The last fight of the war was not clean, and it was not fair, and it was not the single ringing duel the stories would later pretend it was.
It was Damien and his hardened core against a bloodied king, a servant-born Luna, a wall of exhausted Ironfang, and a traitor who'd chosen, for reasons he refused to name, to fight on the wrong side of his whole life. It was ugly and close and it happened in the failing dark on the lawless ground where Damien had come to watch us die.
Cain took Damien.
That was right. That was owed. Twenty years and two burned parents and a stolen throne it was Cain's debt to collect, and I would not take it from him, even as every instinct screamed to put myself between the man I loved and the blade of the man who'd started all of it. Instead I did the thing the b
