“Well?” she asks.
I glance at her. “Well what?”
“Tell me I was right.”
I let the pause stretch just enough to make her narrow her eyes.
“You were useful,” I say.
“That wasn’t the line.”
“It’s the line you’re getting.”
She huffs a tired laugh and looks back toward the square, where two of my soldiers are taking instructions from an elderly woman about which wall will freeze first when the night wind shifts. “You know,” she says softly, “one day you’re going to admit the obvious without acting like it costs you blood.”
“One day,” I say, “you may stop demanding recognition every time you breathe.”
She smiles then, small and crooked and too alive for a place like this.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think I will.”
And I find, to my private irritation, that I’m beginning to trust the world a little more when she says things like that.
23
LYRIA
Iknow we’re close before anyone says it, before the road bends enough to show the first edge of the river or the outline of the watch post. The air changes first, settling warmer against my skin, carrying the faint sweetness of river water and turned soil instead of smoke and ash. It slips into my lungs differently, familiar in a way that tightens something deep in my chest before I can stop it, and I find myself slowing without meaning to as the scent of wet reeds and silt drifts across the road.
Behind me, the steady rhythm of boots and armor doesn’t break, disciplined and even, but I can feel the difference now—the weight of them here, pressing into a place that was never meant to hold something like this.
“You’re drifting,” Verr says from just behind my shoulder, his voice low but sharp enough to cut through the movement.
“I know where I’m going,” I reply, keeping my eyes forward.
“That’s not what I said.”
I glance back anyway. He’s not looking at me anymore, his attention already moving past me, tracking the tree line, the uneven slope of the ground, the way the road curves ahead like it’s trying to conceal what’s waiting beyond it. His posture hasn’tchanged, but there’s tension in it now, something more alert, less contained.
Good.
He needs to feel it.
“This is where it changes,” I say, turning forward again as the village edge comes into view.
“I’m aware.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head slightly, slowing just enough that the front line adjusts with me without thinking. “You’re not.”
That pulls his attention back to me, sharper now.
“What does that mean?”
“It means they don’t see you the way your soldiers do,” I say. “And they’re not going to wait for orders to decide if they like you.”
A faint shift moves through the line behind us, the kind that comes from soldiers hearing just enough to know something’s different, even if they don’t catch every word.
“And you think that matters,” he says.
