“Stasia? Singing?” Cyrus shook his head. “That hardly sounds like the brutal taskmaster I know.”

“I thought you said it was way too late to be mean, little prince?”

The rebuke did not have the intended effect. His grin stretched ear to ear.

“Stasia called me that when we were first training,” he said. “Sometimes you two seem so different, and then sometimes, so very similar.”

Mari thought of those simple nursery rhymes her older sister had sung, arms wrapped about her quivering body, warm breath blowing against her neck as the songs calmly flowed. Those early years following Miquo’s collapse were so dark, so clouded with fear and confusion her young mind could not understand, but there had been good among them. There had been peace, however fleeting. Could such a moment ever be recaptured? Stasia was now the fabled Ax of Lahareed, and Mari a god-whisperer. They had built legacies of death and bloodshed over these past two decades.

To go back to singing nursery rhymes. To be that innocent again. An impossible dream.

“Forgive me,” Cyrus said softly. “It seems I have a gift for reopening old wounds through ignorance.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “They’re good memories, mostly. Consider it the dangers of talking truthfully at so late an hour. People say it is in the daylight that things are laid bare, but I’ve found truths are best revealed when the moon is high.”

Cyrus was not convinced. He sat up in his chair and then leaned closer. His eyes focused on the carpet. Mari recognized this look, this posture. She embodied gods and goddesses, and she had been at the receiving end of many quiet, heartfelt confessions.

“It’s always the same dream,” Cyrus said. “I’m back on the balcony, watching our boats burn. Rayan isn’t with me, either. I’m alone. I don’t see the fight. I don’t see Endarius die. It’s just Magus, my parents, and me. He’s calling for me, demanding I show myself, otherwise my parents will suffer. I try to shout out, but I can’t move. I can’t speak. I see my parents kneel. I see the sword lift.”

His eyes filled with tears, only Mari wasn’t sure if he realized it. He looked so distant.

“‘I’m here,’ I shout. ‘I’m here.’ But the sword has already fallen.”

No more words came, for the final image could not be spoken aloud. He was lost in the mixture of dream and memory, one confused and malformed, the other stark and vivid. Mari recognized it well. She had helped others through such trauma. She had lived it herself.