The tent they walked to was pitched at the far edge of the command cluster, set apart from the war tables and the runners by a stretch of trampled ground. The canvas was plain, the Warrior King’s standard stitched once at the entrance and nowhere else.

That was when the siege reached her ears.

Distant and layered, the sound carried the way battle-noise always carried across open country: the dull thunder of trebuchets, the much louder cannon shots, and the sharp crack of dwarven machines answering in kind. Somewhere between the lines, elven bows loosed volleys from behind carved embankments while Vraven infantry closed the distance at the cost of their own.

Felicity slowed once on the threshold. Her ear tilted toward the sound and her gaze tracked it for a breath before the canvas fell closed behind her.

Then it was only the two of them.

Alexios lowered himself onto the camp stool at the head of the field table and his armor settled with him. He gestured to the seat across.

"Sit."

She did, hands folded in her lap, hood pushed all the way back now, purple hair catching the lamplight the way it had caught the afternoon sun.

He looked at her.

’She had been barely up to my elbow once,’ he thought. ’Crying about a braid.’

The child across the table was still small. Still young.

Yet she carried no fear of the camp. She had walked through a Vraven scout regiment alone, dropped her hood in front of a line of spears, and sat down in her father’s private tent as if she had come home for dinner.

Looking at her now, it was clearer to the old king than ever before: she had become a person of her own.

’The bastard put her through a hard few months, didn’t he?’

He watched her longer. She watched him back, and there was nothing performed in it. She was happy to be here. Happy to be looked at. She sat in her own skin without a single edge sanded off.

Alexios disliked it. He would not pretend, even in the privacy of his own skull, to like it.

But a crash course in what the world actually was, delivered by a man who had kept her from harm through every day of it, was not the worst thing a father could learn about his daughter’s time in the captivity of the kingdom’s most wanted criminal.

Perhaps it was for the best.

He kept all of it inside.

Felicity blinked once. Her smile tilted.

"You know, father. I think you two are sooo alike."

Alexios’s brow rose.

"Who are you talking about?"

"You and Quin, obviously! You’re both big girl dads. Rosie basically gets whatever she wants whenever she wants. He folds every time. It’s so adorable."

She giggled softly into her hand.

Alexios exhaled through his nose.

"A girl dad. Me."

"Uh-huh!"

"I command half a continent under arms."

"More like a third! Well, not even that much, considering recent events..."

"...Felicity."

"Mm-hmm!"

"You’re saying I am a girl dad."

"The worst kind," Felicity confirmed sunnily. "Rosie would approve."

"..."

She tipped her head.

"You’re sitting in a tent with the daughter you very well know could bring about your demise should she betray you. And yet, here we are, and you can’t quite bring yourself to distrust me, can you, father? You’d rather not exist in a world where your daughter would do such a thing."

Alexios had no answer to give her.

She was right.

His eyes stayed on her. Hers stayed on his. There was no pressure behind either, only Felicity saying what she had noticed, and her noticing was kind.

"Daughter."

"Mm?"

His voice came out quieter than he had meant.

"Tell me. Did he..."

She understood before he finished it.

"Enslave me?"

His throat tightened, and the rest of the question went nowhere.

Felicity beamed at him, bright and unbothered.

"Yes! After a lot of begging and a lot of pouting, he finally gave in and accepted my decision!"

Alexios’s world tilted, so much so that the old man nearly fell out of his chair.

His breath went in and stayed there.

Across the table, Felicity’s smile held. Her chin was tilted up the same way it had been when she dropped her hood in front of the scouts. She was waiting for him to take it in, amusement bright in her eyes.

She had said it proudly.

Outside, the siege kept going. A Vraven captain’s voice rose above the line-noise for one long call and fell. A trebuchet answered somewhere on the right flank.

Alexios looked at his daughter.

He had buried more friends than most men had ever met. A couple months ago, the bastard had taken her at his own thousand-year feast and refused to give her back. One day past, Alexios had cut the arms off the villain for his trouble, and the man had taken his wife from him as a response.

The rage was one part of it. Most of what he carried was older than rage, and quieter.

For months now, this bastard had lived inside his head. The headaches never lifted. Meetings were called at three in the morning, maps spread out, generals and councillors roused from their beds, every one of them looking to him for a plan he no longer had the breath to invent. Sleepless nights had run into sleepless weeks and sleepless months. A mortal man had wrecked his brain into sickness trying to cage an immortal who kept pulling new impossibilities out of nowhere every time Alexios closed a door.

He was tired.

He was so tired.

And under all of it, a quiet truth bubbled to the front of his mind. Quinlan had never used her.

Not once. He had waited for the bastard’s voice to come through the pendant at his daughter’s throat, saying stand down or the girl pays. The pendant was the only channel between the two men, the one Quinlan had used whenever he had something to tell the king.

The call had never come.

Quinlan had told him that he would protect her as if she were his own daughter, and he had. Not a hair on her head had been touched. Every day since, through the ambush that had cost Quinlan his arms, through every countermove the crown had thrown at him, through every pressure point the kingdom’s best minds had found. Not one word about Felicity had ever been held over his head.

The bastard had simply let her come.

Alexios rose.

He crossed the small distance between them and put his arms around his daughter.

Felicity went still.

She could not recall a single time her father had reached for her first. It had always run the other way: she scrambled, she launched, she was caught.

Her hands came up slowly, as if the moment might break if she moved too fast. They settled on his back and gripped.

She held onto him longer than she had meant to.

When she leaned back, her eyes were shining.

But then the smile faded.

"Father."

"..."

"It’s time the two most important men in my life stop this nonsense. Enough is enough."