It ended the way twenty years of brotherhood ends. Badly, and without ceremony.
Cain and Roan went down together into the grey light of the old crossing, and I got to Celeste, and I cut her bonds with the knife Cain had given me at the fords, and I pulled her back from the water's edge and put my body between her and the two men fighting for the right to end each other. She was shaking. Her hands went to her belly first, always first, and when she felt the baby move she made a sound that broke something in me.
"I've got you," I said. "I've got you. It's over."
But it wasn't, quite. Not yet.
The fight didn't last long. Roan was good the best in the war, he'd said, and he hadn't been lying but Cain had twenty years of grief behind every strike, and there is nothing in this world faster t
