Chapter 37. Where the River Remembers

She didn’t sleep that night, not because she couldn’t, but because every time her eyes began to close, the rhythm of water returned—first soft, then stronger, until it became impossible to ignore. It wasn’t a hallucination. The rhythm wasn’t coming from within the room, or the keep, or even her own thoughts. It was an echo. A memory surfacing. And it carried the smell of wet stone, moss, and that peculiar metallic sharpness she had not tasted since she was a child.

At dawn she walked out without permission. No one stopped her. Maybe because Kaid hadn’t given the order, or maybe because something in her expression made it clear that this was not a morning to be argued with. Her path wound downward, away from the core chambers and ceremonial courts, toward the frost-edged cliffs where the old aqueducts ran.

She remembered them in fragments—stone archways half-swallowed by vines, a mossy ledge where she once scraped her knee, a crooked tree whose roots had nearly pulled he