“You don’t understand,” his father said, his voice oddly gravelly. His hand clenched into a fist around the dart in his palm. “I have to—”
“Have to what?” Tristan interrupted, angry again. His father’s plans were going to get him killed, and Tristan wasn’t going to sit here and pretend it was a totally reasonable idea. First Veronyka and Val, and now this. “Protect our interests? Prove a point? I don’t—”
“I have to face them again!” his father roared, slamming his closed fist onto the table. Silence pressed in on them, and Cassian’s chest rose and fell rapidly as he collected himself. “I have to.”
“No, you don’t,” Tristan said desperately, but his father’s anger had ebbed away as quickly as it had come, replaced instead with cold fury.
“Yes,” he said, his voice soft and deadly and dangerous. “I do. I can still see their faces, Tristan.” He closed his eyes, and Tristan railed against the tired look on his familiar features, the way his wrinkles and gray hairs stood out in the harsh light of the nearest lantern, casting his father into stark relief. “I can still see their faces when they condemned her, your mother, to death. It was unprecedented. It was personal. And they smiled when they did it. I will smile too.”
“Will you smile when you’re dead and leave us here without a leader?”
“We’ll have a leader,” the commander said, opening his eyes. They glittered as they settled on Tristan, a fierce mix of desperation and pride in his expression that Tristan had never seen before. It rooted him to the ground, made his chest heave with something that should have been happiness but wasn’t. “That’s why you cannot be involved in this, son. Why I’ve kept you in the dark. They need you—the Riders need you.”
“But I need you,” Tristan choked out, staring at the table and avoiding his father’s gaze, unable to face the vulnerability there. Didn’t his father see that if he failed, those same people who’d taken Tristan’s mother from him would have taken his father, too? “You can’t go through with it. It’s a suicide mission.”
“No,” the commander said, straightening, his voice steadier than before. Tristan chanced a look at him, and his eyes were dry. “I have every intention of returning. Even so, it is perilous work—and I am the only one who can do it.”
“And you expect me to… what? Stand aside while you take all the risk?”
“I expect you to be a leader, and sometimes that means playing parts we don’t want to play or taking a back seat and letting others do the work. Sometimes it means presenting a unified, confident front—no matter how we might feel on the inside.” There was censure in his words, along with something that almost sounded like humor.
“You want me to stop fighting with you,” Tristan said, more statement than question.
“That would be nice,” his father said dryly, taking a drink from his cup.
Tristan ran a hand through his hair, suddenly exhausted. He didn’t know how long they’d been talking, but he knew he had to get back to the others. Val had given Veronyka until midnight, and there was the matter with Latham, too….
Tristan had work to do. He had to be a leader.
“I’d better get back to my patrol.”
His father nodded. “I will stay here for the night in case there are any more issues. Then I’ll return to the Eyrie in the morning.”
“You’re letting me stay—letting me keep my command?”
A small smile spread on his father’s face. “You’re the one who’s made a mess of things—it’s only fair that you should have to clean it up.”
Now I fight not for my life or my world,
but for you and yours.
- CHAPTER 36 - VERONYKA
THE SILENCE AFTER LATHAM’S accusations and the commander’s arrival was decidedly awkward.
Veronyka just put her head down and worked, avoiding the others, though she felt their stares. In some ways it was a relief to finally understand Latham’s ill will toward her…. But that didn’t mean she was happy about it. She’d blamed herself for much of the devastation after the attack on the Eyrie, especially with regard to the animal population. Latham was right—it had been Veronyka’s idea to involve first the phoenixes, then every animal at the Eyrie. Some, like Xoe and Sparrow’s animal companion, Chirp, had paid the ultimate price—but it was because of their involvement that anyone had survived at all. She’d made peace with that, and the fact that those