Blacktail Deer Plateau it's already burning

to make sure that you're ok, hadrian corrected her matter-of-factly. i know you don't really need my protection. a conspiring wink is given to his sister, followed closely by a toothy grin; after all, she had the same military training as aeneas and himself. he'd be disappointed if she needed anyone else to fight her battles for her. truth was, it was extremely lucky that she happened to run into him and scream for him. she'd been up wind of him and if she hadn't caught his scent it occurs to hadrian that he'd have kept going, right on past her. fortuna favors him, as she always has. her favor like any gods, however, was as fickle as a summer breeze: there and then gone at her whim.

if we don't saar ...then who will? there was none more fit to continue on the emperor's legacy in these wilds than his grandchildren. we are the only ones fit. haughty, arrogant and proud, as always. sure, the emperor'd had other children besides trajan and surely had other grandchildren but ...they hadn't been raised in their patriarch's presence. this matters greatly to hadrian who was an pureblood elitist if there ever was one.

the topic shifts then to the very thing hadrian was pointedly avoiding speaking of. reyna. it takes all of his self-control to hide the disapproval in his expression and the exasperation out of the soft inhale and exhale that leaves him. she's fishing for information, hadrian assumes, though she pretends like reyna is a nobody to her. i know. about you and reyna, he tells her forwardly, figuring there was no sense in playing cat-and-mouse about it: with her pretending that she doesn't ( or didn't ) care and him pretending he didn't know about their sordid affair though hadrian does not place the blame at saarthal's paws, biased as he is towards her. instead, reyna: the charlatan bears the worst of hadrian's scorn and blame.

no. they've split. it was aeneas' doing, he hesitates here, wondering how honest he should be. he handled the affair about as well as anyone would expect: throwing himself into war and almost dying. it's why i didn't come sooner. someone had to patch the fool back up and make sure he didn't die. in the end, hadrian wants transparency. if aeneas did decide to follow to the wilds he didn't want to base anyone's reunion on lies.