They’d been in Dunte for three days when Max felt it pressing closer. There was a presence in the woods. An energy. He walked toward the path, only to hear Artis call his name.

“Maxim!” The old man was sitting in the garden near the wood-fired oven where Kyra had set bread to rise. “What are you doing?”

Trying to figure out what is stalking us.

No, better not to bother Artis with it. The old man had softened, that Renata had been right about, but not by much. Max usually saw his grandfather staring into the distance, sometimes leaning toward something, as if there was music in another room he couldn’t quite hear.

“Just taking a walk,” he said. “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Fine.” The old man brought a steaming mug to his mouth. “Just fine.”

Max had never been in the presence of an Irin scribe or singer who was peacefully passing into the heavens. He didn’t know if it was normal for them to look so healthy. Artis was as formidable as Max remembered, if slightly more distractible. Throughout Max’s childhood, it had been Artis who had corralled them and made them practice their letters and books. It had been Artis who had taught them their music lessons. Artis had made them pick up their first sword.

A thousand lessons of war but none about family or friendship. Max didn’t know how to relate to his grandfather in any familiar way. He strolled over to Artis. “What did you do with your ax?”

“Do you want it?” Artis asked. “It’s in the armory.”

The armory was a reinforced section of the barn, unassuming unless you were looking for it. It looked like a storage room unless you knew what lever to pull.

“I don’t want it,” Max said. “There is little use for war-axes these days. They’re a bit conspicuous in urban environments.”

Artis shrugged. “Well, now you know why I’m ready to die.”

A rebellious shout tried to work its way out of Max’s throat. “Why don’t you care?”

“If you lost your Renata, you wouldn’t be asking me that question.”

Max knew he was right. He was just angry about it. “Then tell me why you called us here.”

“Because you didn’t return on your own.” Artis frowned. “We waited for months for you to bring your mates to meet us. You never did.”

“Why would we come where we are not welcome?”

“What are you talking about?” the old man scoffed. “This is your home. You think you need an invitation to come home? I didn’t raise you to be stupid, Maxim.”

“You didn’t raise me to be anything. You trained a little soldier. That’s all we ever were to you.”

Artis’s face froze.

“Be honest in your death, even if you never spoke the truth in life.” Max stepped closer. “You wish we’d died with our mothers because then you could have mourned in peace. Or killed yourself and gone to be with them. But no, you had two small children to care for—children you didn’t want—and you had to raise them. Well, you did. You raised us to be soldiers, and the world put us to use. Why do you expect us to be something we’re not?”

“You have mates now,” Artis said. “You should understand.”

“Understand what?” Max threw up his hands. “That we were enough to stay alive for but not enough to love?” He pointed at the house and dropped his voice. “Kyra is with child. Did you know that? They think we don’t know. They haven’t told anyone, but Renata knew the day Kyra did. And instead of being filled with joy at such a blessing, Leo worries. I can see it in his face. He worries he won’t be a good father because he didn’t learn from his own family.” Max rapped his chest with his fist. “Do you know how angry that makes me?”

Artis said nothing.

Max continued. “That man is the kindest person I have ever known in my life, and I’m not saying that because he’s my cousin. He is the most purely good person I have ever met. And he is worried about loving his own child because of you and Peter.”

Artis’s face fell. “We did our duty. We gave you—”

“Nothing,” Max spit out. “You trained soldiers, but you gave us nothing else. Why would we come here and bring the ones we love to a place of duty and pain? You resented us, and we felt it every moment of our childhoods.”

Some unknown emotion flickered in Artis’s eyes, but he quickly snuffed it out. “Do you want my ax or not?”

“I don’t want your ax.”

“Fine.” Artis stood. “But you should take your father’s sword from the armory before you go. I doubt you’ll be coming back when I’m dead.”

Max started. “You have my father’s sword?”

“Someone in the Riga house found it and sent pictures to Peter. He kept it for you. It’s clean and oiled. Peter made a new scabbard for it, but you don’t have to keep it. It might not be to your taste.”

“Fine.” He glanced at the woods. “I need to go.” He started down the path, only to stop when he heard Artis’s voice.

