The time that had passed since Aliver’s death at Maeander’s hands had been the longest ordeal of Mena’s life. Nothing even slightly compared. She had not really had a chance to reckon with her brother’s killing. The world did not pause to grant her the moments she needed, and things had happened too fast following it. As Dariel had ordered, Maeander and his entire entourage were pounced upon. Mena stayed with Aliver, cradling him, trying to focus only on him, but she heard what happened. The Meins fought bravely. They formed a pronged-star formation, each of them facing out at the innumerable sea of Acacians and Talayans and Aushenians, as representatives from every corner of the Known World all turned against them. Maeander had ranted and laughed the entire time, calling them honorless bastards and whores, belittling them with a verbal dexterity that matched his martial prowess. They killed a great many before they were all cut down. Their dead bodies were abused, stabbed and stabbed again and again. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to wash their blades in Maeander’s blood, to punish him for what he had done and to try to forget the things he had said. Mena hated to hear of it, hated knowing that Dariel had been there among them, venting his misery and confusion on a corpse.
This was not all the day had in store for them, though. Scarcely had the fervor died down before new shouts sprayed out through the masses. The Meinish army, using the distraction, had marched all the way across the field unnoticed. The Meins were emboldened, whipped into a frenzy by their leader’s death. They rushed in, shouting vengeance. They knew of his fate and of the treachery by which it was achieved before news could possibly have reached them. It had happened just moments before! Maeander must have told his generals exactly what would transpire before he set out that morning. Because of this, his army fought with a level of fury and indignation beyond anything they had shown previously. Maeander had made himself an instant hero, a leader of greater stature than he was in life. He had become a martyr. And, just as he had said, a martyr inspired devotion. A curious kind, he had said. What he meant was a ferocious kind.
As soon as she had given orders to protect Aliver’s body, Mena grabbed up her weapons and ran to face the enemy. Try as they might, Mena, Dariel, Leeka, and the other generals could not muster their forces into order to meet the attack. The army had lost itself in grief and uncertainty. Even as they tried to respond to orders they seemed dazed, made tentative by the realization that Aliver would not be leading them to the victory. The Snow King was dead. He would not give to them all the myriad things he had promised. He would not sweep into Acacia with a righteous sword, victorious. And if he would not, how could they?
The battle raged right among their tents, over cook fires and around latrines and amid stacks of supplies and foodstuffs. At some point Mena stopped trying to rally others and focused on her own deadly desires. She led by example, and quite an example she became. She ran deep into the Meinish ranks, filled with a hunger to kill and a rage of such humming intensity and heat that it felt like she would combust if she stopped moving even for a second. The sword that Melio had returned to her whirled around her with its own mind and deadly purpose. She but followed it, pushing farther and farther into the enemy, knowing that she had to stay away from her own. She was killing too fast to pick out friend from foe.
And though it was rage that propelled her she felt no joy as she achieved this slaughter. Just the opposite. It was a nightmare battle. In everything around her she saw signs and sights of Aliver. As she hacked and sliced, severed limbs and peeled skin from faces and sent ears spiraling up from her blade and spilled bellies onto the dirt, she saw Aliver in all of it. She knew that she was slaying an enemy-his enemy-but he was there in every Mein killed, in the shape of limbs and the expressions in glazed eyes and in the voices crying out in anguish. It was maddening. It made her a whirlwind of violence, as if she could butcher her way through this notion of her brother’s violent death. The bodies she left around her in hacked piles numbered in the many dozens. If her blade had not been the finest of steel, she would have dulled and bent it before the day was out. Instead, however, even at the close of the day it had edge enough to slice through the crowns of skulls and cut clean through muscle and bone.
Eventually, the Meins withdrew. They had not been defeated, not even beaten back. By the look of the camp and the heaps of Acacian dead the Meins could be assured of closing this business on the morrow. Oubadal’s Halaly had been the first to face the Meinish attack; word now was that they were no more, gone completely, killed to the last. This was a great blow. Even the tribes that had begun the war fearing or loathing them had learned to respect them these last few days. Now they were gone.
Kelis, Aliver’s great friend, was grazed by a spear across the abdomen, a serious enough injury that he was bed bound and in great pain. How many more would die during the night? How many would slink away defeated, fleeing to their homes, wishing they had taken no part in this war?
As she walked amid the carnage, her limbs trembling, every inch of her crusted in gore, Mena felt the eyes of her troops on her. Even Dariel, who had earlier ordered an honorless murder, stared at her in awe. Perhaps they were all seeing for the first time what a monster she actually was. She wanted to shout at them. What were they looking at? Of course she was a killer. She was Maeben. She would always be Maeben. Always better at rage than anything else. It was hard not to feel she had personally killed every corpse in sight herself.
In the tent later that night, with Melio’s arms around her, his words close in her ears, his body rocking hers…then she found stillness enough to believe that she had not been killing Aliver over and over again on the field. She remembered holding his blood-slick body in her hands. He had been so hot, heat pouring from him like a furnace. She had tasted rust on her tongue and in her nostrils. There had been a terrible moment, she recalled, when her fingers-while trying to find the wound and measure its damage-actually slipped inside the fissure. It was the strangest of memories, for each time it came to her she remembered the incredible softness in the warmth of his tissues. Nothing she had ever felt before had been so soft, so delicate. And yet at the same time she felt a gut-wrenching revulsion rooted in the thought that her fingers had caused the wound, that they could cut just as easily as her blade.
But all this was before. Now Melio lay in his fitful slumber, grasping her with one hand, protecting her. What a strange thought, that. What could she need protection from? Her body wanted desperately to sleep, but she would not let it. She feared that her unconscious mind would conjure something horrible with that slip of her fingers.
“How can you be dead?” she asked again.
In the silence after this she returned to something else she’d been spinning around in her mind, an exchange she had had with Aliver before the duel. He had pulled her aside as they were exiting the council tent. He waited for the others to move away slightly and then he fixed his eyes on hers. “If I die,” he said, “hold the King’s Trust for a time. When you think he is ready, give it to Dariel. I want him to have it. You don’t need it, right, Mena? You’ve created a mythic sword of your own.”
He smiled. “Another thing, and this is important. You must be prepared to summon the Santoth.” She had started to protest, but Aliver silenced her. She had to accept this responsibility. If he died, he explained, everything fell upon her and Dariel. Dariel had great strength within him, but he was still too emotional. He was the youngest of them and would be too emotional until it was tempered out of him. Only she would have the focus to see above the turmoil and send a call out to the Santoth. She protested that she didn’t know how, but he told her she would learn how when the time came.