She wasn’t sure what side of the line she fell on. For Zekia and the Crafters who believed in the Kingpin’s new world, weren’t Karam and the others just villains who were trying to steal it from them?

“Wesley has killed people too,” Saxony said. “He handed Zekia over to Ashwood once before. Maybe my sister is too far gone, but you need to think about the possibility that Wesley might also be beyond saving.”

“I have,” Tavia said, but there was no change in her eyes.

She had been threatening to give up on Wesley for years, but her inaction spoke volumes that her vows could not. Threats were nothing if they didn’t carry weight, and Tavia’s words were as light as air, flying from her lips and across the wind into nothing.

She couldn’t give up on Wesley, even if she tried. Karam could see that. Just like Karam would never give up on Saxony, or choose a side that didn’t have her on it.

If the years of Wesley being a crook and a total bastard hadn’t changed Tavia’s heart, then Ashwood’s influence wouldn’t. This war wouldn’t. She’d try to save him until the end, even if that put her on the opposite side from her friends.

Karam clutched her pehta’s pendant, threaded around her neck and falling perfectly beside her thumping heart. She wondered what side he would be on, or if he would counsel the absence of such a choice, trying to bring their armies together instead of preparing for them to fall apart. Or perhaps he would still have preached peace and given them a solution that offered no bloodshed or trampled loyalties.

Karam wished he were still alive to ask, but it was useless to hope for such things, because her father was gone, as so many others soon would be.

Life and loyalty were constantly in flux and Karam knew that sooner or later every bond on this side of the Onnela Sea would be tested.

She and Saxony and Tavia would fight this war on whatever side it took to save the people closest to them. Karam could only hope that those sides stayed the same for as long as possible.

ASEES LOOKED between Karam and Saxony, as though she were trying to decide who was more senseless. She finally settled on Saxony.

“You want me to go against the leader of your Kin? The woman who is allowing us safe stay in this place?” Asees asked her.

Though Asees and Karam had grown to respect one another, their mutual love for Arjun like a bond between them, she often looked at Saxony in a way that was far from endeared. Nobody could blame her, given everything that had happened between the two of them.