Again, his eyes pulled him to Rae Li Tam, and he felt the sorrow moving through him like water.
She’d given her life to save him, taking in the blood magicks so that she would have the speed and strength to find him and pull him from the sea. He’d not anticipated that, and her sacrifice, at the end of so many other deaths, broke the old man’s heart.
I have changed, he realized.
He’d sent many of his children to their deaths to move this river or shift that mountain. He’d sent them to the beds of tyrants and into prisons with thieves and killers. He’d made them murderers and torturers and liars and whores.
Never again, he vowed.
Baryk rested on the pickaxe now, and Vlad Li Tam worked his shovel. They went back and forth like that until the hole was just so. Then, they put down their tools and took up their beloved.
The tears flowed freely now, and he did not despise them. I will grow my pain into an army.
He looked across and saw that Baryk also wept. He builds his army, too. We all do.
It would be a mighty army, he realized, that each of them grew. It would be a terrible reckoning for whatever hand had moved those pieces against Vlad Li Tam’s family.
Gently, and in silence, they laid Rae Li Tam into the ground and readied their hearts for war.
Winters
Winters knelt before Seamus, holding his hands in her own. He blinked at the mention of the woman who shared her name, his face showing his surprise.
She’d finally come and awakened him in the middle of the night when her questions and nightmares would not let her sleep.
“She claims to be my sister,” she told him. “She said to ask you about her.”
“It can’t be so,” he said, his voice quiet and low.
She read wonder in his voice, and her eyes narrowed. “What do you know, Seamus?”
He drew in his breath. “I know that it can’t be so,” he said again. “She couldn’t be.. I helped your father bury her. The fever took her in the first month.” He looked to her. “Unless. ”
Yes, she thought. It was possible. She’d watched the drop from the phial bring Petronus back. She’d seen the second drop heal Jakob. The dead could be raised.
Or, she thought, a death could be faked. Petronus again came to mind.
“And her name was Winteria?”
Seamus nodded. “Yes.”
She sat with this and tried to take it in. Why wasn’t this in the Book? She’d seen not a hint of it through all her father’s writings. and his closest friend, Hanric, had said nothing of it to her. “Why was her death kept secret?”
Seamus’s eyes were hard now. “Her birth was kept secret as well. Only a handful of us knew, and your father swore us to silence. Your mother was kept in isolation from the time she first conceived.”
“But why?” she asked again.
He shook his head. “I do not know.”
“Do not know or will not tell?” She raised her voice and heard the bitterness in it. “Seamus, I abjure you to tell me what you know.”
He shook his head. “I know nothing, my queen.”
Winters stood, and she felt a wave of nausea roll over her as the truth settled in. “If you speak truth, then I am not your queen.”
And without another word, she slipped out of the tent and into the frozen night.
Turning north, she slipped past the Gypsy guards and wandered toward the treeline at the edge of the ruined plain.
This was familiar ground. Not so long ago, she’d walked this plain with Neb as he patrolled the gravedigger’s defenses. Where was he, she wondered? Her dreams were empty without him. Violence and blood and dark birds filled them, and there was no comforting word in it for her. Still, she clung to her memory of him and longed to walk with him again. Longed for him to tell her that everything would be fine, that home still arose though she was no longer certain that it did.
And she missed the dreams. Not the ones of late that unfolded now behind her eyes.
In that future, the light swallowed her Book of Dreaming Kings. And a song-mad Tertius playing it upon the harp-led her love away from her and deeper into desolation. Her secret sister-back from the dead, it seemed, and sharing her name-built shrines to Wizard Kings long dead and cut their mark into her people and their children, openly pledging themselves in service to the Crimson Empress whose soon-coming they preached.
The Marshfolk were gone. The Machtvolk had returned in their place. And now she was gone, as well, and another Winteria would climb the spire and announce herself Machtvolk Queen and Bond-Servant of House Y’Zir.
Until this day, she’d never felt an orphan, because she’d always had her people. And even when their sudden fall to the Y’Zirite heresy had shaken her, until she saw her sister, until she recognized her own eyes, her own mouth, her own nose upon the older Winteria, she’d not truly believed she’d lost them.
But she had. And beyond the loss of her name, her people, her dream and her love, Winters had also lost her faith, she realized. She felt the hole where it had been and wondered how it had vanished so fast. And she wondered how or if she would ever get it back. She doubted it.
But just as when she’d lost Hanric and before him, her father and her mother, she would take this loss into herself and would drink the pain of it.
As the sun rose, she turned to the east to watch it and knew what she would do. She returned quietly to camp and left again with a small bundle beneath her arm.
She walked upriver until she was out of eyeshot of the camp and she stripped carefully, feeling the cold winter air move over her, causing her to shudder.
Teeth chattering, she waded out into that river and quickly scrubbed the mud and ash from her body. She pulled the braids from her hair and sent the bits of stick and leaf floating downriver. Then she scrubbed with the bar of strong soap until the numbness of the cold water drove her back to shore. She dried off with a rough cotton towel from the Ninefold Forest supply wagon and dressed herself in a calico dress and boots.
Buttoning her fur coat against the cold, Winters turned her back to the north and returned to camp.
Tomorrow, she would ride with Lynnae and Jin Li Tam and Jakob. She would take up her work in the Ninefold Forest, helping to integrate the refugees into the city that grew there. Jin Li Tam had suggested that it would be meaningful work while she determined her next steps.
She wanted to feel excitement, but curiosity was the best she could muster. Her mind was elsewhere, working her crisis of faith like a tongue upon a missing tooth. Finding meaning and sorting facts out from the knotted mess of it all. The dreams had been real. The glossolalia had been real. And everything had changed now. She wanted to know why, and she wanted to know what she was meant to believe now. She could not even find the passion to be angry or bereaved over it.
Somehow, Winters knew, she would sustain this loss and find treasure in it. Perhaps something better than the faith she had lost would grow up in its place.
Perhaps I’m meant to be a Gypsy wife after all; perhaps home was never any farther away than that. Would that be so bad? And would it be wrong to hope for it? And to hope that someday, she would have a child who laughed and blew bubbles in his sleep?
A child with eyes as piercing and blue as a summer sky above the Dragon’s Spine.
Like Neb’s eyes.
Sighing, Winters slipped back into her tent and fell into a light sleep, her nose twitching at the clean smell of soap on her skin and hair. As her sleep deepened, she dreamed about her white-haired boy, even though it wasn’t him but a memory of him. He held her by the campfire and told her that everything would be fine and well again in its proper season.
And above them, the blue-green moon sang both of them to sleep.