Their High Solar is the representative of Aedryn, brother to Erevan. I can’t help the stiffness that enters my body. The curiosity. “Go on.”
“I grew up in the Sunspire tower, which overlooks the temple and the military encampment. He kept me separated from everyone else. Only a few people knew I existed, really.” Her voice grows distant, like she’s looking back there instead of at me. “I was allowed outside for training, but I had a private area. My instructors visited me.”
My jaw tightens.
“Endless training.” She shakes her head. “Luminth control. Combat. Pain tolerance. Obedience. When I did well, he still corrected me, and if I failed—”
She doesn’t need to finish that sentence for me to understand. Not when all the little pieces of her are starting to click together like a puzzle.
“Torture,” I say quietly.
She nods once. “He didn’t call it that. It was… discipline. I wouldn't have either until I came here.”
I can feel my heartbeat in my ears now, a slow, furious drum. I don’t interrupt. If I do, I won’t be able to stop myself. “They told me I was chosen,” Lyra continues, her voice tight. “That everything they did wasnecessary. That I was meant to bring peace, and everything was planned to lead me to where I needed to be to make sure the prophecy would come true at the right place, and the right time. The High Solar was most insistent, and my father… he went along with it.”
I swallow. “What did the prophecy actually say?”
Lyra looks me directly in the eyes. “That I would kill you, and it would end the war.”
The world narrows to a single point. For a moment, all I can hear is her breathing and my own blood roaring through myveins. This… this is the moment, I realize distantly. The truth that redefines everything that came before it.
“My mission was to come here.” Her words speed up, tumbling as if she expects me to stop her. “To find you. And I was to do whatever was needed to attract your attention, and find a way. They trained me for it my entire life. They told me you were… a brute. Cruel. So their training methods made sense, because I had to be prepared.”
They told her I would hurt her. Made her believe she needed to go through pain to keep her wits about her so she could assassinate me. “When Eres found you in the Veilspire?"
“Truth,” she whispers. “But I was on my way here. The village was burned, and they staked me.”
I search her face.
“I don’t want to do it anymore, Kaelen.” Lyra closes her eyes. “I neverdid.”
The words hit harder than the prophecy itself.
“I knew from the first day,” she continues, voice breaking. “The first day I saw you. I knew I wouldn’t be able to. I tried to hate you, to hate all of you but I just… I couldn’t.”
She swallows. “He… I have a sister. And Vaelion told me that if I didn’t finish it, he would kill her. I was to kill you, and then myself. I brought poison with me. Eres found it, but he threw it away. My father made me carry that poison with me every day from the age of ten. Eres took it, and he refused to let me have it back.”
Fuck.My thumb brushes over her face. “Lyra.”
Her head is shaking. “Reena is his heir. And I don’t… I don’t think I mean that much to him, in the end. I don’t think he’d hurt her just to punish me. I have to believe that.”
I could snap her neck right now. When she’s tired, and vulnerable, and I have her here, in my arms. And she knows it.Something in my chest cracks open, raw and aching. “Why are you telling me this?”
That suddenly feels like the most important thing.
She exhales shakily. “Because I don’t want there to be lies between us, Kaelen. You… There's so much happening here. I don’t want this hanging over my head, nor yours. I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t have anything that could help. But if I could, I would."
She was born because of me. Thrust into that world because of me. “You must have hated me.”
“My father made me hate an idea of you that doesn’t exist.” She glances up. “Though youwerea prick when I first arrived.”
“I was… on edge, I’ll admit.” I bite my cheek to hide my smile. “And I’d just found you in Eres’s bed. He’s never had much regard for his own safety.”
“No.” Lyra frowns. “I agree with you. No sense of self-preservation.”
The look we share is complete agreement. She sucks in a breath when I lift my hand, hesitating before I set it against her cheek. “I’m very glad he brought you here.”
That he found her, and saved her, and bound her.
