“Yes.” Somewhere. “Yours?”
“Dead. My father was killed, and my mother died on the battlefield two years later.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
Suddenly I missed my parents so much, it hurt.
“What does your father do?” Reynald asked. “He must be retired from the army by now.”
How to explain a civil engineer?
“Yes. He earned our country’s version of the Green Purse and then became a kind of architect.”
“So you are from a scholar family?”
“I suppose. You could say I was a scholar.”
“What did you study?” he asked.
“Power. How to acquire it, how to keep it, how not to abuse it. How to exercise it for the greater good of as many people as possible.”
“Fitting,” he murmured.
“What about your father? What kind of man was he?”
“Kind.” He sighed, looking at the trees across the path. “Many people feared him, but he was a good father. He loved my mother, and he loved me. I wish we’d had more time.”
There was a world of pain and regret in those words.
“I need to be there when you take the Butcher down,” I said.
“You’re not a trained fighter, Maggie,” he said gently.
“And yet, of all of us, I’m the most likely to survive that fight. I will come back to life. I’m Maggie the Undying.”
“I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“I won’t be.”
“‘Dying horribly and then waking up in a lot of pain,’” he quoted.
“Do you remember everything?”
“Only the important things.”
He wasn’t going to derail me. I needed to see this through. “I cried when you died, Reynald.”
I could feel the tears building now, a wet frustrated heat just behind my eyes. I’d spent the last week worrying and going over every possibility, every contingency, and the pressure cooker of it finally broke me.
“I . . . witnessed it happen many times, and I cried every time.”
I had read about it, not witnessed it directly, but I wasn’t ready to tell him that.
“I wanted so much for you to succeed, to save your son, and get far away from Kair Toren. You must survive. I cannot come here to bury you. I can’t have you turn into one of those wooden plaques hanging off the branches. I can’t do it. It will destroy me.”
I’d said too much.
