Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Carissa Broadbent (best book recommendations txt) 📖

from my distraction. I snapped my head down to the other end of the table, where Caduan sat.

“On the scouting mission,” he added, as if the silence that greeted him meant he had been unclear.

As always, he seemed to have woefully misread the room.

Shadya spoke first. “Perhaps it would be better to leave such dangerous travels to the soldiers. As a king, your insight may be needed here.”

“The Stoneheld nation is nothing more than a dozen people now, none of whom need me for anything,” Caduan replied. “To say that they need me to stand here doing nothing and being some sort of… figurehead is insulting to them and to me.”

Shadya’s eyebrows arched. Ishqa blinked three times in rapid succession, the only sign that he was taken aback.

I had to fight an awkward laugh. I didn’t understand Caduan. Everyone kept trying to hand him the kind of respect I would kill for, and every time, he carelessly discarded it.

“I think it is unwise,” my father said.

“I disagree.” Caduan looked around the table, his stare suddenly razor-edged. “Let me remind you. I watched my home destroyed. I watched my kin murdered. I watched the world around me burn. And I am not going to sit here in a tunnel and wait for someone else to give me the answers. I want to know why, and when we find who did this, I am going to hear that answer from their lips.”

His words were quiet, but they lingered in the air.

“It is not our place to disagree with that,” I said, before I realized I was speaking aloud.

“Indeed.” Shadya gave Caduan a curious look that he did not return. “It is not. And so it shall be, King Caduan.”

The meeting gave way to a feast. Once the shock wore off, I was so excited that I could barely think — an affectation not at all helped by the several mugs of celebratory whiskey that I guzzled down over dinner. I threw myself into the music of the band, into the dancing at the center of the room. And when I finally saw my father stand and drift away — when I was finally able to find him standing in a quiet hallway, gazing off into the stone shadow of the Pales’ tunnels — I chased after him only to slow to a stop a few paces behind, suddenly self-conscious.

I already had reason to distrust my own words, so often too sharp and too quick. I stood there in silence.

“What is it, Aefe?”

He didn’t turn around. He was staring down the hallway, into darkness so deep that it was nothing but a wall of black.

“What are you looking at?”

“The Pales. Sometimes, when the world is dangerous and uncertain, I just like to… look at them.”

His palm pressed against the stone wall. Something in me leapt at this small, familiar gesture. I do that too! a childish part of me wanted to say, as if to cling to every thread of similarity between us.

I cleared my throat. “It is a great honor to serve them. A great, great honor. Thank you.”

My father glanced at me, and I could have sworn that I saw a flicker of pity in his gaze. “Contrary to what you might think, Aefe, I do believe you have… potential.” His stare fell to my exposed forearm, and the topography of dark X’s. “You just fail to utilize it.”

“Do you ever think that things could be different?” I asked, quietly. “Do you ever imagine what it would be like if they were?”

I cringed as soon as I spoke. As always, I had asked a question I shouldn’t have, and I knew the answer would hurt.

“There is no use in dreaming of realities that do not exist.”

“I am still your daughter.” I wrenched my sleeve up on my right arm, the one covered not with X’s but ink and raised scars that told the stories of my ancestry. “I wear your stories on my skin just as they are in my blood.”

“If only that was the only thing your blood carried.”

I flinched. There it was. Just as I knew it would, just as it did every time, it hurt.

But only because it would always be true.

My father turned to me. There was an odd expression on his face, something I could barely read but was so much deeper than his typical cold dismissal. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought it was affection. Or… regret.

“I do wish that things weren’t as they are,” he said. “But the gods have tainted you. You know why you cannot be the Teirness—”

“I do not want to be the Teirness,” I whispered. “I want to be your daughter.”

My father looked away, as if my words had encroached on something too personal, and I regretted them immediately. When he spoke again, his voice was measured and distant, and I hated my honesty for shortening that brief moment of connection.

“We stand at an important juncture, Aefe,” he said. “The crossroads of so many bloody pathways. Your mission is important, and it will decide whether this one leads to blood. I do not trust the Wyshraj. Watch them. And beyond that, watch for the truth. The Sidnee are relying on you.” He paused, then added, “I am relying on you.”

I couldn’t help but savor those words. I never thought I would hear them.

He placed a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Show me all that you could be, my daughter.”

Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the heady excitement of the day. Maybe it was the rush of his hand on my shoulder, the kind of familial touch I had not felt in so long. But I found myself fighting tears.

“Yes,” I choked out. “I will. I will.”

Chapter Fourteen

Tisaanah

“That,” Zeryth said, “was not what I had commanded you to do.”

He was pacing the length of his office. This seemed unusual. Zeryth was not the type to pace. I stood there