His niece turned for the door. Rayan wished to stop her, but a lifetime of wisdom told him it would only make things worse. He let her final words hang in the air, far heavier than any incense.

“For once, the goddess must earn my faith.”

“You’re gloomier than usual,” Mari said as she joined Thorda on the couch facing their new home’s hearth. “And that is truly saying something.”

“Is it so obvious?”

Mari’s father had stared into the fire for several minutes without him noticing she had entered the room. Normally he’d be aware of her every movement, with senses she swore bordered on the divine. To be so completely lost in his thoughts meant something troubled his soul.

“Yes,” she said, declining to elaborate further. “So what bothers you?”

Her father shifted against the arm of the couch, away from her. Physical connection had always been complicated with him. He loved her and Stasia, she knew that in her heart, but he did not show it with a kind embrace or a playful touch of their hair while they were children. His fight for a free Miquo, and a free Gadir, was for his two daughters more than it was for himself. At least, that’s what she told herself as they rode a carriage to yet another nation, to fight yet another war.

“I find my sins weighing heavily upon me this evening,” he said, eyes locked to the hearth. “Especially the lives of the forty who will hang on the morrow. They trusted me. I offered them promises of a free Thanet, and now they rot in a prison, their only future a knotted rope.”

“Imperials love to blame punishments on those who resist,” she said. “No different than a drunken abuser blaming his wife for her bruises. The empire is responsible for its actions, not those who rise up to point out its crimes. Those forty, they chose to fight back. They wanted to fight back. We both know this. You’ve given the same speech a hundred times before, to men far less intelligent than yourself.”

“Yet it does not absolve my involvement,” her father said. “These men and women, they die because of me. They die because of my choices. They die because I sailed across the Crystal Sea, scattered gold and silver coins across Thanet’s sands, and bade them to rise up and believe. Forty men and women, set to hang from a rope. I will not pretend their blood belongs on anyone else’s hands but my own. I must put that guilt upon my shoulders and bear it, for who else will?”

“We will,” Mari said. “Stasia and I, we’ll keep going, for as long as we must. Everywhere we go, there are people willing to help. You don’t need to carry the burden alone.”