Page 148 of Daughter of No Worlds

“What?”

“You know me well enough by now to know that I’m not stupid, Tisaanah.”

I almost laughed. Stupidity had nothing to do with it. We’d simply moved past the point where either of us was capable of hiding from the other.

“I don’t know. Are we? If you open a door, it opens both ways.”

He scoffed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

A lump had risen in my throat, and when I turned to look at him, I felt it swell. “You should not have come back,” I choked out. “After everything that it did to you.”

Something tightened in his features. Almost a wince. “You should have listened to me.”

He was right, a part of me whispered.I should have.“You should havetoldme.”

“I couldn’t, Tisaanah.”

“Then tell me now,” I said. “Tell me everything. I need to know, because we arelivingit.”

My voice was still so quiet that it was barely more than a whisper. But the intensity of it hung in the words like smoke.

Slowly, he turned his gaze back to mine and held it. There was a part of me that wanted to break it, look away from those peculiar eyes. I didn’t.

“Six months,” he said, roughly. “I had it for six months. Maybe a little longer. I was in the military. A Captain. It was becoming increasingly clear that the war would not end easily or without significant blood. We’d been attacked. Azre, the Arch Commandant, wanted a successor chosen, in case of the worst. Me, Zeryth and Nura were among the candidates. And I wanted it. I wanted that title more than I’d ever wanted anything. So…” His voice trailed off, and when it resumed, it was rougher. “You signed that contract because it gave you the means to protect all the people you left behind. But me? I signed mine because Iwantedto. Because I wantedpower.”

He spat the word, and I couldfeelhis regret, his anger.

“For awhile,” he said, “It seemed like I got that. Because Reshaye is wildly, insanely powerful.Nothingshould be that powerful. My magic was my own, but… so much more. It was terrific, at first. But soon…” He let out a breath. Shook his head. “It’s unpredictable. Possessive. Vindictive. And it’s willing to crush whatever defies it.”

Possess or destroy.

I shuddered.

“Inhuman,” he muttered.

“Inhuman?” I shook my head. “Very human. The ugliest parts of humanity.”

“I believed that if I tried hard enough, I could force it into submission. It didn’t work that way. In Sarlazai, it all came to a head. And then…”

He didn’t need to continue.

My hand slid into his before I realized what I was doing, and his fingers folded easily around mine. In the contact of our skin, I felt faint waves of his nervousness pulse from him to me, even from behind those carefully guarded mental walls.

“The thing was, only a very, very small handful of people knew about the existence of Reshaye. Which meant that most people believed —believe— that I was personally responsible for what happened at Sarlazai. And it was war, but that was…”

His gaze darkened, and as it did, the memories skimmed the surface of my thoughts, too — his memories, of the fire and the flesh and the burned-up too-little corpses.

“There were pre-trials,” he said, “to determine whether I would be charged with war crimes. I wasn’t there. I was… not in a position to testify on my own behalf. But Nura testified for me. For hours. From a fuckingwheelchair. I’ll never forgive her for what she did to those people, or, selfishly, what she did to me. But that… sometimes I still don’t know what to make of it.”

Nura. Ever the enigma. Every piece of information only made her more difficult to understand.

My fingers tightened.

“And they removed it then?”

“Yes. It was… bad. Like receiving it, but worse, because it rips out half your mind with it when it goes. And Reshaye very much didnotwant to go…” He lapsed into silence, then stared at me with a lowered brow. As if there was something else he might say.

But then he glanced away. Shook his head. “Well. It almost killed me.”

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