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Kissed by the Gods Chapters 22–31 Summary
This Caty Rogan Kissed by the Gods chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 22
Leina is finally discharged from the infirmary after two weeks. She packs her few belongings, including the clothes Ryot gave her, and says a warm goodbye to Elowen, who promises to hem a pair of trousers before sending them along.
Leif and Kiernan arrive to escort Leina to the barracks. On the way, they pass the Reckoning Hall, a vast room lined floor to ceiling with historical records and old journals. Leina is immediately drawn to it and mentally marks it as somewhere she needs to return.
Just before the three enter the barracks, Leif drops unwelcome news. Leina’s unnaming ceremony is happening that very night, which shakes her more than she lets on.
Inside, Leif introduces Leina to several of her fellow Altor. The easy atmosphere doesn’t last long. Tyrston walks in, still sweaty from training, and wastes no time telling Leina she doesn’t belong and implying she should’ve died. Leif steps up beside her without hesitation, and Daon backs him up by reminding Tyrston the archons had already settled the matter. Tyrston backs down and leaves, though the tension he brought lingers well after he’s gone.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 23
Leina arrives at the Shrine of Vanishing Light to find the Elder, all four archons, and her future castmates already assembled. Ryot kneels at the center of the room, and she takes her place beside him. The Elder lays out the Synod’s purpose before Leina swears her vows, and when she finishes, a candle lights on its own as confirmation.
The Elder conducts the bonding ritual. Ryot pledges himself as Leina’s guardian, and she’s bound to him in return. The Elder draws blood from both their hands and joins them together to seal the ward bond. She’s renamed Leina of Stormriven.
Archon Robias welcomes Leina first, and the rest of the cast follows. Faelon insists the group celebrate at the Crimson Feather, which is apparently their tradition after an unnaming. Ryot shuts it down, saying Leina is already behind in training and they can’t afford the delay. Thalric agrees, pointing to the threat Kheris poses. Leina sides with Ryot, and the group heads to the training grounds.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 24
Leina makes it through her first wardcall on almost no sleep, having spent the entire night training with Leif and Kiernan. During morning inspection, Archon Robias singles her out over her unusually fine armor, weapons, and boots and tells her to bring them to the armorer and cobbler so they can be studied. He also notices her leather wrist cuffs and lets slip that Ryot likely made them himself, well before she had even formally chosen him as her master.
Back at the training grounds, the masters tell Leina and Kiernan they’re heading to the galehold, a remote stretch of mountain territory where the faravars roam freely. Leif argues it’s too early and too dangerous, but Ryot overrules him.
Kiernan’s fear gets the better of him, pulling the group into a conversation about how to shield emotions. It surfaces that Leina has been doing it on instinct all along. Ryot turns this into a defense of her, arguing the hardships she endured before the Synod shaped her in ways formal training simply can’t replicate.
The group sets off for the galehold.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 25
The group climbs toward the galehold while Leif fills Leina in on Stormriven’s recent losses. A ward named Aelric went missing on patrol and was never searched for, and several others died together in a single devastating battle. Kiernan drops back with Caius, who tries to walk him through a mental technique he’s struggling with.
At the galehold, the faravars greet their riders, and Einarr approaches Leina, pressing his forehead against hers before returning to the others with the rest of the beasts.
On the way down, Ryot tells Leina something is coming and that she needs to be ready, though he can’t say what or when. The conversation turns to Elandors Veil, a mountain where the gods thinned the barrier between their realm and the mortal one. Every Altor has to climb it to bond with a faravar, and those who fail don’t return. Leina tells Ryot she’s willing to try.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 26
Leina struggles through temperance training, where she has to separate flower petals from their blooms without damaging them. After hours of effort, she still hasn’t managed to keep a single petal intact, and her frustration builds. Caius coaches her patiently while Kiernan works steadily beside her and Faelon reads in the corner.
Frustration finally boils over, and Leina challenges the point of the exercise. Faelon offers to spar with her one-handed, disarms her effortlessly twice, and reveals he’d been hiding a buttercup behind his back the whole time. He reframes it as a baby dangling in an enemy’s grip. She lunges and catches it when he drops it, but she crushes it on the way down.
Caius tells Leina the training exists so that when a real moment like that comes, her strength doesn’t become the thing that causes harm. It lands. She recognizes that underneath her anger she’s afraid, specifically afraid of failing someone the way she feels she failed Leo. She accepts a fresh flower from Caius, keeps her hands steady, and successfully removes one petal whole. Caius praises her, and Faelon immediately starts ribbing her about their next fight.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 27
Ryot and Leina stay behind after everyone else clears out of the training yard, pushing through drills until they’re both exhausted. They end up lying on the ground, talking about missing their families and struggling with who they’ve become since everything changed. In a brief, quiet moment, Leina reaches for Ryot’s hand, and he takes it, but Faelon shows up and breaks the spell. Ryot leaves, telling Leina to get some sleep before their patrol the next day.
