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“You should sit down.”

Fenrir frowned. “Think I pushed myself too hard.”

“You’re still healing, you need to take care.” Then, “You shouldn’t play favorites with Mercer.”

“Favorites?” Fenrir repeated, lowering down to the steps rather than the throne. He still couldn’t bring himself to sit on it. “He’s the only one struggling with anything important, and Red specifically asked me to help him.”

“As inane as their complaints can be, it’s all a matter of perspective. To them, these are real issues.”

“Real issues that they are perfectly capable of handling without me getting involved.”

“Well, that still doesn’t mean you should talk to them like they’re idiots.” Vera followed him down to the steps, sitting close. “Even if they are.”

Fenrir laughed. “You’re starting to sound like Red, ya know?”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one,” came out before he could stop it. They both went quiet, the moment awkward, the throne room suddenly very, very small.

Eventually, Vera sighed and broke the silence. She didn’t offer him a return compliment, but it came close. “I suppose you’ll get better with practice.”

“Practice,” Fenrir snorted. “That’s terrifying to think about, considering what’s at stake.” A whole Empire. Thousands of lives. Humanity’s future.

Orpheus was right, Fenrir thought, not for the first time. I really didn’t think this through.

“If anyone can do it, it’s you.” There was the compliment Fenrir had been hoping for, falling flat because…well, because Fenrir wasn’t sure he wouldn’t let everyone down now when they needed him the most. Needed him to be a hero. Their hero.

Not just Orpheus’.

Fenrir swallowed, shifting his weight, and Vera must have sensed she said the wrong thing because she clasped her hands between her knees and sighed.

“I should have let your father come, instead of me,” she said, voice quiet. “He’s always been better with people. I’ve never been great at that.”

“What were you good at?” The question came out more raw than Fenrir intended.

“Animals,” she said simply. “Growing crops. Working the field. Laying bricks.”

“Pretty good with the grandkids.” She was, he’d seen it himself. They were as adoring of Vera as they were terrified of her.

Vera’s mouth tugged up into a small smile, her pale eyes sharp when she met his. “Like I said, I’m good with animals.”

Fenrir choked, then began laughing. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you make a joke,” he said between breaths.

Vera sat up straighter. “Then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Maybe he hadn’t. Fenrir glanced at his mom, noting the lines on her face that didn’t exist in his memories of her. The age that had spun her blonde hair white and her cheeks hollow. They were surface-level changes Fenrir couldn’t deny, but it was the stuff within he couldn’t see. The little glimpses of the person his mother was versus the person she had to be. Different from the homunculus of a caretaker that had always kept herself at arm’s length for reasons that Fenrir always believed were personal to him. Her son. Her first of many children, and the one she’d given away.

Now, more than ever before, Fenrir understood what kind of sacrifice that could be—the cost of doing what needed to be done took on a person. The kind of strength required to forgo your own wants and needs in favor of family, or duty, or survival.

Who would his mother have been if her life hadn’t required her to fight for her family’s survival? What kind of choices would she have made if those choices had been for herself rather than the people she was responsible for? Fenrir hadn’t ever asked himself those questions, let alone Vera. But now he wondered whether he was finally getting a glimpse of who his mother really was, and if she hadn’t been there for him to see all along, shadowed by their history, tucked safely into the box she needed to fit in because to recognize her as anything else meant confronting his own unfair assessment of the choice she’d made by sending him away.

Whether both could be true at once, and if he could see past one for the other—and whether he even wanted to.

I can choose to forgive her.

He didn’t have to, but he could.

Fenrir swallowed and shifted. “You’re a great cook, too.” He offered the white flag up gently and Vera went stiff, eyes down, breath still. Fenrir bumped her shoulder, his small smile crooked. “Fed a whole damn army’s worth of people at the fairgrounds.”