Chapter 14 The Morning After

• Kaelen didn't sleep that night.
• I knew because I didn't either. I lay on my cot near the kitchen hearth, listening to the wind outside and the soft, uneven rhythm of his pacing in the main room. Back and forth. Back and forth. The sound of his crutch against the wooden floor was steady, but his breathing was not.
• I thought about Tomas. About the boy he had been and the man he had become. About the way shame could twist a person into something ugly, and how one honest meal had cracked him open like an egg. It didn't fix anything. A bowl of fried rice couldn't erase years of betrayal. But it had done something worse to him than a sword ever could. It had made him remember who he used to be before he became the kind of man who sold his mentor for silver.