Faelon produces a letter he was handed by a Selencian woman at the Crimson Feather. Leina suspects the woman is Maeravel, the rebel commander’s daughter. The letter turns out to be from Seb, written in a secret language their mother taught them. He tells her that he and Leo are safe and have found the rebels. He also reveals that Aelric, the Altor who went missing from Leina’s cast, is actually Maeravel’s husband, and that he learned Leina was safe and got word back to Seb.
Aelric asks Leina to dig up whatever she can about the Kingdom of Aish, a desert land with no connection to Faraengard that the rebels believe could be key to their cause. Leina burns the letter and heads straight to the Reckoning Hall, putting Ryot’s orders out of her mind entirely.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 28
Leina and Ryot fly coastal patrol on Einarr when she nearly falls off from exhaustion. Ryot brings them down on a cliff, scolds her, and massages the soreness from her legs. Before they can settle in for the night, Einarr senses something wrong. Two Kher’zenn approach on draegoths, following the coastline. Ryot sends Leina into a narrow cave and takes off on Einarr to pull the creatures away.
It doesn’t fully work. One of the Kher’zenn dismounts and follows Leina into the cave on foot. He knows her name and says he has a message for her. When Ryot kills his draegoth outside, the Kher’zenn is briefly distracted, and Leina seizes the opening to drive her scythe into his chest. He dies whispering that someone is coming to find her.
Ryot rushes in, shaken, and when Leina tells him the Kher’zenn knew her name, he scraps the rest of the patrol. On the flight back, he pulls her in front of him instead of behind, holding her against his chest, and she realizes she feels genuinely safe for the first time since childhood.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 29
Leina is dreaming, but this time the darkness feels more like water than something threatening. She drifts through it until she sees Ryot perched alone on a rocky ledge, shirtless, head down, lost in thought. She approaches him, and they fall into conversation.
As they talk, Leina asks Ryot to share something nobody knows about him. After a long pause, he admits he’s afraid of deep water because the depths are unknowable. She teases him about his fearless reputation, and he explains the real difference isn’t between cowards and warriors but between those who endure and those who are lost to fear.
The conversation draws Leina and Ryot closer. Leina leans in and kisses him, unhurried, as if they’re both wary of disturbing something fragile. He raises a hand to her jaw. When she pulls back, she sees his whole expression has shifted, open and intense in a way she hasn’t seen before. They share a quiet moment, and just as she reaches out to touch him, she’s yanked backward out of the dream. She hears him call her name as everything dissolves.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 30
Leina oversleeps, and Leif wakes her by dumping cold water on her head. They’re running late for weapons training, and on the walk over, Leif warns her that members of the Altor order are forbidden from forming romantic attachments. It’s a pointed reference to her growing closeness with Ryot.
Brushing Leif off, Leina accidentally reveals that she can sense Ryot’s presence, something she thought was a side effect of the unnaming ceremony. Leif tells her that no such connection comes from the ceremony, which rattles her. They’re interrupted before either of them can dig into it further and have to run the rest of the way.
When Leina and Leif arrive late, Ryot singles her out immediately and pulls her into a sparring match as punishment. He pushes her hard throughout, pointing out every mistake in her form and footwork.
Eventually, Ryot knocks Leina off her feet with a strike to the thigh. Standing over her, he tells her bluntly what hesitation costs in real combat. He ends the session early, sends her to Elowen, and leaves her with a book called The Treatise on Tactical Collapse to study while she recovers.
Leif helps Leina off the grounds. Leina is furious, but her anger hardens into resolve rather than defeat.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 31
Leina can’t sleep, so she sneaks out of the barracks to the Reckoning Hall. She lights a candle, picks up The Treatise on Tactical Collapse, the dense book Ryot gave her, and resumes reading. In the margins, she finds a handwritten note in the old tongue, the language her mother taught her, but she has little time to sit with the discovery before the Elder walks in and catches her there.
The Elder settles at a table covered in maps, then tells Leina he’s been asking questions no one else seems willing to voice, mainly why the gods would bless a girl from Selencia after hundreds of years of silence. He doesn’t accuse her of anything but makes it clear he’s been studying the matter. He also says blessings often feel like curses to those who carry them.
Eventually, the Elder points to the map and asks Leina to identify a stretch of land in Selencia near where she grew up. She recognizes it as ruins inside the Weeping Forest, a place she knew mostly by reputation. Her brothers once dared each other to go near it and came back shaken, unwilling to say what they’d seen.
The Elder then asks Leina to pull up a chair and tells her she’ll spend the rest of the night answering his questions.