For a moment she imagined telling everything: “I am no prophet. The goddess does not speak, either through me or to me. My scars are only scars. My blessings were lies.”
And then? The righteous would rise up to kill her. Others would kill the killers, declare her a martyr. It was an old story, told over and over in the histories: bodies dragged from homes, butchered in the streets, burned alive, faith pitted against faith, belief against belief. The only way out was to stay alive, to keep wearing her bright mantle of lies. She had a lifetime to find a way to abdicate, to dismantle the broken apparatus of empire, to find a way to avoid passing the horror of her position on to her only son, that tiny child who was, even now, being carried down to her from the chilly fortress in Aergad.
“The dead are dust,” she said again, “but you know this already. You have seen it.”
She gestured to the bier.
“My brother, Kaden hui’Malkeenian, died to save our city, to defeat a traitor at its very heart-but he is gone. Gone beyond all human reach, gone certainly beyond any meager language I might muster.
“So are the loggers of the Thousand Lakes hacked apart by the Urghul. So are the soldiers sacrificed on bloody altars across the north. So are the Channarians who starved during Dombang’s blockade, the warriors of the Waist who rose up to be slaughtered by our legions, and the legionaries slaughtered in their turn. So are the unnumbered Urghul buried, nameless, in their twin mounds north of Annur itself.
“My brother lies right here, at my feet”-the lie was easier this time-“but he will not hear the words I speak today, nor will the rest of the dead spread across Vash and Eridroa, whom we will never fully tally.”
Nira, laid to rest beside her brother in a tiny cemetery by the sea …
The fallen Kettral, whom Gwenna had carried back to the Islands in the claws of a giant bird …
Fulton, buried with pomp in the northern forests; Mailly, dragged from her hanging cell and burned without remark …
“The dead are beyond all speech and hearing, so why speak at all? Why have we come here today?
“I will tell you. Forget the dead. A funeral is the time for the living to speak with the living.”
She thought again of Valyn walking away, of the Urghul finally riding north, disappearing like a storm over the horizon.
“And what should we say, those of us who have survived? Should we drag out the old platitudes?
“The dead will never be forgotten.…
“They fell that we might live.…
“The living will rebuild.…”
She shook her head.
“No.
“Each death is a smashed glass, a burned pyre, a broken bow. Nothing can be put back.”
Two dozen paces off, silent in his tomb, her father lay. In front of Adare, almost at her feet, wrapped in Liran silk, waited the corpse of the creature who had killed him.
He will be the last, Adare decided. She gazed the length of the valley, the final resting place of so many Malkeenians. It was his, anyway, this empire we called Annur. He made it, and he is dead.
She raised her chin.
The sun was cold on her face.
When she spoke, her words sounded like something written down long ago, as though she were listening to herself from some inexplicable distance.
“What remains is the oldest work, the only labor, that endless task from which the dead have been absolved at last: to go into this smoldering, splintered world, and to make from the wreckage something strange and new, something unknown to us until now.”
EPILOGUE
A woman with eyes that burn like fire walks to the center of a bridge over deep, fast water. The woman has a name, as does the river, as does the bridge-Adare hui’Malkeenian, the White River, the Span of Peace-but the name is not the thing. This is the first of many challenges facing the Historian.
All record is translation. There is no way to press that woman between the pages of a codex, no way to preserve the scarred man who approaches her but in words. All approaches are imperfect:
Valyn hui’Malkeenian, the first son of Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian, first of that name …
A badly scarred young man, his dark flesh twisted with muscle, stalking across the span …
Chosen by Hull in the caverns beneath Irsk, a warrior-prophet faster and stronger than all other men …
The Kettral commander who defected from Annur to join the Urghul north of the White River …
Murderer of hundreds, traitor to his own people …
Loyal brother …
Beast …
The characters shift with the focus, like the clouds scraping across the bowl of the sky, like the never-still shapes of the river surging between the piers below. Like waves, men and women exist only in motion, in change. Put them on the page, and you have already failed.
And then there are their words:
“This bridge,” says the Emperor, the sister, the mother, the prophet, gesturing to the stones beneath her feet, “this edifice, is a monument to the newfound peace between Annurians and Urghul.”
This is a lie. The bridge will be different things to different people over the long years. To Adare, now, it is the price she has paid to make the Urghul stay out of Annur. Her brother does something like a smile with his face. How to describe it?
“A link,” he agrees, “between two great lands.”
This, too, a lie. To Valyn, the bridge is the knife he holds against his sister’s throat. He is not the chieftain of the Urghul; they fractured into a hundred rival tribes when the Kettral killed the leach who led them, their assault on the city suddenly inchoate, hopeless. He is not their chieftain, but as the only Annurian who rides among them, he speaks here for all the pale riders. He translates their Urghul words into Annurian, then translates the plain truth once more into this lie he sets before his sister.
“It will bring us closer.”
The bridge was his idea. The paved span took half a year to build. It is wide enough for twenty Urghul to ride abreast, which they will do, if the Emperor closes her fist too tightly around her empire. If it is even still an empire.
The word that the historian might use for the bridge is bond-the bridge binds as surely as any chain-but it is not a historian’s place to use his own words. When he pens this moment, he will record the words as they were spoken: Monument to peace. A link between lands.
What else will he record? The detail is infinite. A full description of the scene, of each of the tens of thousands of horses gathered on the northern bank, of every ranked legionary at the Emperor’s back, would be impossible. There is a universe of truth in the green-gold dragonfly that buzzes between these two Malkeenians, in the patterns of its fine-veined wings, in the refractions of its multiform eyes. A diligent historian could reflect for a lifetime on a single, swaying nuns-blossom, on the tessellation of the flower’s white petals.…
For millennia, this was the way of the Csestriim: accounts of glaciation, records of water levels in flood and drought, examinations of the courses of the stars, investigations into heredity, numerical pattern, river formation, each with its columns and tallies, charts, maps, graphs.