Page 59 of The Truth-Teller's Bargain
The light drew her.
She stepped out of the tent before she’d quite decided to.
The camp moved around her in that careful quiet—soldiers packing, hauling, loading. The rising sun spilled across the field beyond the tents, highlighting the frost on the grass and turning it silver. It was beautiful in the way early mornings sometimes were: fragile, untouched, almost innocent.
No one stopped her as she limped toward it, one step after another. Slowly. Unsteadily. She crested the slight rise at the edge of the camp before realizing she’d left its noise behind.
That was when she saw them, down in the valley below—a small group gathered in the open field. Dawes stood among them, carrying a ledger. The rest of them moved deliberately, sleeves rolled, hands bare despite the cold. Shovels bit into theearth with dull, measured sounds. Someone kneeled beside a still form laid out on a cloak.
A corpse, she realized.
Another body waited nearby.
And another.
The shapes resolved slowly in the morning light as Alethea began to make sense of what she was seeing. These were the lives lost during Leandro Gregor’s attack on their camp.
Dawes stood at the center of it, already dusted with earth at the knees, his broad hands gentler than she’d ever seen them as he arranged one of the fallen—straightening a collar, adjusting a cloak, making something orderly from what violence had left behind.
Someone passed him a small bowl. The wind carried the faintest trace of it toward her.
Ash.
She should have turned away.
Instead, she found herself moving toward them, drawn by the same quiet inevitability that had pulled her from the Healer’s tent into the pale morning light. The slope was gentle, but the descent tugged sharply at the wound in her side, forcing her into a slow, uneven limp. Each step sent a reminder through her ribs—a hot, tightening ache that warned she had no business being upright, let alone walking.
Still, she went.
Fourteen from Nakir’s camp had been laid out in careful rows, each resting on a cloak or a folded blanket. Their bodies were straightened, hands placed neatly over their middles, boots aligned as though they were simply waiting for inspection rather than burial. Their faces were uncovered, turned toward the morning light.
Beyond them, further down the field, another line stretched. The mercenaries. More of them. Twenty, at least. They, too, hadbeen gathered and laid with a kind of reluctant dignity, though fewer hands worked among them.
The sight settled over her with suffocating clarity.
Alethea had seen the dead before. How many executions had she witnessed in the throne room? Too many to count, and every single one haunted her. She had never learned to stomach it.
And yet this was different in every way.
If she had ever believed Goran’s death to be her fault, that weight dimmed besidethis.
Alethea slowed at the edge of the first row, her breath shallow despite the way it pulled painfully against her side. Dawes noticed her—she saw it in the brief rise of his gaze—but she continued as though he had not. He simply continued his work, dipping his thumb into the ash and pressing it gently to the brow of the fallen before him.
She moved along the line without meaning to, her attention drawn from one still face to the next.
And then she saw him.
Cyrus.
The guard who’d stood watch outside Nakir’s tent that first night. Steady, kind, and present in the quiet way of someone who expected nothing but duty. Now he was laid among the others, his face cleaned of blood, his collar straightened, hands folded with the same care as the rest.
Alethea lowered herself to her knees beside him, the movement slow, careful, as she reached for his hand.
It was cold.
She closed her fingers around it anyway.
The gesture came without thought—the same instinct that had kept her at her father’s side as he’d faded, her hand wrapped around his until his last breath, and for the still days that had followed before they laid him to rest.
