At first his mind could not process what he saw. The general strode into the room with a confident if slightly uneven gait, owing to the fact that one of her legs was missing below the knee. In its place was an artificed prosthetic. Her hair was cropped much shorter than usual, perfectly framing her high cheekbones and a face that, while more lined than Hassan remembered, was as familiar to him as his own, right down to the light brown eyes they both shared, which at the moment were widened with shock.

“Right,” Zareen said faintly behind him. “So, that’s what I was going to tell you.”

Hassan stared at the general, his heart beating double time in his chest until at last he cracked open his mouth and let his disbelief spill from it.

“Mother?”

Even after an hour, Hassan still couldn’t believe it. His mother was here. Alive. Safe from Lethia’s and the Witnesses’ clutches.

And apparently leading an army.

They sat beside each other at the war room table. Everyone else had cleared the room. Hassan’s mother held his hand, stroking her thumb idly over his knuckles. She could not seem to stop touching him. He could not seem to stop staring at her.

“And that’s when we decided to return,” Hassan said. He’d told her everything—from the day he’d fled the palace during the coup to the moment he boarded a ship to come home.

“I thought you were dead,” she said tearfully, cupping his face. “Lethia said you were dead. If I’d known—Hassan, if I’d known, there would have been nothing that would have stopped me from finding you.”

“I know,” he said. He felt tears gather in the corners of his eyes. He could not keep them from falling. “I missed you so much. When I learned of Father’s execution, I just … I had to hold on to hope that you hadn’t met the same fate.”

She shook her head, her face crumpling. A vulnerability she showed to few people. “Your father is the one who got me out. We were both imprisoned in the palace during those weeks after the coup. We could only hope that you had escaped. We had no way of knowing. And your father—he had allies. Ones even I knew nothing about. They were able to infiltrate the palace and smuggle me out. I couldn’t bear to leave him behind, but I knew if you were alive that I had to find you. But as we fled the city, we were attacked again. Many of the people who protected me lost their lives. I lost my leg.”

Hassan had wondered about the wound.