Il Tornja’s eyes went empty as a starless sky. The jocularity was gone, the wry act he’d worn for so long replaced by his true face, that unreadable, unknowable alien gaze. Even now it made something in Adare quail.
“But I had your son,” he murmured.
“What did you do to him?” Adare hissed, seizing her kenarang by the lapels of his coat. “What did you do to him?”
The Csestriim shook his head. “Nothing. He is safe.”
Adare stared, scouring that inhuman gaze for the truth. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Why? After everyone you’ve murdered, why would you spare one infant?”
Il Tornja stared past her, past the landing and the stairs, into the bright, empty air of the Spear. “One grows tired,” he said finally, voice slender, “of killing one’s own children.”
Adare’s sob was like some jagged, broken thing torn bloody from her throat. The tears sheeted down her face. Il Tornja cocked his head to the side, studying her the way a botanist might scrutinize some strange, inexplicable flower.
“So broken,” he murmured, slumping to the floor. “All these years I tried to fix you, but you are still so broken.”
* * *
Strong hands gentle as air under his arms and legs, lifting, carrying.
Kaden tried to cry out, but there was nothing left inside him that could still cry. Where his mind had been, there was only a gaping hole, a passage to nothingness, oblivion. Meshkent was bellowing his fury, clinging with long claws to the remnants of Kaden, but Kaden himself was failing, unraveling. There was no way to undo what he had done. A few more heartbeats now, just a little more time, and it would be over.
We failed.
The words were vague, more sounds than words. He struggled to put a meaning to them, then gave up.
“… up. To the roof. Both of them…”
A brother’s voice, fierce and urgent, so tightly tethered to the world.
“… breathing’s weak. Can’t find a heartbeat. Wait…”
The voice went with a woman with hair like fire.
“… go. Go. Go…”
He was floating. The furious violence was gone, and he was floating up, light as smoke into the light.
We failed.
Meshkent raged desperately inside him.
Kaden could feel, with the little life that he had left, a sharp knife of regret, but even that was fading.
“… there. Open it. Open it! Through the door…”
“Kaden.” A sister’s voice. “Kaden!”
He tried to open his eyes. Failed. The hands were lowering him onto something hard and impossibly far away.
Meshkent-instantly, awfully silent.
We failed.
Then the god’s voice, composed this time, free, huge as the whole world, brutal and triumphant: NO.
The hole in Kaden’s mind, so dark a moment earlier, filled with light, so much light, too much. Kaden opened his eyes to escape it, and there, lying against the ironglass a pace away-Triste, her violet eyes fixed on his.
She smiled.
Something that had been Kaden remembered falling, a cold place full of stone and snow. A memory of falling like this falling. He waited to strike the ground, but this time, there was no ground. The whole world was those eyes, that face. Her name was gone, but the name didn’t matter, had never mattered. There was only the falling, endless, effortless, only a death that felt somehow as wide and strong and bright as any love.
60
Morning’s blue ax split the Valley of Eternal Repose. At the land’s crease, white-gray and lazy, the thin, indifferent river traced its ancient course. Years earlier, Adare had labored through a treatise on hydraulics. Mostly it focused on the building of canals, but there was an entire section on the natural history of rivers, on the way that even a small stream could carve a canyon through the land, given enough time. She tried to imagine the valley before it was a valley, before the current had cut down through the topsoil, exposing the low limestone walls that would serve as tombs to her people. How long had the water toiled through that stretch of ground? Tens of millennia? Hundreds?
And it’s not finished.
Even now, while the Annurians who had gathered in the valley stood still, silent, waiting for her to speak, the current was moving, going about its patient work, chiseling away at its bed, digging deeper, deeper. One day, the stone tombs along the valley’s walls would be too high to reach. Some traveler would stand at the bottom of the gorge and stare up, baffled, at the monuments of Malkeenian emperors-the weathered lumps that had been Alial the Great’s stone lions, Olanon’s martial bas-relief, the rising sun carved around her own father’s tomb-and wonder who had built so far up the wall of the cliff, and why, and where they had gone.
They might not notice Kaden’s grave at all. The huge cedar doors would have rotted away by then, leaving a simple aperture into the cliff’s darkness. Even if that future traveler climbed the limestone cliff to look inside, the body would be gone, ground to dust beneath time’s silent hammer. Even if people remembered, so many millennia hence, names like Annur or Malkeenian, there would be no proof left of the lie Adare was about to tell, no corpse to gaze upon, no evidence to suggest that the Malkeenian laid in that last tomb was no Malkeenian at all.
She had burned Kaden’s body ten days earlier, the night after the fire inside Intarra’s Spear. She could have asked Gwenna to carry the corpse down. The Kettral had already made two trips-the first, to lift the Flea and Sigrid to the palace infirmary; the second, to bring the bodies of Nira, and Oshi, and Ran il Tornja.
“I’ll get your brother next,” Gwenna announced gruffly. “Him and Triste.”
Adare shook her head. “We will burn them here.”
Below her, the tower glowed with still-smoldering fire. Overhead, the smoke-smudged stars carved their slow arcs through the dark. Valyn was watching her with his scarred eyes.
“Here?” Gwenna asked.
Adare nodded. “Here.” Her own conviction surprised her. “This is the place they fought so hard to reach. It is the place they made their stand. It is here that they won our war. Why take them down? Why cover them with dirt?”
And so she had labored half the night alongside Gwenna, and Annick, and Talal, and Valyn to build a rough pyre from the wreckage of the staircase below. When they were finally finished, her hands bled. Her back screamed.
“You’re limping,” Gwenna pointed out quietly. As though that were worth worrying about, as though, compared to everything else that had happened that day, it constituted some kind of sacrifice.
“I’ll survive.”
They laid the two bodies atop the pyre just before dawn. The leach kindled a spark. It wavered, then caught. The flame’s blades made smoke of the dead. The Kettral stood their vigil silently. Even Valyn just stared into the flame as though hoping to go blind. Adare opened her mouth, then shut it. What did she know of Kaden or Triste? Anything she said might be a lie. Silence was the truest eulogy, and it was a relief to remain silent. There would be time in the weeks to come, too much time, for speeches, ample need for noble-sounding lies.
And now, she thought, gazing out over the throng assembled in the valley, that time has come.
She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then began.
“Some of you who have gathered here will see the splendor of this funeral and whisper, ‘Waste.’”
She gestured to the columns of soldiers-bull-thick Aedolians, legionaries, Sons of Flame in their flashing bronze-that had marched all the way from Annur, through the wreckage north of the wall, over the low hills, then into the long, winding valley, halting, finally, before her to stand motionless as stone men. The steel heads of a thousand spears blazed like torches in the morning light.