Gods.
I hadn’t even thought of that. What else he’d seen. Who else he’d—
“I’m so sorry, Will.” My throat ached. “She was good.”
His jaw tightened further, like the muscles might snap.
“She was,” he said, staring at the floorboards. “But I couldn’t save her. And I couldn’t save you.”
His voice was bitter. “We lost.”
His voice barely made it across the space between us.
“I told you we wouldn’t, but we did.”
He drifted toward the barn wall, fingers trailing across the wood. Leaned into it like he needed something solid to stay upright.
“We went to ambush those bastards. But they weren’t there. Someone warned them,” he said. “They knew we were coming. It was all a trap, and we walked right into it.”
He exhaled hard, chest heaving like he’d been holding it in for too long.
“I fought,” he said, eyes unfocused. “I tried. But we were losing.”
His shoulders caved in like the truth was folding him in half. He sank down onto an overturned crate, burying his face in his hands.
“I’m such a fucking coward.”
“You’re not.”
I didn’t move toward him, but my voice did—quiet, certain. Like if I said it soft enough, maybe it would sink in.
He looked up, eyes rimmed red.
“I turned and ran.”
“And you came back for me.” My voice cracked. “If you hadn’t—”
“I ran,” he repeated. Like it hurt. Like the word itself bruised his tongue. His fist clenched at his side. “And then I saw the smoke.”
The silence between us stretched, brittle and sharp.
I swallowed.
“There was never a ceremony… was there?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We walked along a dusty old road for what felt like hours, until a cart came rattling past and the driver agreed to take us. He was middle-aged and kind, with a round face and a patchy beard, and he wouldn’t stop talking about his wife and children. He loved them. That much was clear. The way his eyes lit up when he spoke of them, how his voice softened. I listened, nodded when it felt polite, smiled when I had to, but the whole time, a bitter thought kept pulsing behind my ribs. Would he be strong enough to protect them when the Eredians came?
Will had stolen clothes for me. A green dress and a pair of old boots from a laundry line behind a farmhouse. They didn’t match, but I didn’t care. The dress was soft and loose, clinging in some places and falling in others. It smelled like dust and sunlight and someone else’s life. It smelled like something that wasn’t mine. But it let me pretend Ibelonged. That I was just a girl on a cart with a friend, not a fugitive dragging the ashes of a ruined life behind her.
Will still had his boots. His coin. His pack.
I had nothing.
Everything I’d once owned had burned.
Everything except him.
