Kess woke hours later to a warm, dark room, surrounded by the sounds of sleeping people. Beside her, Rowan was out cold, his head back against the wall. How he slept like that, she had no idea, but her own head had been crammed into the corner of the room and she fared no better.

  She flexed her sore neck and blinked for a moment in the near darkness, though someone had left a small lantern burning towards the center of the tavern. Her throat burned and her entire mouth felt like parchment, so she took a swig of water from her canteen, stuffed behind her against the wall. Her head ached, and her body burned. Some of the shaking from earlier remained when she put the canteen back in its spot, but she could already tell that she had avoided the worst of the burnout. Perhaps being out in the icy rain all night had been the best remedy for a woman whose body burned like a well-lit fire when overused.

  She leaned her head against the wall and sighed, watching Rowan. His curls had dried, which left them even messier than they had been before. She fought the urge to run her fingers through them. He was handsome, but that didn’t mean she had to fall for him. The galas were a role she played for the sake of gaining information—and Rowan was in a similar role. She shouldn’t confuse their jobs with their feelings. But the line was blurred more than Kess wanted to admit.

  Rowan stirred, opening his eyes. He uncrossed his arms and immediately placed the outside of his hand to her cheek, brows furrowed.

  “How bad is it this time?” he asked quietly. Kess shrugged, fighting the urge to place her hand over his.

  “I’ll manage,” she said. A wry smile appeared on Rowan’s lips.

  “That’s what you always say,” he said, taking away his hand.

  “It’s not as bad as last time,” she assured him.

  “Well, Mariel help us if it was. You’d already be dead.” Something soured in his expression with the comment, and he turned towards her slightly, one shoulder pressed into the wall. “Kess, I meant what I said earlier,” he said. “If you keep trying to do everything alone, it’s going to get you killed.” His eyes were pained—even more than when he’d spoken to his father. “Let me help. You have to trust someone.”

  Kess studied his half-shadowed face by the dim light of the lantern. Then, she surprised herself by putting a hand on his chest. She watched her hand rise and fall with his breathing, the sounds of sleeping refugees a soft silk against her ears.

  “Trust requires truth, Rowan,” she said quietly. “And I haven’t been honest with you. There are…” She trailed off, fighting for the words. “Things you should know about me. Where I’ve come from, what I’ve done to get here. This—what you see here isn’t the entire picture,” she said, meeting his eyes. It was there that she saw something she feared more than Rae, more than the Council, and maybe more than herself. “I—I don’t know if I can—“

  “It’s fine,” Rowan said, taking her hand and tentatively sliding his other arm around her shoulders, holding her close. Kess stiffened, then relaxed. Whatever this was, she wanted it—needed it, even. She just wasn’t sure if she deserved it. “You don’t have to tell me, Kess. Until you’re ready,” he said. “But let me help, at least.”

  Kess nodded and said no more, leaning against him, his presence a salve to her spirit. She didn’t know how much she could give him. If this was real, here was one more person who risked themselves by being around her. Would Rowan even want to be around her if he knew what she’d done?

  They were questions she didn’t have an answer to, but she leaned against him all the same, knowing that the moment would pass, and she would have time to answer those questions another day.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Close to dawn, footsteps woke Kess. Eamon appeared from behind the bar, a curious look on his face. Rowan was already awake beside her, and he rotated his arm with a wince. They’d both fallen asleep pressed against one another, and heat that had nothing to do with burnout crept into her face. Eamon, to his credit, said nothing about their embarrassing sleeping arrangement.

  “You’d both better come with me,” Eamon whispered, careful not to wake others. Kess and Rowan shared a look, then got to their feet and picked their way through the piles of sleeping bodies. A few eyes tracked Kess in the darkness as she walked in front of Rowan, and she tried to push her discomfort down to an unreachable place.

  Eamon led them out of the tavern and into what used to pass for an office. A single lantern lit this room as well, but it was enough to see by, as the room was embarrassingly tiny. A single desk sat in the center of the room, with a chair behind it, and everything was coated in a fine layer of dust, except for a single, crumpled sheet of filthy paper, folded multiple times—clearly a new addition to the desk’s stack of papers.

  “Lass, you should see this,” Eamon said, sitting in the chair with a puff of dust. His rugged, bearded face looked as haggard as Rowan’s did, and he rubbed his eyes. “One refugee was carrying it, stuffed in his shirt. He handed it to me. I don’t know how the guards didn’t find it, to be honest with you. It’s—“

  Kess stared at the paper, her mouth slightly agape. “It’s Draven’s will,” she whispered, running her hands over the page, trying to flatten it. She had recognized the handwriting before anything else, a careful but plain scrawl learned for utilitarian purposes only. A broken seal at the top of the page indicated its status as testament and will.

  “Aye,” Eamon said, voice grave. He looked past Kess’s shoulder at Rowan, his dark eyes serious. “It names her as the sole heir to his property and fortune, but more importantly, as the new leader of Forgebrand.”

  Kess scanned the paper multiple times with shaking hands. Surely it was a mistake. She finally lowered it, looking at Eamon with panic. “That can’t be right,” she said.

  “I didn’t write it, lass.”

  Kess reread the page over and over, but the words were plain and simple. In the event of my untimely passing, I abdicate my title and assets as Forgebrand leader to my adopted daughter Kestril. Her family name was conspicuously left out.

  Rowan gently took the paper from her hands to read it for himself. “Well, he’s not wrong,” he said in a matter-of-fact way, handing the paper back to her.

  “I don’t know how to run a militia,” Kess said. “I didn’t even know Forgebrand was a resistance before this week.” Eamon chuckled, but the smile didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “Aye lass, but now you’re leading it. Fortunately, none of the rest of us have any idea how to run one either, or what Draven intended to do with it in the first place.”

  “We’ll have to let Arlette know,” Rowan said from behind her. “She’ll be able to get you on the right track.”

  Kess stared at the page for a very long moment. Panic lanced through her, a white-hot prickly feeling that covered her from head to toe. But beneath it, Kess felt something like relief. Draven had trusted her. Draven had known, somehow, that she wouldn’t turn her back when the Downhill needed her help.

  It filled her with warmth—that of pride. Her hands tightened around the page as the words danced around in the shadow of the flickering lantern, and she wiped at her tears with her other hand. But she was also no general, and no leader. She couldn’t be what these people needed—she couldn’t be Mariel.

  When the lower city called for her leadership and direction, and all she had to offer them was a silly girl, where would that leave them all?

  “You’ve both had a long night,” Eamon said, his voice gentle as Kess folded the page again. “I’ll take care of things here, and you two can get some proper rest—not against a wall in a tavern.”

  “It wasn’t the worst night of sleep I’ve ever had,” Rowan said, running his hands through his curls. Kess caught a ghost of a smile on Rowan’s lips.

  “Now that I believe, lad. Get out.”

  Rowan and Kess made their way through the tavern and into the underground tunnel connecting it to the manor. Their departure was quiet, but Kess didn’t miss the dozens of eyes on her, the excited whispers, and the very distinct feeling that she was about to disappoint a great many people.

  NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s and publisher’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.