“There’s something in the woods.”

Max stopped and turned. “What do you feel?”

“I feel… age. If that makes sense. Something immense and old.”

“Malevolent?”

“No.” The old man shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

It was the same feeling Max had. He didn’t know what it meant, but he was going to find out.

* * *

Peter was standing in front of the forge when Leo walked in. His father’s body was dripping with sweat from the fire as he held a bent horseshoe with heavy tongs. The metal glowed red-hot before Peter pulled it out and turned, placing it on the anvil.

Peter knew Leo was there. He knew the moment anyone set foot in his shop. He didn’t look up or acknowledge him in any way. The smith grabbed a hammer hanging from a wooden rack and beat on the shoe, shaping it so it could be useful again.

That’s what my childhood was.

Heat followed by shaping. Max and Leo were pushed to the maximum of their endurance and then pushed again. The scribes who trained them in Riga only taught them when they were at the end of their endurance. When they were malleable. Especially Max. Max had been more rebellious than Leo.

Leo had always wanted to please. He would have taken instruction just to make his father happy, but that wasn’t how it was done.

Once upon a time, when their world was not filled with raw, wounded soldiers, Leo and Max would have gone to a proper scribe academy at age thirteen. They would have learned every facet of Irin life, from preserving manuscripts to magic useful for the family. They would have been taught the customs and spells to care for a mate and children, along with those for fighting, weapons, and building talesm. They would have had a true education from elders and soldiers and fathers and healers.

Instead, they’d been thrown into the fire and shaped to be weapons.

Leo had frozen. He didn’t know what to do. He was still trying to understand what it meant to be a mate; he didn’t know anything about being a father. Then the look in Kyra’s eyes had gutted him.

What he didn’t tell her was how scared he was. How the thought of a small, vulnerable child in their world made him freeze. It was hard enough being an uncle to Malachi’s children. His own and Kyra’s? Terrifying.

Leo sat on a pine stump his father used for shaping metal. There were hammered divots in the top. It wasn’t the stump his father had used when he was a child. Pine didn’t last long, and Leo had been alive for over two hundred years. He’d spent the first sixty training with his father, his grandfather, and the scribes in Riga before being presented to the Watchers’ Council as a full-fledged warrior. The council traditionally didn’t take scribes trained for less than a hundred years.

They’d taken Leo and Max at sixty.

Leo knew war. He knew fighting. He knew nothing about children.

Some nights in Istanbul, dark dreams would taunt him—dreams of screaming and fire—and he would wake up covered with sweat. He’d go to the courtyard, waiting under Matti and Geron’s window, tracing talesm on his temples until he could hear every heartbeat in the house. Until he could hear their inhalations and snores. He would listen for a few minutes—wait for the pounding in his chest to pass—before he could go back to sleep.

They were so small and vulnerable.

The child in Kyra, his child, was even smaller. Only a few months old, it was barely the size of an apricot. Kyra had told him that. She had looked it up online, excited about when she would be able to hear the baby and what the baby’s mind would sound like, and all Leo could think about was how would he be able to sleep knowing that his mate carried new life and he could not guard her every moment of the day.

And then he wondered how he could possibly be the kind of father his child would need when he knew nothing about having a family.

He watched his father quench the horseshoe and hang it on a bar near the forge. Peter hung the hammer and put the tongs on a rack. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt that fully covered him. Scars and burns on talesm were regrettable and often damaged the magical armor their tattoos provided. Wearing protective clothing, even in the heat, was practical.

Peter was nothing if not practical.

“Did you want me?” Leo asked the silent man. “When my mother became pregnant, was it an accident or was it purposeful?”

Peter frowned. “Why would you ask that?”

“Did you want me?”

He pulled off the heavy leather gloves that covered his forearms. “We petitioned Uriel with songs and prayers for three years before your mother became pregnant.”

“So you wanted me.”

“I answered you.”

Leo crossed his arms. The fire was still going, and trails of sweat dripped down the center of his back. “Kyra is expecting a child.”

Peter, as Leo had done, froze. His eyes went wide and darted to the door. “Who is with her?”

“Renata.”

