questions. He hesitated. “I have used my gift with her, Hamal. Forgive me, but you have not seen what I have seen. I will be one room away if you require my assistance.”

            So Cale gathered his things and left. Hamal could hear him and a few of the others speaking quietly out in the hall.

            A short while later, there was a knock on the door, and two men who looked exactly alike carried the items Hamal wanted into the room—a washtub, blankets and somewhat clean towels, and even a small trundle bed. One of the legs was missing, so they’d brought a wooden block to keep everything level. The bed was so small that it resembled a bassinet, but Rosy was small and Hamal thought she would fit comfortably.

            The men left and one returned, carrying a tray with a bowl of stew, a carefully folded napkin, a spoon with a wooden handle, and half a loaf of fresh bread. He hesitated at the door, and at first Hamal thought he might want to help with Rosy. Right as he realized the man was hoping for money, Chestirad happened to step out of the next room and “encouraged” the man to return downstairs.

            Rosy didn’t seem to know how to use a spoon. Instead, she shoved food into her mouth with her fingers, watching Hamal over the bowl’s rim as if she thought he might take the food from her. Her expression and actions didn’t change even after Hamal spoke to her again and again and told her everything would be all right now.

            She doesn’t understand, he thought sadly. She’s safe with us, but she doesn’t know.

            As she cleaned out her bowl, he told her stories about some of his adventures with his grandfather and about a dog named Zayzay, who knew how to count sheep.

            “He truly did!” he said. “He could count up to seven. It was amazing.”

            Rosy stared at him as he talked. And he talked a long time, trying to set her at ease. Twice during his storytelling, the door had opened, and Cale had stuck his head into the room. Twice the seer had departed without a word.

            Rosy didn’t lie down in her bed until nearly four in the morning.

            From his bed against the wall, Hamal could hear her heartbeat—steady but fast, like a nervous little deer’s, and he grieved over the fear he’d felt in her bones. Oh, little child. This place has taught you bad things.

            Lying on his back, hands folded under his head, he waited to close his eyes until he heard her heart slow and knew she had gone to sleep. Finally. How long had it been since she had gotten good sleep in this place? And in a real bed? Although this one was old and falling apart. At least she could sleep tonight in peace and be gone from here tomorrow forever.

            Hamal fell asleep right away, without concern.

            In the quiet room, Rosy slept.

            But her gift did not.

            Hamal opened his eyes to smoky air and sand under his boots. He looked around in surprise. What?

– H –

Author’s note: I really like Lord Rhyan. I may need to write his love story one day. ❤️

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 4

Chapter 4

This Is Rose

            Little Rose couldn’t have been more than six. The scrap bucket was almost bigger than she was, and she moved it as if it were an extension of her body. Every piece of food and broken bowl went into the bucket as fast as Hamal could blink, and he realized he was just about to lose her to the corner again.

            “Rosy!” he called, sliding off the bench. He sat down on the floor—close, but not too close, to her.

            She froze, head down, one small hand gripping the bucket’s edge.

            “Rosy, my name is Hamal. I’m a healer,” he said in his kindest voice. “Are you sick? Do you not feel well? I would like to put my hand on your shoulder, if that is all right?”

            It was not all right. The thin shoulder jerked away before he could even get his arm lifted.

            “Wait, Rosy! Don’t go away. I’m not going to hurt you—”

            Her head came up. She stared at him with red eyes.

            Hamal froze, his arm outstretched, his fingers inches from her shoulder.

            The color in her eyes seemed to sway like fire. For a moment, he thought he could see actual flames in her irises, and his mind paused on that point: She has fire in her eyes.

            She blinked.

            Her eyes were brown.

            Hamal nearly reached up to rub his face, but at the last moment, he didn’t, suspecting that if he looked away even for an instant, she would vanish back to her corner. He leaned forward slowly, repeating, “I am a healer. I am going to make you feel better. You don’t need to do anything. I’m not going to hurt you. Just sit there, just like that. Good girl. You’re a very good girl. I can tell.”

            His fingertips touched her shoulder lightly. One little touch.

            Emotion swamped him, to the point that he nearly gasped. The rush was so swift and so strong that he almost pulled his hand away. Her bones were weeping. That’s what it felt like as they told him how all the people she once had known had died or left her without a reason. She was alone now, and she was scared. Her bones couldn’t tell him what she feared, but over and over again, they said she was afraid, she had lost everything, and she was alone. Bones were the history keepers of the body, and that was her history—that she had lost everyone and she was all by herself.

            And her blood was sick.

            He tilted his head as his gift examined her blood and the strange thing growing in her chest, near her heart. A tumor, but an unusual one. Hamal felt like he had stepped into a conversation that had been going on for a long time. Her blood knew about the tumor and knew it shouldn’t be there. It had a lot to say about it. This should not be. Something is wrong. Her blood kept repeating itself.

            What an odd thing, Hamal thought. No wonder the innkeeper said she was sickly.

            As quickly as he could, he removed the growth. It dissolved at the touch of his gift, and he rebuilt the inside of the child’s chest, so her bones and her heart and all the other pieces of her could operate the way they were supposed to. He washed her blood so it could think and act properly, and he also found an old break in her wrist that needed healing. The body had tried to heal by itself, but it had done a poor job. So he fixed the bone too.

            All in all, healing her small body took about one minute. She sat quietly for him the entire time, staring at him.

            “There you are,” he said and pulled his hand away. “Now you will feel better.”

            Not a sound. Just dark eyes that studied him. He decided he must have imagined the fire eyes from before.

            Rosy picked up her bucket and scrambled back to her corner, where she situated herself in the shadows and watched him through the table legs. Hamal stared at her from across the room until his eyes began to sting. They were on a mission for the king. They had a job to do, but how could they possibly leave this child here, in this terrible place with an innkeeper who didn’t care about her? He wanted to tell Rosy’s blood everything was all right now. He wanted to tell her she didn’t have to be alone anymore.

