Page 60 of The Truth-Teller's Bargain
She had not left him then.
And she did not pull away now.
Up close, she noticed things about Cyrus she hadn’t taken the time to see before. The deep lines carved by years of weather and wear. The dark hair, still thick, though streaked faintly at the temples. A trimmed beard that spoke of routine even in a life that likely allowed little for it. His face had the look of someone accustomed to long watches and hard roads, unremarkable in the way of many who kept others safe.
His eyes were closed now. There was nothing to meet her gaze.
Around her, the morning moved quietly on. Frost surrendered to the slow warmth of the rising sun. Leather creaked. Somewhere on the hill behind her, a horse stamped, impatient for the road.
And in the field, Dawes spoke. His voice carried low and steady, shaped more by practice than volume.
“Borrowed mind, be unbound.”
Ash brushed gently across a brow.
“Borrowed breath, be unloosed.”
Across a throat.
“Borrowed blood, be unspilled again.”
Across a chest.
“Borrowed hands, be unburdened.”
Across folded fingers.
Each body received the same care, the same measured words, whether clad in Nakir’s colors or the rough, mismatched leathers of the mercenaries who’d come to steal her away.
Alethea’s gaze drifted.
Past Cyrus.
To the next.
And the next.
A woman she remembered laughing softly near the cookfires the evening before. A young scout whose name she had not learned. A mercenary barely older than she was, his expressionstrangely peaceful in death, as though the violence that had ended him had not yet reached his features.
Faces.
Lives.
People who’d woken expecting another day.
People who’d died because someone had come for her.
The truth settled without flourish.
These were not people born to legend. They had come from farms and ports and market towns; from families who would still be expecting letters; from lives that had once been filled with small certainties: morning chores, shared meals, the comfort of familiar roads. They’d chosen this path believing it meant something beyond themselves. Protection, justice, a future they could help shape. A cause worth standing beside. Or enough coin to support their loved ones and make it all worth it.
Alethea could not make herself believe any cause—any prophecy, any crown, any future—was worth even a single one of them.
The thought broke through her, a quiet, shattering realization that split something open inside, leaving no space for the easy narratives of sacrifice or necessity.
Behind her, Dawes’s voice continued, steady as breath, as he marked another brow with ash. But the words felt distant now, muffled by the sudden unbearable clarity.
That none of this should have cost them their lives.
