Averifa went straight to the main gate, where soldiers and dragons were already forming up for departure. Ares stood beside his own dragon, a white beast so large it changed the shape of the courtyard.
"You ride with me," he said.
"Why yours specifically? I have my own—"
"There's no time to argue." He put out his hand to help her up.
Before she could answer, a woman's voice rang across the yard.
"Ares!"
A beautiful woman in a flowing green gown ran past Averifa and threw herself into his arms.
Averifa's blood went cold. She knew that face. She had seen it last on the floor of a hall under a full moon, and it belonged to the woman she had killed, and to the reason she had been executed for it.
Lorenza Orietta Raffendora.
She stood frozen while her worst nightmare arranged itself in front of her, and the sight of the two of them together put a sharp pain straight through her chest.
Ares was trying to push Lorenza off him. "You shouldn't have come," he said, and his voice was firm.
"Don't leave me behind," Lorenza said, and clung harder. "Please. Don't leave me behind."
Averifa was forced to stand and watch the reunion, and a cold, bitter understanding washed over her as she did. She had been so foolish. So thoroughly, catastrophically blind. This had been going on the entire time, right under her nose, in her own house, and she had never once noticed.
I loved a man like this, she thought, watching them. And now I can't even manage a single tear over it.
Lorenza was still clinging. "I won't be a bother. I'll behave. I promise I'll behave."
Averifa stepped forward with a polite, cold smile and interrupted the drama.
"It's quite all right," she said. "Please, go on. This must be your tearful farewell — anyone would find it hard to see their love off to battle."
"She is not—" Ares began.
"It isn't a farewell," Lorenza cut in, lifting her chin, "because I'm going with him."
Averifa's mask came off in one movement. Her eyes went dark, and when she spoke there was a threat sitting openly in her voice.
"You must want to meet your end."
Ares's dragon shifted and rumbled something at its rider, which came out roughly as: stop fussing over your lover so we can finally leave.
"She is not my lover," Ares said, exasperated, to a dragon.
Threats or no threats, Averifa was the one left standing alone in the yard as they made ready to go. She watched them mount. She watched the great wings settle.
"Come back safely," she said quietly. "Please."
Without another word, Ares and Lorenza rose into the night sky on his massive dragon and were gone.
As they disappeared, everything she already knew came flooding back — the inevitable future she was so desperate to avoid, the two of them bound by a love deep enough that one day it would bring a child into the world.
High above the ground, Ares was already exhausted with the situation.
"You are not my lover," he said. "You're a childhood friend. That's all you have ever been."
Lorenza's answering look made it very clear that she did not believe a word of it.
The wind picked up as they climbed.
"Hold on to me properly," he said. "For your own safety."
"I'd rather fall," she said proudly.
Annoyed, Ares reached back, took her arm and forced it around him, and made sure she was holding on so that she wouldn't be thrown off the dragon's back.
Lorenza clung there in the cold air with her feelings in a knot. She could not understand why he was suddenly being kind to her like this — forcing her to hold on, arranging her hands as though she mattered. It would only make her look more foolish in the end. That was all kindness from him had ever done.
Dawn broke over a barren landscape, and they came down at the military encampment.
An officer met them with his report. Thanks to the efforts of every man in the company, the camp had been fully established before sunrise.
Standing with Lorenza at his side, Ares formally thanked his men. Then he gave them a final warning, and it was stark.
"The enemy army will reach this position by morning. Stay alert. Be ready to fight."
The soldiers saluted their commander. While they did, Averifa quietly turned and walked away.
She stood and watched the sun come up over the flat country, and what she felt was not fear so much as finality.
It was truly about to begin.
Ares, in his own way, was in the same sober mood. This was not a game. It was a real war.
Alone in her tent, Averifa let herself remember. In her first life, Ares had led this same army against the Strald Empire on this same ground. He had won — decisively, completely — and Strald had been absorbed into Winstein afterward, and the histories had recorded it as a triumph.
But there was one detail that was different this time, and it would not stop turning over in her mind.
She had not been there.
In the first life she had been hundreds of miles away, in a castle, waiting. Now she was here, with a bow, on the field itself. What part of history was she about to change by accident?
The thought was cut off. The tent flap moved, and Ares was standing there.
"Come with me," he said.