Peter’s posture relaxed, but only a little. “You should not have flown in an airplane to get here,” he said.

“The healer assured her it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“You should drive back.” His eyes kept going to the door.

“She’s safe here,” Leo said. “Do you think she isn’t? Are there Grigori in the village I should know about?”

His father’s spine straightened and he pulled his shoulders back. “No.”

“There are no Grigori?”

“Why are you trying to provoke me, Leontios?”

“I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “No, I do know. I’m angry.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t understand you. And I should know what to do for her, what to do for this child. But I know none of those things because you weren’t a father to me.”

Peter started organizing the shop. Tongs on one wall. Hammers on another. Forging hammers. Chasing hammers. “I do not know what you want from me.”

“I don’t know either. Maybe nothing. Maybe some sign that…” Leo didn’t hope Peter would fill the gap in conversation. “Will you at least tell me about my mother?”

Peter dropped the tongs he’d picked up. They clattered to the stones that covered the smithy, and the violent noise filled the space between father and son.

Leo had never once asked his father about his mother. Some childish instinct had warned against it. From the desolate, dead look in Peter’s eyes, Leo knew that instinct had been correct.

Peter’s eyes stayed on the floor, staring at the tongs he’d dropped. “I killed them all. The Grigori who came to the farm. They were still in the house.” It sounded as if a voice were speaking from the grave. “I killed them all, but I couldn’t find you. There was only dust.”

From the little bit Artis had told Leo and Max, he knew their parents had shared a farm outside Vilnius in Lithuania. Peter had been away, trading in the city. For years, everyone had thought Peter was dead because he’d disappeared after the Rending. There was no reason for Peter to have believed Max and Leo had survived. Irin bodies dissolved at death. They left no trace but a fine gold dust.

Leo’s father was utterly still, a towering bulk of muscle and talesm with hair only slightly greyed at the temples. He was a powerful man, but in that moment, Leo thought if he touched him—if he even came near—Peter would crumble.

“I went… a bit mad when I lost Lauma.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “When I lost you.”

“You didn’t lose me.”

Peter looked up to meet Leo’s eyes. “I did.”

Leo felt his throat tighten, because he realized his father was right. In that shattered moment, Peter had lost everything. Even though his son had survived, he didn’t know it. He hadn’t known it for seven long years.

“You got me back,” Leo said softly. “Wasn’t there any joy in that?”

“There was fear. I was a monster when I returned. The others didn’t trust me. And you were…” Peter looked away. “You look like her. Your eyes.”

Seven years had passed before Peter returned to find Artis. In that time, he’d scribed talesm down both legs and gained scars he never explained. Some of the magic had been covered over, creating thick black bands of ink over Peter’s body.

Blood magic, some had whispered. Black magic. Forbidden.

According to the other scribes, Peter had followed no accepted code when he wreaked vengeance on those who had killed his family. He was mad. Dangerous.

“You didn’t trust yourself around us,” Leo said.

Peter shook his head and picked up the tongs. He set them back on the table. The forge burned behind him, throwing dark shadows despite the sun shining outside.

“I’m sorry I look like her.”

“No.” Peter cleared his throat. “Your eyes are what made me sane again.”

The quiet confession broke Leo’s heart even as it soothed the wound he’d carried since childhood.

“Those things you fear,” Peter said. “Do not fear them. You have Lauma’s heart. I have seen how you are with your mate. You know how to love.”

His father reached into a quenching basin and picked up a dagger black from the fire. He carefully set it in a wooden brace and began to gather the polishing compounds and files he would need to finish the blade.

The conversation was over. It was the longest one they’d ever had.

* * *

Max spent all day in the woods, walking old paths, surrounded by the sights and scents of childhood. He didn’t find anything malevolent. He didn’t find anything at all except an unexpected sense of peace.

It hadn’t been all bad.

Memories washed through him as he wandered in the woods. Memories of long summers and warm fires in the winter. Catching fish and shooting arrows. Though they’d never had love or affection growing up, Max had always felt safe. And he had Leo. Leo loved him. Leo was his brighter, happier half. Leo wasn’t an orphan like Max. Or at least not technically.

