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KISSEN LAY IN THE PERFECT CROOK BETWEEN ELO ’ S SHOULDER and chest, sated and exhausted. The cabin she had been permitted was barely three strides across, and her small cot took up most of the room.

Still, she preferred it to a hammock in the belly of the ship, cheek to cheek with its crew that looked like they’d steal her teeth from her mouth and slit her throat with a smile.

Despite Inara’s assurances, Kissen didn’t trust Lessa Craier, or her rebels.

Her hand still ached from having to escape from the lady’s chains through a cellar of blackfire.

It was nice to have a locking door between her and them. And, well, some privacy went a long way.

‘How do you have so much energy?’ she groaned, sitting up and reaching over to splash herself with cold water from the washstand. Elo hoisted himself on his elbows and grinned across at her, looking annoyingly pleased with himself.

‘I didn’t hear you complaining,’ he said.

‘I didn’t say I was complaining.’ She leaned back against the other side of the cot and regarded her friend in the thin light of the porthole.

He had changed. He was harder, wilder than he was when she met him. The burn scar across his chest that he had received from Hseth had healed well into a mottled pink hand, bright against the dark brown skin of his broad chest. It added to the hatchwork of scars from battles old and new.

‘But,’ she added, ‘I know when I’m being used as a distraction.’

Elo tipped his head and smirked. He had a shadow of stubble, accentuating the sharp line of his jaw. ‘I promise you, Kissenna, you had my full attention,’ he said.

Bastard. No one used her full name. Not even Yatho and Telle.

He sat up straighter, his smile falling. ‘Of course I need a distraction,’ he said. ‘We’re on the losing side of war.’

It didn’t feel like war in Sakre. It had been weeks since Kissen had stopped Lessa Craier’s attempted coup, and the king was still lurking in the capital, gathering forces from local nobles, shoring up defences, supplies, weaponry. Most of this war was the tedium of waiting for it to happen.

But Kissen knew that the battle with Hseth wasn’t the only one on Elo’s mind. His own rebellion had failed, lost at the outset, and now he had been forced to unite again with the king he had tried to kill, who had tried to kill him.

‘You should come with us to Irisia,’ said Kissen, and he frowned.

‘Fuck the king. Fuck all of this. Join the Craier mission and speak for Middren there, in your mothers’ land.

’ She nudged him with her foot. ‘Anyway, between Skedi, Inara, her mother and the gods, I don’t know where I stand.

’ She lifted her shortened leg and wiggled it at him. ‘Or hop.’

Elo laughed, closing his eyes, and Kissen pulled her leg back, rubbing her thumb over the severed end of her knee.

She was most comfortable naked, scarred in all her glory, and it was rare that she had the luxury of the privacy and warmth that a ship’s cabin afforded.

After she had dragged herself through the rugged Talician highlands, she was going to make the most of it.

‘Or …’ she continued. ‘If you want me to stay, I could fight—’

He opened his eyes again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Last word I could find of your sisters was that they made it to Weild. If there’s any goodness in the world, they will have taken the first ship to Irisia.’

Kissen glanced out of the porthole towards the harbour wall, between the towers to the open sea, bright as glass and silver-tipped. It was a big world, and her sisters could be anywhere. ‘It’s a fool’s hope,’ she said.

‘But it’s hope. You’ve given more than enough for this country.’

‘And you haven’t?’

He rubbed his brow. The early summer sun beat at the sides of the cabin, and heat prickled on their skin despite the slight breeze slipping beneath the door.

The air was scented with the Irisian stew Elo had brought her in a thin pottery bowl from one of the harbourside stalls.

His favourite. ‘I can’t leave,’ he said.

‘I won’t. My place is here. Only a coward abandons the mess they made. ’

‘It’s not your mess,’ insisted Kissen. ‘It’s Arren’s, it’s the gods’, it’s Lessa Craier’s. You tried to put things right.’

‘And failed.’ Elo laughed hollowly. ‘Miserably. I almost broke our land on the brink of war. I almost lost Inara, got your family killed.’ He touched the top of his hair; it had grown out in tight coils, nearly long enough to braid. ‘I almost got you killed, Kissen.’

‘Well, I contributed some arrogance to that, didn’t I?’ she said.

He laughed again. At least she could make him laugh.

His smile was warm, but brief, and he swung his muscled legs out over the side of the narrow bed.

