how can you rise
if you have not burned?
She sighs slightly. ”I hope it doesn’t matter. Oh, but if Zariah tricked the Eirachi...” The realization hits her suddenly. Had Zariah tricked the Eirachi, and would it matter? She’d gotten a child, whether that child was actually Zariah and Neron’s or not. Maybe the Eirachi didn’t really care where the child came from, so long as she got one. Or maybe she would be furious. There may be only one choice, outside of execution, when it came to what she could do with Neron and Zariah both.She listens to him, and she wants to tell him that nothing he could have done would have mattered. ”Perhaps that would have stopped the cultists from attacking, but that would not have stopped the Eirachi. That you had no control over. She would have sent something else to our gates, and I have no idea if that foe would have been better or worse.” She pauses, her voice a little harder, though the hardness is not directed at him. It is the Warden voice that she has found with far too much ease. ”Is there anything else I ought to know, though? Things you have found out in the Tundra?”
As he speaks of the shadow of his family, she listens, kissing him briefly when he is done. ”Very selfishly, I do not want you to leave.” Her voice is quiet now, raw in the honesty of those words. Maybe that would change, but she has grown so used to him being there that she cannot quite imagine her life without him. The idea of it feels like a yawning chasm that she would never be able to cross.
WEAVER
