“You don’t have any clue.” Aeron sounded very certain of that. “If you did, you wouldn’t be within a thousand miles of them.”
“Why don’t you educate me then?” Kira invited.
She was interested in what he had to say.
“The Sye are the masters’ most trusted pets. They are never free,” Aeron hissed.
“You’re wrong about that.” Odin reached up to remove the eye patch, revealing a sunken, empty socket. The skin around it was filled with twisted scars. The ugly raised ridges of which gleamed in the light. “Though the cost was quite high.”
Aeron backed himself into the wall as if he could disappear into it as he shook his head. “They would have eliminated your entire line.”
Odin inclined their head in agreement. “Only if they knew I’d survived. They do not and so my line is safe—from death at least.”
Everyone in the room knew that death could sometimes be a mercy—particularly when you were in the clutches of beings as ruthless as the Tsavitee’s masters.
Kira took advantage of Aeron’s unbalanced state to advance her cause. “You were right earlier. I did encounter Elise. She left me a message. ‘Help the changeling.’”
There was only one person she could have meant. Odin.
Aeron’s head dropped against the wall. “Good for you. Why are you telling me this?”
“Much as it pains me to say, I think we might be on the same side.”
And how that fact grated. Kira and the generals had been enemies for so long it was difficult to see them as anything else. Victims of the same masters who’d tried to twist Kira and the forty-three into their monsters.
Now, she was finding that maybe the generals had gone through the same hell. Only, unlike her and the rest, there had been no escape.
“You told me once that I always saved everyone else, but I never came for you.”
Kira remembered because the comment had always bugged her. Until he’d said that, she’d never viewed the generals as beings who might need rescue.
Perhaps that’s why they’d gone to Elise for help.
Aeron’s laugh held an air of despair that made Kira’s heart clench as he looked at the ceiling. “Does this mean you want to save us now? Will you forgive us for those we took from you?”
The air stilled as Kira looked away from him for the first time. “No.”
The answer was a foregone conclusion. Kira couldn’t forget or forgive.
The people they’d killed were never coming back. Kira would always feel hate for what they’d done.
Aeron’s face twisted before his hands came up to cover it.
“But I don’t expect forgiveness for the lives I’ve taken either,” Kira finished.
It was always easier to view the opposite side of any war as monsters. It took away the guilt that accompanied the taking of a life. You didn’t have to care if the soldiers on the other side were evil. You could tell yourself you were doing the right thing.
Kira’s mentor and father figure had always said the only thing that separated two forces was which side of the battle line they stood on.
Kira had forgotten that. Though the generals had made that easy given all they’d done.
Still, swaying the generals away from their masters would deal the Tsavitee a tremendous blow. Kira’s dead would kick her ass if she didn’t take advantage of such an opportunity.
Aeron brought his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them before lowering his head to rest it on his knees. “Nothing will change as long as they hold our young.”
“And if those young were free?” Kira asked carefully.
Aeron lifted his head. “Then some of us would no longer have a reason to obey.”
