“It isn’t,” Kit said. “The world has never been fair. Often beautiful. Sometimes kind when kindness was not deserved. But never fair.”
“What are you thinking, Kit?” Cithrin said.
He stepped back, his arms rising at his sides as if he were only walking a stage, and the flames and devastation behind him were just a clever set piece.
“As long as I am in the world, the danger is as well. I am known to too many people, and the power I carry is too great. No, no, please. Don’t cry. This is victory too. I love you all. It has been an honor traveling with you.”
“Kit!” Cithrin shouted, but he was right. She felt it in her heart like a bruise too deep to touch.
The old actor turned his back to them and walked toward the fire, his steps steady and sure. His head held high and bravely. A dead man, choosing his own pyre.
Cary shrieked and surged forward. Sandr leaped for her, grabbing her shoulder and half spinning her. Cithrin took her arm, but the woman shrieked louder and fought. Clara came as well, and her huntsman, and even Aster. Cary lowered her head, pushing madly against them as the other actors came. It was a cruel parody of the embrace they’d just shared. Or else it was the same. Just the same.
When Cary’s knees gave way and she buckled, the others sank to the wounded grass with her. Cithrin’s world stank of fire and soil and dust and tears. When she looked up, Kit was gone among the flames. She closed her eyes again and looked away.
Time moved strangely for a while. The guards came, eyes wide, swords drawn against some enemy that they imagined they could cut. When none such appeared, they took position around Aster but then seemed not to know what they should do. Eventually, the boy prince ordered them to help contain the fires. A rose garden was in flame to their right. The rubble and debris from the Kingspire scattered like bones to the left, falling out over the edge and into the Division. If something caught flame down there, Cithrin didn’t know how they’d extinguish it, or if maybe it would find its place in the layer upon layer of ruins that were the earth under Camnipol, and set the whole city up like an endless torch. It didn’t matter.
As the fires moved, Aster joined the soldiers and servants in hunting through the wreckage for any who might still live. A sweep of well-tended grass became a makeshift cunning man’s tent, the wounded and the dying laid out in rows. There were more than Cithrin had hoped, but fewer than she’d feared. The cunning men moved through them, chanting and calling forth angels until the air seemed to bend from their petty magics.
She found Marcus on a gravel path by the edge of a burning pavilion. Blood caked his side, and his face was pale with its loss. It seemed almost certain that he would have collapsed without Yardem at his side, supporting him. The evil green blade in its scabbard was across Yardem’s back now. A soldier in the livery of House Caot stood before them, a naked blade in his hand.
“You can’t find an axe?” Marcus said.
“No,” the swordsman said. “This is all I have.”
“It’ll have to do. Get to the north side, up by that fountain. We need to clear all that brush. What you cut down, bring to the fire. Burn it where we can control the flames. Clearing the ground doesn’t do shit if you’re building up a pile of kindling on the far side of it.”
“Yes, sir,” the enemy soldier said, and sprinted away.
Marcus sagged, shaking his head.
“All their best men are in the field, sir,” Yardem said. Then, with a nod, “Magistra.”
She wanted to run to them, to fold her arms around them as she had with Clara, with Kit. But somehow, it felt wrong. That wasn’t who they were to each other. Or perhaps to themselves.
“Kit’s dead,” she said.
“How?” Marcus asked. She made her report—what Kit had said, holding Cary back as he walked into the flames—with a calm that sounded like shock even as she said it.
The pain that flickered across Marcus’s eyes was real, and more terrible for being so little expressed. “Sorry to hear that. Liked him. I’m fairly certain we got all the rest. I took the big one. Yardem locked the others in the tower before Inys came.”
“Inys escaped,” Cithrin said. “I… I tried.”
“You did fine. It’s the best plan I could find in the moment, but was long odds even before we started improvising.”
“Still…”
“You stopped the world from falling into an endless war of every man for himself,” Marcus said. “One asshole got past you. Still makes for a damned good record.”
“The asshole was a dragon.”
Marcus shrugged gingerly, flinching when the pain struck. “Didn’t call it perfect.”
“And Geder?” she asked.
Yardem flicked his ears and looked thoughtfully up at the ruined tower. “Dead, ma’am. He stayed behind so that the priests wouldn’t be alarmed. He wanted me to tell you.”
Cithrin frowned, waiting to see what emotions rose up in her. A bit of relief, a bit of confusion. “What did he want you to tell me?”
“That he died a hero, I think. That he sacrificed himself for your plan. For you.”
“Ah,” she said. “Not sure what to think of that.”
“We’ll put it on his tombstone,” Marcus said. “‘Here lies a vicious, petty tyrant who damn near broke the world. He did one brave thing at the end.’”
“It’s the thing he hoped to be remembered for,” Yardem said.
“I can hope for the clouds to rain silver,” Marcus said, “but it’s not going to happen.”
“No,” Cithrin agreed. “It isn’t.”
Her mind was already racing ahead. With Geder gone, the rest of the plan had to change as well, but possibly in ways that made things better. There wasn’t time for the Anteans to appoint a new Lord Regent. The city was wounded and under threat. The mark of their power was broken both in the city and in the world outside it. But there was a symmetry—the new saving the new—that might help sell what she needed sold now.
“Come with me,” she said.
“Where are we going?” Marcus asked, already falling into half-carried step behind her.
“We need Aster.”
At the base of the Kingspire, the worst of the fire had exhausted itself. Here and there, great beams still burned like tree-thick logs in a Haaverkin common house. The tower stood smoking, its top jagged as a broken tooth. A severed monument to match the Severed Throne. The players were gone except for Mikel, Lak, and Sandr, who were moving with a group of the palace servants, carrying shovels to bury the little fires that still burned. Clara had been joined by several of the other women of the court, and was bringing water from some palace pump or well, not to stop the conflagration but to soothe the throats and clean the eyes and burns of those who did. Cithrin lifted an arm to her, and Clara nodded. She understood. It was time.
Aster stood amid the royal guard, staring up at the ruin that had been his home. Tear tracks marked his soot-dark face, but he was not weeping now. He only looked emptied. She couldn’t help wondering what this was like to him. So many years of believing all that Basrahip and the priests had said. She wasn’t sure even Kit’s words could have untied all of that knot. Would he still hate the Timzinae, even knowing that there was no call to? Would he still believe in a great spirit in the world that promised to slaughter all lies, when it had itself been proven false? Or would he reject everything, and live his life in the desolation that comes after betrayal? She didn’t know what to hope.
The guards closed rank to keep her from him, but Aster ordered them back. She walked to him. Her clothes were as filthy and smoke-stinking as his. Her body was shuddering with weariness. He smiled at her with a sorrow that belonged on a much older face.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?”
“He is,” she said.
He lowered his head, mouth twisting for a moment in grief. “I thought so. He would have found me before this. If he could.”