“Not peace,” she said. “Unity. The kind that can’t be broken by pride or history.”
He was silent. A slow wind passed through the trees, stirring the mist.
“You’d tie your people to mine?” he asked finally.
“I already have.”
His eyes flicked toward her, sharp and startled.
“In blood,” she said. “In choice. In what we are now.”
Something flickered in his expression—confusion, maybe, or hunger. His shadows shifted, faintly restless.
“And if I destroy what’s left of you?” he asked.
She stepped closer. “Then you’ll have to live with what you’ve lost.”
The words landed between them like a spark.
They stood by the stream, close enough for her to see the fine tremor in his hands where they rested on his knees, the tension in his jaw. He was holding himself still, too still.
She could almost feel his breath. The heat radiating off him. The slow, deliberate control that was both armor and invitation.
“You want peace,” he said finally.
“I want an end,” she corrected. “To this. To the killing. To the stories they tell about monsters in the dark. I want them to see what we’ve seen.”
“And what’s that?”
“That the light needs the dark,” she said softly. “And the dark needs the light. Neither wins alone.”
He exhaled slowly, the tension leaving him like smoke. “You sound like Azfar.”
“Then perhaps he’s right about some things.”
He laughed once, low and rough. “He’s never right about anything pleasant.”
“Then I’ll be the exception.”
When he looked at her again, his expression had changed. The wary distance that always lived in him had eased. There was something almost reverent in the way he studied her face, as though memorizing her—some part of him still waiting for her to vanish like a mirage.
She felt the weight of his gaze like a touch. Her pulse stuttered.
He reached up, his fingers brushing a strand of hair from her face. “You sound like a queen.”
“I don’t have a crown,” she whispered.
“Not yet.”
The sun broke through the canopy just then, slicing gold across the clearing. It caught his scars, turning them into lines of molten bronze, and touched her hair, lighting it like flame. For a breathless moment, the world seemed to balance—shadow and light, ruin and promise, side by side.
She looked at him and saw not the enemy who had taken her from her throne, nor the monster the mages had chained in the dark, but the man who had bled to stay whole.
He looked at her and saw not a queen without a kingdom, but the woman who might build one out of ashes.
And between them, something unspoken took root.
A vow, not yet spoken. A future, not yet forged.
