Chapter 1203: Reason and Excuse

What is the difference between a reason and an excuse?

A simple question.

Or perhaps it only appears simple when you are asking it about someone else.

Had you asked me several minutes ago, I would have answered without much difficulty. A reason was something real: an existing condition that shaped a decision before it was made. An excuse came afterward, assembled from whatever fragments allowed someone to escape responsibility for what they had already done.

One was true.

The other did not need to be.

A clean distinction, wouldn’t you say?

I certainly thought so.

After all, I did not lie. I could withhold an answer, redirect a question or offer only the portion of the truth I was willing to surrender, but I did not knowingly speak something false. That principle had survived battlefields, false accusations and more than one occasion when abandoning it would have made my life considerably easier.

Therefore, if every reason I offered Jesse was true, they could not be excuses.

Convenient.

You already noticed the problem, didn’t you?

Jesse’s fist remained twisted in my collar, the fabric drawn tight beneath her fingers while the knuckles of her other hand rested against my chest. I could feel the tremor she had failed to force out of them. Her forehead was nearly level with mine after dragging me down, her breath uneven from everything she had shouted, and the anger in her eyes had not disappeared merely because I had finally given her the answer she demanded.

"You are right."

I had scarcely finished saying it.

Nothing upon the terrace had changed. Wind still moved over the low stone wall, catching strands of brown hair against Jesse’s damp cheek before carrying the distant sounds of the Academy past us. Somewhere below, students crossed between buildings, instructors continued their lessons and hundreds of people remained occupied with lives that had nothing to do with the narrow strip of shadow between our boots.

Yet the distinction I had defended only moments ago no longer survived inspection.

The danger surrounding me had been real. Returning to Loria would have meant being caught. Approaching Jesse after the Entrance Banquet might have drawn attention toward her before I understood who was watching me or what they intended to do.

None of that was false, which was why I had trusted those answers.

A lie could be uncovered. A contradiction could be challenged. A true answer needed neither invention nor rehearsal; it could simply be given, and it would hold.

I had given Jesse those answers from the moment she brought me onto the terrace. Loria had been dangerous, the Academy complicated, her standing her own, and I had not known what she wanted. Each answer held, and none of them ever made me ask what it was holding up.

Every one of them had carried me to the same comfortable conclusion: that the correct thing to do had also been the thing that required nothing from me. No return, no message, and above all no question whose answer I might not want to hear.

I had always assumed a reason turned into an excuse only once it was false. Mine had stayed true, and I had still used them the way an excuse is used, to forgive what I had chosen.

I had overlooked something embarrassingly simple beneath all that reasoning.

I had cared in the quiet, private way that asked nothing of me and therefore cost nothing. I had cared whether Jesse survived. I had cared when other soldiers insulted her, when her family’s name became another weapon used against her and when she entered battles without the strength or training necessary to return from them. I had taught her because I wanted her to live, stayed beside her because I enjoyed having her there and worried whenever an assignment carried her somewhere beyond my sight.

All of that had been real. It had simply failed at the moment when caring demanded that I place something important into her hands and allow her to decide what she would do with it.

Perhaps another comparison would make the problem clearer.

What would I have done if the woman inside that tent had been Valeria?

I let out a quiet scoff, one Jesse must have felt through the fist still pressed against my chest. Valeria would have understood something was wrong before I finished my first warning. She would have blocked the entrance, demanded my orders and dragged at the truth through persistence, authority or the threat of bodily violence. Depending on which Valeria stood before me, the order of those methods might change, but not their arrival.

I knew that because I knew her.

Or, more accurately, I had known enough of the woman she was supposed to become that I would never have trusted a vague farewell to satisfy her.

Elara would have been different. She would have questioned the timing, found the weakness in whatever I offered and pressed at my silence until it became evidence. Even if she failed to uncover my intention that night, I would have known which part of the disappearance would wound her, because I had already read what abandonment and betrayal would make of her.

That knowledge would have changed how I acted.

Perhaps I would still have left. The battlefield would not have become safer because someone important stood beside me, and Gerald’s final wish would not have ceased to matter because fulfilling it hurt another person. But I would have prepared something. A warning hidden inside another truth, a message left where only she might find it, or some path by which she could eventually learn that my silence had not meant indifference.

