Page 255 of Season Warriors & Wolves

My brother looked up at me. “You told her?”

Hm. That is why she’d wished me an early happy birthday the other night. She’d killed Celia then. “Didn’t think it mattered much. You told me so yourself when I caught you the first time. Don’t give a shit what anyone says or you say. That’s it, those were the words.”

“Old fu—”

Snow hit him. “I’ll kill them all, Mal. I’ll even kill you, if I must.”

My brother grinned at her. “And we’re back to threatening me morning, noon and night. Might I persuade you to spare me a while longer?”

“How?”

He brought a little bag out of his jacket pocket. “A snack.”

“Mooncakes.”

Oh to be a boiled burnt sugar and flour little treat.

“When do you leave?” I asked him.

He grabbed Snow’s hand and took a bite from her sweet. “Two days from now.”

I expected rage, fury, blood. Snow did not react to the stolen bite. She did react to him leaving. “Stay.”

“I need this. If I don’t go somewhere far from h—” He caught himself, leaving that sentence hanging for a few seconds. “I need the space.”

“Come visit. At Dolunay,” my wife said.

He threw an arm around her neck and kissed her head. “I will. At Dolunay. Every one of them.”

Endgame-Five years after

Kilian

It was oddly silent, and it was a silence I no longer liked after years of loving chaos—of adoring and worshipping chaos. I missed it. It was also silent enough for me to hear the steady small breaths of the small human plastered to my chest while I finished signing approval for the new deliveries to the unblessed isles. My son slept softly against me, his dark hair was plastered to his sweaty forehead and his pale cheeks had turned a soft hue of pink. He had so much of his mother, yet everyone insisted he resembled me most. How could they say that when he snored identically to her.

He would be three soon. We had waited. We’d waited and healed first. Though not entirely, the small one had joined us in that process, too.

The skies gurgled outside and lightning struck ahead, but Sam didn’t stir. He was already used to it as he often preferred to sleep in his grandfather’s bed in Olympia amongst thunder and rain, surrounded by the noise and grandness of it. For the first few months of his life, the sounds of the skies had been the only thing to calm him down, to soothe his cries and many restless nights.

Slowly, I threw a jacket over his small body and I stood, heading toward the direction of lightning I had not seen in nearly a week.

She walked along Atlas who was rattling off a list of things that he had prepared during her long week stay in Isjord to aid Thora, now Queen of Isjord.

When she took notice of us, she smiled wide and rushed her steps as did I.

“Darling,” she whispered, kissing me. She pulled the jacket covering our son back to reveal his face and kissed his cheek. “My little darling.”

I pulled her to me and kissed her again. Apparently too much because Atlas slowly backed away and fled the scene. “How are my girls?”

“Famished. If I see another bowl of pine soup in my periphery I will scream.”

Still chuckling, I went down on one knee and kissed her round stomach. “What shall I feed my little princess and her mother, hm?”

She licked her lips and thought about it for a moment. From the way she scrunched her nose as if she could already feel the sourness of her favourite fruit in her mouth, I already knew.

“No more munching on lemons,” I said.

“Can’t help it.”