She liked that he was comfortable around her, in his own skin.

Honest. They were honest with each other.

This was no love story between them, no romance.

It was trust, unfettered. Need, without possession.

She had the sudden urge to kiss him again.

‘My time is marked by failure,’ he said. ‘I may as well accept it and fix my mistakes, or die trying.’

‘Or, you could leave behind this land that has done nothing but hurt you.’

He looked at her then, and by the crease near his lip, the tension in his jaw, she knew he would not. Could not. He had given too much to Middren, to Arren, to let it all go.

‘Do you think you’ll come back?’ he said instead of answering.

Kissen pushed her hair from her eyes and leaned back against the cabin wall.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, honestly. ‘There’s not much left for me here apart from you.

And I might have your attention, baker-knight,’ she looked him up and down, ‘and the rest of you. But … I know your heart lies elsewhere.’

Elo winced. Then he stood and grabbed his shirt from the pile he had made of his clothes. The rotten man had folded them as they were undressing. ‘I’d better leave,’ he said, pulling it over his head and the scar on his chest. ‘Before the ship disembarks with me on it.’

Shit. Not her best choice of words. It was his heart, his life, that Hseth and the king had tried to take from him in exchange for power.

Arren. The core of Elo’s hurt and bad humour. His betrayer, and the centre of his soul.

‘He told you he loved you,’ pressed Kissen, ‘didn’t he?’

‘He was manipulating me,’ said Elo, bending over to grab his trousers and giving Kissen a quite tasty view. ‘While I tried to kill him.’

‘And he succeeds in it because …’ Because Elo’s life was intertwined with Arren’s, tangled, knotted, and painful. And ignoring that wasn’t making it go away.

‘We’ve never even kissed, Kissen.’

‘If love were only kisses everyone would be in less trouble.’

‘I hate him. Everything he has done. Everything he stands for.’

‘Love and pain are not so different,’ said Kissen. ‘Why else would gods want blood and death as sacrifice?’

Elo sighed, lacing up his trews. ‘He’s not a good man.’

‘No.’ Kissen grabbed her own rumpled shirt and pulled it on.

These stolen moments could not last long, not when they both walked the fine line between arrest and usefulness in this city.

But perhaps it would have lasted longer had she some better skill in holding her tongue.

‘But if you’re fighting in his army, you’re going to need to resolve your issues somehow. ’

Her knight ignored her, sitting on the bed to pull his boots on.

‘You could fuck,’ she said brightly. ‘That worked for us.’

Despite himself, Elo snorted, one boot on, one off. Kissen gave him a grin and leaned over to pick up her new prosthesis from the floor. Elo had helped navigate Sakre and paid for a new one from the funds he had stored in one of the city temples that had been repurposed as banks.

‘Is it working all right for you?’ he asked, noticing her adjusting the straps to put it on.

It was a fine enough piece, with red leather for the kneecap and a wooden leg, but it was nowhere near as effective as the one that Yatho had made.

Its base was already chipped and battered from use, and it hadn’t been created for her, so she felt unsteady in it, as if her leg was a breath behind the rest of her.

Still, it was an improvement on the twisted thing that her old one had become through all her trials.

‘It’s like losing a sword made for your hand, and being given a hammer to use instead,’ said Kissen.

A hammer that bit the hand; the agonising squeezing of her right shin and calf were worse when her leg didn’t feel enough like her own body.

‘But it’s serviceable. The artificers have got better in the years since the God War, you should see the shit I wore as a kid. ’

Elo put his warm hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into it for a second. Then he took a breath—

‘If you say you’re sorry again I’ll punch you in the mouth,’ she said, finishing her straps and shrugging him off. ‘I made my choice to fight the fire god. And beat her too. And I’d do it again.’

Elo nodded, passed her her trews, then picked up his own tabard.

This was a bright padded blue, striped in curling waves of gold, and he fastened it with his belt and a new sword.

He had lost his old one in Lesscia, and this new blade had a plain hilt, no longer a reminder of the lion’s head he had sacrificed.

‘Only …’ she pulled her trews over her prosthesis, the right leg adjusted and unlaced so it would slide on easily. ‘She has briddite in her heart. I don’t know if a veiga’s tricks will harm her this time.’

‘Do you think the reports are true?’ said Elo, kneeling down without being asked to help her tie up the laces. ‘That they can summon her to use as a weapon of war?’