“Yet it was your plan they followed, and your name they chanted after the battle,” Brio points out.

“Are you just riding me, or are you making a point?”

Brio closes his eyes. “A smidge of both, I suppose.”

She removes the cloth from his forehead, using one corner to dab at his temples before returning it to the basin.

“I wasn’t looking for any of this,” she insists. “But I couldn’t ignore what was there in front of us. We never would’ve made it to the Tenth City, not even with the Sicclunan horses. You were dying. And even if I’d been able to heal you, even if we did make it through the Skrain vanguard, the both of us would still be fugitives, with these fucking runes on our skin and because of what you know. An opportunity presented itself.”

“So you started a revolution,” Brio concludes mildly.

“I seized the opportunity. You’re alive. We have a chance, slender though it may be.”

“We have a war. That’s what we have. And it will no doubt be a short and bloody one.”

“What would you have me do, Brio?” she demands. “What did you want to do, if not this? You wanted to change things in Crache, didn’t you? You wanted to stop the lies and the oppression and things like the Savage Legion. Wars, revolutions, what else brings about that kind of change?”

“I wanted to expose the truth,” Brio says, and now the bitterness has crept into his voice. “I wanted to bring the crimes of Crache into the light, where the people could see. They are not all tools of oppression, they simply believe what they’re told, what they’re presented with every day of their lives. The truth would have changed things, without bloodshed.”

Evie stares at the ground, unable to meet his eyes in that moment. She isn’t ashamed of herself or her actions, she simply doesn’t wish to see him in the throes of such naivety.

She shakes her head. “Someone always bleeds, Brio. Your father never understood that, and neither do you. You plead for the people in the Bottoms, but you’ve never lived their lives. You may know one truth, but Crache and its Gens have still blinded you.”

He sighs. “There is nothing to be done now, I suppose.”

“You’ve done all you can. If Spud-Bar delivered your message then it’s given to Lexi to bring light to your truth. Maybe she can, and maybe it will be enough. I hope so, because if my ‘revolution’ as you call it fails here, no one in the cities will ever know. Your truth will be the only weapon that’s left.”

“I never wanted to put Lexi in this position,” he whispers, no longer speaking to Evie.