You come back to yourself slowly, in pieces, the way you'd surface from being dunked too long in cold water — first the ringing, then the ache, then the growing, unwelcome certainty that you're going to be awake for whatever comes next whether you're ready or not.

The ceiling above you isn't Basgiath's. That's the first real thought that manages to assemble itself. Basgiath's ceilings are all black stone and iron sconces, built by people who'd never once considered that a person lying in a sickbed might want something softer to look at. This ceiling is warm sandstone, carved with a repeating pattern of interlocking wings, and someone has clearly beaten the dust out of this room recently, because the light coming through the shutters isn't fighting through cobwebs to get to you.

Your ribs inform you, with some force, that they remember exactly what happened. So does your shoulder. So, distantly, does whatever wyvern claw had opinions about the back of your leg.

"Oh, thank the gods."

Rhiannon's voice, before you've even managed to turn your head. When you do, she's already out of the chair by your bed, and the relief on her face is doing a poor job of hiding how frightened she's been. "You've been out for four days. I was starting to lose money on you — Ridoc had the pool at six."

"Tell Ridoc," you manage, throat raw, "that I fully intend to hold this against him."

"He'll be thrilled you're conscious enough to threaten him." She sits back down, hard, like her legs stopped being reliable the second she knew you weren't going to need her to hold you together. "You scared the hell out of us. You went down under a wyvern and I didn't see you get back up."

"Did everyone—" You already know, somehow, from the careful way she's not answering yet. "Rhiannon."

"Liam didn't make it." She says it plainly, because there isn't a version of that sentence that hurts less for being softened. "Deigh went down and he went down with him. I'm sorry. I know you two were close."

The grief lands the way these things do in the middle of a war — not all at once, but like a debt you know you'll be paying installments on for a long time. You'd traded him rations on your second week at Basgiath because his tasted better than yours and he never once let you forget it. You don't say any of that out loud. You don't have to; Rhiannon's face says she's carrying the same math.

"Where are we," you ask instead, because it's easier, and because the answer to that question has been nagging at the back of your skull since you noticed the ceiling. "This isn't the infirmary. This isn't anywhere."

"That's the part that's going to be difficult to explain." Rhiannon's mouth does something complicated. "You're going to want to sit up for it. Actually — you're going to want Dain here for it, because I already tried explaining it to Sawyer and he called me a liar twice."

Dain arrives before you've finished being annoyed about not getting to choose. He looks like a man who hasn't slept properly in four days either, wingleader insignia still slightly crooked like he's put the uniform on in a hurry more than once this week.

"You're awake." Something in his shoulders loosens, just slightly. "Good. That's — good."

"Rhiannon tells me I'm apparently nowhere."

"You're in Aretia." He says it like he's still getting used to the shape of the word himself. "Former capital of Tyrrendor. Burned to the ground during the rebellion, six years ago, or so every history text at Basgiath will happily tell you." A humorless almost-smile. "Turns out the histories were wrong about a few things."

"Define a few."

"The city, for one. It's not ash. It's — this." He gestures, vaguely, at the sandstone ceiling, the carved wings, all of it. "Rebuilt. Hidden. Run, as it turns out, by a man everyone at Basgiath has spent six years mourning."

You sit with that for a second. "Someone's going to have to be specific, Dain, because I've had a concussion and I am not going to enjoy guessing."

"Brennan Sorrengail." He watches your face carefully as he says it, gauging how much you already suspect. "Violet's brother. The one who died in the original uprising. He didn't."

That, you were not braced for. "He's alive?"

"Alive, mended, and apparently running the entire resistance that's been quietly fighting venin along our borders for years while Navarre told us wyvern were bedtime stories." Dain drags a hand through his hair. "I've had four days to sit with it and it still doesn't sound real coming out of my mouth."

You meet Brennan properly that evening, once you can stand without the room reconsidering its opinion on gravity. He has Violet's same watchful eyes, though on him they read less like caution and more like a man perpetually doing math on how much time everyone around him has left.

"You're one of Xaden's," he says, not quite a question, looking at the Fourth Wing insignia someone's clearly already stitched onto the spare shirt you're wearing. "Rhiannon says you held the west line at Resson longer than anyone had a right to."

"Rhiannon's being generous. I mostly just didn't want to be the one who ran."

"That's most of what holding a line is." Something that isn't quite a smile crosses his face. "You're safe here. However temporarily 'here' turns out to be. That's more than most people in Navarre can say about venin territory, and it isn't nothing."

Across the courtyard, through the open doorway, you catch sight of Violet — upright, technically, though there's a stillness to how she's standing that tells you she's somewhere else entirely in her head. You know that look. You've been wearing some version of it since you woke up.

She notices you noticing. For a second neither of you says anything, because there isn't really anything to say that four days and a battlefield haven't already said for you.

"Still alive," she says finally, like she's confirming a fact she wasn't fully sure of.

"Barely. You?"

"Working on it." A ghost of something almost like humor. "I hear Ridoc owes you money."

"I hear a lot of people owe me money. I intend to collect."

It's not much of a conversation. It doesn't need to be. You've both just survived the same impossible night, and there's a kind of relief in not having to perform anything more than that for each other.

That night, what's left of the riot gathers in a room too small for how much weight is about to get put on it. Xaden stands near the door rather than at its head, arms crossed, letting Brennan and the Assembly's other leaders lay out the actual decision on the table: stay hidden here in Aretia, safe and useless, or fly back into Basgiath tomorrow and pretend, for as long as the lie holds, that none of this happened.

"If we go back," Xaden says, when it's his turn, "we go back with a story everyone can recite in their sleep, and we go back knowing some of us won't get to keep doing this twice." His eyes move over the room — over Rhiannon, over Dain, over you, weighing something you can't quite name. "I won't order anyone into that. Not again."

Nobody moves to leave.

"Didn't figure I'd need to ask twice," he says, quieter, and for just a second the wingleader mask slips enough to look almost like relief.

You think about Liam. About the six days nobody back at Basgiath knows are missing yet. About the very short list of people who are ever going to hear the true version of what happened at Resson.

"So," you say, into the silence, "what's the lie."

Xaden's gaze lands on you, steady, assessing — the same look from your first day on the Parapet, a year and a lifetime ago. Whatever he sees this time, it seems to satisfy him.

"Gryphon ambush," he says. "Get comfortable with it. You're going to be telling it a lot."