Chapter 24 #3
“They rounded up anyone still standing who could lift a blade. Said we could serve the king or die where we stood.” He stared into the flames, their light glinting off the wet shine in his eyes.
“I watched three of my cousins kneel in the mud that morning. Watched them set their swords down and bow their heads. We were only boys—barely grown enough to wear steel. My cousins didn’t want the Legion or Ulrith’s war.
The officers didn’t care. They just walked behind them and drew their blades.
Cut their throats where they knelt, then dragged the bodies aside so the rest of us would know the price of refusal. ”
His hands had begun to shake. “I thought about joining them,” he said quietly. “But I told myself one of us had to live, one of us had to remember.” His voice thinned to a whisper. “Truth is, I was just afraid.”
Ivan’s hands curled at his sides. He knew too well what it meant to have a choice stolen before it was old enough to be named.
Osin had not begun with armies. He had begun in council chambers and dining halls, with rumors laid like kindling and old fears fed until they warmed the right men’s hands.
For decades before Elara, before the war had a face, he had taught fathers what to hate, and those fathers had taught their sons.
By the time the first sword left its scabbard, the ground had been salted for a generation.
He had been born into that salted earth, the younger son of a councilman whose house had belonged to Osin before Ivan ever drew breath.
The inheritance had come early, dressed as duty, polished as honor, laid around his neck like finery when it had always been a chain.
He had been too young to know he had been born into another man’s war.
Then he met her, and the world shifted on its axis.
For a while, there was something beyond his mother’s favor to win, something brighter than the long shadow cast by his father’s name.
She was the first choice that hadn’t been made for him—the first flicker of loyalty born from choice, not obligation.
A distraction, his mother had called her with the certainty of someone who believed all tenderness a luxury.
But she had been more than that. She had been the one thing in his life that had felt real.
His thumb pressed once, absently, to the small, round shape in his pocket. The pearl warmed by some grudging degree against the cloth.
When Thane tried to kill her, everything came undone. He could still taste the fear, hear the rough scrape of his own voice as he begged for her life. He hadn’t understood what he was offering. By morning, she was gone—and with her went the last illusion that his life had ever belonged to him.
Across the fire, Rolfe no longer looked like a soldier—just another boy who’d learned what the world does to those born powerless.
Ivan watched the faint tremor in his hands, refusing to think of his own.
Few alive knew the full measure of him or his past. Even those who had glimpsed parts—Sybil, Tristan, Elara—had barely scratched the surface.
Their names stirred uneasily in his mind.
Sybil, no doubt, would be glad to have him gone at last. She’d always had a gift for survival—and for keeping dangerous men at a safe distance.
Tristan…
Ivan’s brow tightened. He had asked about him during those first brutal days after his capture, when they’d dragged him through mud and frost across half the countryside.
People spat when he spoke then, cursed his name.
Some claimed Tristan was dead; others said he’d fled like a coward.
Ivan had never believed either. The Council would have protected him—that much, Ivan was sure of—and Tristan would never run.
He was far too stubborn for that.
And far too fond of irritating the world simply by continuing to exist.
Ivan pushed the thought aside and looked back at Rolfe. “I’ve come to think life is little more than a chain of accidents, one event dragging the next behind it, whether we will it or not. Most of it makes no sense when it happens. Some of it never will.”
He drew a slow breath, and his hands at last went still.
“People dress it up with finer names—fate, the will of the gods, some unseen hand guiding us toward purpose. If any of that’s true, then perhaps whatever power sits above decided it needed you alive that day.”
Rolfe tossed the rest of his meal into the fire and stood. “I stopped trusting the gods long ago. Why kneel to beings who watch men butcher one another for sport? What kind of gods let cities burn and children starve, then call it design?”
Ivan met his gaze and found he couldn’t look away.
“If the gods care to listen at all,” Rolfe went on, voice rough but certain, “their favor lies with kings and lords, not men like us.”
He turned into the dark, and Ivan’s eyes followed, caught on the single word he’d left behind—us. It lingered long after Rolfe’s footsteps faded, a strange kindness pressing against old shame.
Ivan wasn’t used to being counted among the living.