Page 126 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“Why did you come here?”

I struggled to verbalize the answer to that question. “You were gone for too long.”

“And that mattered to you?”

It did matter to me. Only now did I realize how different that was from the way I had been when I had first returned to this body—that the word I had really been looking for was “concern.”

The sensation of caring for someone else was, oddly, frightening.

Caduan seemed as if he made this connection, too.

“I did not want you to see this,” he said.

“I have seen plenty of death, in all of my lives.”

“It isn’t the violence I wanted to shield you from. It was…” His stare was glassy as they stared out into the destruction—at those rows of neat, white-wrapped bodies. “The day humans came for the House of Reeds, they killed and destroyed and burned and slaughtered as if it was simply a matter of duty. So many of us tried to reason with them, but the humans had decided that we were inconsistent with their own survival. With that decision, we became animals to them. Pests to be eliminated.”

The memory was buried somewhere deep, far beneath centuries of my time as Reshaye. But lately, these thoughts had been closer to the surface. The image of Caduan’s blood-soaked body lying in the swamps came to me easily.

“Do you know what I thought that day, as I dragged myself away from my home? I thought,what a waste. Thousands of years of knowledge and history obliterated with one stupid, selfish human decision. Full lives destroyed as if they were worth nothing.Wasteful.” He spat the word, a curl of disgust at his lip. It did not disappear as he turned to gaze out at the charred remains of a once-great city. “Humans don’t care. They are willing to destroy and discard with abandon. And here, I helped them do it. I sacrificed Fey lives for this. The way those people fought. The way they screamed—”

He seemed to remember that he was speaking aloud, straightened, and looked away. “I have no illusions about the realities of what my task will entail. But this… it reminded me too much of things I would rather forget.”

And it aligned him with the monsters he swore to destroy.

Was he looking for me to validate his choice? I didn’t want to. Perhaps one of his advisors might have said something soft and comforting, something like “there was no good decision” or “you had no choice” or “you did the best thing for Ela’Dar.” Perhaps all those justifications were true, but true things did not have to be acceptable.

I was just as angry as Caduan was. Hated these humans, and what they made him do, just as much.

“I know what it is like,” I said, softly, “to become the thing you hate the most.”

“I won’t let us become them.”

“No. We will be better.”

Caduan’s gaze snapped to me fast, as if this was an unexpected response. I felt like he was seeing me, truly seeing me, for the first time since I had gotten here.

Pleasure shivered over me at that stare.

He put his hand out to help me stand. I took it, but only so I could slide my fingers over the soft skin on the inside of his wrist, where his pulse thrummed. I let my hand remain there even after I stood.

“We will be better,” he agreed.

On Caduan’s lips, it was a promise.

* * *

We returned to Ela’Dar exhausted.I traveled with Meajqa, and Caduan, along with our other troops, would follow soon after. When we arrived at the palace, I went to my chambers and immediately collapsed onto my bed.NowI understood why mortals liked these things so much. When you feel like your muscles have all been peeled out from beneath your skin, the softness doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

I did not even feel myself dozing off, until I blinked through my bleary half-sleep to see a silhouette in the door.

I sat up. Caduan did not look as if he had stopped anywhere before coming to me, his clothes still bloodstained and face still dirty.

“I see you have come to appreciate beds,” he said.

“It is… not horrible.”

“Enjoy it while you can. We start training again at dawn.”

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