            He ended up sitting on the floor for twice as long as it had taken to heal her. Then he sighed deeply and returned to the table he shared with his friends.

            As he slid onto the bench, he told the others, “She had a growth in her chest. It was trying to kill her and poison her blood, but she is all better now. She was in a lot of pain. I don’t know for how long.”

            No one said anything.

            Hamal realized how quiet the table was, and he looked up to find his companions watching him. Cale, Masly, Gregory, and Rhyan all stared at him.

            “What is it?” he asked.

            Masly spoke first. “Did you not see what we saw?”

            “With Rosy?” Then he straightened up excitedly. “You mean the fire eyes? Aye, I saw the fire eyes!”

            Gregory reached into one of his many pockets and removed a book, thumbing through the pages.

            Lord Rhyan cleared his throat. “Why would a little child have fire in her eyes? That can happen with a flamemaker, but this child is not a flamemaker. I would have been able to feel her gift, and I did not. A child without fire, yet she somehow has fire in her eyes?” He grimaced. “I have never heard of such a thing, and I would like to think, considering my gift, that I’ve heard of most things involving fire—”

            “Here we are,” Gregory announced and slapped his book on the table, spreading out the pages with his fingers. “The child is a gift called an oracle.”

            Everyone leaned forward.

            Gregory’s book didn’t have any words. It had pictures instead. Staring back at them was a sketch of a beautiful lady with long hair and red eyes. The entire picture was black and white, except for the eyes. The artist had carefully filled them with crimson paint. They looked as if they were made of fire.

            Hamal took a quick breath in surprise. Many years had passed since he’d seen this face, and he wasn’t expecting to see it on this journey, and the sight of it made him smile. “I say, Cale—”

            Gregory didn’t seem to hear him. “This is Hellan,” the reader stated. “She was the last oracle. Two hundred years ago, she helped bring an end to the Barrow Wars.”

            “An oracle,” Masly repeated. His silver eyes narrowed. “I keep discovering gifts I didn’t know existed. It’s quite vexing.” He glanced at Hamal, but there was no malice in his gaze.

            “Yes, sir. It is an incredibly rare gift that does not follow the bloodline. It appears at random, a quality it shares with the seer gift, but unlike the seer gift, the oracle does not simply bypass multiple generations in a row. It is genuinely random. A decision made by the gods.”

            Masly frowned. “You’re certain she isn’t just a thiever? A thiever could deceive this way.”

            A flicker of annoyance went across Gregory’s face, but quickly his expression returned to one of calm. “Yes, sir. With the exception of the flamemaker gift, the oracle is the only gift that produces color saturation in the eyes to the extent that the irises appear to be made of fire. It is not actual fire, as it would be with flamemakers, but it has the appearance of fire. The oracle is related to the seer gift. It is a type of seer, but its realm is vastly different. With only one exception, all Court Gifts are marked by their eyes. The seer has silver. The prophet has gold.” He paused. “And the oracle, also a Court Gift, has fire—but only when the gift is in operation.”

            “What’s the possibility we would walk into an inn in a miserable town in the North Territory and find one of the Court Gifts?” Rhyan murmured.

            Gregory, who knew many things, replied, “None. The gift is ridiculously rare—even more so than that of sage. Every historian who has studied the gifts in depth has an opinion on oracles, but their rarity is not questioned. In fact, they all agree that the oracle gift is impossible to find.”

            “Well,” Masly said, “you’re saying we found one, so impossible seems like a strong word.”

            Again, faint annoyance twitched through Gregory’s expression. He bowed his head politely. “They say it is impossible to find—unless one is meant to find it. If an oracle stumbles across your path, it is purposefully done. It is the will of the gods.”

            “Lovely,” Lord Rhyan muttered and sat back on the bench. “Just what we need on this venture. An interfering god.”

            Gregory smiled slightly as delight filled his eyes. “An interfering god is not always a detriment.” He flipped to the next page in his book of pictures.

            When he saw yet another familiar face staring back at him, Hamal started laughing. “You brought my grandfather on the trip with us! I didn’t realize you were going to bring him—who else do you have hidden in the folds of your cloak?”

            Though his eyes still twinkled, Gregory did not laugh. “Your grandfather acted as a guide for Hellan, the last oracle. He escorted her to our city, where she played a significant role in stopping the Barrow Wars. Oracles require wisdom because their gift enables them to see what the gods or a specific god is doing. They are then able to mirror that god’s actions. It is vital for the oracle to mirror a god who is interested in the welfare of men.” Gregory’s look grew pointed. “Hamal, what do you know about the oracle gift?”

            Again, everyone around the table gave Hamal their attention.  

             “Well,” Hamal said, thinking about it, “I know they’re always girls. And I know she can pick the god she wants to follow. And you’re right—it is very important for an oracle to choose the right god. If you do what the wrong one is doing, it’s bad. Wars and plagues and death—it’s possible for bad gods to do very bad things that hurt people, and the oracle might help them. But if the oracle follows the right god, she can do what the right god is doing, and she can bring life instead of death. If you’re an oracle, you have to know who the right god is.”

            “Which is why your grandfather supported Hellan and participated with her gift,” Gregory said, nodding in affirmation. “He gave her wisdom. He was her wisdom, in a sense.”

            The only born nobleman among them, Rhyan leaned back on the bench and gave the girl in the corner another brief look. He didn’t sound pleased as he said, “We can’t overlook the presence of an oracle, especially not when we’re here on the king’s behalf. We’ll have to turn around and take her back to the city.”

            No one answered. Hamal looked at the others’ faces and decided they all thought Rhyan was right, but they didn’t like it.

            Masly glanced through the room. In a low voice, he said, “A lot of learning a little girl would get in a place like this. And none of it good. If this place teaches this child about a god, it surely would not be a god we desire in King’s Barrow.”

