“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.”
“That’s true,” she said, because she believed that it was. “I’m so terribly sorry. About all of this. But I need you to come with me. With us. I need you to take Geder’s place.”
Aster shook hi
s head. When he spoke, his voice was thin and lost. “I can’t.”
“You have to. This isn’t over,” she said. “And you may not be crowned yet, but you’re king.”
Entr’acte: The Dragon
Inys flew. The fallen, empty world passed beneath him like a bad dream from which he could never wake. His mind drifted as effortlessly as his body. He ached in both. Steel barbs still dug in his flesh, his blood sowing the fields he passed over. His wings were more torn and ragged. Even now, he carried the funereal scent of pitch and sage in his nostrils like a memory. There had been a poem he’d heard once about flames being the beginning and end of all things. He tried to remember it now, but it slipped away from him. And if he forgot it, it was gone forever.
The sun slid to the west and vanished. The forests below him turned to waves. Far beneath the sea he could follow the ghost lights of a great pod of the Drowned as they met for their slow council, even as they had done when they were a race new-made. He felt something at that. Not pleasure, but a nostalgia so steeped in longing as to grow poisonous. Near a great rocky island, he found an updraft and spiraled in it, rising up until the moon seemed as near as the ocean below him. The air grew thinner and colder until the draft could carry him no higher, and he only turned in a wide circle watching the moonlight play across his own outstretched wings. Silver against the black.
Marcus Stormcrow had betrayed him, but Inys bore no anger. Later, he might. Or he might not. There was no wisdom in blaming a flawed tool for shattering. His Stormcrow here was too feral. Untrained. If anything, the blame for the attack lay on Inys himself. He should have spent the time to better manage his slaves. So long as they valued their small, petty wills over his own, they would be dull knives for him, and he had a world to unmake and stitch back together.
He would be more careful next time. Whatever else, he had learned to respect the low cunning of this new generation of slaves and their untamed violence. The long ages through which he’d slept had changed them. The races were as they had been before, or at least nearly so, and he’d let that lull him into thinking that the men and women within the races were likewise unchanged. And perhaps some were. Perhaps it was only a few like Marcus Stormcrow and the half-breed girl whose willful natures had gone unchecked.
It didn’t matter. He knew now. He would do better next time.
He made one last lazy turn, and sloped down to the south. The bones in his back where his wings locked fast creaked and ached. The promise of rest plucked at him like a dragonet begging for food, insistent and endearing and annoying all at the same time. But there was no land wide enough for him yet. There would be. By morning, if not before. The wind of his own passage whispered in his ears until he could almost imagine voices in it.
And still, despite everything, the Stormcrow had helped him. Clinging to the side of the great tower, he had smelled again the coppery tang of his brother’s flesh as the last of Morade died. Each of the tiny creatures and the corruption they’d carried had burned and the fumes from them had felt like a promise. Morade had meant to steal away the use of the slaves, and he had done, once. Nearly did again. But Inys had won the battle against his dead brother. Yes, through unstable alliance. Yes, through subterfuge and lies. Yes, despite his own grief and despair. What mattered was only that it was done. Had the spiders spread, the slaves of the world would have been tainted forever. Untamable. Now Morade’s influence was gone, they could be made use of in a more systematic way. That credit belonged to the Stormcrow. For that, Inys resolved not to kill the treacherous servant. But he wouldn’t breed him. Mercy had limits.
The ache in his body grew worse slowly. That was fine. Pain was nothing. It was a message he could choose to ignore. He watched the jungle canopy below him until he scented the animals that made their homes beneath the nighttime green, and found a place where he might not be disturbed. With a shrug, he unlocked the bones of his back and canted his wings to cut the air. His descent felt like the long slow fall into sleep made physical. He was not only tired, but weary.
He landed harder than he’d intended, belly thumping against the ground, claws digging into the soil as he tried to slow himself. He came to rest against the trees and lay still, his eyes closed and the wounds in his flesh shouting in new pain. The emptiness of the world overwhelmed him. No air carried the scent of another of his kind. No water carried their taste. And he, like a fool, had allied himself with slaves. He could as well have expected loyalty from fish and pigs. An animal that could speak and write was still an animal. He had lowered himself to treat them with dignity. It was only that there was no one else.
He lifted his head in the air, opened his mouth to breathe more fully. For an hour, he stayed still, waiting, tasting, longing with a fervor worse than physical pain. And then—for a moment—he caught the scent. Cloying and musky and gone again even before he was certain it was there. It opened a vault of memories. His mother’s workshop in the South Tower, the air hot and rich with the smell of blood and iron, salt and sand. He remembered being so young he could do little more than perch and watch as she took her turn fashioning wonders for the court. He had thought little enough of it all then. He could wish now he’d been a better student. Now that all had been lost, and everything depended on how he could remake it.
