Page 3 of The Last War We Ever Fought

The human had figured a way into cheating the God of War and no one knew—no one knew she had found a way to weaken him.

“The little thief,” he murmured to himself, watching the older soldier lead her away inside a tent.

She spared him one last scathing glance over her shoulder and ducked out of sight.

That made him chuckle. It had been a long while since he felt so entertained.

“Rowan,” he spoke her name to the autumn wind, and then waited to watch if it would shiver.

It did.

Two poppies

Rowan’s mind was far away from where everyone else’s inside the main tent was. She was still disbelieving of her ears and the words Daniel had screamed on top of his lungs for all the camp to hear.

The God of War was here himself. Dawnbringer strapped to the back of his black armour that looked more etched to his body than worn.

He’d looked at her, too. He’d looked at her as if she were something that belonged to him. Maybe she did.

He was war, and Rowan was his blade. She’d been his blade since the age of six, freshly orphaned after both her parents had died fighting the same war she was now fighting. Shortly after she’d buried her mother and father, she’d been made to join the war, too. Kitchens and then infirmary, bandaging severed limbs and praying when they’d run out of medication. And soon after, at barely eleven years old, she’d been thrown in the training grounds, made to hold a weapon twice her weight and endure pain twice what her brittle bones could withhold without being too far gone for repair. Fifteen years later, she had lost count how many times she’d been made to withstand that pain, she’d also lost sense of the weight of her weapon as she’d grown into her body. The body that had been kind to her despite how unkind she’d been to it. She’d grown past what most female soldiers grew to be, and at five feet and ten inches, she could disguise herself fairly well between the men. Well enough that the general had promoted her into rank after rank without taking notice, and had somehow now sat her on an important decision-making seat that decided on the fate of the thirty-two regiments they were leading down Gobresh. Rowan had very little sense of vanity, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d faced a mirror or even remember how she looked, not that there was much to look at beneath the grime and the grim, but she’d been a little offended when the other general, Adam, had only found out she was a woman several months after she’d been in the position.

And as Adam spoke of their next move towards the north they were to take next, Rowan couldn’t look away from the reflection of her eyes on the blade she held before her. She’d seen death. She’d seen so much death. All kinds of it. But she was struggling to understand what kind of death her eyes had died to look so far gone from the world of the living. There was nothing in them. Not even a faint memory or ghost of them.

She twisted and twisted the blade, as if some other angle of the reflection would find the life that she was not sure if it had been there in the first place. A silent gasp trapped between her slightly parted lips when another figure joined the reflection on the blade. Frozen, Rowan could only stare at the figure of the man with long dark hair and such violent violet eyes that sent a tremble down her spine. His gaze had pinned Rowan’s, trapped it in the blade she held because she was unable to look elsewhere. Surely, he’d conjured some curse, a deadly glamour that wouldn’t allow her to look away until she’d wither and die, because Rowan could almost feel the crawl of death pulling onto her fingertips. But the call of death was mercy. A call of desperation, a call as if to come to her rescue. Rescue from him. He was far worse than death—at least Death was a gentler god.

A warm trickle of liquid touched the finger that held the tip of the blade. It trailed down her hand and past her sleeve, soaking her wool shirt that was already far too warm against her skin.

“You’re bleeding,” a haunting dark voice called, and the ringing in her ears seized, the spell of her frozen body fled, and her lungs moved fast to steal the air around as if it was finite.

Rowan’s eyes darted away from the reflection on the blade to the small wound on her fingertip that gushed with blood. Quickly, she wiped the cut on her trousers, and spun round to look at the man. But there was no man. He was no man. Even without his terrifying obsidian armour or sword, he would never look like a man.

“Rowan,” he said her name as if he was walking through fire.

She looked around the now empty tent, wondering how long she’d been looking at that reflection in the blade to not have noticed the time that had passed or that she was now alone with him. “Yes?”

“You’re still bleeding.”

Her attention jerked down to her finger, and she wiped it again to her trousers before raising her eyes back to the man who was no man. War stood entirely too close to her and she had no choice but to shrink back in her seat, covered entirely by his towering shadow. He went down to a knee before her and pulled a strip off his long dark shirt made of material she’d never touched or seen before. Entirely too clean to belong in a place such as the one they were in.

“Your hand.”

For some reason, she extended her hand to him even though she’d rarely ever seen a nurse or had ever nursed a wound. She’d always let them be. If they had festered and killed her, she would have been fine with it. The luck had it that they’d never did.

“For someone who bleeds so easily and so heavily, I’m surprised to know that you’re my earnest soldier.”

Rowan’s hand jerked back away from him as if she’d been whipped. That earned her back his attention. The violet in his irises looked turbulent, as if it moved. “You.”

Him.

Only heard of.

Never seen.

She’d prayed hard to never have that chance.

He raised a brow. “Me.”

Immediately, she shot up again and made to move away, only to be blocked by the table behind her.