“I don’t know if I can ever tell you how sorry I am. I understand if you can never trust me again. But I swear to you, I’m done. I don’t want to hurt you anymore. I don’t want my position back if you’re the price of it.”

“Why does it matter so much to you?”

Even if it would never make her actions right, she wanted to give him this. “I don’t care about the military, really. But it was an escape for me. I told you I never felt like I belonged at the abbey, but it was more than that. Being there … it was letting the queen win. Admitting I was worthless. Disposable. Like I wasn’t her niece but a piece of trash. I knew she would never love me, but I could make her acknowledge me. So I made sure I would never be disposable again.”

Wren clenched her fist, absently watching her magic flicker. “Healing is the only thing I’m good at. The only thing that makes me useful. I had to be the best, or I’d be sent back.”

“That isn’t true,” Hal said. “You’re worth more than what you can do.”

“I guess,” she murmured. “But that was the fire that kept me going through my training and the recruitment process. And then I met Una.”

She still remembered seeing Una for the first time. They’d locked eyes across the field. Una had tossed her hair over her shoulder and given her a look of pure disdain. Wren had been helpless against it. Love at first sight, she supposed.

“The first weeks of basic training were hell. Rumors circulate fast, so everybody knew who I was. Most of them kept their distance, but a few other recruits were awful to me.” She understood it. Her aunt hadn’t done anything for anyone since she took the throne, and Wren had become an easy outlet for the frustration her peers inherited from their parents. “Una caught wind of it one day. She’s always had this sense of black-and-white justice and no patience for nonsense. I’ll never forget the look on this girl’s face when Una pulled a sword on her.”

Wren still shivered when she remembered the ring of Una’s saber loosed from its sheath. The flutter of her tormentor’s pulse as the blade quivered a bare inch from her throat. The righteous anger gleaming in Una’s golden eyes when she said, If you’d like a real fight, I’ll happily oblige.

Of course, Una had shrugged off her thanks. Back then, she had wielded her confidence like a blade, painfully aware of her lack of magic. But she had always been dedicated to protecting those weaker than her. People like Wren.