Page 20 of Children of Fallen Gods

“Zeryth is the difference.Reshayeis the difference.”

“I controlled it,” I said. “I can do it again. I can use that power to make this war less bloody than it would be without it.”

“You sound like Nura.”

The words cut me open. I yanked my hand away from his, even though I could already see the regret spilling over his face.

“What do you want me to say to you?” I shot back. “Do you want me to tell you that I want to walk away from all of this? I do, Max. Of course I do. But there are so many people who cannot walk away. They are still there, suffering. Girls like me. You hate Zeryth for leaving me there, but you’re asking me to do the same thing.”

Something flickered in his expression. “That isn’t the same.”

“Why? Because they aren’t standing in front of you? Because you don’t love them the way you love me? Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and they are just as loved, just as important. It is aprivilegeto donothing, Max. So many people do not have that gift.”

He looked at me, jaw tight, regret and sadness and anger all mingling in his eyes.

“No war can be fought with clean hands,” he said. “Not even the ones waged for the right reasons. Not even the ones you win.”

I knew he was right. In the Threllian wars, I had lost so many of my own people to the cost of victory.

But what choice did I have?

I stepped closer and placed my hands on either side of his face.

“You don’t have to fight this fight,” I whispered. “You have already given so much.”

Max’s forehead pressed against mine, his body so close I could feel its warmth surrounding me. And when he spoke again, all that anger was gone, replaced only with weary resignation.

“That was never an option, Tisaanah,” he murmured, and pulled me into an embrace.

It felt like falling. One moment, I was clinging to my plans and composure, and the next, I was lost in him. His scent of lilacs and ash surrounded me. I buried my face against his neck, inhaling it. I could feel the slight shudder in his breathing as he struggled to keep from unraveling.

I pulled away just enough to turn my face, lips parted even though I didn’t know what would come out. But before I could speak, he kissed me — gave me the kind of kiss that communicated everything that we couldn’t put into words. For precious seconds, nothing mattered except for this, the cadence of our shared breath, the movement of his lips, the brush of his tongue.

Nothing mattered except that we were alive, and here, and together.

We parted but stayed close, his forehead against mine.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’m just…being here is…”

He sounded as if he could barely get out those fractured words. My chest ached. It had been impossible to miss the change in him the minute we stepped through those doors — a raw, tangible pain, like he was walking over razor blades.

“We will not let it be like last time,” I whispered. “We will find a way.”

I told myself I could make it true. I was grateful that he didn’t call out my uncertainty, even though I know he heard it.

Instead, he pressed a kiss to my jaw and said, quietly, “I want to believe you.”

Chapter Seven

Aefe

“What he says cannot be true,” the king said.

“All the survivors say the same thing, my Lord,” Siobhan said. She knelt at my father’s feet, at the bottom of glassy black steps that rose up to his place upon the dais, sleek and dark beneath an arch of polished stone.

He, my mother, and my sister all stood there, crowns adorning each of their brows. My father’s was Nightglass upon a head of long, ashen brown hair. My mother’s, spires of twisted silver against pale skin and sleek locks of red-black — near identical to my own. Actually, it was uncanny, the extent to which I resembled my mother. A less beautiful version of her, to be fair. My skin was a little ruddier, my mouth a little broader, my eyes bigger and curved down in a way that my mother used to always joke made me look as if I was perpetually sad.

Used tojoke. It had been a long time since my mother had joked about anything. Now she sat upon her throne, gazing off into the middle distance, that lovely face offering no sign that she had heard anything that we had told her.

---