I would have found a way. That was what I always did for them.

The novel had shown me where they broke. It had placed their wounds into words and arranged the consequences into Chapters, allowing me to recognize dangers long before the women themselves understood what approached them. Knowing where Valeria’s certainty would fail meant I could force her to look again. Knowing the direction of Priscilla’s isolation gave me reason to place a choice before her rather than deciding its answer myself.

Jesse had possessed no such Chapters.

No description had warned me what my disappearance would do to her. There had been no future scene waiting in my memory, no tragedy already written and therefore important enough to prevent. She had merely been there upon the battlefield, close enough to touch and ordinary enough that I had mistaken the absence of foreknowledge for the absence of consequence.

Yet before any of those women became more than names and scenes I remembered from a novel, Jesse had remained beside me.

Gerald had already left me by then. Whatever instruction, affection and obligation he placed behind had survived, but the man himself was gone. The battlefield had taken everything else and reduced each day to orders, mud, blood and the practical question of whether morning would find us alive. Jesse had been there through it.

She had relied upon me; that much was undeniable. She needed the training I could offer, the corrections that kept her sword from traveling too far and the companionship that made the contempt surrounding her a little easier to endure.

But reliance had never explained all of it.

She had worried when I was sent into the field alone. She had entered my tent because she heard I had returned and needed to see it for herself. When I tried to move aside, she embraced me anyway, holding on with the graceless insistence of someone who had spent the hours before my return imagining that I might not.

Then, while I was already planning to disappear that night, she had looked directly at me and asked:

"Are you leaving, Lucavion?"

I had understood. There was no confusion to hide behind now, only the question, the suspicion in her face and my own irritation at being trapped between the answer she deserved and the secret I intended to keep.

With the messenger at the tent flap and her question still unanswered, I took the interruption as my exit without examining why.

Rather than answer her, I told Jesse to remain strong. I prepared her to endure my absence without admitting that I had already chosen to inflict it, and when she gave me that small, miserable smile, as though some part of her understood despite everything I refused to say, I still walked away.

Returning to Loria afterward was different. I had called it dangerous because it was, but danger had never been the complete reason. After the army I had deserted, the house that had condemned me and the people who had watched my life collapse and found silence easier than standing beside me, the thought of crossing that border still put an old knot in my stomach.

I had been afraid to return.

Even now, after everything I had survived and everything I had become, that fear had not disappeared. Facing an enemy with a weapon was simple. Facing the place that had taught me how conditional affection could be required a kind of courage I had apparently found easier to postpone.

Jesse had gone back. She had returned to the country that questioned her, discarded her and sent her toward Shale once suspicion made her inconvenient, and she had faced House Burns.

I remembered how she had explained her house, and how fragile she had looked when she spoke of the way she was treated beneath its roof. A household like that would have regarded a place at this Academy as an opportunity, and one it had already decided belonged to her brother.

To come here after all that, she could only have faced her brother and her family, and won, and I doubted the victory had felt like one.

She had crossed all that distance. I had only needed to cross an Academy hall.

What danger had prevented me from doing that?

The people watching me had been real, but I had not objected when Valeria associated herself with me. I had interfered in Elara’s life so thoroughly that her original future had already become something neither the novel nor I could predict. I had stepped into Priscilla’s political struggle, challenged the people surrounding her and told her that the decision belonged in her hands.

The same applied to Aeliana, did it not?

Danger had not kept me away from any of them. When their lives became complicated, I moved closer. When Jesse appeared, I used complication as permission to remain where I was.

Why?

The battlefield had exhausted me. Gerald’s wish had demanded everything I possessed. The future I remembered contained deaths, betrayals and disasters that would not wait until I had resolved every attachment left behind in Loria. I had chosen my direction because continuing to look backward threatened to stop me from moving at all.

However true every one of those explanations was, I had leaned on all of them.

’No. In the end, they are all excuses.’

Jesse had cared enough to come here.

I had not cared enough to go to her.

That was the answer she demanded, stripped of every danger and obligation I had placed around it. I could dislike its cruelty, explain how I arrived there and wish that intention counted for more than the choice it produced, but I could not call the answer false.

I did not lie.

I would not begin by lying to her now.