Page 144 of Beds and Blades

I turned to him.

“The Council of Generals is being reconstituted. For the first time in eleven years. They want two representatives from the outpost line. They want me.”

Something in his expression shifted.

“And they want you.”

I looked back at the mountains.

Newardia. The seat of the empty throne Morvanna had abandoned forty years before.

For four decades, its leaders had managed the threat in the mountains rather than ended it. Now they were asking for the man who had held the line for six years and the woman who had seen what everyone else had missed.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

He was quiet for a moment.

“I have been here for six years. I know this fortress. I know the line. I know how the command layer moves when it is testing us and how it moves when it intends to break through.”

His gaze remained fixed on Druvenfall.

“I know what holding this position costs. I also know what it accomplishes.”

He drew a slow breath.

“But I no longer know whether holding forever counts as winning.”

I felt the truth of that through the bond before he spoke again.

“If we intend to win, we have to do something differently. Perhaps it is time to shift our purpose from holding the line to ending the war.”

“Newardia,” I said.

“Newardia.”

We stood in silence.

The mountains stood as they always had. Druvenfall waited at the summit, dark and patient. Below it stretched the outpost line, five fortresses holding the boundary between what Morvanna had built and everything she had not yet reached.

The line had held.

It held because of the people who stood on it, day after day and year after year. Because of Gaius. Because of Flavia. Because of Caen and Cato and every soldier who had chosen to remain when leaving would have been easier. Because of Varia, who had broken through the dark bond long enough to save us all.

The line would hold without us.

The line was not Skip and Meghan.

It was everyone who had chosen to stand.

Newardia needed something different. It needed people willing to say the true thing in the room where it most needed to be heard.

Skip’s arm tightened around me. Warmth moved through the bond. The warmth forged in our claiming. The warmth of a love that had survived fear, distance, and blood and emerged stronger for having been tested.

It was the warmth of two people who had found each other the way Mytharo seemed to find its people, and who no longer feared where that finding might lead.

I thought of the woman who had entered this world alone in a field.

I looked at the mountains.