            “She’s afraid,” Hamal said. “I’ve never seen the movements of gods, but I imagine it could be scary. Especially if you were all alone and needed wisdom and didn’t have any. She’s terrified. Her bones are all marked up with her fears.”

            “We have to take her to the king,” Rhyan repeated.

            “We are on a specific timeline,” Cale answered. “Oracle or not, I don’t believe Cedrick would have us turn around and go home.”

            “We could take her with us,” Hamal suggested.

            All four heads swung toward him.

            “Hamal,” Cale began. “You know where we’re going. You know what we are likely to confront when we get there. It is no place for a little girl, even if she has a powerful gift.”

            Rhyan agreed. “We can’t leave her here, but neither can we take her to the coast. I have no desire to give the king bad news about an oracle. Yes, Sire, we found one, but we accidentally dropped her down a hole in the ground.”

            “Well, we don’t have to take her all the way into the mine,” Hamal said.

            “Lower your voice,” Masly ordered, voice sharp.  

            Hamal did as he was told, this time whispering, “We don’t have to take her all the way into that one place. We could just take her to a better place, and she could wait for us there. This is a bad place. We can’t leave a god’s oracle in a place like this, so maybe we can just leave her at a different place instead.”

            Cale studied Hamal for a long time.

            Hamal began to twitch on the bench.

            Eventually Cale sighed and said, “Very well,” which drew quick looks from the other three men. Looks he ignored. “If that is wisdom. But I foresee that our gracious host will smell the scent of gold and refuse to part with the girl immediately. He will demand a price.”

            A moment passed as Hamal tried to figure out what Cale meant.

            Rhyan muttered a word Hamal had never said in his life. The lord glared at the innkeeper, who stood laughing with a table of patrons on the other side of the room.

            The innkeeper wanted money? Why did he want money for Rosy? “But she’s healed now. He doesn’t need money for her anymore.”

            “He will call it compensation due to a lack of coin and being forced to care for her himself.” Cale looked at Hamal steadily. “The king gave you a purse for this journey. How much will wisdom offer a cruel man to compensate for the care—the obviously poor care—he has given this child?”

            Hamal considered the situation with care, thinking about gods and his grandfather and Hellan, who had once knitted him a sweater and told him how handsome he looked. He wore the sweater every winter for seventy years (he wasn’t certain, but he thought it was that long) and only gave it up when the elbows were gone and a mouse used it for a nest.

            But more than those things, Hamal thought about something Gregory had not said.

            Oracles appeared only in times of war. How was this a time of war? King’s Barrow was at peace.

            I don’t understand, he thought, looking over at Rosy.

            She stared at him.

            In the shadows, he saw two pools of flame, flickering.

– H –

Author’s note: Happy Independence Day! 250 years! 🎉

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

A Bit Like Looking at Hamal

            The king had told Cale to bring anyone he wanted. So Cale did.

            Lord Rhyan was a flamemaker—a bored flamemaker, Cale told Hamal in private, though why that was important for this venture Hamal didn’t know. They were going to arrest a bad man who could kill flamemakers with fire, but even after the situation was thoroughly explained to him, Lord Rhyan eagerly accepted the chance to be a member of Cale’s team.

            Chestirad and Ermond were flamemakers too, but they also happened to be something Rhyan was not: seasoned soldiers. Every night around the campfire, Chestirad polished his sword and what seemed to be a dozen knives he carried somewhere on his person. The only time Hamal saw the knives was at night around the campfire.

            Ermond, meanwhile, was a brooding sort of fellow who liked poetry and smoked a long, thin pipe called a ballister. Apparently, it was something rich people liked to do in Dasken. Just a few days into their journey, Hamal knew more than he wished about Ermond and a woman named Nallia who, by all accounts, seemed to like men who read poetry and smoked skinny pipes.

            Will Chiodo was a charter. This meant he could read the earth the way Hamal could read a person’s bones. Will had brought his dog with him—a surprisingly large, sandy-colored wolf pup whose fangs were visible even when her mouth was closed. Hamal, who liked dogs, thought it was funny how most of the men in their party pretended the wolf wasn’t there and became very quiet whenever she got up and moved around.

            “It’s a sand wolf,” Cale explained to Lord Rhyan one night beneath the stars.

            “By the gods, how did a charter acquire a sand wolf?” Rhyan exclaimed.

            “Cale gave her to him,” Hamal replied. “When we were in the East Territory a few weeks ago, he found the puppy in the ravine and gave her to Will as a present.”

            Rhyan’s brows lifted, and he made a strange noise in the back of his throat. Staring at Cale, he said, “You found a wolf on a piece of land commonly believed to be haunted, and you took the wolf and gave it to someone? As a gift?”

            “The wolf is a girl,” Hamal said. “Her name is Mercy.” Will had given her a feeler name.

            “Yes,” Cale answered. “I did give the wolf as a gift.”

            He looked at Rhyan, who cleared his throat and eventually said, “Ah,” then directed the conversation along a different route.

            Gregory Almes was a reader and official recorder for the king. The throne required a reader to document their journey; this was standard practice when the king’s business took place outside the city. Gregory spent most of his days with a pencil and a notebook in his hands. Even in the saddle, he was constantly writing. The king would receive Gregory’s report when they returned to the city.

            Hainn and Vincent were weathermakers. Hainn was quiet, barely saying a word unless he was asked a direct question, while Vincent loved water. Something about him was a little different, and Hamal couldn’t tell what it was. The way he moved? The way he watched the land around him? Hamal didn’t know, but after a while, he noticed that Vincent constantly had a waterskin in his hands. All the time. He drank more water than anyone else in their party. As the days passed, Hamal began to wonder if Vincent needed someone to heal him—it was a lot of water. The man seemed to have trouble sleeping. He was awake every time Hamal opened his eyes at night, except for the night they made camp next to a stream. That night, Vincent slept like a toddler who had done nothing that day but run.

            Gild, a healer, had four sons and three daughters with his weathermaker wife.

