Chapter Seventy-Two
Max
I staggered back.
It took a few long seconds to come back to myself. I felt unmoored, drifting somewhere between the past and the present, between Nura’s memories and my own. The visions settled deep in my gut, like I had eaten something rancid.
Nura was looking at me the way I never thought she would look at me again — with such vulnerability.
My eyes fell past her. To the single, thick door.
“What is in there.”
Barely louder than a whisper. A demand, not a question. I didn’t know if I wanted to know.
Without another word, Nura opened it.
The interior of the room was so starkly white and bright that it hurt my eyes. It was a narrow room, closer to a short hallway. There was a desk here, scattered with piles of parchment, and a few chairs.
But then I turned, and my mouth went dry.
The room had one glass wall. Beyond the glass were iron bars. And beyond those bars were people.
No… not people. Not humans, anyway. Fey.
There were six of them. Two were in the same enclosure. Some lay on small cots, covered by thin white blankets. Others sat on the floor, leaning against the wall. One lay on the ground, on her stomach, not moving. None of them reacted when we entered. Was that because the glass was so thick they couldn’t hear us? Or was it because they were no longer able to?
Some didn’t even look like they were alive.
Tisaanah whispered a curse beneath her breath.
“They invaded us,” Nura said. “The first one came into our territory in Threll, only days after the Mikovs fell. But others came here. They came to our shores. Some of them have killed here. That one skewered a couple that found him hiding in their barn. Just innocent farmers.”
Tisaanah had stepped forward, her fingers pressed to the glass. She was silent. I followed her gaze to one of the Fey, who lifted his head just enough to look at us over his shoulder. Matted fair hair. Tan skin. And a glimpse of a bright gold eye.
Ishqa’s words echoed: My son is among the Fey who were taken.
Tisaanah’s gaze slid to me, and I knew we were thinking the same thing.
“Why are they here, Nura?” I asked, quietly.
I hoped I was wrong. Prayed I was wrong. But the pieces fit too well — for these creatures to be here, beneath the Towers, with Vardir. Here, in this room of white and white.
“There are things we can do with Fey blood,” Nura said. “Fey magic. Things we can create, with access to all the different threads of magic. Things that might be powerful enough to save us.”
Fuck no.
“You want to create more Reshayes.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tisaanah back against the desk, sinking into the chair — as if utterly overwhelmed.
Despite everything, a part of me still hoped Nura would correct me.
But she just said, “We don’t have a choice.”
“Of course we have a fucking choice.”
“You saw what I saw,” she shot back. “You saw what has already started coming for us. How do we defeat that, if not with the greatest weapons we can create?”
There was a silent plea beneath the hard edge of her words, as if to silently add, You of all people believe me, don’t you?
“Nura, look at this. Look at what you’re doing. This is— this is insane. You think this is the right thing? Torturing them so you can create more monsters to go slaughter someone else’s family?”
A flicker of hurt crossed Nura’s face.
“I think about them all the time, Max. Every single day. Don’t throw them at me like I don’t.”
I spent years telling myself how much I hated Nura, telling myself I blamed her for all of it. It was never true — I had never blamed her as much as I blamed myself. But I hated knowing the shape of her grief. I couldn’t hate her and feel bad for her. I couldn’t carry the weight of her pain after I was so tired from carrying mine for so many years.
It was easy when I could think of her as cold and unfeeling. Black and white. Bad and good. A strong, clear divide between the girl I had known as my best friend and the woman who had ruined my life. Not this — this person who was so hurt, so fucking broken, that she would let her grief destroy the damned world.
“I know this isn’t morally good,” Nura said. “I know it isn’t right. But I’ve made the hard choices before, and I’ll do it again if it means saving this country. Someone has to. You saw what I saw — what failure means. We need to be more powerful than that, no matter what it takes.”
“That is what the Nyzrenese said, too, once,” Tisaanah said. “They created the most incredible instruments of death and threw a million men wielding them into war against the Threllians. Only for those weapons to be turned against us in the end.”
Nura’s expression shifted. She turned to Tisaanah. “We found the hands, when we went to the cottage. I saw the tattoos.”
Tisaanah went still.
“Then it would appear,” Nura said, “that our greatest enemies have allied themselves with each other. It makes sense, doesn’t it? All of the research I’ve done indicates that the Fey have power, but they don’t have numbers. No one has greater numbers than the Threllians. And no one has a greater shared interest in Ara. There were children’s hands in that crate, Tisaanah. Children. I want to create weapons so powerful that there isn’t a chance of even one of those bastards walking away alive. Are you telling me that isn’t what you want, too?”
Tisaanah was silent, her jaw clenched.
“Reshaye never saw the difference between colors on a uniform,” I said. “The things that you’re doing, the things that you want to create, they won’t know the difference. And who’s going to pay the price for that? You’re building weapons to indiscriminately kill the slaves that the Zorokovs are going to throw at them.”
