Page 171 of Children of Fallen Gods

“That’s no great sacrifice. I’d love to never use it again.”

Sammerin just gave me a hard stare.

“I mean it. Something is…” He frowned and shook his head. “Just don’t.”

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Tisaanah

My body was broken.

I stood in front of the mirror. For what felt like the first time in months, I was not wearing a military uniform. Instead, I wore a crimson shirt that wrapped around my body and tied with black fabric around my waist, a pair of close-fitting, black trousers, and boots that laced up to my knees. Ordinary clothes.

And yet, I looked so far from ordinary.

My arms were covered in scars where I had rotted those tattoos off. The wound that Esmaris’s whip had torn across my chest, when I had barely managed to shield myself, was visible beneath the deep neckline of my blouse. And of course, my hands… my hands were still black and blue, dark veins extending up my forearms.

Sammerin had mentioned that he might be able to heal some of the scarring. Maybe one day I’d take him up on his offer, though I wasn’t sure what I’d be hiding.

Still, I found myself grieving something that went deeper than vanity. Perhaps I was mourning an unmarked body. But then again, before these scars, I had the ones on my back. Before those, I had the ones on my thighs. And before all of that, I had my Fragmented skin, skin that marked me neither Valtain nor non-Wielder. Even before I lost my mother, or my home, or my country, I was lingering in the space between things, belonging to all and none.

I had never had an unmarked body. Not truly.

I sighed and rolled my gloves up my arms, all the way to my elbows.

“You ready to go?”

I jumped.

Gods, I wasn’t used to this — this silence inside of me. It made all other noises feel so much louder. I turned to see Max at the door, one eyebrow quirked.

“You need to work on that awareness, soldier,” he said.

“I knew you were there,” I sniffed. “I was just humbling you.”

His mouth thinned with a suppressed smile. “Humbling? Orhumoring?”

I gave him a look of exaggerated determination. “Humbling. I always mean what I say.”

Fine, I meant humoring. But I blamed Aran, for being a ridiculous language with many words that sounded almost exactly the same, even when many of them that meant multiple different unrelated things. No matter how long I stayed here, I would never entirely get used to it.

“I suppose you humble me sometimes, too, so I’ll allow it.” Max wandered closer. His arms were casually tucked into his pockets, but I did not miss the deliberate force of his gaze assessing me, lingering on the tremor of my hands and slightly-unsteady stance. I did the same to him. I almost laughed at the thought of what the two of us must look like together. A couple of walking corpses.

“Let’s go home,” he said, and his voice was thick with longing. Longing that I shared, too

But…

“One thing first,” I said.

* * *

There werechildren laughing in the street. My gaze kept wandering to them stumbling after each other on the cobblestones outside, locked in what looked to be a particularly spirited game of…tag, perhaps? Two of the windowpanes had finally been replaced, leaving just one with a single crack from corner to corner.

Still, Riasha’s apartment was tidy, orderly, warm. I sat at a wooden table adorned with three modest candlesticks and a bouquet of wildflowers. Filias was across from me, stretched out in his chair like a cat. Behind him, Riasha paced the length of the kitchen. And Serel sat at the other end of the table, watching quietly.

Max’s gaze wandered across the living space. I wondered if he was having the same realization that I was.

I wasn’t sure when this had happened — when Riasha’s apartment, and the other refugee apartments, had begun to finally look like homes. It was modest, yes, but it was also homey, adorned with trinkets and flowers and simple decorations. There was food in the oven, dishes to be washed. So many little markers of a life being lived.

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