            Kolling was an archer. She journeyed by herself during the day and, every night, appeared at sunset with dinner hanging off her saddle.

            And the last member of their party was Masly Hawl. The seer who had kidnapped the king’s brother.

            “Anyone I want,” Cale said.

            The king had recently allowed Masly to move back to his house under careful guard. Masly lived there with a handful of the king’s soldiers and a court-assigned servant named Reckoning, a feeler who didn’t smile very much.

            When Cale told the king he wanted Masly to accompany them, the king had stared down his long nose at Cale and eventually said, “Very well. I don’t make a habit of arguing with seers.”

            Which Hamal didn’t understand at all, because Cedrick argued with Cale all the time. Sometimes they even bickered back and forth like brothers who had very good manners.

            So, Masly went with them.

            It was an interesting mix of people, to be sure.

            Toward the end of their eighth day on the road, they came to a small town called Redsprin.

            Even before they passed through the gate, Hamal began to suspect this town didn’t have any feelers. He was a healer, but even he could sense that something wasn’t right about this place. There weren’t any streets—just muddy tracks that tried to swallow wagon wheels and people’s boots. Residents waded through the muck as if they didn’t see it anymore, and no one was wearing clean clothes. Everyone Hamal saw, even the handful of children he spotted playing in a questionable alley, had an obvious weapon strapped somewhere on their body.

            As Cale’s party traveled deeper into the dirty little town, it was like somebody had blown a trumpet. Everything stopped. People turned and stared. And then they started frowning, especially at Cale and Masly.

            Hamal leaned sideways in the saddle and, in as quiet a voice as possible, whispered to Cale, “Why are we staying here again?”

            “Thieves,” Cale replied, also quiet. “This area of the country is notorious for theft. Highwaymen, mostly. Or armed men hiding in the trees. I would not typically wish to travel through this land, but it is the most direct route to our destination. The town, at least, offers a small amount of protection against external forces.” His eyes narrowed as he scanned the area. “A small amount of protection.”

            Hamal suspected he knew what Cale was sensing—a town without feelers. When a town did not have feelers, it felt different than other places. If feelers couldn’t live there, something inside the town needed to be healed—and as quickly as possible, because it was sick.

            The town had two inns situated around the muddy center square, and after a quick conversation between Cale and Masly, they chose the inn on the right. It was called Mourning Dove, a name that seemed sadly fitting. The inside of the inn was cleaner than the outside, but the windows were small and there weren’t many lamps to keep out the night. At least the main room was warm. A fire spit and crackled on a hearth that was built like a large triangle in the corner.

            Cale’s party took every available room on the inn’s second floor, and once that was done, they returned to the dining room for supper. Five of them—Hamal, Cale, Gregory the reader, Masly, and Lord Rhyan—sat together in a large booth in the back of the room. Hamal had learned that his friend Cale liked to watch things from the back, and he assumed Masly was the same way.

            The venison stew was good, better than Hamal expected, given the state of the town. Some of the others seemed a bit hesitant, however. Lord Rhyan made a face and then ate only the bread, and Gregory pretended to eat but, in the end, only poked around the bowl with his spoon.

            Hamal was halfway done with his meal when one of the customers dropped a dish. The plate hit the floor and shattered, pieces splintering. The other customers roared with laughter, and people lifted their drinks to cheer the chaos.

            Before the broken pieces had stopped moving, a small dark form raced out of a corner and began throwing them in a bucket.

            Hamal squinted, trying to see through the shadows. Was that a child?

            The broken shards and chunks of food went into the bucket, and then the small form fled back to the corner, where it sat in the darkness opposite the fireplace and picked through the bucket, choosing bits of things that it shoved into its mouth.

            It was a child. A girl, Hamal thought, but he couldn’t quite tell from where he was sitting. Was this her job—to clean the floor when someone dropped a dish? Frowning, he turned back to the table and discovered he was not the only one whose interest the child had captured. Cale and Masly both stared toward the corner where the little girl sat, nearly invisible in the shadows.

            “I have no idea what that is,” Masly said, his soft, boyish voice barely audible above the noise of the dining room.

            “Prophetic in nature,” Cale said.

            It was like he and Masly had been having a private conversation and only now did they feel it necessary to speak out loud.

            “In nature, yes,” Masly replied, “but not the prophetic gift itself. Obviously. Her eyes would give her away, and not even the master of this inn would dare treat a prophet-child in this fashion.” He frowned toward the innkeeper as the large man laughed uproariously at a nearby table.

            Oh, Hamal realized. They’re talking about her gift. He watched them frown, and then he glanced over at Gregory, who was writing things down again, and Lord Rhyan, who was twisting around on the bench and trying to see what everyone was talking about.

            Masly slowly said, “Whatever her gift is, it’s a bit like looking at Hamal for the first time.”

            Cale chuckled as if Masly had told a joke.

            “Looking at me? What does that mean?” Hamal asked. He was a healer, not a prophet.

            Neither seer seemed to hear him.

            The innkeeper walked by, and Lord Rhyan reached out and snagged a corner of his sleeve. The man was as tall and wide as a dining table set on end.

            “Your pardon,” Rhyan said politely. He nodded toward the child. “Who is that little boy in the corner?”

            The innkeeper followed his look. “Oh, that? That’s Rose. That’s what we call her. The little thing doesn’t speak. A thiever dropped her off here last year and left some coin for her, but then he never come back, and coin run out, and she’s been sickly ever since.”

            “Don’t you have healers in Redsprin, sir?” Hamal asked.

            The innkeeper’s dark gaze turned to him. “The coin run out,” he repeated. “Healers don’t work for no coin.”

            “Some of them do,” Hamal said.

            “What is her gift?” Masly asked.

            The innkeeper shrugged and looked toward another table whose occupants were laughing. “Don’t rightly know. The child is odd.” He tapped his forehead. “Up here. She hasn’t shown no signs of a gift since she came. Naturally, that was one of the first questions I asked that thiever, but he didn’t know either. Said he found her out on the road.” The innkeeper harrumphed. “Of course he did. Thievers is always honest, you know.” He laughed loudly.

