I have to ride through the corpses with the horseman, their blood still dripping from their wounds. I think this is the way things are going to be.

But then, something drastic changes.

Chapter 51

I sit with Zara near the center of camp we’ve erected just outside Luxor. The kid in me is desperate to catch sight of ancient Egyptian ruins, but the pragmatist knows that’s never going to happen. Not during a battle campaign. So I settle for enjoying the sight of the palm trees that hug the bank of the Nile.

Next to me, my friend is trying—and failing—to weave a basket.

Aside from the distant sound of children’s laughter and a few murmured conversations, camp is utterly quiet. War and his army rode out long ago, leaving only a few of us behind.

“Fuck this,” Zara finally says, chucking her lumpy basket in front of her. “I can’t do it.”

It rolls away like a tumbleweed.

“I thought it looked okay,” I lie. Because sometimes encouragement is better than the cold hard truth.

Zara snorts. “You’d have to be blind to—”

The sound of hoof beats interrupts us.

I glance towards the edge of camp. I can’t see past the few cream colored tents in the way, but the longer I listen, the louder the hoof beats become.

For once, War and his riders don’t gallop into camp at full speed. Instead, War appears first, Deimos sauntering almost leisurely into the clearing. Several more riders and their war horses follow, each moving sedately. It’s only after the first few of them pass that I see the children.

There are hundreds of them being herded into camp, their faces dirty and tear-streaked. They range in age from young teenagers to infants.

I rise to my feet, staring at them all in shock.

Zara stands up next to me. “What on earth … ?”

War and his riders came back from battle with captured children.

No, not captured.

Spared.

There was a time when it was a miracle to get War to save a single child. Now he has nearly a city’s worth of them.

My horseman whistles to Zara. “I have more children for you to tend to.” War doesn’t bother speaking in tongues. He hasn’t for the last two cities we’ve camped nearby. Now his mind and words are as open as they’ve ever been—much to the shock of the remaining humans that live here.

Zara points to herself, her eyes wide. “Me?”

War gives a nod.

I raise my eyebrows at her. “I guess you’re now the unofficial caretaker of kids.”

She gives me a beseeching look before she approaches the line of children. There are so, so many of them.

Zara corrals them, calling over other individuals to help out. Together they move the kids off to the side of the clearing, where dinner is already prepared.

Let’s hope it’s enough food.

War comes over to me on Deimos, his form obscuring the sun behind him.

“You saved them,” I say.

He stares at me for a long moment, then squints into the distance. “It is … not so easy to destroy them, knowing that they could’ve been mine,” he says, his eyes dropping to my stomach.

My child, he means. He sees his own kid in them.

For a moment, I don’t breathe. This might be the first time I’ve seen true empathy from War.

“Is that why you spared them?”

He glances down at me. “I did it for your soft heart,” he says. “But still, they could’ve been mine.”

This becomes a pattern—sparing children—until there are too many children in camp and not enough adults to attend to all of them. We’ve had to recruit the older kids to help with the younger, which isn’t ideal.

That all changes today. Today War doesn’t just bring back children along with his other war prizes. Today, he also returns with adults.

These people are blood-spattered and their eyes are wide from the things they’ve seen, but they come in with the children and receive meals and shelter all the same. They don’t have to kneel in the blood of their former neighbors while they swear allegiance or choose death. They don’t have to witness daily executions or face killing and dying in battle.

The worst they’ll have to deal with is the culture shock that comes with camp life.

War dismounts Deimos and comes up to me, one of his hands moving to my belly.

“For your soft heart.”

“Who are they?” I ask later that night.

“You mean the people I saved?” War says. He pulls his pants on over his legs, his hair still wet from his bath. His shoulders look a kilometer wide.

I can hear a few phobos riders belligerently shouting outside, drunk from tonight’s revelries. I’m sure if I strain my ears enough, I might even pick up the soft sounds of people weeping. This is the most terrible day of their lives, but they have no idea that it’s one of the horsemen’s most compassionate ones.

He runs a hand through his hair, looking impossibly sexy. “They are the innocents. I judged their hearts and found them pure—or at least as pure as a human heart can be.”

I raise my eyebrows. “What made you decide to spare the innocents?” I ask.

The children I understand; he saw his own child in them. What does he see in these people?

“I vowed to you that I would change,” he says. “I’m trying.”

My throat constricts at that. “So this is all for me?” I can’t say whether that makes me feel impossibly cherished or a little sad.

War narrows his eyes, studying my features for several seconds. “That is a rigged question, wife. I say it’s for you, and you fear I am changing my ways without changing my heart. I say it’s because I’ve suddenly grown a conscience, and I risk slighting your own significant involvement in this process.”

Him growing a conscience could never be a slight against me. It’s what I’ve wanted since I first met him.

“Have you?” I ask. “Have you grown a conscience?”

He saunters towards me then, the tattoos on his chest glittering. War kneels down before me and lifts my fitted grey shirt. It’s probably just my imagination, but my stomach looks a little fuller.

Grabbing my hips, the horseman leans in and brushes a kiss along my abdomen.

“My entire world is right here,” he says, looking up at me. “Late at night, I tremble at the thought of something befalling either of you. Do you understand how crazed that makes me feel?” He stands, moving a hand to my stomach. “There is the barest tendril of another life in you, and it is so vulnerable.” His eyes move to mine. “And that is to say nothing of your own vulnerability. I am impervious to death, but anything can take you—and our child along with you.

“It’s hard to be aware of that fact and to not think about all the other fathers whose families I’ve killed. Whose loves I’ve killed. I am filled with growing shame at what I’ve done because losing you is already unfathomable.

“So yes, I believe I’ve grown a conscience.”

The horseman has done so many horrible things. He deserves to lose the only things he’s ever cared about. Maybe then he would actually know the price of his war. But I don’t want to die, I don’t want my baby to die, and most twisted of all, I don’t want War to feel pain the way he’s made others feel it. Even if it would be just.