Mother of Death & Dawn (The War of Lost Hearts, #3)

by Carissa Broadbent

What if it wasn’t just two weeks? What if this was our lives? He had said it the way someone spoke of a dream, with all the vulnerability and joy of giving life to something precious. He had handed me his heart.

“The wayfinder that she has,” he went on, “provides a means to discover, and perhaps even use, deep pools of magic called Lejaras. They are deeper and more powerful than any other magic that has been seen in many, many hundreds of years. For a long time, I thought they were a myth. So did most others.

“One hundred and eighty thousand days I have been at the mercy of human kings,” I snarled. “And if you think you are any better than any of them, you are a fool.”

When we were done, Sella rose from her seat. “We can go into the library for tea, if you would like some.” If I would like some. I would murder someone for tea.

He put us in a fucking closet.

I was so close to the man I loved, close enough to cradle the precious pieces of everything that made him him.

Sammerin was silent for a long moment. “Yes,” he said, at last. “I don’t think it’s a perfect thing, but I think it’s the right thing. And in times like this, perhaps that’s the most we can hope for.”

“It was a gift, Max,” she murmured. “A gift to have known you. I hope that you have the most incredible, happy life. I hope you find a future worth forgetting your past. Make it worth it. Find joy. Do you understand?”

My arms wrapped around her like the shape of her body was already a homeland I knew by heart.

A realization came to me, one that I had been grappling with for the last ten years. There was no single moment when everything changed. No single before and after. There was just… life. A million decisions and a million consequences.

All this time, I had thought I had been erased of my past. But I had been wearing it all over me, as permanent as the tattoos on my skin.

“My regret is worthless.”

I almost gasped when he let me into his mind. It was so different from before—walls replaced with claw-gouged passages, as if he had ripped them out with sheer force. They were tender and bleeding, like wounds. Well… they were wounds, weren’t they?

She tasted like home. Like everything good about reclaiming where I had been.

I could fucking die here. Like I said, I was weak.

Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home.

If the memories are gone, something is still there that makes it love.

“Listen,” he said, after a long pause. “I’m not much for words, so I’ll only say this once. If you ever have to guess what I want, or what is best for me, it is you. Alright? I have made that decision already. I do not make it lightly. Don’t disrespect that by claiming that you know better for me than I do. I have made bad decisions before. But you are not, never have been, and never will be one of them. It is always you.”

Perhaps we didn’t need gods to find our place in something larger. Perhaps it already existed in us.

“One creates life, one destroys life, and one changes life.”

seemed to understand immediately what Sammerin was asking. “In Old Besrithian, the word for ‘change’ only refers to… the way things change over time. Like…” She struggled to find the Aran translation. “Evolution,” I finished.

But sometime today, a million deadly combinations of a million deadly acts converged in exactly the right way, and just like that, my best friend lost the love of his life. That would never be a fair exchange.