“No,” Renard said. “But your father did.”
“I have to go back to it,” Neb said.
Renard nodded. “We will. I can’t run, but I can ride.”
Neb looked around the camp. He would need to say good-bye to Isaak at some point and secretly pass to him the memory scroll his metal cousin had intended for him. And he would want to eat with the men. But after that, he thought, it would be good to take the root and stretch his legs.
To let the history of this land seep into him through his feet as he ran toward that buried song.
His calling stirred within him, Nebios Homeseeker felt the joy of it pulling him and he smiled at it.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam brushed her long hair out and watched Winters holding her son. Her initial fears of the newborn had faded, and the same instincts that guided Jin as a new mother guided the young girl as she explored one of the wonders that her body could someday produce. She watched and forced a smile.
My son is saved; I should not need to force my joy. But she did. She saw her hands upon the Machtvolk queen’s feet and heard the catch in her voice as she pleaded for her son’s life. It shamed her, and yet she felt relief flooding her when his skin turned pink and when he found his laughter and his lungs; and even now, when she heard him giggle with Winters, she brushed up against a miracle.
And Petronus, too. She’d watched him die and then return from the dead.
She heard a clearing of the voice and looked up, startled.
Her father stood at the tent flap. He avoided eye contact with her, averting his eyes. “I know that I’ve earned every bit of your disfavor,” he told her, “but I beg audience with you, Daughter.”
As he stepped into the light, she could see the scars upon his face-wounds nearly healed and yet angrily red. She’d heard what had happened in her brief hours with Rudolfo before he’d left to try to salvage some kind of kin-clave among the others. She furrowed her brows now and tried to find anger for her father; she could not.
He’s had his reckoning. And she knew that someday, because of who she had begged to save her son, she would have hers. “Come in,” she said, “and meet your grandson.”
Winters nodded before Jin Li Tam said a word and brought Jakob back to her. “I will think about what we discussed,” the girl said.
Jin Li Tam smiled. “Do. I know you would be welcome. You would have a home there.”
Winters returned the smile and inclined her head. After she left, Jin Li Tam motioned her father to a chair. “Sit. You can hold Jakob.”
She watched her father wince when she said the name. Good, she thought. She did not think it out of bitterness but because he should understand the price that was paid. Jakob had been Rudolfo’s father’s name-a man her own father had killed using one of the Tam sons as a weapon.
Vlad Li Tam took the baby into his arms. He held the child for a few minutes in silence before he looked up at her. “Your husband told me once that if ever he were a father he would not use his children as pieces in a game.” He took a deep breath. “This was the same day that he vowed to kill me the next time he saw me because of what I had done to his family.”
“You deserve to die for that.” She said it without thinking and in a matter-of-fact tone.
He surprised her by nodding. “I do. But the next time he saw me, he did not kill me. He saved me and what remained of my family. our family.” He looked at her, and his eyes were suddenly hard. “I know you’ve thought yourself a strategic piece in some game of mine, and it is true. I raised you for this, shaped you for this day. And now I know that my father did the same to me. That I was a tower in his game, scripted like your metal men to perform a function. To make you and Rudolfo.” He leaned forward and kissed Jakob’s forehead. “And to make you, too, Jakob.”
She remembered well the note he’d left for her beneath the pillow of her guest bed in the Summer Papal Palace, warning her of war to come and ordering her to bear Rudolfo an heir. But why was he telling her?
Now when their eyes met, she could see that his were full of tears. “I regret every harm I caused another’s child or father or mother,” he said. “The grief of it consumes me now, and when I sleep at night, I hear only poetry and screams-only it’s not my children but someone else’s, and I have been the cutter, weaving a spell in blood and believing it would save the world.”
She felt tears pulling at her own eyes, and it made her angry. Sadness often did. Finally, she gave voice to her question. “Why are you telling me?”
He sighed. “Because I think sometimes you are afraid you will be like me.”
She remembered her exhilaration on the ride with the Wandering Army, remembered what it felt like to dance with the knives and bring down a Blood Scout in her wrath. “I don’t want to be like you,” she said.
And then he smiled and handed Jakob back to her. “You are not like me, Jin Li Tam. And I am proud of that.” He stood, and she saw a strange look pass over his face. “Do you remember where you got your name?”
She nodded. It had been a long time since she’d thought of that. “From the D’Jin of the Younger Gods, swimming in the deepest darks of the haunted oceans.”
He nodded. “I saw one before your sister pulled me from the sea,” he said. “It sang to me.”
Jin Li Tam did not know what to say. So she said nothing and simply stood.
Her father bowed to her. “He is a beautiful boy. He will be formidable and strong.”
She returned the bow but again could find no words. Her father had changed, and her brain spun now to decipher what he’d become.
Because he’s been broken.
And though these past months had worn her, they had not broken her. Seeing what her father had become, she did not want to ever experience it.
After he left, she slipped into her sleep shift and laid Jakob into the crib beside her bed. Rudolfo would be up late into the night and would probably not sleep until sometime after dawn. He would be working to save what kin-clave he could with Pylos and Turam, though she was certain his effort there would be fruitless. Still, he would try because he always saw the right path and chose it. She would not see him tonight, though some part of her needed to. Some part of her that she was unfamiliar with wanted to smell him, to feel him warm and near her. He’d been away for too long. Still, he was an influential man. He could belong to the Named Lands tonight and she could hope for tomorrow.
She did not realize that she slept until she felt a warm hand encircling her, stroking her bare stomach beneath her shift. She felt the messages pressed into her soft skin as gooseflesh rose upon her. My sunrise.
She stirred awake and inhaled the scent of Rudolfo’s hair. “I can’t stay long,” he whispered into her ear. His hand moved again. My truest path.
“I’m glad you’re home,” she told him and rolled over to pull him into her arms.
And for a time, she let go of her worry about what came toward them from the gathering storm clouds and savored this moment as a gift of great value.
Lysias
Lysias stared at the scout magicks and the poisoned knife before him and willed focus into his hands and feet for what was to come.
He’d been suspicious before Vlad Li Tam called for him. He’d seen the look of ecstasy upon Ignatio’s face when Petronus fell beneath the woman’s blade, and it had set him to thinking.
A conspiracy large enough to bring down Windwir would involve infiltrations at key levels across nations, and the Marshlands had fallen too quickly for it to have been a fledgling movement.
He’d arrived to the Kinshark just after dusk and listened to Vlad Li Tam reading from a slender volume. The man had changed, latticed now in scars and meek of voice. Initially, he made no eye contact and kept to his book. He was nothing like the arrogant, confident man Lysias remembered from the night they’d met near the ruins of Rachyle’s Bridge. Vlad Li Tam had given him the means to end the war by bringing down Resolute and Sethbert, and later that night, Lysias and Grymlis had helped Resolute to his end.