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“That was before you were injured,” Cian huffed.
“I’m practically healed already. By the time the ballistas leave, I’ll be back at your side and ready to remind Brenna and her forces that I am not to be dismissed so easily.” I went back to unlacing his breeches.
Cian caught my hands again, this time lifting my fingers to his lips. “You need more time.”
I leveled a scolding look at him, pinching my brows. “I amfine.”
He lifted my chin slightly, and my hearts skipped a beat when I saw the worry in his eyes. “I almost lost you, Hel. For a while, I thought I had. I thought…” His throat worked, and he closed his eyes, resting his forehead against mine. “For a minute, I thought I was going to be alone in the world again. Now that you’re both back with me, don’t ask me to send him away, and don’t you dare go taking any more risks.”
“This is war, Cian. You asked me to fight beside you, not to hide behind you.” I pulled his lips to mine for a brief kiss. “Let me be who I am, and you must do the same for him. It stops being protection and starts being smothering when you dictate what we are allowed to do. Don’t smother us.”
“I don’t want to send him away either.”
“I’m not saying you should. Let him be a part of what you’ve built. Listen to him. Trust him to know his limits. He is so much stronger than he appears.”
Cian let out a breath through his nose that tickled my lips and relented with a quick nod. “We will have him train the ballista unit. For now, I’ll put off naming a new commander for the unit. Perhaps someone will step up.”
“Not Morlash,” I insisted. If he gave Morlash anything more, it’d go straight to his head.
“Not Morlash,” Cian agreed.
“Good. Now that we are in agreement, let me suck your cock to celebrate.” I started tugging at the laces again.
Cian laughed and pushed my hands away. “Later. After the council meeting.”
I let out an unimpressed grunt and slid off the table, mumbling, “You’re no fun. The meeting’s not for hours.”
He pretended not to hear me as he went about arranging the table for the meeting.
I pouted around the main part of the tent for a while before slipping into the back to crawl into bed with Nevahn. While I didn’t want to admit it aloud so Cian could hear me, my stomach was sore. The warmth of Nevhan’s body alleviated some of the pain, but that was only one reason I curled up in bed with him. I missed his scent and his soft, steady breaths. I missedhim.
I pressed my face into his back, breathing in his scent like a rare perfume until I drifted off to sleep.
My dreams were a jumbled mess of past events. I walked through battlefields home to ghosts long gone, in lands I had not seen for decades. The sweltering air of the Spirit lands weighed heavily upon my shoulders as I moved among the dead, looking at corpses burned beyond recognition. My hair clung to the blood drying on my neck and my khopesh were heavy in my fists. A pregnant silence hung in the air. This was but the calm before the storm. Another battle was waiting on the horizon; I could taste it on the air, feel it in my bones.
I walked the dreamscape until my feet bled, leaving behind crimson footprints in the black sand. The sands of time fell away, and a path formed before me, carrying me to a silver bridge, the entrance to a distant shrine. Red roses bowed their heads on either side of the bridge, stretching as far as the eye could see.
At the center of the shrine, I found Ren kneeling before a lit stick of incense, hands folded, head down. My heart seized at the sight of him. He looked just as I remembered: beautiful, mischievous, without a care in the world.
“I was wondering when you would come,” he said and rose slowly.
My lips parted, but no sound would come out. The dream had stolen my voice, so my tears spoke for me, sliding down my cheeks in silence.
Ren gave a reluctant smile, coming to stand before me. “Don’t cry for me, Hel,” he said, wiping the tears away. “Our time is too limited for tears. I’m glad you came. There’s something I need to show you.”
He took my hand and walked me to the back of the shrine. Ren gave me one quick glance before pulling back the black curtain before us and I gasped at what I saw.
When I left Jaida, it had been a beautiful city in the mountains, untouched by war, famine, or disease. The gold domes of the palace glittered in the moonlight and lush gardens grew in the shadow of the Avalon Falls. Jaida was beauty defined, for that was how I had worked to make her.
But that was not the city before me. The Jaida Ren showed me was broken; the proud minarets I had built lay in ruins. My bridges were burning. The great glass palace was a maw of jagged teeth, half flooded, her golden domes shattered and dull. Skulls and dusty bones littered the streets, ghosts the only inhabitants of my beloved city.
For fifty years, I had poured all my knowledge and strength into building the greatest city in the world, and there it lay, a war-torn graveyard.
I turned to Ren, finally finding my voice. “What is this?”
“You must return to Jaida,” he said quietly, “or this will be its fate.”
I frowned, surveying the burning city of the dead. “Not if we stop Brenna at Lach Ban-Lenon.”
