Daughter of the Dawn #3
We cannot return to the inn—our cover is compromised, our faces known. Instead, we make camp in the least damaged corner of the sanctum, building a small fire from fallen timbers. The stars are visible through the collapsed roof, sharp and cold and indifferent to everything we have learned.
Lián has barely spoken since the battle. She sits across the fire from me, her knees drawn to her chest, her face unreadable. Dumpling has curled in her lap, purring with the aggressive contentment of a creature who has no idea that the world might end.
I do not know how to bridge the distance between us.
“He’s been hunting my bloodline for seven hundred years.” Her voice is quiet, almost conversational.
“Yes.”
“He loved someone who looked like me.”
“He was a man, once. Before.”
“And now he wants to—what? Use me to eat the world because she died?”
“Grief makes monsters of us all.”
She looks at me then. The firelight catches in her eyes, turning them to amber, and I see something shift behind them. A calculation. A test.
“What would you become?” she asks quietly. “If I died and didn’t come back?”
The fire pops. Sparks rise toward the broken roof, toward the stars.
I think of the Hungering King. A man who loved someone enough to trade his humanity. A man who became a void when she was gone.
I think of watching Lián die in the warehouse, the light leaving her eyes. The moment before she breathed again. I did not know, in that moment, that she would return. I did not know anything except that something inside me was breaking.
She is watching me. Waiting for an answer I do not have.
“I do not know,” I say finally. The words feel insufficient. “I know what I would want to become. I know what duty demands. But—”
“But?”
“But I think I understand him somehow. The Hungering King.” I meet her eyes. “I understand how a man could unmake the world for love. I understand the hunger.”
The fire crackles. The silence stretches.
“That’s honest,” she says finally.
“You asked.”
“I did.” She unfolds slowly, dislodging Dumpling, who yowls in protest before relocating to her abandoned bedroll. “I regret it a little.”
“Why?”
“Because now I have to live with the answer.” She crosses to my side of the fire, settles beside me close enough that our shoulders touch. The warmth of her against my side is a counterpoint to the cold truth we have uncovered. “Because now I know.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re dangerous.” Her head drops to my shoulder, a weight I did not know I was waiting for. “That I might be in love with something that could end the world.”
The words land somewhere beneath my ribs. I am afraid to breathe, afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might break this moment.
“Might be?” I say carefully.
“Don’t push it.” But her hand finds mine in the darkness. Cold fingers. Warm grip. “We should sleep. Tomorrow will be complicated.”
“Today was complicated.”
“Today was revelations about centuries-old conspiracies, apocalyptic rituals, and your mother’s comb being a villain’s wedding gift.
” Her voice carries a ghost of her usual humor, and something in my chest loosens.
This is who she is—the woman who jokes when the world is ending, who uses laughter like armor, who has survived eight centuries by refusing to let anything be as heavy as it should be.
“Tomorrow might just be bandits. That would be refreshing.”
I find myself almost smiling. “Your optimism is concerning.”
“My optimism is survival.” She shifts closer, her warmth pressing against my side. Her fingers interlace with mine, and she holds on with a grip that suggests she has no intention of letting go. “Sleep. I’ll keep watch first.”
“Lián—”
“Don’t argue. You got stabbed.”
“It was barely a scratch.”
“It was a sword wound. I watched it happen. I—” She stops. When she speaks again, her voice is softer. “I did not like watching it happen. So let me keep watch. Let me make sure it doesn’t happen again tonight.”
I should argue. I am the emperor. I should insist on taking the first watch, on protecting her, on maintaining some vestige of the control that has defined my existence for twenty-two years.
But her hand is in mine. And her head is on my shoulder. And she is warm and alive and here, despite seven hundred years of fate trying to make her a sacrifice.
“Wake me in two hours,” I say.
“I’ll wake you when I’m tired.”
“That is not—”
“That is how this works now. We take care of each other.” Her thumb traces a circle on the back of my hand. “That’s what this is, isn’t it? Taking care of each other?”
I think of the Hungering King. Of love that became hunger that became destruction. Of a man who wanted so badly to keep what he loved that he unmade himself in the trying.
I do not want to be that.
I want to be the kind of love that lets go when it has to. The kind that protects without possessing. The kind that chooses, every day, to stay.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s what this is.”
She presses closer. Her breathing evens out. The fire burns down to embers.
And for now—for this one night in the ruins of an ancient temple, with the weight of prophecy and conspiracy and fate pressing down on us both—for now, that is enough.