The knife, held high, shone with the light from the few unbroken oil lamps. She raised it and looked beyond it at her former lover’s chest, at his neck, at his muscled abdomen. Where does one stick a knife? No place seemed right. Each and every portion of him was too familiar. She had held that chest close to her too often, brushed her lips over that skin, and listened to that heart beating within that cage of ribs. In a way, she knew, a piece of that heart beat inside her, small, quiet, growing. There was no place on him into which she could thrust this blade. Instead, she did something else, something she had not been aware she’d even considered an option.
She pressed the honed edge of the dagger into the palm of her other hand. It cut the flesh easily down to the bone, without any real pain. Removing the blade, she clenched the wounded hand into a fist, held it up for a moment. Crimson oozed between her fingertips, inching tentatively over her hand. “Do you know what?” she whispered. She wanted Hanish to hear her, but hoped he would not look up, hoped that the words would enter his unconscious mind, unsure that she could say them into his eyes. “I am carrying your baby. Can you believe that? You’ve fathered the future of Acacia.” She bent and pressed her bloody palm into the receiving basin, leaving a blurred handprint that the stone sucked up like a sponge. “I will raise this one well, as an Acacian. Whether that is a joy or a punishment is up to you. But neither you, nor your ancestors, will have any say in this child’s fate.”
She could not be sure if she heard Hanish call to her as she turned and descended from the stone. She might have, but the air was too filled with other sounds. Who knew if she was supposed to have intoned certain words in a certain way? Perhaps she should have spoken the language written in The Song of Elenet, the hidden volume that she would begin to study soon. Surely, she did not do it quite right. But she did the thing that mattered. She offered her blood, willingly, in forgiveness. In the first moments afterward, the air filled with a thousand cries that she might or might not have heard, protests from those ancient undead at being denied their second chance at life. But it did not last long. In their coffins, she sensed, those ancient bodies of Hanish’s ancestors finally gave up their long purgatory. They became dust, and the spirits within them rejoined the natural order of the world. They joined the mystery, no longer trapped outside it, no longer a threat to the living in any way.
When she stepped back into the sunlight, she found Rialus staring toward the south, transfixed enough that he did not note her approach. She followed his gaze. As her eyes adjusted to the glare of the late afternoon, she made out the seething clouds that fascinated him. There was a storm of some sort on the horizon. The heavens shuddered with the power of it, alive with color, flashing with what must have been bolts of lightning, though they were like nothing she had ever seen. It might have been an ominous sight, but the longer she stared, the more she resolved that whatever was happening out there was at a great, great distance. It was not going to affect them.
Reassured of this, she reached out and touched Rialus on the shoulder. He turned toward her, his face letting go of one set of questions and adopting another. Seeing the blood dripping from her hand, he asked, “Are you hurt?”
She said that she was not.
“It is done, Princess?”
“No,” she answered. “How could I kill the father of my child? If I do that, he will have brought me down to his level. He’ll have debased me. I just looked at him and knew that if I drew this blade through his flesh, I’d relive the moment over and over again for the rest of my life. I’d never be free of it. I’d see him in my child’s face. Do you understand? He would rule me, even in his death. So I could not do it.” She turned her eyes away from the small man’s, not liking the familiarity taking shape in them, surprised at how readily that confession had poured out of her. Enough of weakness. She said, “So instead, Rialus, you will do it. Here, use his own blade against him. I give this as a gift to you.”
Rialus took the weapon and stared at it, incredulous, the sliver of metal curved like a lean moon. He looked from it to her and then back to the blade again. He could have been a dealer in Meinish artifacts, so intently did his gaze drift over the lettering engraved in the collar and across the twisted metalwork of the guard and down the ridged contours of the handle. But Corinn, studying the slow evolution of thought behind his features, knew that his mind was not on the details of the weapon at all. He was rushing back through his long list of grievances against Hanish. He was recalling the ways he had been belittled, mocked, shunned over the years. He was thinking how powerless he had been and how much he yearned for revenge.
“Can you do it?” she asked.
“Is he…secured?” Rialus asked.
Corinn said that he would give him no trouble. He was secured. He was waiting. Nodding, Rialus turned and moved toward the passageway. “Yes,” he said, just barely audible, “this I can do, Princess, if it is what you wish.” He walked with short, hesitant steps, a man dazed by an act of fortune so complete he had never imagined it and doubted it yet.
Once he was swallowed by the shadows, Corinn turned back to the churning chaos at play in the southern heavens. She had never seen anything like it. There was fury in it, but it was muted by distance. Of more note was the beauty of it: the way the high reaches seemed aflame with liquid fire, dancing with colors she could not even recall the names of. With colors that she was not sure she had ever seen before. She could not help feeling the display was meant for her, that it somehow marked the change in the world that she had just arranged. She wished that she felt more joy than she did, more relief, more solace, but something about the sight touched her with melancholy. She could not put her finger on it. She did make sure to refute what Hanish had said, though. He was wrong. She was not like him at all.
“I am better than you.” Corinn said this aloud, although there was nobody around her, nobody but herself to convince.
End of Book Three
Epilogue
It was a chill afternoon, windblown and low clouded, the sea all around Acacia whitecapped and desolate. The memorial procession left the palace via the western gate and followed the high road toward Haven’s Rock. They walked the winding ridges, a long, thin line of mourners. The hills around them dropped down into valleys that tumbled headlong into the gray waters of late autumn. Mena strode near the front, with her remaining siblings and the small, cobbled-together remnants that passed now for the Acacian aristocracy. She followed an ornate cart that carried two urns of ashes. In one were those of Leodan Akaran. Thaddeus Clegg had secretly kept them hidden all these years. In the other urn were the remains of Aliver Akaran, a boy who became a leader the ages would remember, a prince who never quite became a king.
It had been nearly ten years since Mena last traversed this route. She still remembered that earlier occasion, riding horseback with her father and all her siblings. At the time she could not have imagined her father’s death or Aliver’s or the strange, diverse lives they had lived between those two terrible events. Progressing in silence, she could not help recalling the child that she had once been. Looking at the plumage dotting the landscape, she remembered that she’d once been afraid of acacia trees. It would have seemed a silly thought-a tree is but a tree-except that she knew she had replaced those childish fears with new ones.
Now she feared her dreams. Too often in them she faced Larken again, her first kill. Each time the experience was much like the event had been in reality: she full of certainty, moving with purpose, able to slice the flesh of him without any inkling of remorse. It was the same with her reveries of the battles in Talay, especially the afternoon after Aliver’s death three months ago, when she had killed with such abandon that it had seemed she had been designed for no other purpose. On waking, the details of all the deaths she had caused hung before her like hundreds of individual portraits, floating between her and the world. She knew such things would haunt her for years to come. It was not exactly this that she feared, though. The frightening thing was knowing that in an instant she could and would slay again. She really had taken a bit of Maeben into her. It would always be there beneath the skin. Her gift of rage.