Page 6 of The Last War We Ever Fought

“But you care. You cared enough to take your brother’s place and give yourself a death sentence.”

He started violently shaking at Rowan’s last words, but managed a nod. “If it is meant to be so, then it cannot be changed.”

“This is where you’re supposed to beg,” Rowan said, kneeling down to the boy and inspecting the wound she’d inflicted on him. “Did no one teach you to beg for your life first?”

“What good will it do?”

“I could be remorseful.”

“You’re General Rowan of Ingburn,” he said, wincing as Rowan tightly tied a piece of her own bandage on top of the wound. “You have no soul. They say your parents sold it in exchange for your war skills.”

“Untrue,” she said, wedging the blade out of his leg. “They sold it for a sack of potatoes. Then the merchant who bought me sold me to the barracks once they figured I wasn’t a boy.”

“That is horrible.”

“Also very untrue. My parents loved me.”

“Oh.”

“Also a lie. See what I did there?” She stayed there, pressing on his wound, thinking how her parents never had that chance—to love her. “It is easy to believe lies. Even easier to tell them.”

After thinking for a minute, he asked, “You…you want me to lie to them?”

“Whether you lie to them or tell them the truth about what you saw or heard today will bear no significance in this war. You counted the thousands of armouries we have that you do not have. You noted the thousands of soldiers we have that you do not have. You saw our strategies that you have no chance of evading. Whether you tell them our numbers or strategies, whether you fight us knowing them or not, you will lose. Fighting with the knowledge you are going to lose will not give them much spirit to fight. Your men are owed at least that—hope. If they step on that battlefield without hope, they’ve already died once. It is your choice to spare them an extra death.” Tying one last extra knot to make sure it would not come loose enough to let him lose more blood on the way back to his village, Rowan helped him to his uninjured foot.

His chin trembled and stray tears streamed down his dirt smeared cheeks. “We’re all going to die, aren’t we? My brother, too.”

Tilting her face up to the burning skies that had suddenly spared them with some sunshine after bitter rain, she closed her eyes. “I already killed you, didn’t I?”

The boy's hoarse sobs shook the very ground Rowan stepped on as she helped him to the edge of her camp and onto the concealed path that would take him back to his town.

Rowan couldn’t force herself to return to camp. She stayed there, watching the boy she’d killed disappear through the forest, wondering how many souls she’d taken without making them bleed at all. That was her power. That was her gift from the god who’d tempted her enough to feel anger for the first time in a long while. Rowan’s magic was human in all ways even though she never even partly felt human at all. Rowan knew how to dissect the human mind, how to numb it with fear, how to terrorise it with hopelessness. It was how she’d come this far into the life she had not wanted, thriving in it, too. Her strategies had never touched a human body, only their mind. She’d drowned lands to scare people into thinking of storms and flee instead of fight, she dried lakes and rivers into scarcity and hunger. She planted lies here, there and everywhere human words could seed. And lies were like weed, they took everywhere, even in the most barren of soils. She’d robbed soil out of iron, depriving them of weaponry. She had hunted for food no one needed just so she could taunt her enemy into starvation. And that was how Rowan killed. Without touching blood, without seeing life seep out of anyone’s eyes, without hearing a single last breath.

“You’re a merciless little creature,” the cold, dark voice of War cooed in her ear. “You should have just killed him and spared the boy some misery.”

And despite his heavy presence behind her, she did not turn, she let him linger there. Heart pacing fast, thinking of what he’d do to her. Hoping it would be something unmerciful.

Rowan had only ever wanted one thing. She wanted whoever was writing her story to end it. Because she couldn’t.

Rowan was hoping.

Rowan finally had hope.

That maybe he would do it.

That the God of War would be the one to do so. The one who had already killed her once long ago, when he’d robbed her of the desire to live.

“Maybe he won’t die, after all,” she said, turning to him even though he was closer to her than she’d thought. “Maybe you will die first.”

“Fingers crossed.”

“Fingers crossed,” Rowan agreed, playing to his tune just to see if it aggravated him the same as it aggravated her. Unluckily for her, it looked like he enjoyed blowing his own horn because he grinned down at her. “Do you enjoy suffering this much?”

“Immensely. I wouldn’t be the God of War if I didn’t.”

“You’re right, you’d just be the God of Morons.”

“Maybe you meant belligerence.”