Nura flinched, as if I had slapped her across the face. And now, for the first time, I did understand how much she grieved the lives lost in collateral damage. I don’t know why it made it that much worse to me. It would be one thing to claim heartlessness or ignorance. Another to know — to know — exactly the scale of what she was inflicting, and to do it anyway.
Tisaanah leaned over the desk, hands at her temples.
“I know you’ve never had the stomach for it,” Nura said. “But we’re past the point where there’s a choice.”
“You don’t even know what they want, or what they intend to do. And you’re already—”
“What is this?”
Tisaanah’s voice was quiet, but sharp. Nura and I turned to see her holding up a stack of parchments. They appeared to be documents, written in Thereni, stamped with an unfamiliar crimson seal.
“What is this?” she said, again.
Only now, for the very first time, was there unabashed shame on Nura’s face. Her mouth opened and closed several times before she answered.
“We need numbers. If we are to win.”
Tisaanah stood. The paper buckled beneath the slow clench of her hand.
“How many more? This cannot be the only bill.”
“No. Only enough to—”
“How many slaves did you buy?” She threw the papers down onto the desk, sending them scattering.
My blood went cold. I whirled to Nura. “You what?”
Nura looked as if she wasn’t breathing. She approached Tisaanah the way one might approach a wild animal.
“If we want to win, we need manpower. Ara is a small country. When this is all over, we’ll free them. We’ll provide for them, we’ll—”
“‘When this is all over?’ How many times have you people said that to me? How easy it is for you to make promises for a future that might never exist.”
“If we don’t win this, there won’t be a future. I don’t like it, either. Trust me, you don’t know—” Nura bit down on her words, losing track of them. “But we need them, Tisaanah. Threllians. They’re our best ch
ance to…”
I looked at the notes and instruments around us with renewed horror.
Needed Threllians.
Needed Threllians the way she had needed Tisaanah.
And Tisaanah understood just after I did, her whole face crumbling with the realization. “This? This is what you need them for?’
“No. I— I would never… Only volunteers—”
“Volunteers? Volunteers like I volunteered?” Tears of rage filled Tisaanah’s eyes.
“I never claimed it was good. I never claimed it was right. It’s terrible. I know it is, and I know I’ll be damned for it in this life or the next one. But we have a choice, Tisaanah. We can end it all, right now. If we don’t win, millions will die. And you will never free your people. You told me you would do anything. So would I.”
Her eyes flicked to me, wild and desperate. “But I need both of you. No one can Wield this magic but you. They know who you are, and they want you, and they’re going to keep coming for you. So help me. Help me build a better world. Or at the very least keep this one from being destroyed.”
I was so angry that everything went numb — numb, until I looked at Tisaanah and saw the gutting heartbreak written across her face.
That expression devastated me.
I had given up on so much. I couldn’t even remember the moment it happened, the moment I realized you could dream and fight and bleed with the purest of intentions, and it would still end up rotten and maggot-infested. But Tisaanah — Tisaanah, from the minute she showed up at my doorstep, believed. Even in the worst times, she truly had faith it could all be better.
And now, I was watching that belief shatter. An irreplaceable treasure destroyed.
“This is the only way.” Nura approached Tisaanah slowly, hand outstretched, only for Tisaanah to lurch away.
“Don’t touch me.”
And then the door was open, and Tisaanah was setting off down the hall. But I lingered for a moment longer.
I felt exhausted.
“After a while, it becomes my own damn fault,” I muttered. “Expecting more. Expecting better.”
Nura lifted her head and looked at me. Suddenly she looked so much like she had ten years ago. And it was the voice of my friend, not my enemy, that said, “I always wanted all of it to be better.”
The worst thing was, I believed her.
“This isn’t how it happens, Nura.”
“Not without you.” She moved towards me, one tentative attempt at bridging the gap between us. “I need you, Max. Please. We’re the only ones left.”
The only ones left. Yes. Maybe that was why there was a part of me who could never abandon the version of Nura that I had known, once. Because she was the last thing I had of a more innocent life.
Even if the core of that had been infested, too. None of it looked the same as it had back then.
“Not anymore,” I said, and left her there.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Tisaanah
I had to get out of the Towers. Everything about this place revolted me, all the way down to my bones. I was halfway down the hall by the time that Max caught up with me. I could feel his rage vibrating off of him, our anger surrounding us both like smoke. We didn’t speak. When we made it to the front steps, I cast one last glance over my shoulder at the two white columns looming over us.
The day I had seen Vos, or what had become of him, I had staggered out of these doors and stood in these shadows and struggled not to fall apart. That was the first time I had looked up at the Towers and thought they looked foreboding rather than comforting.
Now, they disgusted me.
Max drew the final line of his Stratagram, and they unraveled.
The first part of the world to return was the smell — a scent of ash so strong it burned my nostrils. And when everything else followed, I made a small, wordless sound of horror.
The cottage was gone.
