When I speak again, I ask, “Was Aramin always so prickly?”

He shrugs. “As long as I’ve known him.”

“Oh?” I smile and lean back against the cool stone. “Tell me a story and distract me from the misery of our surroundings.”

Jeran’s smile turns wistful. His hands toy with a bit of the wild stalks growing around us. There he goes again, fiddling unconsciously as his thoughts turn to the Firstblade. “I first met him because he needed a translator.”

I laugh. “Naturally.”

“This was long before he became the Firstblade. He and a few others needed to interrogate a Karensan soldier they’d captured. They couldn’t understand a word of what the soldier was saying, of course, so he came to fetch me.” Jeran drops the rest of the wild stalks into the water. “‘I heard you’re the only one in the east patrols who can speak Karenese.’ That was the first thing he ever said to me.”

“He’s so romantic.”

That makes Jeran genuinely chuckle, and his eyes dart up to the underside of the bridge, as if the rest of the city could have heard him. “He looked so annoyed to be asking me that I was genuinely offended,” he says, barely above a whisper.

“And what did an offended Jeran say in return?” I whisper back.

He smiles, and for an instant, a mischievous glint appears in his eyes. “‘How much?’”

I stifle a burst of laughter, and it makes me cough instead. I lean forward and shove his shoulder. “Somehow, I get the sense this is a rare thing coming from you.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic. He paid me fifty of his mess hall credits for that translation.”

I lean my arm on one knee and regard him in amusement. “Jeran Min Terra, I never took you for a mercenary.”

“Aramin brings it out in me.” He winks. “He didn’t speak to me again for months afterward. It took our mutual friends Adena and Corian to force us to start hanging out together in the mess hall.”

I try to imagine all these young soldiers, still recruits who hadn’t witnessed the harshness of the warfront, laughing and joking and pranking one another in the warmth of a shared hall. Hadn’t I once been like that too? Gambling with bored guards, betting on games, covering one another on our watches to sneak to food stands during the solstice?

And then you see the world for what it really is. You’re forced to participate in all the ugliness it can offer. And things change.

If Talin and I can survive all this, what comes next? Can things ever be soft and silly and gentle between us?

“It’s my turn to guess your thoughts,” Jeran says, and I glance over to see him giving me a sad nod. “You’re thinking of Talin, aren’t you?”

Do I make unconscious gestures when I think of her too? I nod, quiet for a while. I’m not ready to talk about the way she’d pulled away during our last dream.