            “Didn’t you ask her what her gift was?” Hamal asked.

            The large man growled, “She don’t talk. Not a word.”

            After the innkeeper had stomped away, Rhyan lowered his voice and said to the rest of them, “I daresay we might get a better night’s sleep out in the woods, despite the threat of thieves.”

            “Might be true,” Masly muttered.

            But he and Cale looked back to the child in the corner.

            “What do you see?” Hamal asked, bumping Cale’s arm with his shoulder.

            “She’s peculiar,” Cale replied.

            “What does that mean?”

            “I’m not sure I could describe it to you. It is more of a sense than a sight. I can see nothing about this child clearly.”

            Masly agreed with a nod. “Yes, and that’s strange too. I should be able to see something, but her gift hides her. Whatever it is.”

            Gregory’s pencil scratched the page. He made notes as quickly as he could.

            Blowing out his breath in a hot sigh, Rhyan rolled his eyes and straightened up on the bench. “Gentlemen, if there is one thing I cannot abide, it is indecision.”

            Hamal believed it. Rhyan was a flamemaker.

            As they all knew he was a flamemaker, perhaps they should have been expecting it, but they still jumped as Rhyan took hold of Hamal’s bowl and threw it on the floor. The porcelain shattered, the pieces bouncing everywhere. Just as they had the first time, other customers laughed, glasses raised.

            “If we are all so curious,” Rhyan said, “let’s meet her, shall we?”

– H –

Author’s note: We just got back from housesitting for my parents. While at their house, my nearly 2-year-old discovered that playing in toilets is a load of fun and so is stripping off his diaper and peeing on the kitchen floor as close to Mommy’s leg as possible. We had…an adventure. 😅

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Rumors of Ghosts

            Two days later, at nine o’clock in the morning, Hamal and Cale took a carriage across the city and entered the district of West Barrow, home to most of the city’s scholars and historians. The people who liked to study things lived in this district. Gregory Almes, one of Hamal’s reader friends, had a house here on Lettering Street.

            The carriage rolled to a stop in front of a house so far west that it nestled within the shadow of the city wall. Like many houses in West Barrow, this house looked fairly plain. Most people didn’t have fancy houses here because they spent their money on other things, like books and education and travel.

            But Hamal did notice one interesting thing about this house.

            “Are they building something?” he asked, peering through the carriage window at the carnage that used to be the front lawn. Five large holes gaped up at the sky: one hole beside the cobbled drive, one next to the rose garden, one against the wall, two others under some trees. The excess dirt had been carefully piled up next to each hole.

            Cale leaned forward and narrowed his eyes at the deep scrapes in the earth. A moment passed as he used his gift. “Experiments,” he said finally.

            “What?”

            “They’re testing the soil.” Cale smiled slightly. “Likely for the third or fourth time, I’d imagine.”

            Hamal did not understand why Cale thought this was funny. “Testing the soil? You mean, with an alchemist? Why are they testing the soil with an alchemist?”

            “The Elortons explore caves, Hamal. That is their occupation. They are interested in the earth—all manner of soil and rocks and what can be found under the surface. I imagine their natural interest has not abated, despite their recent setbacks.”

            Recent setbacks. An interesting way to describe what had happened with Lord Masgrave and his dragons. Cale seemed to think the trauma the siblings had endured had already lifted. Hamal smiled, pleased with his friend’s opinion. Good.

            A servant met them on the drive. He was tall and thin, and his lips barely moved as he said, “This way, sirs.”  

            He took Hamal and Cale up the stone steps and into the house, where there was even more dirt—dirt inside the house, in piles that appeared to be just as carefully arranged as the piles outside, only smaller.

            “Oh,” Hamal said in surprise.

            The servant sighed. “Yes,” he stated in a completely different tone. “Yes, I know. There’s no stopping them, and since their return three weeks ago, it’s been particularly bad. I have never—” His voice cracked to a halt as his eyes widened. He straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin. In the first voice, the one that sounded very formal, he continued, “This way, sirs. His lordship is in the library.”

            The servant led them down a long hallway lined with bookcases. There were no books on these shelves. Instead, they were loaded with rocks. Some were rough and dark, full of holes. Some were spiky and sharp looking, and some were pretty. Hamal touched a shiny one that was the same color as spring grass. Imagine that—a green rock. They must have found it in a cave.

            The servant stopped in front of a door, and Hamal ran into his back. The man sniffed and pretended the collision hadn’t happened.

            “Sirs,” he said and opened the door.

            The smells of cinnamon tea and old paper followed the door’s movement. So did voices. A woman, talking about the military and an upcoming event—it sounded like a wedding—that involved someone in the military, and a man, who thought there would be plenty of time for everyone to arrive. Hamal saw more bookcases and more rocks, but there were actual books here, and he realized the large room was a library. Though he couldn’t see the speakers yet, he began to sense the presence of another healer.

            “She’s here!” he whispered excitedly to Cale.

            “Yes,” the seer replied.

            They walked down three aisles of bookcases filled with books that looked as old as the kingdom. As they approached the end of the third row, the servant loudly cleared his throat, and the familiar voices cut off.

            “Jon,” the woman called. “Are they here?”

            “Yes, mistress,” the servant replied.

            Hamal walked around the corner and stopped, grinning at the scene before him.

            Saviana Elorton, sitting on Lieutenant Com Reardon’s lap.

            “Why, Hamal,” she said and didn’t bother to pull her arms from around Com’s neck. She wouldn’t be embarrassed, he knew. Not this one. She didn’t know what embarrassment was, and she never cared what other people thought. “When I heard you were coming, I rearranged my schedule.”

            Com laughed at her. “You have a schedule?”

            “Quiet, darling. It is good to see you again, Hamal. Where is your silver-eyed friend? Did you remember to bring him too?”

