Chapter 13 #3
The camp moved around her in that careful quiet—soldiers packing, hauling, loading. The rising sun spilled across the field beyond the tents, highlighting the frost on the grass and turning it silver. It was beautiful in the way early mornings sometimes were: fragile, untouched, almost innocent.
No one stopped her as she limped toward it, one step after another. Slowly. Unsteadily. She crested the slight rise at the edge of the camp before realizing she’d left its noise behind.
That was when she saw them, down in the valley below—a small group gathered in the open field.
Dawes stood among them, carrying a ledger.
The rest of them moved deliberately, sleeves rolled, hands bare despite the cold.
Shovels bit into the earth with dull, measured sounds.
Someone kneeled beside a still form laid out on a cloak.
A corpse, she realized.
Another body waited nearby.
And another.
The shapes resolved slowly in the morning light as Alethea began to make sense of what she was seeing. These were the lives lost during Leandro Gregor’s attack on their camp.
Dawes stood at the center of it, already dusted with earth at the knees, his broad hands gentler than she’d ever seen them as he arranged one of the fallen—straightening a collar, adjusting a cloak, making something orderly from what violence had left behind.
Someone passed him a small bowl. The wind carried the faintest trace of it toward her.
Ash.
She should have turned away.
Instead, she found herself moving toward them, drawn by the same quiet inevitability that had pulled her from the Healer’s tent into the pale morning light.
The slope was gentle, but the descent tugged sharply at the wound in her side, forcing her into a slow, uneven limp.
Each step sent a reminder through her ribs—a hot, tightening ache that warned she had no business being upright, let alone walking.
Still, she went.
Fourteen from Nakir’s camp had been laid out in careful rows, each resting on a cloak or a folded blanket.
Their bodies were straightened, hands placed neatly over their middles, boots aligned as though they were simply waiting for inspection rather than burial.
Their faces were uncovered, turned toward the morning light.
Beyond them, further down the field, another line stretched. The mercenaries. More of them. Twenty, at least. They, too, had been gathered and laid with a kind of reluctant dignity, though fewer hands worked among them.
The sight settled over her with suffocating clarity.
Alethea had seen the dead before. How many executions had she witnessed in the throne room? Too many to count, and every single one haunted her. She had never learned to stomach it.
And yet this was different in every way.
If she had ever believed Goran’s death to be her fault, that weight dimmed beside this.
Alethea slowed at the edge of the first row, her breath shallow despite the way it pulled painfully against her side.
Dawes noticed her—she saw it in the brief rise of his gaze—but she continued as though he had not.
He simply continued his work, dipping his thumb into the ash and pressing it gently to the brow of the fallen before him.
She moved along the line without meaning to, her attention drawn from one still face to the next.
And then she saw him.
Cyrus.
The guard who’d stood watch outside Nakir’s tent that first night. Steady, kind, and present in the quiet way of someone who expected nothing but duty. Now he was laid among the others, his face cleaned of blood, his collar straightened, hands folded with the same care as the rest.
Alethea lowered herself to her knees beside him, the movement slow, careful, as she reached for his hand.
It was cold.
She closed her fingers around it anyway.
The gesture came without thought—the same instinct that had kept her at her father’s side as he’d faded, her hand wrapped around his until his last breath, and for the still days that had followed before they laid him to rest.
She had not left him then.
And she did not pull away now.
Up close, she noticed things about Cyrus she hadn’t taken the time to see before.
The deep lines carved by years of weather and wear.
The dark hair, still thick, though streaked faintly at the temples.
A trimmed beard that spoke of routine even in a life that likely allowed little for it.
His face had the look of someone accustomed to long watches and hard roads, unremarkable in the way of many who kept others safe.
His eyes were closed now. There was nothing to meet her gaze.
Around her, the morning moved quietly on. Frost surrendered to the slow warmth of the rising sun. Leather creaked. Somewhere on the hill behind her, a horse stamped, impatient for the road.
And in the field, Dawes spoke. His voice carried low and steady, shaped more by practice than volume.
“Borrowed mind, be unbound.”
Ash brushed gently across a brow.
“Borrowed breath, be unloosed.”
Across a throat.
“Borrowed blood, be unspilled again.”
Across a chest.
“Borrowed hands, be unburdened.”
Across folded fingers.
Each body received the same care, the same measured words, whether clad in Nakir’s colors or the rough, mismatched leathers of the mercenaries who’d come to steal her away.
Alethea’s gaze drifted.
Past Cyrus.
To the next.
And the next.
A woman she remembered laughing softly near the cookfires the evening before. A young scout whose name she had not learned. A mercenary barely older than she was, his expression strangely peaceful in death, as though the violence that had ended him had not yet reached his features.
Faces.
Lives.
People who’d woken expecting another day.
People who’d died because someone had come for her.
The truth settled without flourish.
These were not people born to legend. They had come from farms and ports and market towns; from families who would still be expecting letters; from lives that had once been filled with small certainties: morning chores, shared meals, the comfort of familiar roads.
They’d chosen this path believing it meant something beyond themselves.
Protection, justice, a future they could help shape.
A cause worth standing beside. Or enough coin to support their loved ones and make it all worth it.
Alethea could not make herself believe any cause—any prophecy, any crown, any future—was worth even a single one of them.
The thought broke through her, a quiet, shattering realization that split something open inside, leaving no space for the easy narratives of sacrifice or necessity.
Behind her, Dawes’s voice continued, steady as breath, as he marked another brow with ash. But the words felt distant now, muffled by the sudden unbearable clarity.
That none of this should have cost them their lives.
Not even one.