Page 62 of Never the Roses

The king’s war council?“Discussed me?” she cut in sharply. “You told them where I am?” She tensed in alarm, Bunny raising his head with a growl, hackles rising.

“Easy,” Stearanos said, to both of them, expression stern, but voice gentle. “No, I told them nothing. Only that I would try to find you, since they begged me to.”

“I won’t be bought by your king or your war council,” she fired at him. “You should know better than that.”

“I do know better, which is why I’m not asking for that. Would you relax and hear me out?” Impatience edged into his tone.

She sat back—though she was anything but relaxed—lifting a hand in resignation, waving him to go on.

“Without the king’s knowledge, the council has calculated to the best of our ability what will result from my brilliant strategy.” His voice was bitterly sardonic, flattening as he went on, tallyingfor her, relentlessly and methodically, the cost of this war that had nothing to do with her.

She closed her eyes as the numbers washed over her. He kept details to a minimum and, as much as possible, she divorced the strategic part of her own mind, honed by decades of war, from trying to predict the order of conflict, the potential locations of the various battles. Some of them, though, were easy to guess. The predicted casualty numbers staggered her, as he intended them to. What truly gutted her, as Stearanos warned her it would, though he remained stoic in his recitation of the numbers, was the future he painted for both realms, overextended, supplies attenuated, weakened to the point of being a dying carcass for the vultures of the world.

He eventually concluded his soul-crushing summation, blessedly ending the onslaught of horror. Only when the silence stretched out did she reluctantly open her eyes, finding him regarding her steadily, expectantly.

“I don’t know what you expect I can do to stop any of this,” she said. “It’s your war, not mine.”

“I know,” he replied. “I’m not expecting, but asking: will you come out of retirement?”

“No.” The denial erupted out of her unbidden.

“Just to provide the brakes that you always have.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Not to fight. Only long enough for His Majesty to hear that you have returned to the queen’s court. They won’t dare attempt this war with the threat of you on the other side. Don’t you see how simple and elegant a solution this is? You can stop this before it begins. Only you, Oneira.”

She did see. She saw and she hated that he was likely right. But she… could not do this. “I can’t,” she said, a broken creak of a refusal. “Don’t ask this of me.”

He met her eyes gravely. “Iamasking.Weare asking, all of us indebted to Uhtric—and you know what that means, his holding our contracts, our debt, and what it will mean for us should the king discover our actions. I wouldn’t ask it if I could think of any other way. Please, Oneira.”

“You didn’t have to craft such a brilliant strategy, Stearanos!” she hurled at him, suddenly and incandescently furious, startling Bunny anew with her outburst. Moriah only gazed at her calmly, having listened all along. “I am not responsible for correcting a situationyoucreated.”

“I know you’re not.” Instead of meeting her anger with his, he yielded, turning up his palms. “And yet, I cannot unmake what I’ve made.”

“Again,yourproblem,” she hissed, her fury transcending heat and chilling to ice.

“Myfault,” he corrected. “But the problems this war will create will belong to all of us. They will reach even this pristine place.”

“Then I’ll find another.”

“And continue to run, Oneira?” he asked softly. “You cannot run all your life from who you are, from the road that’s brought you to the here and now.”

That brought her up short. “Is that what you think I’m doing—running? You couldn’t be more wrong. Running from the truth is whatyouare doing, Stearanos. You, blithely going along, doing as you’re told, burying your head and pretending you’re just an employee, but this war couldn’t happen without you.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” he fired back, in a temper at last. “I don’t have the luxury of being able to retire, Oneira! My debt is crushing. I have no idea how you paid yours, but I cannot escape the geas that binds me. Even if I sold everything I own, I’d still owe three times that amount. I don’t have your freedomto putter in the garden and divorce myself from the woes of the world.”

Thrusting herself to her feet, fingertips tingling with the desire to open the Dream and throw something truly hideous at Stearanos, Oneira struggled to master her seething rage, all the more intense for having chilled. She knew this place in herself, where her skull plates felt as if they folded in tightly, where she became the warped and amoral creature capable of anything to free itself.

“Myfreedom,” she sneered. “Do you have any idea what price I paid to escape the wars of men? No, you don’t. But I paid it and not so I couldputterin my garden, but so I could… could—” The words stuck in her throat, her breath caught painfully in her chest.

With detached shock, she realized she was perilously close to tears. Yet again. In all these years, she hadn’t wept. Not since that day when the academy took her away, and she sobbed in the arms of her mother, who had handed her over, that look of mingled terror and revulsion on her face. Oneira hadn’t known to identify those emotions then, but she’d known very well that she’d been a bad girl. So bad that they didn’t want her anymore. Didn’t love her.

Worst of all, they’d been right. Anyone could argue that she’d been a child, that her family had acted unfairly, out of fear and ignorance. But, in the end, Oneira had proven them correct in their foulest assumptions: they’d birthed a monster, a being capable of unthinkable and unthinking destruction. One not only able to commit the vilest of crimes, but willing to. She’d grown into an anathema, and she had only herself to blame.

“Could what, Oneira?” Stearanos asked softly, with more compassion than she could bear.

Yanked back from her thoughts, spiraling down into the dark pit of despair, she stared at him wildly, having nearly forgotten he was there.Whywas he there? To ask her to do the impossible, appealing to the conscience she utterly lacked. Well, she’d show him.

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