Ruan gasped as the vision shattered and he came back awake in the little room where they were all hiding.

The problem with these visions, with reliving those moments, it meant he felt things all over again. Things that hadn’t exactly been sleeping peacefully in the first place.

Everything had become anger in all the years since that day, but now Ruan was reliving the fresh hurt, the betrayal. The lost lonely emptiness when Varajas had walked away like he was nothing.

Varajas who sitting next to him, not quite close enough to touch, unless Ruan reached out. Varajas who was rubbing at the back of his neck, looking down and away, not meeting Ruan’s eyes. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I may have fucked that up.”

The admission was so utterly unexpected. Ruan wasn’t prepared. It interrupted the circling thoughts that his mind had been locked to for years, forced him to truly think.

Dimly, he was aware of Samir, quiet against the wall across from them, sitting almost motionless with one hand on each member of their animal menagerie. And while Ruan would have preferred privacy—this was between him and Varajas—that ship had pretty much already sailed. Whatever was happening in this haunted other-world, it had bound them all three together and opened their minds to each other in a way that left no sense in trying to hide.

There was no sense left in trying to hide anything. “You just walked away from me.”

“Yes.” Whatever Varajas’s faults—and Ruan could catalogue them to the finest detail—he had never been afraid of honesty. He met Ruan’s accusing gaze, didn’t duck away. “I should never have done that.”

There it was. The admission Ruan had been searching for, living for. Varajas admitting he had been wrong. That Ruan had been right. The words that for seven years some unspoken part of Ruan had believed would make everything better.

Nothing was better. “What do you want from me?”

Varajas shrugged. “I’m not trying to get anything out of you. I’m just saying what I needed to say.”

What did Ruan need to say? Words were trying so hard to bubble up. That he had missed Varajas. That he still loved Varajas. That he’d spent every day they’d been apart struggling against the knowledge that…

That Varajas had been right.

But if Ruan had ever admitted that, it would have broken him. He had already lost Varajas. To face that he’d lost his faith as well—that would have been too much.

“I was angry,” Varajas said. “I’m not trying to make excuses. Just telling you—I couldn’t think straight. Everything we’d been taught, everything we believed—it was a lie. Eldred’s betrayal, the fact Donatien wouldn’t even listen, and then you showed up and it seemed so much like you were taking their side. It just underscored the fact that…

“I was so angry with myself. I’d failed. Failed the order. Failed the people we were supposed to protect. I’d failed you. I couldn’t face that I might not be the man you believed me to be. Just you standing in front of me felt like an accusation. I wasn’t even seeing you, not really. I was fighting myself as much as anything.”

Varajas turned so he was shoulder against the wall, fully facing Ruan. “I’m sorry. I know apologies don’t actually fix anything. But it’s the first step towards fixing things. If anything even can be fixed.”

Ruan was still trying to figure out how he wanted to respond to that when Samir’s soft question floated across the room.

“What happened next?”

“Next?” Varajas asked, looking at Samir without turning away from Ruan. “What do you mean next?”

“After your fight.”

Ruan didn’t understand what Samir was getting at either. “I had a month of recovery. By the time I was returned to duty, the war had started.”

Varajas nodded. “And I went to the knights.” He sounded just as unsure what Samir was looking for.

“And you didn’t—no one did anything about her?”

Sidaine. He was talking about Sidaine.

“The High Father knew about her,” Ruan said. “And I heard nothing more. I presumed she had been dealt with.”

“I was a fugitive. Derian took me in, and then Ulek was under siege. I wasn’t in any position—”

“Not in any position?” Samir’s voice was rising in volume. “You just…you walked away like it was over? You let it stay secret?”

Ruan and Varajas exchanged an awkward look, and Samir said. “Of course you did.”

“Why, what—” Ruan started to ask, but it was too late.

Samir had wrapped them back in the magic and was dragging them back down into the past. Into the visions.

Into whatever he wanted them to see.