“Do you plan on holding a sword at their throat? Or trapping them in a ward and shoving them onto whatever ship we convince to carry us back to Shiara?”



“Of course not.”



“Then don’t demean their choices.” Tessen brushes his nose against my cheek, up the side of my face until he can kiss my temple. “We don’t expect you to keep us alive no matter what, Khya. Besides, death in this battle will mean something. It’s a sacrifice worth making.”



“Sacrifice.” I snort, unable to suppress the scorn. “For honors in Ryogo?”



“You think Varan invented the afterlife? I don’t,” Tessen says quietly. “You heard Lo’a’s stories. It seems like a lot of Varan taught us has been more truth than lies.”



“Not Ryogo.” But that isn’t quite true, is it?



“It may not be the afterlife, but almost everything else is true,” he says, almost chidingly. “So, yes—I think there’s an afterlife, and that we can earn a place in it, I just don’t know what it’ll look like when we get there.”