And I can feel my guys. There, quiet as a sentinel. Ever present.
“I trained them.” The words scrape out of me sideways, aimed at Dagda’s chest because I can’t look at his face and confess at the same time. “The siege formation they used tonight. I designed it. Four teams. Surround, suppress, eliminate. Always attack from above. I signed off on the final assessment myself.”
His hands don’t move.
“I was so goddamn proud of that work. Graves told me I was the best tactical mind he’d ever trained and I believed him. Didn’t ask questions. Signed the assessments. Went home and slept fine.”
I finally look up.
Dagda’s expression hasn’t changed. No horror. No pity. Just that steady witnessing that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin because I don’t know what to do with someone who won’t look away.
“My fingerprints are on my own people’s graves.”
“Yes.” His voice is simple. No softening. “They are.”
The honesty of it hits harder than any reassurance could. Noit wasn’t your fault. Noyou didn’t know. Just the clean blade of truth from a god old enough to know that comfort and honesty rarely share the same sentence.
“You cannot control the hearts of men.” His thumbs press into my shoulders, grounding pressure that keeps my knees from buckling. “You can only do your best to survive them.” His lips twitch. “Then murder them.”
The laugh that breaks out of me is wet and ugly and undignified.
Behind me, Orion exhales. One long, slow breath. Like he’d been holding it since I started talking.
“We woke others.” Dagda’s voice shifts register now. “Not all is lost.”
“How many?”
“Enough.” He evades with the particular skill of someone who’s been dodging direct questions for millennia.
Damn Fae god.
“Go.” He lifts his hands from my shoulders and the absence of that weight almost drops me. My body sways forward half an inch before I catch it. “Be with your mates. Our time here grows short, and healing,” he exhales through his nose, the sound of a man who’s seen too many wars end and too many wounds fester, “healing is a long and torturous road.”
“Preaching to the choir.”
“What is a choir?”
“Ask Finnian. He’ll give you a twelve-page answer with footnotes.”
Dagda’s laugh rumbles through the ground beneath my feet. I feel it in my heels.
I turn.
The battlefield registers in pieces. Scorch marks where Orion’s fire ate the earth black. Ice and piles of snow lays on soil where Kieran’s shadows crystallized mid-strike, already melting at the edges. A boot sitting upright near the tree line with the jagged edges of a foot still in there.
I don’t look at that one again.
The goddesses have sorted themselves. Morrigan cleans her blade between licks. Yes, licks. She’s licking the blood off the metal. Macha is already gone, no, there, a shadow between shadows at the perimeter, ensuring no runners circle back. Badb is sitting on a body and eating something suspicious that she keep digging through his chest cavity for.
I’m not going to ask.
My mates are clustered near a fire that Orion must have started because it burns too clean and too controlled to be battle residue. Orion is still on the ground where he sat himself down. He doesn’t look up when I turn, like he wasn’t watching, like he’s been fascinated by this particular patch of scorched earth the entire time.
Kieran is standing a few feet from him, back straight, shadows still. Small piles of snow gather around him that Orion melts.
Neither of them planned that. I don’t think either of them noticed.
And Finnian. I don’t know when he showed up. When he found his way back to us. But he did. Never mind that he is covered in blood that isn’t his.
