Page 115 of Children of Fallen Gods

“Perhaps,” Tisaanah said, but I could tell that she wasn’t satisfied with this answer.

You escaped me once.

I fought a shudder and went to the window, mostly because it gave me an excuse to turn away from Tisaanah’s stare — one that, as always, saw too much.

“We have more important things to worry about than Ilyzath’s sadistic tendencies, anyway,” I said.

* * *

Tisaanahand I did what we always did when we mutually needed a distraction that night: we trained. There was comforting familiarity in the two of us throwing ourselves into work with no room for other unpleasant realities. Tisaanah had gotten better since I left, especially at combat. Il’Sahaj now worked as an extension of her body and her magic, almost as well as my staff worked as an extension of mine. But it was still unnervingly strange whenever I caught glimpses of my own tactics in her movements — a reminder of why we were here, and the terrifying thing that now bound us together deeper than our friendship or our affection.

We trained until our bodies no longer cooperated, and then we rinsed ourselves off and collapsed into bed, where we lay in silence pretending to be asleep. We left the lanterns on, and neither of us discussed why.

You belong here.

It was past midnight when I felt Tisaanah’s limbs wind around me. Her voice was quiet in my ear.

“When they charged you, after Sarlazai,” she murmured, “if you had been found guilty, is that where they would have sent you?”

I’d known the question was coming, and was dreading it. “If I had been convicted, yes.” War crimes. That had been my charge. What other word was there for what had happened in Sarlazai?

It was oddly difficult to speak. “It would have been the right place. To send someone who was responsible for that.”

“It wasn’tyou, Max,” she whispered.

Sometimes, I wasn’t sure how much it mattered.

“I wasn’t even at the trial. I was… distracted. But I heard that the survivors were there. They came and testified before the Orders because they wanted justice, just days after they buried whatever was left to bury…” I cleared my throat. “I was only freed because Nura fought for me. Sometimes I think about that. How those people must have felt, watching me be cleared when I wasn’t even there. Is that justice?”

“You going to that place because you felt guilty wouldn’t have been justice, either.”

Maybe. But maybe it would have been closer to it.

You belong here.

When Ilyzath had whispered that to me, it had felt like the truth.

“Max.” Tisaanah turned my face to her. Her mismatched eyes were bright and fierce. “You haveneverbelonged there. And you never will, no matter what it said to you. Do you understand?”

She said it the same way she had once declared that she would free the Threllian slaves — the same voice she had used when she insisted that she would save Serel, even when the world told her it was impossible. Relentless brute force.

I kissed her on the forehead and pulled her into an embrace. “I know,” I murmured.

She did always make it seem so easy to believe her.

But when I looked at her again, her face as I had seen it in the darkness of Ilyzath stared back at me. Ilyzath’s whispers caressed my dreams all night long.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Tisaanah

Icouldn’t shake the things that Ilyzath had shown me. Sleep was restless. It was nearly morning by the time I finally dozed off, and when I woke again, Max was gone, a note on his pillow:

T,

Your snoring was charming and you were too peaceful to wake. Early drills. Dinner later?

Love,

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