            Cale stepped up next to Hamal, and Savi’s smile widened. “Oh, there you are, my lord. Forgive me. I didn’t know you were coming.”

            Hamal highly doubted that was true. He chuckled, sensing the presence of a joke even if he didn’t fully understand it.

            Savi untangled her arms and stood from the couch, brushing off her dress in a manner that made Hamal think of digs and dust and the exploration of old places, even though her dress appeared perfectly clean and presentable. She had a practiced hand.

            “I fear I must apologize on behalf of my brother, sir,” she said to Cale. “After receiving your letter yesterday, he vanished somewhere within the worded catacombs—” She gestured toward the library they stood in. “—and we haven’t been able to find him. I fear he is gone forever.”

            From somewhere deeper within the library, a man’s voice came floating through the dust. “Not true.”

            “We fear we may never see him again,” Savi continued in the same friendly tone.

            “No, we don’t.” Garrick Elorton, Savi’s brother and leader of their underground expeditions, stepped around an overloaded bookcase. Dust as thick as white powder clung to the shoulder of his dark tunic, and cobwebs had pasted themselves to his hair. In one hand he held an old scroll, the paper darkening with age, and in the other hand he clutched a black book. Also old, also dusty. “As always, thank you, Saviana, for your surge of creative details.”  

            He turned to Cale and lifted the scroll. “I found the map, Commander. If you will follow me over to the table, I can show you everything you need to know about the Dursen Head Mine.”

            Garrick led them to the long table next to the couch where Saviana and Com had been sitting. The table had been recently cleaned off, Hamal thought, judging by the papers and books stacked underneath it. Garrick set the black book off to the side and then rolled out the map, smoothing it down with both hands.

            “This is Dursen Head,” he said. “Two different renderings, as you can see. The one on the left is a copy of the original map drafted by a charter about nine hundred years ago. The one on the right is a more current map.”

            “How old?” Cale asked.

            “Ninety-nine years,” Garrick replied and tapped the scroll’s right side. “This is a charter’s work as well, so you can be certain of what you see.”

            Hamal studied the map and all the dark lines, shaded areas, town names, and other features carefully drawn out or labeled with old ink. The map was highly detailed concerning the mine itself. The charter had marked each shaft and how it turned through the soil and stones. In the eight hundred years between drawings, the mine appeared to have grown considerably. It was a single shaft on the left side of the paper but more like a town of passages on the right. Charters knew the earth; it spoke to them, and their maps were always dependable.

            Cale was already nodding. “They dug beneath the sea.”

            “They did. Most of the mine lays hidden beneath the soil, close to the shore but not quite touching it. This arm here, however, extends out beneath the water.” Garrick traced the route with a calloused finger. “A few hundred years ago, some believed the e’nethaine knew more about Dursen Head than we landers did.” He grinned like this was a ridiculous idea.

            Hamal didn’t think anything about the e’nethaine was ridiculous, and he knew Cale thought so as well. But neither of them tried to correct Garrick’s opinion.

            Instead, Cale said, “Some say the mine is haunted. What do you say?”

            Garrick’s smile hesitated. He seemed to notice the dust on his sleeve for the first time because he reached up and absently rubbed at his shoulder. “We are familiar with rumors of ghosts, my lord. That’s fairly standard in our business—digging up the earth, discovering artifacts and unknown territory buried under cities and towns and the like. Plenty of ghost stories. But here?” He swiped his fingertip across the northern coastline. “This is a different kind of ghost story. You’d almost think the e’nethaine were involved somehow.”

            I knew it, Hamal thought.

            Garrick kept speaking. “I have never been to Dursen Head myself, but Savi and I have heard a few of the stories and they’re…unique.”

            Cale frowned at Garrick. “How so?”

            Garrick looked over at his sister, sitting on the arm of the couch with the lieutenant on the cushion next to her.

            Savi wrinkled her nose like the entire notion of ghosts was distasteful to her. “Here is an example. A hundred years ago, Tome Dranda the charter—”

            Garrick pointed toward the right side of the map.

            “—scanned the mine to verify his map, and he insisted that the mine’s register was not correct. The register reported twenty-three miners in a certain shaft that day, but the charter counted twenty-seven. Four extra men, walking about.”

            E’nethaine, Hamal thought.

            “These ‘ghosts’ have weight,” Saviana continued. “Enough weight that a charter can sense their steps on the earth and assume they are men. But the more interesting stories involving the mine also involve healers.”

            She gave Cale an odd look. “You have heard about the Healer’s Treasure, I assume?”

            “I have.”

            For some reason, Saviana looked relieved. “Then you know that according to the legend, the gods hid some kind of massive treasure in the earth at Dursen Head, and only a healer can find it. Healers have been trying to discover it for centuries. Interestingly, it is like the mine itself—or perhaps whatever dwells in the mine—tries to keep them from finding it. This is where the ghost stories become more interesting. If anything goes missing, is tampered with, or is broken in the mine, that thing will certainly belong to a healer and not any other gift. Accidents happen, of course—but the strange things, the truly bizarre stories, always involve healers.” Saviana shrugged. “If the mine is truly haunted the way people say, it would seem that whatever lives there doesn’t like healers.”

            “Interesting,” Cale murmured. He lowered his gaze back to the map but, after a moment, looked at Hamal across the table. “What is your opinion, Hamal? Why would the e’nethaine prefer a healer’s belongings to those of anyone else?”

            Garrick’s eyes lit up like he was intrigued.

            Saviana looked serious.

            Com’s brows lowered in a frown.

            Hamal rubbed the top of his head as he considered the question. His mind touched upon the e’nethaine and landers and gods and how the world was made, and eventually he said, “They wouldn’t. The e’nethaine have their own healers. Why would they care about ours?”

            “Do you think the legend is true?” Cale asked. “That the treasure exists and is meant for a healer?”

            “Well, yes. My grandfather told me about it.”

            “Ah.” Cale’s silver gaze grew sharp. “And what did Shel Galen have to say?”

