This Ends in Embers (Divine Traitors, #2)

by Kamilah Cole

There had been no time to apologize or explain. There had been only the sound of two hearts breaking, a sound oddly similar to that of powerful dragon wings beating on the wind.

Three children—Faron, Elara, and Aveline—sitting in places of honor, surrounded by uniformed officers, discussing things like supply lines, access points, artillery stock, and army sizes. Of course, Aveline had seemed, to her, like another adult, but now that Faron was the same age as the queen had been back then, she knew better. They’d all been too young to be there. They were still too young.

They flew over a patchwork of greens—olive and pine, sage and mint, moss and fern—all the shades smearing into one another like mixed paint on a palette. Here and there, Faron saw the pewter of mountain ranges, the sepia of dark hills, and the cobalt of ponds and lagoons. Sun-dappled clouds hung above them, their color almost grimy compared with the arrant white of Lightbringer’s beating wings.

Elara’s smile wobbled as she felt a wave of love for her parents. They were the reason she was the person she was today, and though war had changed her relationship with them to something more fraught, she had forgotten what it was like to feel as if she could lean on them. No matter what the gods or the newspapers said, they would love her. Even if she failed.

They were alike in many ways, Elara and Aveline. The crushing responsibility on their shoulders was one they couldn’t set down, even for a second, without feeling guilty. Their lives had never been truly their own. And they were tired. So very tired.

It was easy for Lynwood to be proud of where he came from—who he came from—because he knew. Faron didn’t even know what her family’s name had been before they’d been taken to San Irie to be enslaved. An entire history had been erased by imperialists like him, who bred all over Nova like rabbits. Faron, her eyes narrowed, snuffed out the flames that wrapped around her fist. “Of course you don’t respect hard work, if everything has always come so easily to you. My ancestors worked and bled and died for me to be standing here today, and that doesn’t make them lesser than you or me. Their hard work made them strong. It made me strong.”

The reprieve from being around a crowd gave her the chance to cry again, just once more, for all she’d lost and all she’d failed to do. For her sister’s dimming light and the absence of Reeve’s calming presence. For a world that was a casualty of the power plays between people with too much authority and not enough sense. And for the child she had been, who had believed in right and wrong, in good and evil, in heroes and villains, and been launched into a war where the only real difference between the good guys and the bad guys was what side of the battlefield they were standing on.

This was no longer just about distraction. It was about the pain woven into Iya’s voice, their shared fear of being forgotten, their shared anger at the tatters of their reputations, their shared thirst for vengeance. All those thorny, complicated feelings that kept them irreparably bonded together. All those thorny, complicated emotions that Faron understood better than anyone else.

“That’s who I am. Someone who never stops trying. I may have forgotten that for a while, but that’s why we’re not the same. You gave up. You’re giving up. And I won’t. I can’t.”

Lynwood would have given his life to preserve the illusion that he was perfection embodied, because the realization that he was mediocre at best would have broken him. This was who held her fate in their hands. People who cared more about how they were perceived than they did about their own lives—let alone anyone else’s.