“No,” Ruan said abruptly, shaking his head. “No, that’s ridiculous, Adrissu. Everyone would see you, and would know you were near enough to see what was happening—it’s too dangerous. You’d get found out.”
“It doesn’t matter. We could go somewhere else after,” he pressed, shaking his head.
“No!” Ruan exclaimed. “Adrissu, that’s insane. You can’t. I won’t let you.”
“Why?” Adrissu snapped. “To keepmesafe?”
“Yes!”
“Then you do understand!” he shouted, before biting his lip and forcing himself to continue in a strained, but quiet voice. “All I want is for you to be safe, Ruan. Please just let me protect you.”
“I don’t need your protection,” he muttered.
“If you march with the rest of them to fight Autreth, youwilldie,” Adrissu hissed. His eyes burned, and his stomach roiled with bile when he said the words aloud. “It’s a suicide mission, Ruan. Everyone knows it.”
“We don’t know that,” he protested, and Adrissu forced himself not to laugh.
“I can promise you, this rebellion will not be successful,” he said, shaking his head. “The Lords of Gennemont and the Federation have been nothing if not strategic in all this. Their forces have numbers enough now that annexing all of Autreth is a feasible goal. Vlissingstadt is triple the size of Polimnos at least, and even they would be hard-pressed to fight off the full brunt of their forces. We have a mercenary’s guild, Ruan, not a standing army.”
Ruan’s expression had darkened the longer he went on, but at least this time he seemed to be at a loss for words. They were both silent for a long moment, and Adrissu watched as Ruan’s eyes flickered nervously around the room, landing anywhere but on him.
“Maybe that’s true,” he finally said, softly. “But I... Polimnos’ freedom is worth fighting for.”
“Worth dying for?” Adrissu pressed, and again Ruan had no immediate answer.
“Yes,” he finally said, but his tone was tremulous.
“You truly believe that?” Adrissu said, and stubbornly Ruan nodded.
“Yes,” he repeated.
All the fire drained out of Adrissu in an instant, his shoulders sagging, and a cold dread settled in its place. He could not convince Ruan not to go, could not convince him to let Zamnes go with him, could not convince the council to abandon their pointless rebellion. Ruan had told him not to bring up the soul-binding ritual again, and as much as it killed him to stay silent, he would not ask again. If ten years of asking could not convince him, he had nothing left.
That cold feeling had spread from his chest to his extremities, and he now felt distant and far away–as if it were someone else who gripped the back of the chair across from Ruan, so tightly that his knuckles were white.
“I see,” he said, barely above a whisper, and he turned toward the stairs to go to his study. “Then I have nothing else to say. You’ve made your choice. I will respect it.”
“Adrissu,” Ruan said, and distantly Adrissu thought he sounded alarmed, but silently he made his way up the stairs. It did not sound like Ruan followed.
In his study, he sat down at his desk and reached for some of his old notes. Several sheets of parchment were tucked between the pages of a tome, written by a long-dead mage that argued magic was its own element in the natural world, and not a separate force that manipulated the elements, as was the leading theory at the time. It had been well over a year since he’d last touched the book, so carefully he folded away the notes and turned the page back to the beginning. His studies were familiar and safe. Those, at least, he could control.
On the fifth day, the Polimnos council met again with the representatives from the Federation of Autreth.
“I would hate to waste your time, so we’ll make this short,” Cyrus said, hands clasped on the table in front of him. The eight councilors sat tightly packed on one side of their long meeting table, and the six visitors sat on the other. “After much deliberation, the council and I have come to the decision that we cannot accept the terms Gennemont and your Lords of the Federation have proposed.”
Across from them, the younger man’s nostrils flared, and his chin turned up in obvious offense; but the warrior woman, who clearly led them, only nodded, looking entirely unsurprised.
“I trust you understand the ramifications of your decision,” she said, sounding strangely stern but without malice.
“We do,” Cyrus said, nodding once. “And we will be ready.”
“Then we have no further business here,” the woman answered, then stood. After a beat of hesitation, her companions stood as well. “Farewell.”
Cyrus only nodded, and the council watched them go. Adrissu glared at the woman’s back as they departed, wishing he could rip her limb from limb, then devour every one of these wretched Federation puppets who had come to steal his city away. But he was above his instincts, he told himself; and ultimately, he could only behave as any citizen of Polimnos would. To do more would risk his discovery, and that would upend whatever semblance of normalcy the city was still clinging to.
He thought of his conversation with Ruan, years ago now: he had told him that just because he was a dragon, it didn’t make him evil. The thought of Ruan was too painful to hold, but he could cling to that conviction. He was not evil. He would not act like he was.
The council dispersed after that. Maya, Yue, Abe, and Cyrus walked slowly in a cluster toward the mercenary’s guild—he was sure that now the mercenaries, and whatever forces they had gathered in the short time allotted to them, would begin to move with even more haste. From the corner of his eye he could see Benil Branwood nervously watch him walk away; the human looked like he wanted to say something to Adrissu, but seemingly deciding against it, he too turned away.
