Page 46 of Children of Fallen Gods

I blinked, and for a moment, the image overtook me: the black-clad Blades fighting alongside the Wyshraj knights, shadow and light, the stone and the sky mingling. Even in my imagination, it was so beautiful that I felt the hair on my arms rise.

I glanced at my father, wondering if he, too, saw the incredible beauty in this potential. If he did, he did not show it. “Have you already chosen who among the Wyshraj will join the scouting team?”

“Iajqa will lead the development of the joint military here,” Shadya said. “And Ishqa will be my point representative on the mission. This, of course, in equal partnership with whichever general you would like to send on your behalf. You can decide once—”

“I don’t need to wait,” my father said, smoothly. “Klein, my master of war, will join Admiral Iajqa in the development of the military. And my daughter, Aefe of the Sidnee Blades, will represent the House of Obsidian on the scouting journey.”

I nearly choked on the air I was breathing. I barely heard anything after he said my name.

The Wyshraj nodded at this, completely failing to grasp why any of this was remarkable. But the Sidnee all visibly stiffened. I felt dozens of sets of eyes glance at me, confused. No one said a word. But I knew they were all thinking it.Iwas thinking it:

Why?

Klein was looking at me as if my father had just made some terrible mistake. I could feel Siobhan’s analytical stare drilling into the side of my face. But I looked only at my father. My father, who neither loved me nor respected me. My father, who had dozens of far more qualified Blades than I.

My father, who, despite all of that, hadchosenme.

“I will go as well.”

The sound of a new voice pulled me from my distraction. I snapped my head down to the other end of the table, where Caduan sat.

“On the scouting mission,” he added, as if the silence that greeted him meant he had been unclear.

As always, he seemed to have woefully misread the room.

Shadya spoke first. “Perhaps it would be better to leave such dangerous travels to the soldiers. As a king, your insight may be needed here.”

“The Stoneheld nation is nothing more than a dozen people now, none of whom need me for anything,” Caduan replied. “To say that they need me to stand here doing nothing and being some sort of… figurehead is insulting to them and to me.”

Shadya’s eyebrows arched. Ishqa blinked three times in rapid succession, the only sign that he was taken aback.

I had to fight an awkward laugh. I didn’t understand Caduan. Everyone kept trying to hand him the kind of respect I would kill for, and every time, he carelessly discarded it.

“I think it is unwise,” my father said.

“I disagree.” Caduan looked around the table, his stare suddenly razor-edged. “Let me remind you. I watched my home destroyed. I watched my kin murdered. I watched the world around me burn. And I am not going to sit here in a tunnel and wait for someone else to give me the answers. I want to knowwhy, and when we find who did this, I am going to hear that answer from their lips.”

His words were quiet, but they lingered in the air.

“It is not our place to disagree with that,” I said, before I realized I was speaking aloud.

“Indeed.” Shadya gave Caduan a curious look that he did not return. “It is not. And so it shall be, King Caduan.”

* * *

The meeting gaveway to a feast. Once the shock wore off, I was so excited that I could barely think — an affectation not at all helped by the several mugs of celebratory whiskey that I guzzled down over dinner. I threw myself into the music of the band, into the dancing at the center of the room. And when I finally saw my father stand and drift away — when I was finally able to find him standing in a quiet hallway, gazing off into the stone shadow of the Pales’ tunnels — I chased after him only to slow to a stop a few paces behind, suddenly self-conscious.

I already had reason to distrust my own words, so often too sharp and too quick. I stood there in silence.

“What is it, Aefe?”

He didn’t turn around. He was staring down the hallway, into darkness so deep that it was nothing but a wall of black.

“What are you looking at?”

“The Pales. Sometimes, when the world is dangerous and uncertain, I just like to… look at them.”

His palm pressed against the stone wall. Something in me leapt at this small, familiar gesture.I do that too!a childish part of me wanted to say, as if to cling to every thread of similarity between us.

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