Max was surprised by how light his heart felt when he walked to the water. He saw Leo in the distance, sitting on the same rise where he and Renata had watched the ocean the first day they arrived.

He sat down next to his cousin and mirrored Leo, legs propped up and arms wrapped loosely around his knees. His cousin was staring at the ocean. The tide was coming in, teasing the shorebirds with spray and scattering the gulls that hopped around the rocks.

“Kyra is with child,” Leo said into the wind.

“I know.”

“I suspected you did.”

“Everything is well?”

“Yes. She’s very healthy. She spoke to Orsala in Cappadocia and a human doctor in Istanbul. She’s gaining weight, but she needed to. The doctor said she was too thin.”

“Good.”

They stared in silence at the waves for a few minutes. “Orsala said that mixed Irin and Grigori couples are more likely to have children,” Leo said. “That’s why—”

“Ava and Malachi were surprised by the twins?”

“Yes.”

Max said, “So was this a surprise?”

“Yes.”

He threw his arm around Leo. “Blessings on you and your mate, brother. I would rejoice in any of my brothers expecting a child, but yours is a double blessing. A triple one. I am so happy for you.”

Leo turned to Max, and his eyes were shining. “Will you write your blessing and ward on the baby when it comes? I know your father’s blessing lies on me. And my father’s on you. We’re only cousins—”

“We’re brothers,” Max said. “And I will protect your child as I would my own. I will write my ward on the baby, Leo. And I’ll love him. Or her. Maybe you’ll get lucky like Malachi and get one of each.”

Leo finally smiled. “There is only one heartbeat. I can hear it.”

The quiet joy on his brother’s face soothed Max’s heart. “Can you?”

Leo nodded. “Sometimes at night I wake up and… I’m afraid. But the past few weeks, I’ve been able to hear the heartbeat if I focus. It lets me sleep again.”

“That’s good.”

“And Kyra amazes me. She is so calm. She called her brother last week, and she said Kostas was crying over the phone. Happiness. He no longer wants to kill me most days.”

“Greeks are more emotional than we stoic Baltic men.” Max nudged his shoulder. “It’s better, I think, to be like that.”

Leo nodded. “I told my father.”

“What did he say?” Max paused. “Wrong question. Did he say anything at all?”

“He did.” Leo glanced over his shoulder toward the farm in the distance. “He was afraid for us. Worried about Kyra’s safety. I think I might finally… not understand him. Or maybe I understand him a little. And maybe that’s all I need.”

Max wanted to shout that Leo deserved a father who loved him and showed it, but that wasn’t what Leo needed. His issues with Peter were his own, and Max had no illusions that change would come quickly. If Leo felt more at ease with his father, that was all Max could hope for.

“I’m glad,” he said. “You’re going to make a wonderful father, Leo.”

“Do you think so?” Insecurity was written all over his face.

“I know you will. You’ve always taken care of me, and I’m not nearly as cute as your baby will be.”

Leo smiled. “I think it will look like Kyra. Grigori genes are strong.”

You’re strong. So much stronger than me to remain open and accepting of others and expect so little for yourself. Max felt a fierce wave of love for his brother. “Your child will have so many people who love him, Leo. So many. It won’t be like it was with us. I promise you that.”

“I know.” Leo brushed the back of his hand over his eyes. “I know that, but thank you for telling me.”

Max sat quietly for a few moments until he felt it again. There was a presence in the woods. An energy that felt foreign. It wasn’t Grigori. It wasn’t one of the Fallen. It wasn’t…

“Do you feel it?” Leo asked quietly. “In the woods?”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I’ve been thinking… it is Death.” Leo took a deep breath. “Like in Vienna.”

“Yes.” Max tried to remember what the angel of death had felt like, but his memories of that day were jumbled. “I think you’re right.”

Leo nodded. “This feels a little bit like that.”

“So not a bad thing?”

“No. Artis is ready.”

“I can’t imagine welcoming death. Can you?”

“Of course not,” Leo said. “We’ve just begun to live.”

They sat by the water until the sun went down. They didn’t speak anymore, but if there was one lesson Max had learned from his grandfather and his uncle, it was this: some moments were beyond words.