Chapter 77 — The Question I Had to Ask

I reached for the pendant that night, alone in my room despite every careful rule about proper watch and guarded circumstance, because the question burning through me would not wait for a more cautious hour.

Cressida, I thought, as soon as the familiar warmth rose beneath my palm. I need to ask you something, and I need you to understand why I have to ask it plainly.

Ask, she said, and something in her voice already carried the wariness of someone who suspected what was coming.

Were you at my mating fire? In my first life? Watching from the edges while Kael rejected me?

The silence that followed stretched long enough that my heart began to pound with something closer to dread than patience. When Cressida finally answered, her voice had gone quiet, careful, stripped of its usual warmth.

No, she said. I was not there. I did not learn of your death until considerably after it had already happened, in whatever strange way knowledge travels between broken timelines. If someone was watching that night, planting fragments in the mind of the man who rejected you, it was not me.

How do I know that's true?

You don't, Cressida said, and the honesty of the admission landed harder than any reassurance could have. I understand why you have to ask, Liora. I understand why trust, after everything you've already survived, doesn't come easily or completely. I can only tell you what I know to be true, and let you weigh it against whatever else you've learned.

I sat with that a long moment, turning the uncertainty over, wishing desperately for some clearer way to test the truth of what she offered. If it wasn't you, I said finally, then who? You said yourself you've fought this same war across multiple lives. Could the cold presence have a companion I don't yet know about? Someone working alongside them rather than against them?

It's possible, Cressida admitted slowly. I've never encountered evidence of it before, in any life I remember clearly. But my memory of those earlier lives grows less reliable the further back I reach, the same way your own memory of your first life has already begun to fade and shift as this second one diverges from it. There may be things I've forgotten. There may be people I never knew to look for.

That's not comforting.

No, Cressida agreed. I don't imagine it is. I wish I had a cleaner answer to give you. I only have the truth, such as I understand it, and the truth tonight is considerably messier than either of us would prefer.

I withdrew from the connection slowly, my mind still churning with unresolved uncertainty, and sat alone in the dark a long while after, turning over the particular loneliness of an ally whose innocence I could not fully confirm, in a war where nearly everyone's true allegiance remained, in some crucial way, still hidden from view.

I thought of everything Cressida had given me since our first contact — the warning that had saved Seraphine's life, the patient teaching about my own developing gift, the raw honesty of her admission that she had failed this same fight more times than she could bear to count. None of it felt like the careful performance of an enemy. And yet performance was precisely what Vane had once offered me too, warm and convincing enough that I had trusted him completely for the better part of a year in my first life, never once suspecting the patient calculation beneath his kindness.

I did not know, lying awake long into the night, whether my instinct to trust Cressida was wisdom earned through genuine connection, or simply the same old weakness that had cost me so dearly before — the particular hunger of a lonely soul, desperate enough for allies that she stopped questioning them as carefully as she should have. The uncertainty itself felt like its own kind of exhaustion, one more weight added to a war already heavy with more questions than answers.

I resolved, finally, to keep trusting her cautiously rather than completely — grateful for her help, wary of her claims, watching for whatever proof might eventually settle the question one way or the other. It was not a comfortable resolution. It was, I understood, the only honest one available to me.

I rose before dawn, unable to find real rest, and made my way to the training yard where Maren was already awake, sharpening a blade in the gray early light with her usual unhurried patience.

"You've got that look," she said, without glancing up from her work. "The one that means you've been chewing on something all night and haven't managed to swallow it yet."

"I asked Cressida if she was the woman watching at my mating fire," I said, settling onto the bench beside her. "She said no. I don't know whether to believe her."

Maren set down her whetstone, studying me with the particular, assessing attention she usually reserved for a student's flawed stance. "Belief isn't the only tool available to you," she said. "You can act cautiously toward someone without fully trusting or fully doubting them. Most alliances worth having are built that way, in my experience — slowly, through tested behavior, rather than through a single conversation that either confirms or destroys everything at once."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It is," Maren agreed, with the particular bluntness that had become, over these past months, one of her most reliable comforts. "Most things worth protecting are. Now pick up a blade. Chewing on uncertainty all night does nothing for your footwork, and I'd rather you work through your worry with your hands than simply let it fester in your head until midday."

I did as she instructed, grateful, as always, for the particular clarity her plain, unglamorous wisdom always managed to offer, and found, an hour later, that the familiar rhythm of blade and breath had indeed loosened something in my chest that hours of restless worry alone had never quite managed to untangle.