Iron Flame Summary & ending explained

My brother is supposed to be dead.

I've grieved him for six years. And now Brennan sits on the edge of my bed in a house that isn't supposed to exist, in a city every history book in Navarre calls ash, and he's lecturing me about drinking water.

"You almost died," he says. "Twice. Humor me."

Aretia is alive. Stone walls are going back up. People carry timber through streets I memorized as ruins. And my brother, the mender who drew the poison out of me, is one of the officers leading the rebellion against everything our mother has spent her life defending.

The venin are real. The wyverns are real. Navarre's wards keep them out, and Navarre's leaders let the people on the other side of the border die and call it peace. I saw it at Resson. Liam died there.

Andarna sleeps. She's been asleep since Resson, growing, so deep inside it that I can barely feel her through the bond. Tairn tells me to let her be. She spent herself holding time still for me.

Xaden finds me on the balcony that night. He doesn't touch me. He stands close enough that his shadows lean toward my feet.

"We have to go back," he says. "All of us who survived. Basgiath will want an explanation for Athebyne, and they'll want it to be gryphons."

"So we lie."

"We lie. Or they kill us, and the truth dies with us."

I look at him: the scar, the rebellion marks climbing his neck, the man who kept a whole city from me. "You'll tell me if I ask you," I say. "Anything."

"Anything," he agrees. "Ask."

But I don't want to have to ask. I want him to offer, and he knows it, and neither of us moves.

Tomorrow we fly back into the college that sent us to die, and we smile at the people who did it.