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Kissed by the Gods Chapters 26–37 Summary
This Caty Rogan Kissed by the Gods chapter summary contains full spoilers.
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.
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 puts 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 Leina 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.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 32
Leina tries to meditate on the cliffs with Ryot, but she can’t settle. Her mind keeps circling back to her nightmares, the people she failed to save, and the weight of her training. After hours of getting nowhere, she snaps, jumps to her feet, and yells that she’s no good at meditating.
Ryot sits beside Leina and demonstrates the practice himself. He tells her the point isn’t to silence the noise but to sit with whatever’s already there. Something in his words shifts her perspective, and she finally finds a measure of calm.
When the tension breaks, Ryot asks Leina about her family. She brushes it off, but then he mentions he had six sisters he was close to growing up, and the honesty of it catches her off guard. She starts talking about her father playing music, her brother dancing, and her mother’s baking. It’s the first real moment of connection between them.
Ryot tells Leina he doesn’t fight for glory or the gods. He fights for his sisters. Then he stands and says it’s time for the evening meal. Leina is left with the understanding that what drives him isn’t duty at all.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 33
Leina heads to Elowen’s herb garden to learn how to identify frostroot, a plant she’ll need to survive her climb up Elandors Veil come spring. When she arrives, she finds King Agis kneeling in the dirt with his young daughter Siofra, whom he’s leaving in Elowen’s care to train as a healer. Seeing him so warm and fatherly shakes Leina, because she holds him responsible for the deaths of her loved ones and the slow destruction of her people.
King Agis notices Leina, and the tenderness vanishes. He makes it clear he sees her as a threat he intends to handle before she grows too difficult to touch. She asks about the investigation into Selencia’s suffering, but he deflects smoothly, and she realizes nothing has actually changed.
After King Agis leaves, Elowen tries to apologize, but Leina shuts her down and asks only for the frostroot. Elowen shows her the plant and explains that it survives winter by stripping away everything tender until the cold can’t reach what’s underneath.
Leina wonders whether survival is worth what it keeps taking from her.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 34
Leina and Ryot are near the top of Brackenfold Peak on a practice climb when they stop to make camp for the night. Ryot goes through her pack and discovers she forgot to bring furs, which they need for shelter against the harsh cold. He’s furious but sets up his own one-man tent and tells her to get in before she freezes.
Cramped together in the small space, Ryot pulls Leina close to share body heat. Their closeness turns physical fast, and what begins as comfort becomes a desperate, consuming kiss. He pulls back and says he can’t have her the way he wants without losing everything, a nod to the vows they both swore.
Hurt and angry, Leina says nothing. Ryot repositions her so her back rests against his chest, and they lie quietly in the dark until sleep takes them, both aware they’ll have to return to keeping their distance in the morning.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 35
Leina sneaks away from the Synod for a rare moment to herself, but it doesn’t last. Tyrston finds her alone in the trees, makes veiled threats about dangerous enemies, and hints that someone wants her dead.
Ryot arrives just in time to drive Tyrston off, then turns his frustration on Leina for wandering unprotected. The tension between them breaks when Nyrica appears with urgent news. Carrisfal, an island to the south, is under attack, and Ryot must ride out immediately with a large force. He asks Nyrica to keep Leina close while he’s gone, then leaves without much of a goodbye.
Leina and Nyrica head back together, and she agrees to let him take her for a drink.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 36
Leina asks Nyrica about the Kher’zenn, and he describes them as unnaturally powerful enemies who grow stronger with every kill. The conversation takes a sharp turn when she casually mentions that none of the Altor will ever have sex again, which stops the whole table cold. Her castmates quickly correct her. The rule isn’t against sex at all but against forming emotional bonds. There’s even a pleasure house called the Crimson Feather set aside specifically for the Altor as a sanctioned outlet.
The mood darkens when Leina catches Tyrston’s eye, a man from a rival vanguard who has been openly threatening her with a dagger across the room. Her cast responds by driving their own daggers into the table at once, a show of solidarity that hushes the entire hall. Tyrston storms out furious, and the tension finally breaks when Faelon says something crude enough to make Leina laugh.
Thalric raises a toast to family, and it moves Leina more than she wants to admit. That night, she dreams of fire, blood, and the people she loves in danger.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 37
Leina slips into a dream and finds herself in Ryot’s tent, already touching herself. Ryot enters, joins her, and goes down on her until she climaxes. Afterward, she mentions Faelon’s suggestion of taking her to the Crimson Feather. Ryot reacts with jealousy, insisting neither Faelon nor the brothel are for her. They hold each other as the dream begins to dissolve, and Leina slips away before it ends.