Another workshop. Stale and empty, perhaps. Unused for ages come and passed, without doubt. Or a figment born from desire and the ability to lie to himself. It didn’t matter. It was all he had left, and so he would reach for it. At worst, he would die in the attempt. No one would mourn him. No one remained.
The steel barbs of the Stormcrow’s betrayal still clung to him like well-forged thorns. He plucked them out. The blood that came from them drew flies and scavengers, but Inys had more than enough flame now to keep them away. The trees here were so lush and heavy with water that no fire they took would spread for long. There were maggots hearty enough to live under scales, though, so he burned his wounds closed before he slept. The blood on his scales charred and flaked away, leaving him bright again. Scarred, but bright. It was the nearest he had to honor in a world where no other voice could ratify him. He was the highest of his kind and the lowest. Purest and most debased. It was the lack of community in which he might place himself that would eat his mind. If he wasn’t more careful. He had to be more careful.
When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of battle. His wounds and exhaustion must have taken more from him than he’d known, because he didn’t sense the hunter’s approach until he was already upon him.
He was young and alone with the pale skin and huge dark eyes of the Nightswarm. The race the others called Southlings now. He held a sling in his hand, but did not threaten Inys with it. His stillness was abject, and his scent all but covered by the paste of leaves and talc that decorated his skin. The animals he hunted would not know he was there until the blow came, but he had nothing that could harm Inys.
The hunter, aware that he’d been seen, did not flee. He took a single, tentative step nearer, and then, when Inys did nothing, another. The wide black eyes glimmered slightly with trapped moonlight. Inys caught the smell of fear now, and it reassured him. Good that the young one should fear. A dragon, even one as worn and broken as he was, deserved fear. When Inys shifted his head, the boy froze but did not retreat. For a time they considered each other. The only sounds were the ticking of leaves, the calls of night animals, the distant drum of thunder from a storm too far away to see. The hunter sank slowly to his knees and made a sign in the air with his two hands. It looked like the pantomime of a bird in flight, but Inys took it as a mark of respect. A self-abasement before something deserving of the Nightswarm’s awe.
Inys moved gingerly as much to keep from crushing the boy as from fear of reopening his own wounds, drawing himself up. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the hunter’s fear.
“You have a name, little one?” Inys asked.
“Amin,” the hunter said. His voice was deeper than his body suggested. Older. Perhaps
Inys had misjudged him. “Amin of Emissir Large.”
“Your people are nearby?”
Amin pointed to the west. “Two nights. I am… I am no longer with them. I was cast out. I did something bad, and so I live here now.”
“An exile?”
“Yes,” Amin said, defiance in his voice. “I am.”
“What were your crimes?”
Amin’s eyes closed and he swayed for a moment before he opened them. They were full of tears. “Am I dreaming this? Are you my vision?”
“No. But if you seek a judge, I am it.”
The answer appeared to satisfy the Nightswarm. He sat and bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice was softer, but clear.
“There was a beast killing my people. I tracked it to its den, laid in wait, and I killed it. Myself. But when I brought it back to my people, my friend said he’d helped. He’d done nothing, but he said he’d been my equal and more than that. I… was angry. I didn’t mean for him to die. I would take it back if I could.”
Inys felt a rush of sorrow. “You cannot. None of us can. Not even me.”
The Nightswarm was quiet for a long moment. “You’re hurt?”
Inys glanced at himself. He’d been cut and healed and been cut again. The edges of his wings looked like ribbons and made his control muddy and rough. No, he wanted to say. This is nothing. No slave can hurt a dragon.
But what point was there in lying? He’d debased himself once by caring what they thought. By acting as though their good opinion of him mattered. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them. “I am.”
“I was a healer once. For my people, and for others. Perhaps…”
Inys shrugged and spread his wings. Do what you can.
Amin came close. Inys smelled the fear in him and heard it in the hummingbird-fast beating of his heart, but it did not affect the boy’s movement. The slave slowly cataloged the insults to Inys’s flesh, new and old both. The rips in his wings, unhealed since the battle in the south. The new burns and pricks still raw under the bandage of char. The long swaths where his scales had once been smooth as water and were now rougher than unfinished stone. An odd peace filled Inys. He recalled long baths of water and oil, tended by a dozen slaves. The gentle vibration of the rasp as teams of slaves sharpened his talons. It had been years ago, before the war started, when he’d lived in his cousin’s house and dreamed of besting his brothers… No, not years. More than that. More than centuries. Even Marcus Stormcrow had only addressed Inys’s body as a thing of convenience and need. To feel cared for, even in so small a way, called forth an ache deep in Inys’s breast.