Page 24 of The Last War We Ever Fought

He did.

Something that surprised her because he’d never done as she’d asked or ordered—in fact, he’d always done the opposite. “You stopped,” she whispered, frowning to herself. “I don’t remember hitting you in the head.”

“You said please.”

She found herself turning to look at him over her shoulder.

“What?” he asked, gently tapping his finger once on her nose.

Her eyes almost twisted to look down where he’d just touched her. Shocked to say the least, her mouth opened and closed a few times, lacking the words. “I’m trying to figure out what exactly makes you such a moronic god.”

“You’ll have to keep looking long and hard for an answer to that, little thief. Good thing I don’t mind.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“If you were any nicer to me, I’d honestly turn pretentious. It would all go to my head.”

“At least something would,” she muttered between her teeth, turning her attention to the conversation between her treacherous pupil who’d joined the conspiracy against her.

“I wouldn’t be angry with him,” he said close to her ear, and she felt a shiver snake down her spine and around her stomach, polling right between her thighs. She’d never hated her traitorous body more. “They probably involved him knowing he’d come to you if he saw something strange. By forcing him into being their ally, he can’t, otherwise he’d be a traitor.”

“He should've become a traitor,” she said, feeling something wrap around her throat and squeeze. “Better a traitor—”

“Then what you will do to him for being their ally?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

“Why are you determined to aid your enemy?” Elijah asked. “Lying about the river tide, sneakily reading things that weren’t meant for your eyes, lying to your queen, lying to your friends about not lying to everyone but yourself, saving the Gobresh girl from your soldiers.”

Her eyes were on Daniel, the boy she’d raised herself. “I am not.”

“Then let them do it. This is it. The end of this war.”

“But is it?” she asked. “If they take the children, it means they’ve been asked to kill everyone else. And one day, those babies and those children will grow to be men and women. Angry men and women who will want their revenge. One war will end a few days from now, and another one will start a few years from now. This isn’t the last one. You can’t say it is the last one, can you?”

“No.”

“See? What will be different in the next war is that the Gobresh younglings will grow along Mugril. Make them sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, friends and family. They will make one another kin. Then they will slay one another yet again.”

“So little faith.”

“I have no faith at all,” she whispered. “There is no such thing as peace. Only fragile concord. You can’t force unity between the slaughterer and the slaughtered. One will always want to hold the axe.”

“You’d rather your people murder them all?”

“No, I’d rather they do not. But between this and that, maybe their death is the least cruel thing to do.”

It’s the least cruel thing to do. That is what she’d always told herself when she’d done what she did best—be cruel. That is what she’d told herself when she’d done everything to evade battles, when she’d convinced Henry and Adam to not lead their honed soldiers to slaughter Gobresh soldiers who were as young as thirteen and as old as seventy because their armies had not been enough to battle the Mugril. No one had caught her yet. No one had caught her cheating battles. They’d celebrated her instead. For being cruel. As if war wasn’t the cruellest thing there was. She’d seen it. It wasn’t. At night, when she closed her eyes, all she could see was young boys dressed as men, wailing for their mothers as they bled into the soil of their home.

“Tell her,” Daniel insisted, and Rowan’s eyes fell on her friend again. “At least let’s tell her. Even if she says no—”

“That girl is a monster and we both know it,” Adam sneered, and Rowan felt her entire body go rigid at his word. “If she were to find out we are doing something she won’t like, it is not beyond her to make us dig our own grave before she somehow makes us bury ourselves in them, too.”

“If you’re so afraid of her, why keep her as General? Why give her so much power?” another Captain asked, one whose name Rowan couldn’t particularly recall.

“The queen likes her and we would have never made it far enough in this war without someone who thinks like a monster. We can main and slay, but we can never have the guts to do what she does. Her mind is another form of twisted that none of the men in our ranks possess.”

Her eyes pricked with the sting of tears. Not because she was upset at how they were talking about her. But because they were right. The cruellest thing to do was still cruel. She didn’t know who she had sold her soul to in exchange for the numbness in her heart, but she knew who had paid the price for it.