            “Just that there’s a treasure there, and eventually the right healer will find it.”

            Everyone looked at him.

            “Did he say you would find it?” Cale asked.

            Hamal laughed. But no one else did.

            “No, he didn’t say I would find it,” Hamal answered. “But he did mention something about time and how the treasure could grow, like it was alive.” He reached up and rubbed the top of his head. “I used to think that all secret treasures weren’t alive—like gold. Gold isn’t alive. It can’t grow like a person or an animal or a plant. But this treasure can grow. Shel said that if it had been found early, it would have been smaller, but because it still hasn’t been found, it is going to be bigger.”

            Everyone was still looking at him.

            “I have no idea what that means,” Saviana said.

            “Neither do I!” Hamal exclaimed. “A treasure that grows? My grandfather is full of secrets.”

            Several hours later, Cale leaned back on the carriage seat and looked at Hamal across the way. “You know, Hamal, if a treasure does exist somewhere within the Dursen Head Mine, you are the healer who will find it. You understand this, do you not?”

            Hamal laughed. “Do you think I’m like Savi and her brother? Hunting for treasures hidden in secret places? I’m not a treasure hunter, Cale.”

            Cale didn’t even smile. “Perhaps you should be, in this case.”

            Hamal felt the weight of his friend’s gaze. Every healer knew the story of the Dursen Head Mine, and Savi was right—many, many healers had gone there trying to find the secret treasure. Some entered the mine legally and some did not. The mine had had several owners through the centuries, and only a few of them allowed healers to search for the treasure.

            Cale abruptly leaned forward and called the driver’s name. “Percy, turn north on Harbor Street.”

            “Yes, sir,” came the muffled reply.

            Harbor Street would not take them back to Cale’s house, to the palace, or to anywhere else they might need to go before leaving the city.

            “Where are we going?” Hamal asked.

            The intensity eased in the seer’s gaze, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile. “The king said I could have anyone I wanted for this venture. Well—I have thought of someone I want.”

– H –

Author’s note: Do you remember Savi and Com from The Healer Who Didn’t Remember? I really enjoy their little love story. ❤️

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.           

Eyes of Fire: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The Body at the Palace

            The king wasn’t a handsome man, and Hamal liked him more because of it. The king knew he wasn’t handsome, but he didn’t care. You didn’t have to be his friend. You didn’t have to tell him lies to get him to like you. He simply was what he was, and Hamal could appreciate a man who was content with what the gods had assigned to him.

            Despite the late hour, the king appeared wide awake. Steam rose from the black mug in his hand, and as Hamal and Cale entered the study, he lifted the mug in greeting.

            “Your majesty.”

            Cale bowed his head, and Hamal hurried to do the same.

            The king took a sip from the mug before asking, “First thoughts?”

            This was how it always began. The king would ask Cale, a seer, what he saw before telling them why they had been summoned. It was almost like a game, Hamal thought. King Cedrick and Cale were friends, and Hamal was surprised every time the king revealed he liked playing games with his friends. Cedrick was a stern man who did not smile very often. Player of games was not what Hamal thought just by looking at him.

            The room dropped into quiet as Cale used his gift. His eyes, the same color as a sword blade, stayed on the king. He blinked once, then again, as if this helped him sort the different images rolling through his mind.

            Finally he said, “There’s a body. It was found at some distance from here and escorted to the palace under guard.”

            Cedrick smiled slightly, with just one corner of his mouth.

            A moment passed in silence. Wait, Hamal thought. Soldiers were guarding a dead body? Why would a dead body need to be guarded?

            “And how did he die?” Cedrick asked next.

            Another long pause. Cale frowned. “He seems to have burned to death.”

            The king’s smile disappeared. He blew out his breath in a huff. “That is what has been suggested, yes.” He turned and set his mug on the desk behind him, then looked at Hamal, his gaze forceful. “But you, Hamal, I trust will not confirm this cause of death.”

            Hamal looked back and forth between the king and Cale. He was not supposed to confirm the cause of death? Just to be certain, he asked, “You want me to tell you something different, your majesty?”

            “I do.”

            “Forgive me, your majesty, but I don’t understand.”

            The king’s brows rose. “Neither do I. Not yet. That’s why both of you are here.”

            Hamal and Cale followed the king and Captain Colbis, the captain of his bodyguard, through the palace to a private room beneath the first floor. Hamal had not been in this area of the palace before, and he looked around with a frown, wondering about the man who had died. What were they just about to see? If someone died in the palace, or anywhere on the palace grounds, the body was kept in a quiet, very clean room connected to the palace infirmary. But not this body. This body had guards, and it was kept in a secret room underground. Hamal tried to think of a reason that would be necessary, but he just felt confused. Why did the king wish to guard a dead body, and then why would he wish to hide this body from others?

            At the end of a long, narrow hallway, they came to a door guarded by two men. Both were flamemakers. Hamal could feel the heat radiating off their bodies.

            The guards bowed to the king, and the man on the right reached back and opened the door.

            Immediately, Cale grimaced and turned his head away as a dark stench rolled out into the hallway. Hamal recognized it right away. He was a healer—he knew what death smelled like. Bodies that had been dead for a long time, bodies that had died recently—he was familiar with these things. Cale and the king hesitated outside the door, but Hamal ducked through it into the mysterious room beyond.

            The room was filled with shadows, especially in the corners where the darkness seemed to pile up. Three tall lamps stood like somber family members around a table in the center of the room and the body that lay upon it. Even from several steps away, Hamal could tell the man had been badly burned.

            But the king wanted a cause of death that did not include fire.

            A strange thing, that request.

            Hamal approached the table carefully, with respect, and set his hand on the dead man’s chest.

            The bones began to speak to him.

            It wasn’t like a conversation, filled with sentences. Bones never spoke in sentences—they spoke in thoughts and short words and quiet ideas that seemed to walk through the healer’s mind. Understanding how to read a person’s bones took time, because the language was so different than regular speech. It was like trying to understand a dream. Hamal listened as the dead man’s bones told him many things.

