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The easiest way to win any war was to create dissent amongst your enemy’s ranks so that they wasted their time and energy fighting each other instead of you.
He held out his hand to me and said, “Take it, or I carry you.” I gave him my hand. “We’ll be back in the morning,” he said to Ren.
You only started snapping again when you wanted to push me away. The cold barbs and the awful shit that comes out of your mouth are a way for you to keep people at arm’s length, aren’t they?”
But you couldn’t hate something without caring about it just a little, too.
“Don’t call her Sunshine,” he commanded. “Why not?”
“Because she is moonlight. The mist that shrouds the mountains. The bite of electricity in the air before a storm. The smoke that rolls across a battlefield before the killing starts. You have no idea what she is. What she could be. You should call her Majesty.”
“She has a mind and a mouth of her own. I am the keeper of neither.”
“You do get used to it, y’know,” Lorreth said conversationally. “That overwhelming sense of impending doom. Eventually, it becomes background noise. You don’t even notice it at all.”
“I don’t want bright and happy,” he whispered roughly. “I want real.”
There were memories that could be put into words, even if it felt like dying to give them light and air. And then there were those that couldn’t.
Fisher hooked his fingers underneath the hem of my shirt and rested his hand against my skin. The move wasn’t sexual. It was simple contact between one person and another. Grounding. Intimate. A connection.
“Could you be any vaguer?” “I mean, probably…” “Fisher!”
Doubt after doubt hit me, but I brushed them all aside. I had nothing to lose. And it didn’t cost me anything to ask.
“Stubborn girl,” he growled. “Don’t you dare die on my watch, Saeris Fane! Fisher will never forgive me if his sole reason for living is torn to pieces on her first fucking battlefield.”
I didn’t know how it made me feel back then. And I was too much of a coward to admit how it made me feel now.
Even the strongest warrior’s heart can break. His soul can still be crushed.
For once, he looked at ease. Content. And… wicked? A slow smile spread across his face. “That was just the beginning, Saeris.” He bumped my nose with the end of his. “Didn’t think I’d be done with you that easily, did you?”
And sometimes, that’s just how things were supposed to be. There were moments that were gifts, meant to be cherished only for as long as you could remember them.
“I’m sensing a little tension in the air,” Carrion quipped. “Have you two fallen out already?” “If by fallen out you mean am I going to kill him, then the answer is yes.”
“Carrion Swift, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to tell all of your asshole friends back in the Third that you were a shitty lay.” Lorreth dealt another blow to his solar plexus. “I mean it!” I cried. Carrion jolted like he’d been struck by lightning. He rolled toward Lorreth and vomited up a lungful of lake water, hacking and sputtering. Oh, thank the gods. I fell back, landing heavily on my ass, trading a relieved look with Lorreth. When he was done puking, Carrion flopped onto his back and fixed me with narrowed eyes. “You wouldn’t… fucking… dare.”
HE WAS the first thing I saw. Always. My heart and my soul knew exactly where to find him.
