What will become of me? He was not as frightened as he had been earlier, but it was hard not to mourn his losses. I will never be that person again.
On the other side of the garden—Beetle’s Wakeful Garden, his thoughts whispered, where Rain Servant held the King of Birds and told him how the world would end—they passed into a vast room, dark except for a small ring of candles on the floor and empty except for those candles and the body that lay on a flat stone at the center of the ring.
Barrick’s eyes filled with tears. He did not need to be told who this was. Now the chorus of whispers in his head served only to fog the clarity of his feelings. The one who lay before him had, in only a single day, become a sort of father to him—no, more than that: Ynnir had shown him nothing but forbearance and kindness.
The queen stood looking down at her husband’s body. The blindfold was gone, Ynnir’s eyes closed as if in sleep. Barrick took a few steps forward and then sank slowly to his knees, unable to carry the weight of the present moment any longer.
Son of the First Stone, the Leaping Stag, Clever Weakling… It was a chorus of whispers like the cooing of pigeons. Traitor!—no, Crooked’s Own ...!
Look at me, another voice said, sighing and distant. So small. So lost in the moment!
Startled, Barrick looked around. “Ynnir? ”The voice had been the king’s, Barrick was certain. Don’t leave me! He cast his thought after the king’s thoughts. The other memories, voices, ghosts, those countless shades and rags of understanding that haunted him now, all dispersed before his inquiry, but whatever of the real Ynnir had touched him was gone again.
“Old fool,” the queen said quietly as she stared down at the king’s pale, rigid face. “Beautiful, blind old fool.”
The funeral of the Lord of Winds and Thought passed before Barrick’s senses like a swollen, flooding river, the current crowded with objects that had become unrecognizable. In that dark, murmurous room shapes assembled around the king’s body, weeping, singing, sometimes making noises and gestures that Barrick could not connect with any human emotion at all, then after a space they dispersed again. Some of these mourning gestures were as complex as plays or temple rituals and seemed to last hours, while others were no more than a brief fluttering of wings above Ynnir’s silent form. Barrick heard speeches of which he could understand every word, but which nevertheless made no sense to him at all. Other mourners stood beside the king’s body and uttered a single unfamiliar sound that opened up in Barrick’s mind like an entire book, like one of the tales told by Orphan’s Night bards that lasted from sunset until dawn.
And still they came.
Rats, a thousand or more, a living velvet carpet that swirled around Ynnir and then were gone; weeping shadows; men with eyes as red as embers; even a beautiful girl made of broomsticks and cobwebs, who sang for the dead king in a voice like settling straw—all came to say their farewells. As the hours crept by, as wind and rain lashed the rooftops outside and the flames of the lamps guttered in the death chamber, Barrick came to understand, not the full depths of what was being expressed in that room, but something of what it meant to be one of these people. He saw that the procession was more than the individuals and what they had to say, or the movements they made to show their grief. Instead it was a collection of shapes and sounds in time, each separate yet as connected to the whole as letters in a word or words in a story. Time itself was the medium, and somehow—this was only a gleam of understanding, like a tiny fish in a stream, and to grab for it was to see it disappear altogether—somehow the People, the Qar, lived in time in a way Barrick’s mortal kind did not. They were both of it and outside it. They mourned, but they also said, This is what mourning is, and how it should be. This is the dance and these the steps. To make either less or more of it would be to lift it out of time, like lifting a fish from the river. The fish would die. The river would be less beautiful. Nothing else would change.
The candles at last flickered out. New tapers were lit, and this itself seemed but another part of the dance, another bend in the river. Barrick let it all flow over him and through him. Sometimes he found himself knowing before someone spoke, or sang, or presented their silent tribute, who they were and what they had brought. Other times he was lost in the strangeness of it all, as when he had been a child and had listened to the wind skirling around the chimneys and under the roof tiles of his home, overwhelmed by suggestions of meaning that he knew he could never grasp, by the eternal mortal frustration of being so small against the uncaring vastness of the night.
He surfaced at last out of a darkness full of dwindling song and shadow. The great room was empty. The king’s body was gone. Only the queen remained.
“Where… where is he… ?”
Saqri was as still as the statue she resembled, gazing at the empty dais. “His husk… is being returned. As for the truth of Ynnir… he has chosen to give his last strength to wake me, and now he and his ancestors are lost to us forever.”
Barrick could only stand, uncomprehending.
“And so we move a step closer to the end of all things,” she said as she turned toward him, although she barely seemed to see him and spoke as though to herself. “What is your place in it to be, mortal man? What is written in the Book for you? Perhaps you are meant to keep a shadow of our memory alive, so that when we altogether vanish, still a dim, confused recollection might trouble the victors. Do we trouble you? Have you an inkling of what you have destroyed?”
So fierce, so bright—like a fire! a voice inside him whispered, but Barrick was too angry to pay it any mind.
“I have destroyed nothing,” he told her. “Whatever my great-grandfathers did is nothing of mine—in fact, it has cursed me too! And I did not choose to come here—I was sent by your… porcupine woman, Yasammez.” A little of his confusion suddenly fell away, as though someone had wiped a layer of grime from an old, shiny thing. “No, I did choose to come here, at least in part. Because Gyir wanted me to. Because the king called me, asked me… urged me. I didn’t ask to be born at all, and I certainly didn’t ask to be born with Qar blood burning inside me. It almost drove me mad!”
The expression on the queen’s perfect, eggshell-delicate face did not change, but she was silent for a while.
“She did choose you, didn’t she—my dear one, my love, my ancestor? ” Saqri moved a step closer to him, lifted a hand and brushed his face. “What did she see?” Although she was no taller than Barrick and slender as a reed, it was all he could do not to shrink back from her touch. Her fingers on his brow, like her husband’s kiss, were cool and dry. “Did Yasammez mean only to taunt him? She never cared for my husband—not as I did. She thought he was too lax a protector of the People, that he valued doing what was right over doing what was necessary.”
But they are the same, something murmured in Barrick’s thoughts. The queen yanked her fingers away from his face as though she had been burned. “What trick is this? ” Her hand shot out again like a striking snake, then flattened with surprising delicacy over his eyes, pressing firmly on the space at the center of his forehead. “What trick… ?”
A moment later she staggered back, the first less than perfectly graceful movement he had seen her make. Her eyes widened. “No. It is not possible!”