Max’s home — our home — had been reduced to nothing but a blackened skeleton. The stone still stood, though it was crumbled and charred. The roof had caved in, only a few broken rafters still remaining. Shattered glass glittered among the wreckage.
And the garden… that beautiful garden was now shriveled ash.
I tore my eyes away from the scene to look at Max, and he was staring at it with a tight jaw, mouth thinned, face betraying everything that he wasn’t expressing aloud.
“We’ll rebuild it,” I said, even though we both knew that we would never be able to recapture what made this place so precious.
His throat bobbed. He walked among the charred foliage, nudging the dirt with his boot.
“There have been people here,” he said. “Look at the footprints.”
“Nura’s people.”
“Had to be. Those things are gone.”
Gods. So much had happened that the attack felt like it had been years ago. Max stopped at what had once been the door. At an open crate, scorched but still standing.
I joined him and looked down. The slave hands within were still there, some burnt so badly that bright white bone cut through blackened skin.
And there, the weight of it all broke me.
I sank to my knees. I bowed over that crate, the smell of burned skin hanging in the air like incense. Tears left little wet spots on their flesh. One, then two, then more, until silent sobs wracked my body.
“How?” I choked out. “How can anything we do make this better?”
“It can’t. Not this part.”
These people were gone forever, and nothing anyone could do — me, or him, or the world — would mean anything to those who had lost their loved ones.
“I should have listened to you,” I said. “You tried to tell me so many times that no matter what I did, it would end up this way.”
“No, Tisaanah,” Max murmured, but the words poured out of me.
“It doesn’t matter how good our intentions are, or how hard we try. It would become something— something twisted. That is what we were fighting for? Just another slaveowner? I brought them here and I asked them to trust me. Now their families are dead and they’re just gears in a different machine. And I have given them nothing.”
Nothing. I had traded away every bargaining chip, and now I was left with no magic and corrupted influence wrenched from a corrupted system. All while an even darker shadow loomed over us, rendering it all useless.
“Is that what they’re going to become?” I murmured. “Again, they’ll become sacrifices for the greater good?”
That’s how it always had been, for us. We were expendable. And everything I did had just perpetuated it.
“We won’t let that happen.” His eyes went far away. “What she showed us was…”
Horrifying.
“Do you believe her?” I asked.
“She wasn’t lying. She couldn’t fake what she showed us. You would have been able to tell. And I….know her well enough to know, if it wasn’t real.”
Gods, the things we had seen. I hated her. It made it even worse, somehow, to see and feel all of her thoughts firsthand, and watch how they came to such horrible conclusions. I had no doubt that Nura had truly loved Max. And she had decided that her love gave her absolution for all the bloody sacrifices she would make on the altar of her good intentions.
“And if what she showed us was true… if what Ishqa told us was true…” My words faltered, and I closed my eyes, a headache buzzing beneath my temples. Ishqa. Fey. An invitation to go be a weapon in yet another war.
Max let out a breath between his teeth. “As if our petty mortal problems weren’t enough.” Then his gaze flicked to me, and something shifted in it. “I don’t know what we do with this.”
He said it like a shameful confession. The expression on his face twisted a dagger between my ribs. He’d gotten out of all of this. And I’d dragged him back in, only for him to end up fighting for terrible leaders and terrible causes, with bigger sacrifices still on the horizon.
He des
erved so much better.
“I think about it often, you know,” I whispered. “How much I wish I had gone with you. When you asked me to leave Ara with you, before I made my Blood Pact.”
It felt like a betrayal, to say it aloud.
“You were the one who wanted to save the world,” he said, quietly. “I just wanted to save you.”
If I hadn’t been so sad, I would have laughed, because that was so blatantly untrue — even if Max himself didn’t realize it. But my chest ached with love for him, both for the lie he told himself and for the deeper truth beneath it.
“I need to tell the refugees. About… the loss.” I nodded to the hands.
“I’m with you,” Max murmured, and gods, I never knew how precious three words could be.
It was jarring, how the refugee dwellings looked exactly as they had when I had last been here. I stood in a street bustling with all the activity of a beautiful winter afternoon, Max beside me, utterly silent. I was living in a different reality than these people were. They still lived in a world in which the future was bright and the sun warm and their lives, slowly, were creaking towards normalcy.
They still lived in a world in which their family and friends were still breathing, somewhere.
Max’s hand slipped into mine. Maybe someone else would have argued, would have said, Maybe it’s a mercy that they don’t know. But Max knew as well as any of us how precious the gift of knowledge was to people who had spent decades being told what they did or didn’t deserve to know. He understood as deeply as I did that they deserved the truth, and those lost lives deserved to be mourned.
“Tisaanah!” I turned to see Serel approaching, a grin on his face. “I didn’t expect to see you around here for a while longer...”
He got closer, and his voice faded just as his smile did.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured, because of course he knew me well enough to sense it.
The sight of him made my eyes burn. Yes, I knew what it was to dream of an impossible embrace. And in Serel, I had gotten my miracle.
But so many of these people would never get theirs.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 48