The academy’s crimes. The king’s silence. The mass grave beneath our feet, where ash and limbs and names all blended into one.
If that wasn’t what caused the blight creeping down the mountain, then nothing was.
And I was one of them now. A magister.
I carried their guilt.
Shock must have shown on my face because Kael looked at me like I was about to scream. Maybe I was. But beneath the horror, there was something worse—disappointment so sharp it burned.
I stepped forward, pointing at the vines writhing around us. “This. All of this. It’s proof of what you’ve done. Of everything thegutters whisper about the Crown!” My voice cracked on the last word.
Kael’s shoulders sagged. “I know.”
“We need to tell the people.” The words came out shaking, but I meant them. Deep down, I believed truth could still cleanse this rot. That if the truth was spoken, really heard, the blight might finally fade. “We need to go back to Befest and make the king come clean.”
“No, we’re not doing that.”
“The people deserve to know!”
He closed the distance between us in one stride, his voice thunderous. “The people are already rioting! What do you think will happen when they find out what we did to save them? This would be the end of the kingdom!” His breath hit my skin—hot, furious, trembling. Or maybe that tremor was remorse.
“They were human,” I hissed. “Just like us.”
“They were prisoners!” he snapped, but the crack in his voice betrayed him. He was trying to convince himself.
“And who are you to be their executioner?” I stepped closer until our faces were a breath apart. “How many were innocent? How many just disappeared into your goddamn mercy? Who are you protecting, Kael, the king, or yourself?”
“I’m protecting the realm?—”
“You’re protecting theliethat saved it!”
His eyes darkened, that blinding blue swallowed by storms. “Do you think we had a choice?” he roared, louder than thunder, heavier than guilt. “You were safe behind your academy walls while the rest of the kingdom suffocated and drowned in its own blood! We had one choice, Evangelina. One. And I would make it again, a thousand times, if it meant saving Vanhaui and the rest of this cursed world.”
I shivered. His words sank deep, heavy as stones thrown into dark water, and the echo of them rattled through my bones.We had one choice.
I wanted to hate him. Gods, Iwantedto. But hatred needed certainty, and certainty was a luxury I no longer had.
Hadn’t I stood in those streets too? Seen hollow-eyed children clutch bread like treasure? Heard coughs that ended in silence? Yes, I’d been tucked away in the academy, safe behind wards and walls, but I’d heard it. Felt it. Seen it for myself the days the walls had become too suffocating for me to stay inside. The plague had left us all starving, terrified, desperate for salvation.
And if I’d been in his place, if the cure had been within reach and all it demanded was the sacrifice of the condemned, would I have done differently?
The bile rose again, but now it was shame. Shame for even asking.
I thought of the prisoners—nameless, faceless, tortured for the good of a kingdom and burned to ash beneath this keep. I thought of the people above, alive because of them. Of myself, breathing because of their pain.
There was no clean side in this. Only blood that refused to wash off.
I looked at Kael, and for a heartbeat, I didn’t see the monster the world painted him as. I saw a man bound to an impossible choice, a man who had caged his own soul so the rest of us could keep breathing.
And yet, what right did any of us have to decide who deserved to live or die?
Maybe that was the cruelest truth of all. The plague had ended, but the rot it left behind wasn’t in the soil. It was in us.
A tear slipped free. Kael caught it with his thumb, his hand rough and careful all at once. He searched my eyes, his voice low. “Did you think better of me? Did I ever tell you to?”
I shook my head. No. He’d never lied about what he was. Kael had always been himself—cold, distant, fierce. A power too strong for this world, and a conscience scarred by it.
“You’re a monster,” I whispered.
