Stormbreak (Seafire #3) - Natalie C. Parker Page 0,38
couldn’t even bring herself to quantify it in any way. She couldn’t even if she’d wanted to. Radio silence was her order. No one except a Bullet would be listening for her call.
When they arrived at the rendezvous, though, she wouldn’t have any choice but to quantify those losses in numbers—how many missing; how many dead; how many of them left to take up the fight or abandon it altogether?
And how had they missed it?
Three knocks sounded against the hatch. Without waiting for an answer, Oran pushed through, his face fixed in an expression of grim determination. Two long strides brought him to her side, where he kneeled to take her hands. His were rough and warm and when he wrapped them around hers, the trembling stopped.
“Did I do this?” she asked in a voiced thinned by exhaustion.
Oran’s sharp brows crashed together. “Caledonia.”
“I know you’ll say it was Lir, but if it weren’t for me, would he do any of this?” She sat up, and her head spun just a little.
“Caledonia.”
“If I hadn’t tried to build an army, this wouldn’t have happened. I don’t even know how many people died back there, Oran. How many people did I get killed because I thought I could stand up to him? Because I thought I knew how to fight him?”
“Caledonia, stop.”
“I can’t. Oran, do you understand that hundreds of people just died and I’m the one who got them killed?!” She stopped. Her mouth falling open in horror, her own words echoing in her head: hundreds of people.
“Caledonia.” Oran’s voice was softer now. He rose from his knees, taking her face in his hands and leaning in to press his lips lightly to hers. When she didn’t immediately pull away, he deepened the kiss until her moment of panic subsided. “I want you to listen to me,” he said, smoothing his hands from her chin to her shoulders. “Nothing I’m about to say is going to make any of this go away. It won’t even make it better. I honestly don’t know that anything can.”
“Then what?” Caledonia had never felt the spiraling sensation in her chest, this feeling that she was falling, sinking, plummeting beneath the surface.
“I can give you something to hold on to,” he said, sitting back on his heels. There was no sympathy in Oran’s eyes. Only understanding. Whatever she was going through, he’d been there before, and he was offering her a way through. Not out.
“Tell me,” she said, missing the warmth of his touch on her shoulders.
“The decisions you make now will never be over,” he began, careful not to touch her while he spoke, aware that even if he understood what she was going through, he couldn’t inhabit it with her. She was on her own, but that didn’t mean she had to be alone. “The consequences are too big, too important to end in a moment. You will carry them with you until the day you die, and others will carry them longer than that. Because that’s what it means to change the world. It means making the kinds of choices that people remember.”
“The ones who survive.”
“Yes, the ones who survive. They aren’t the only ones who matter, but even if they don’t like how you fought, they will always know that you fought for them.”
There was something almost calming in that statement. It felt inevitable and perhaps even simple in the way the Bullet Seas had always seemed simple. You were either a Bullet or you weren’t. Fighting or dead.
Except that wasn’t exactly true. Caledonia knew that. It was why she fought the way she did. Why she released Bullets after battle instead of killing them outright. Maybe if she’d been more ruthless Lir wouldn’t have been able to infiltrate her city, but she was trying to change the Bullet Seas without decimating them. But what would it matter if merciful tactics got everyone dead?
“How can I ask anyone to keep fighting for me after this? How can I ask them to keep trusting me when I hardly trust myself? What kind of leader does that make me?”
“It makes you exactly what we need.” His answer came quickly, without a breath of hesitation. “We missed this, and our losses are terrible, but you didn’t do anything wrong. It’s—war doesn’t work like that. Winning doesn’t mean you were right and losing doesn’t mean you were wrong. All it means is that Lir hit us harder this time.”