Next to him, Cyrus let out a long sigh, looking down at the parchment where he had tallied the votes. His would be the final vote, and the council was silent as they waited for him to speak.
“My vote is against,” he said softly. “Which brings us to a tie.” Adrissu’s heart plummeted to the very bottom of his stomach as the air in the room turned grim. “And in the event of a tie, my vote counts for two. We will not accept the terms Gennemont has offered.”
He carefully folded the paper and turned to Maya.
“We should begin making plans to gather all the forces available to us. Can you have all the guild’s records on available mercenaries ready for a meeting first thing tomorrow morning?”
“Absolutely,” she answered.
Adrissu was on his feet before he realized what he was doing, everyone’s heads swinging to look at him in surprise.
“I—” he started, only for his voice to break. He wanted to protest, to force them to listen, to smash their faces in, to go to the representatives from Gennemont and kill them all himself. Hecouldgo and kill them all, he thought—right now, he could find the inn where they stayed and kill them before they could report back to the Federation. He could. He shouldn’t, but for one wild instant it was so sorely tempting that he thought he might. It took a moment for his senses to return to him: if he killed them now, it would only make whatever conflict was coming even worse.
Everyone was still staring at him, silent and expectant. He cleared his throat. What could he say? He couldn’t explain it, but he couldn’t stand to be in the stuffy meeting hall any longer.
“Excuse me,” he rasped, then turned to go. A flurry of voices erupted behind him, but he didn’t turn back, and he didn’t stop until he was out of the council hall and in fresh air. The sun was setting—it had been just past noon when they’d met. For a long moment he stood, looking out on the horizon, where the sun steadily sank below the jagged horizon, trying to slow his rapid breathing.
“Adrissu.”
He whirled, startled, to see Maya Graylight standing in the doorway of the council hall, looking nearly as grim as he felt. He drew a shuddering breath.
“Maya,” he said evenly, forcing himself to lower his head. “Forgive my abruptness. I...” He trailed off again. How could he explain how urgently he needed to get out—to be anywhere but there?
She eyed him silently for a moment before speaking. “I was surprised at your vote. You don’t seem like the kind of person to let the town go down without a fight.”
“Normally I would not,” he said, hardly above a whisper. Heat flooded his face, partly shame, partly anger, partly something he could not describe. “But Ruan...”
“Ruan would want to fight,” she interjected. “You know he would.”
Adrissu looked away, scowling. “I don’t care,” he muttered. “I only care about keeping him safe.”
“That doesn’t seem fair to him. Regardless of how much you care about him, Adrissu, it’s his decision to make,” she said.
Adrissu bit his lip to force himself not to scowl openly at her. He suspected Maya had been one of the first to pick up on their changed dynamic all those years ago, but she had never openly acknowledged it. Once, it might have made him smile to hear someone else acknowledge that he cared for Ruan, but now it filled his chest with a sticky anger, balking at her presumption.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he said, turning away. “You couldn’t.”
“Of course I understand,” she started.
“We already have so little time!” he spat, whirling on her again. He could feel his face contorting into a snarl—her eyebrows raised in surprise, but otherwise she gave no indication of being startled at his outburst. “Ruan could live to be a hundred, could die an old man, and I—I would still be in myyouth. We already—I already have so little time with him.”
His rage sputtered out as quickly as it came, and his voice broke the longer he spoke. “And now—and nowthis...We cannot win against the armies of the Federation, Maya. It’s a suicide mission. We all know it.”
Shame filled him as his eyes prickled with tears. He pressed his hands to his face, in part to hide them, and in part so he didn’t have to see how Maya reacted to seeing the stoic mage weep.
“I cannot be impartial in this,” he finally said, abruptly forcing his hands back down to his sides. Her expression had not changed, stony as ever. “I cannot. Tell Cyrus that if he doesn’t want me to attend meetings regarding this, I understand. I’ll step down.”
“Adrissu,” Maya said softly, shaking her head. “Polimnos is our home, all of us. I don’t think anyone can truly be impartial.”
They were silent for a long moment, until finally Adrissu turned again.
“I should go,” he said softly. He did not wait to see if Maya would respond before starting down the path that would lead him through the center of town and back to his tower.
“What did the council decide?”
It was the first thing Ruan said, arriving in the doorway of Saltspire Tower. Adrissu lay on the chaise lounge in the front room with Vesper curled on his chest, her weight grounding him like a hand pressed to a bruise. When he’d come home to find Ruan gone, anxiety began to simmer in his gut; but now he sat up with a sigh, Vesper sliding down into his lap.
“To fight,” he said, voice hoarse. There was no point in trying to talk around it. “They voted to fight.”
