Page 69 of Spoils of war
And yet here we were. Still breathing.
Askberg hadn’t stopped. It hadn’t even stumbled.
I glanced at Will.
He wore his grief the way most people wore armor. Quietly. Carefully. But I saw it in the way his shoulders never relaxed, in the way his eyes flinched away from anything too still, too silent, too familiar.
Maybe I scared him now. I wasn’t the girl he remembered. But he hadn’t run. And that had to count for something.
People passed us, arms full of bread and fabric and onions tied in bundles. A woman called after a laughing child. Someone shouted from a doorway with an apron slung over one shoulder.
I stared like I was watching a memory. Or a dream.
But maybe I wasn’t looking at ghosts.
Maybe Iwasthe ghost.
The soldiers stood at every corner here too, just as they had back home. Same cold eyes. Same boots planted in cobblestone like they owned the ground beneath them. Nothing about them had changed, and still, everything felt different. There was no fire in Askberg. No smoke. No blood. Only silence, as if the town had decided long ago that silence was safer.
Maybe that was what we could’ve had. If we had stayed quiet. If we had given in.
Or maybe that was always the plan. Maybe this was what the Eredians and King Devore had counted on. Burn a few villages. Break the resistance. Let the smoke rise high enough for the others to see, and hope the fear would do the rest.
I kept my head down. If I did not look at them, maybe they wouldn’t see me, and I wouldn’t see them. I wouldn’tremember.
But my body remembered, even when my mind tried not to. I stumbled on a loose stone, my feet sliding out from under me for half a second. And when I caught myself, my eyes lifted.
A soldier’s gaze met mine. He did not move. Did not shout.
Just looked at me. Polite. Unassuming.
But all I saw was Arche.
His belt. His breath. His hands.
"Are you alright?” Will asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, brushing it off before he could ask again. “Just slipped.”
Will didn’t question it. “We’re almost there,” he said.
The farther we walked, the quieter everything became. No more chatter. No more distant laughter. Just the hush of wind through the trees, the creak of old shutters shifting with the breeze, the hollow rhythm of our footsteps on the dirt road.
I didn’t know what to expect at his aunt’s house. I barely knew anything about his family at all. He never talked about them, not really.
I didn’t either.
What was there to say?
But I didn’t care if the house was cold, or if the woman was cruel. It would be a roof. A door to close. Maybe a meal and a warm bed.
I’d take whatever was offered.
The house rose ahead, built of gray stone, almost like a castle. Warm light flickered behind the windows, spilling into the dusk like embers.
No.
Not embers.
