Page 105 of Veil of Night & Flames

I shudder, then make myself look at him. “Then I have to ask you something. And I need the real answer, not the king’s one.”

“Of course, Beloved.”

“The army. Yours, not hers. What’s it for?”

“For the Real,” he says. “It has always been for the Real.”

“How?” My voice comes out sharper than I mean it to. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve got an army and a plan to bring the barriers down, and those two things together don’t exactly add up to protect the freshmen.”

“The barriers are failing fast now. My brother knows this,” he says without flinching. “When they fall, the things that have been pressing against them for an age will come through all at once. My army is the wall I intend to put between your people and that flood. A guard. Nothing more, and nothing less.”

“You make it sound noble.” I hear how cold I’ve gone. “But Chase told me the truth a long time ago. You’re the one forcing the cracks. The barriers aren’t just wearing out on their own—you’ve been pushing them down faster. So don’t stand there like some rescuer. You’re the reason this is happening at all.”

I expect him to deny it.

“Yes,” he says, surprising me. “I have hastened it. I have forced cracks, and I will not pretend otherwise to make you think better of me. I believe the barriers must come down, Cora. I have believed it for longer than your world has had a name.” He holds my eyes. “But abandoning your world to what comes after the barriers are down is not the same act. I have never intended either.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Simply that I will not use my resources to shore up the barriers. It is time for them to fall. All the realms can co-exist. Even the Real, so long as my army exists to protect it.”

“That’s insane.” My voice is practically a squeak. We’re way too vulnerable. The people in the Real have no way to fight the creatures from your realm or Retribution or even the Others. Hell, even the Unseen would dominate the Real in a heartbeat. We’re not prepared, and your army couldn’t even protect one percent of the population.”

“There will be casualties, yes.”

His words land like a slap, and I blink back tears. “You could at least pretend that’s hard to say.”

“It is hard to say. But I will not lie to make it easier to hear.”

“You’re not even trying to understand, dammit. You’ve never lived there. It’s not your place, your home. You don’t care because it’s not your world. But it is mine. Dammit, Adric. It’s my home.”

He crouches in the sand in front of me. “Do you truly think I don’t understand that? Do you truly think I believe that my realm will come through unscathed? It won’t. But war is the price every world pays to become part of a larger one. Yours is the youngest at the table, and the least armored. I know that, of course. But I have always meant to put my soldiers between your people and the things that would hunt them, and to hold that line until the Real learns to stand on its own. Not because I am soft. Because a world burned to the bone is no world at all, and I have no use for a unification that leaves yours a graveyard.”

“You son of a bitch.” My voice shakes. “You’re sitting here telling me you’ve done the math. That the death of some huge chunk of the people in the Real is an acceptable loss to you.”

“I am telling you that I have done everything in my power to keep that number as low as a king can keep it. That is not the same as not caring what it is.”

“It’s never been real to you. Not the way it’s real to me.”

Something moves across his face—grief, maybe? “It is true that I do not love your world the way you love it. I cannot. I have watched too many civilizations rise and fall to grieve each one as if it were the first.” He reaches out and takes my hands. I yank them back, and he sighs. “But I have never—not once—built toward ending yours. That is the line, Beloved. And it is the one thing about my reign I have ever been certain of.”

And here’s the awful part—I believe him. I even understand him, at least a little. Of course, a creature who has watched civilizations collapse into dust would look at the Real differently than I do. I just have to figure out how to get through his damn thick skull.

And what to do about his right-hand gal.

With a sigh, I hug my knees to my chest. “What’s Kali doing with an army?”

“Treason, apparently.” He meets my eyes. “My army is a guard. A wall between your people and what’s coming. But hers is a bomb, and I can only assume that when the barriers fall, she means it to drop it on your world—to conquer it, not shelter it.”

I swallow, letting the horror of it all sink in. “So the difference between you and her,” I say slowly, “is that you only want some of us dead.”

It’s cruel, and I mean it to be, and I watch it land.

“Want? No. But if that is how you need to hold it tonight, then yes.” He doesn’t look away. “But do not pretend the two are the same, Beloved. I have spent an age trying to make the price as small as I can. She has spent it trying to make the price everything you are. You can hate us both. But do not confuse us.”

And the awful thing is, he’s right. I do hate it. And it isn’t the same. And I don’t have anywhere to put either of those facts, so I just sit there holding them with no clue where to go next.

“I made a mistake of trust,” he says, gentler now. “Not a mistake of plan. I should have seen her. That is what I owe my brother, and Whistler, and the men I cut down in the courtyard, who may have been her pawns or her sacrifices or both. I will carry it.”