“By giving up my road.”
“We have enough problems with Olet’s actions where therionetkasare concerned, and we’ve lost nearly an entire generation of tithes from the attack last summer. The coming years won’t be easy for wardens in the poison fields, and that’s if Daijaldoesn’twin the war. If Eimarille succeeds, I fear we face a subjugation far worse than the debt slaves they hold.”
Soren stared at Delani for a moment before turning to look back at the shadowed waters of the Celestine Lake and the moonlight reflected there. The quiet of the land around them was broken by the night noises of the fort and the automatons on guard duty. He closed his eyes and remembered what it had been like in that quarry, with its death-defying machine and imprisoned debt slaves, freedom taken from him. He could so easily see his fellow wardens in the same or worse predicament.
He opened his eyes, wondering if this was the road Callisto had wanted him to walk—a broken, empty life where he belonged nowhere, nameless and starless no matter where he stood. “If I go north to pretend to be this prince, would you take me back when this is all over?”
Delani’s silence was answer enough, her single eye unblinking as she stared at him. Soren laughed raggedly, dragging a hand through his hair. He would have turned away if she hadn’t gripped his shoulder, keeping him close. “We can’t unmake you, but to claim you as a warden puts us all at risk.”
“That sounds like banishment to me,” he bit out. “A warden in all but name.”
She smiled a crooked little smile that wasn’t meant to comfort. “We must abide by the Poison Accords. Doing so keeps the peace.”
“There is no peace in Maricol right now.”
“If Ashion wins the war, there will be.” Delani let him go, taking a step back. “Do you have any desire to take the starfire throne?”
He recoiled at the question. “No.”
She nodded. “Good. Keep that mindset. Wardens aren’t meant to rule.”
“You would call me anything but a warden.”
“I can’t fix the mistakes of my predecessors, but I can guard our future. That is what we do as wardens. That is what I am asking you to do. You wanted a border. This is the one I’m giving you.”
A future for wardens that had no place for him but where they would still exist, free from the control of any country. Soren didn’t know how to be a prince, didn’t know how to be anything but a warden, and wardens had been created with one goal in mind: to guard a border, a country, a world against the threat of revenants and the spread of poison fields.
They had a duty, and Delani must have known he would abide by it.
Soren’s chest tightened with the desire to scream, but it would change nothing. “I’ll see to it.”
Delani nodded slowly. “I’ll let Caris know. Pack your things for a morning departure.”
He walked away from her, and she didn’t try to hold him back, his anger and grief a weight on his shoulders that made him want to drag his feet all the way back to the barracks. Soren shut himself away in that small room, staring blankly at the walls of a building he knew he’d never see again after this, not as he had been. Delani wanted him to guard the wardens by becoming someone else, but the only way he’d ever known how to guard anything was as a warden.
“Is this what you wanted from me, Callisto?” Soren asked into the quiet.
It wasn’t a prayer, wasn’t a cry for help, and maybe if it was, the Dawn Star might have answered. But the star god who had led him to the Warden’s Island so very long ago wasn’t there to guide him off it when the sun rose. While Caris and Delani would have him act the prince, in the morning, when he boarded the E’ridian airship, he did so as the man he’d always been, wearing the uniform of a people he could no longer claim but who he’d do anything to keep safe.
“I’ll be your heir, but I won’t be your dead prince,” he said on the decking as crew members bustled around them for the launch. “My name is Soren.”
Caris held out her hand, chin tilted up, a stubborn look in her gray eyes. “Whatever name you go by, you’ll still be my brother.”
He didn’t know about that, but for the wardens, Soren would try.