            Then the blood started in, adding a few words about the man’s family. That was always what the blood wanted to talk about—family and generations and how many children somebody had. This man had no children, and his blood was sad about this.

            Then the bones spoke again.

            “Oh,” Hamal said, straightening up in surprise.

            Instantly other voices broke into the quiet.

            “What is it?” Cale asked.

            “What did you read?” the king said.

            Hamal looked over at them. “This man was surprised when he died. And it was surprise that lasted a long time because it was able to mark his bones. His bones remember it.”

            “What surprised him?” the king asked.

            “That’s a question Cale should answer, your majesty. I don’t know what surprised him. Perhaps it was the fire.”

            The king sighed. He sounded irritable. “So you are confirming the cause of death? He died in a fire?”

            Hamal glanced at the dead man’s face. This poor fellow had clearly died in a fire. Even if there were some other reason the skin would burn like this, that was what his bones said—he burned to death. Why did the king want a different answer?

            “Yes, your majesty,” Hamal said finally. “This man burned to death.”

            That answer was not the one the king wished to hear. Heavy lines appeared between his brows. Colbis stepped closer to speak with him, and as they began a quiet conversation that Hamal didn’t think he was supposed to listen to, he looked away and, slowly—with regret—pulled his hand off the dead man. He had seen many people suffering from injury or disease, and he had seen many people like this, when the suffering was over but not because he had healed them. What a horrible thing, for people to die needlessly. Surely this was not what the gods intended—this kind of pain and sorrow and sadness.

            This man had been dead for seven days. Far beyond the reach of a healer’s gift.

            Hamal became aware of a quiet, prodding sensation on the side of his face. He looked up and found Cale watching him.

            “What else, Hamal?” Cale asked. “I know that look. You only rub your head when something confuses you. What confuses you now?”

            The king’s conversation stopped. Silence filled the room.

            Aware that everyone was looking at him, Hamal pointed at the man’s right arm. “It is strange how this man died. The fire started there. Near his elbow.”

            King Cedrick and Colbis glanced at each other.

            Cale cleared his throat. “So he must have been unconscious when he died. Is that correct? He did not move as the fire approached him.”

            Hamal shook his head. “No, he was conscious. He was awake and tried to put the fire out.” He motioned to Cale. “Your gift might show you what happened. Here. Come touch him.”

            Cale blinked. His silver gaze shot to the dead body. “I’m not going to touch him.”

            “What?” Hamal peered at him. “Oh. Well, what if I put my hand here first, and then you can touch my hand? Is that better?”

            The king and Captain Colbis again traded a glance.

            Cale slowly stepped forward and, with a grimace, set two fingers on the back of Hamal’s hand. He paused but only for a moment before saying, “Hamal, I am not certain this will…”  

            He stopped. His head turned, just a little, and his silver gaze lowered to focus on the body.

            The king and Captain Colbis edged closer.

            His hand beneath Cale’s, Hamal waited a few moments, giving him time. Eventually he asked, “Do you see it? This is where the fire started. It spread from the elbow through the rest of his body. He was awake as the fire happened, but he couldn’t put it out.”

            Cale withdrew his hand. He stared at his fingers as if they belonged to someone else. “Yes,” he said finally and jerked his fingers off of Hamal’s hand. “The fire started on his arm, and he somehow failed to put it out. I cannot see any flames when I look at him. It was fire that was not fire.”

            “Yes!” Hamal agreed. “That’s what I’m trying to say. It was a fire that was not a fire. It didn’t work like a regular fire. Maybe we should talk to a flamemaker and find out more. Is there something that is like fire—but is not fire?”

            Cale was quiet as he thought. He looked over at the captain. “What have you not told us?” Cale always knew things that hadn’t been said out loud.

            “Go ahead,” the king murmured.

            Colbis sighed deeply. He ran his hand over his face and then motioned halfheartedly toward the table. “This is one of my men. Jaldan, his name was. He was part of the team that escorted Darren Ephram to the North Territory to make certain the king’s orders were followed to the letter.”

            Darren Ephram. Hamal knew that name. Darren’s father had illegally “arrested” some of the poor people in South Barrow and made them work in his mine up on the northern coast. One of those people was the husband of Hamal’s dear friend Cally, and another person was a feeler named Steadfast, who worked with Justice Ashby, the new governor of South Barrow. The king was furious with the House of Ephram. He did not take kindly to those who abused his people, especially the poor in his care.

            “I have lost contact with Jaldan’s team,” Captain Colbis stated. “If Jaldan was murdered—if this was murder—I want to know what happened.”

            Cale looked at the captain for a long moment. Hamal wondered what his seer eyes were telling him.

            “Why the guards?” Cale asked at last and nodded toward the door.

            Another sigh. “As impossible as it seems…Jaldan was a flamemaker.”

            Hamal gasped. It sounded loud in the stunned silence.

            “He couldn’t have been a flamemaker,” Cale said. “He burned to death.”

            Colbis nodded. One time. “Exactly. It is impossible, yet that is how he died. You heard Hamal confirm it.”

            In the stillness that followed, Hamal whispered, “No wonder his bones were surprised.”

            “If the House of Ephram has somehow discovered a way to kill flamemakers with fire—” The captain paused. “I want to know about it. I need to know what happened to my men. I sent six of them with Ephram, and four were flamemakers, including Jaldan.”

            The king took a deep breath. “Cale, I want you to put together a team. Make any request of me—take anyone you see you will need. Find out what Ephram is doing. Empty that mine once and for all, and bring the people home. This wicked situation has gone on long enough.”

            Cedrick paused. His stern gaze moved to Hamal. “Take Hamal with you. It is likely you will need him.”

– H –

Author’s note: A flamemaker who died from fire?! What?! 😱 Chapter 2 coming next Friday!

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Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.