Chapter Ten Ashes Between Us #3
She stood and took their hands. She did not look back at Caelan at first. She could not bear the sight of him and the fire at once.
Caelan spoke behind her, voice low. “Morna.”
She did not turn. “Do not,” she whispered.
Silence answered.
Then Caelan moved past her, not close enough to brush her, but near enough that she could feel his presence like heat. He positioned himself slightly ahead and to the side, where guards would see him first. Where danger would reach him before it reached her.
He was still protecting her, even when she wanted to shove him away.
That, too, was poison.
A guard’s shout cut through the smoke, nearer now. “Prisoners back to barracks,” the man bellowed. “Now.”
Another voice replied, frantic. “The store is burning. Get water. Get more men.”
Orders collided. Boots pounded. The camp’s routine fractured.
Caelan turned his head slightly, eyes scanning. “This is the moment,” he murmured, not to Morna, but to himself, as if reciting a list to keep his hands steady.
Morna felt her stomach churn again. She thought of Fergus, still in the mud, still breathing perhaps, still paying for a name spoken with calm certainty. She thought of Valerius’s faint smile when Caelan had offered the lie, as if Valerius had been waiting for that very fracture.
She wondered if Valerius had already won.
The thought made her nauseous. She forced it down. There would be time for grief later, if they lived long enough to have later.
They moved, slipping into deeper smoke, bodies low, heads down. The passage between buildings opened toward the rear yard, where the firelight danced across men hauling buckets.
Morna felt Caelan’s gaze flick back to her once, quick. It was not a plea. It was not an apology. It was a question he did not ask out loud.
Are you still with us.
Morna did not answer with words. She tightened her grip on Elara and Ewan and kept moving.
Caelan’s shoulders squared. He turned forward again, becoming a shadow among shadows.
And Morna, heart torn between fury and the raw truth of dependence, followed him into the smoke while the distance between them remained, sharp as thorns.
A gust of wind shifted, thinning the smoke for an instant. Morna saw the yard again through the grey veil. Fergus’s shape was still there, a dark lump in the mud. No one bent over him. No one checked his breathing. The camp had already moved on, because it always moved on.
Her mind betrayed her with an image of her sister, small hands limp, lips pale, the way Morna had pressed herbs against a child’s tongue and prayed they would be enough.
They had not been. The helplessness of that day had carved something hard into her, a vow made in silence, never again would she be without the tools to fight.
Caelan had been one of her tools in Blackwood. Not like Valerius used men, but like a knife held carefully, trusted because it did not waver. She had leaned on his steadiness the way she leaned on her knowledge of plants. She had believed his principles were the edge that would not turn.
Now the edge had cut the wrong throat.
Caelan slowed just enough that Morna drew even with him. His eyes stayed on the yard, but his voice came low, pitched for her alone. “If they stop us,” he murmured, “you take Elara and Ewan and go.”
Morna’s anger flared again. “Stop trying to decide my choices,” she whispered.
“It is not a choice,” Caelan said, voice rough. “It is survival.”
Morna forced herself to look at him fully. His face was streaked with soot and sweat, and his eyes were darker than she had ever seen them, stripped down to purpose.
“You are not allowed to become a weapon that swings without thought,” she whispered. “If you do, you will turn on us without meaning to.”
Caelan’s gaze held hers. “I will not turn on you,” he said.
“Then remember,” Morna insisted, voice shaking. “Remember Fergus’s face. Remember you chose a man, not a sack of grain. If you forget that, you become Valerius, whether you mean to or not.”
Caelan’s jaw tightened. “I will remember,” he said, and the words sounded like a vow he did not trust himself to keep.
A shout rose, close. “By the sheds, move.”
Boots thundered. Torchlight swept the corner.
Caelan stepped forward at once, putting himself between the sound and Morna.
He stumbled deliberately and lifted his voice.
“The fire is there,” he called, as if helping, as if he belonged with the men trying to contain it.
The nearest guard barked and turned, eager to be useful, shouting for others to run water.
Morna did not waste the moment. She pulled Elara and Ewan deeper into the smoke, moving them along the ditch line where shadow clung low.
Behind her, Caelan fell into step again, not beside her, not close enough to touch, but near enough that she could not pretend he was gone. The distance between them was a line Morna drew to keep herself from shattering.
And Caelan, walking in that thin space of rejection, carried the weight of what he had done without asking anyone to lift it.