Jax elbows him, her mouth still twisted in a sneer. “Who? What does that mean?”
Ronyn blinks.
Once.
Twice.
“No.”
His eyes narrow.
“No.”
Ronyn drags his hand over his stubble. “You’reCallie.”
His mind reels.
“Revryn’s daughter.”
His eyes snap to Jax. “The man who took me in, raised me… this is his little girl. This is Callie.”
His eyes dart back to Calira looking for confirmation.
“Calira,” she corrects. “And Revryn Haradin sired me, yes,” she confirms, emotion never touching her tone. But the name lands somewhere beneath her ribs before she can cauterize it. She shoves it down.
Ronyn scoffs again. “Sired you? That’s all the respect you’ll extend to the man who loved and lost you? He’s your father! The best man I know!”
He starts pacing again.
He spins back to her. “And what of your mother? I suppose she’s just the woman who bore you and died for the Crown?”
Calira feels nothing. No fondness, no connection, no grief. Just the cold, empty presence of indifference. “They were too weak to handle the demands of serving the Crown.”
Jax barks a humorless laugh. “You are fucking heartless. Does the Crown take those as well? Or just your moral compass?”
The insult does not land. Just slips past her in the way Thalmyr taught her.
Ronyn looks at her then, with pity heavy in his eyes.
“You must be so lonely,” he whispers, like he knows the feeling.
She’s not.
Calira knows Revryn loved her.Lovesher. He tells her every week in the letters he sends. The ones she has learned todiscard. Reading them changes nothing. Affection does not alter reality. Because Thalmyr taught her how to endure the system that consumed most others. He took her softness and refined it until it calcified into something impenetrable. Unbreakable. Unbeatable. That’s exactly how she became the Crown’s Blade.
“I have Thalmyr,” she counters simply.
It has always been enough.
She trusts him in the way soldiers trust the blade that keeps them alive.
Ronyn’s mouth falls open in shock.
“You haveThalmyr?” he echoes incredulously. “The fucking dictator that killed my family for stealing apples for my baby brother? The same man who hoards resources and magic behind his precious Barrier? The one who snatches Starborn children from the arms of their mothers for his Guard? The one who watches Earthbounds die of hunger and thirst and disease every fucking day?” He spits the words, then adds, “Are we talking about the same man?”
Calira sets her jaw.They don’t know him.
She knows he is not perfect. But he is still the man who taught her how to excel inside the system he built to protect Dravara. Revryn left. Became weak from grief. Thalmyr adjusted. She respects that.
