“All of you have lost your damn minds,” I say, springing back to my feet.
I try to go back to practicing and problem-solving, but it's useless.
Nothing I do is working. My focus is fading, and it feels like I'm moving backward instead of forward. Which is likely why Briar started her teasing in the first place; she's always been able to tell when I need to come up for air.
I think I would have drowned myself in my desperate attempts to fix and save everything long ago, if not for her.
So eventually, I give in—not to the wedding planning—but to the teasing and the laughter and the attempt to keep things light even as the darkness closes in. Because it loosens the tightness in my chest and allows me to keep breathing, and because smiling with them reminds me that there are things worth fighting for.
I've kept going through every other impossible thing I've survived.
And I have no intentions of stopping now.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The day draws toward its ending, and even though I feel like I haven't accomplished nearly enough, I still have plenty of things I'm eager to talk to Reave about.
If only he were here.
He left before dawn with plans to visit a garrison on the outskirts of the kingdom, to speak face to face with some of his more trusted, higher-ranking soldiers—soldiers with firsthand knowledge regarding some of the more concerning rumors we've been hearing out of Dralsk. He reassured me he'd be back by dinner, acting as though this was a routine mission.
And maybe it is, for him.
But none of it feels routine to me.
Especially not the missing him part.
When evening passes and he still hasn't returned, I try not to think about all the things that could be making him late.
I force myself to eat something, even though food has lost all taste. I bathe and dress slowly, taking more time thannecessary with both, and then skim through multiple books without absorbing a word of any of them. I tinker with a few bits and bobbles I've been collecting and piling on a shelf in Reave's room, using them to create a replica of one of the kites we watched during the Sun Harvest Feast, and I leave it on his desk for him to find.
I'm still not tired after all of this—and he's still not home—so I take one of my books and head to the coliseum, climbing the winding stairs up to the roof.
It's become one of our favorite places to slip away to. Many of the conversations Reave and I have shared these past few days, about politics and otherwise, have taken place up here. So many conversations, in fact, that I've been salvaging cushions and other things from the old seats and viewing boxes down below and hauling them up the stairs, using them to create a cozier sitting area.
It usually calms me down, just being up here. Especially on nights like this, when the sky is clear and I can count the stars and lose myself in constellations, distracting myself with the stories they tell.
After a quick search, I spot a familiar one: seven stars arranged in a loose, tilted arc over four others. Faint and easy to miss, if you don't know where to look for it.
In Halvgate, we called it the Lightkeeper.
Its story goes like this: A long time ago, there lived a woman who spent her entire life walking the roads between the kingdoms, carrying a lantern. Not a queen, not a warrior, not a mercenary hired for any real purpose—just a woman who had seen darkness starting to spread, and who one day took it upon herself to light a lantern instead of cursing that darkness.
Her name changes depending on who's telling the tale. Inthe version I first learned, she had no name at all. Justthe woman who carries the light.
And she carried it through floods and famines and long, brutal winters. She carried it through wars and sickness and the slow despair that settles in your bones when you've endured too much for too long. Other carriers had taken similar pilgrimages before her. All of them, eventually, put their lanterns down.
She didn't.
The gods noticed, it's said. They admired her persistence, and offered her a reward in return—power, long life, a warrior's strength, a dragon's magic.
She said no to all of it.
Baffled, they asked what she wanted instead.
Only to keep doing what I am already doing, she told them.And to be sure, when I am gone, that something of me might remain—a sign, a story, to help others understand what I have learned: that light can only reach so far on its own. That the spreading of it is not a grand act, but a daily choice, made quietly, again and again, to keep going when it would be easier to put the lantern down and let the flame go out.
So the gods placed her in the sky as an eternal reminder.
