“Help me gather everyone,” I said, and Serel nodded, suddenly serious.
The last time I had stood here, surrounded by the refugees, I had let them see me as a vengeful goddess. I had let them believe that I was untouchable. Maybe I had even let myself believe it, too. But now, I had never felt more powerless. The words spilled out of my mouth, dry and bitter like ash collecting at my feet, as I told them of the deaths — nothing else, but those were more than enough. I watched the happiness drain from their faces and grief well up in their eyes.
For the first time, I was grateful that my magic was gone. The looks on their faces were more than enough to skewer me without feeling their emotions, too.
Serel stood in the front of the crowd, those beautiful blue eyes damp. Beside him was Filias, face hard with rage.
“They can’t have killed all of them,” a weak voice said in the crowd. “Waste their resources like that? No… no, it must be a trick. Perhaps they just took the hands.”
“We have seen too much of their cruelty to believe in fairytales,” another muttered.
“We were just… here,” one woman murmured. “We were here, free, while they were… while they were being…”
Her voice trailed off, and her gaze lifted to the apartments, as if seeing a sudden darkness in the happiness that had begun to bloom here.
I understood. She was feeling the same sickening guilt that I had felt — that I still felt — when I realized I was finding undeserved contentment in Max’s garden, all while others were suffering.
Just as I understood, when Filias approached me with clenched fists, why I was the recipient of his anger. The Zorokovs were an intangible evil, half a world away. And I was standing right here.
“You told us this wouldn’t happen,” Filias said. “You told us you had found a way to give them more time, and we didn’t act because of it.”
“I did,” I said, quietly.
“And yet here we are,” another added. “Living our lives thousands of miles away, getting news of their deaths. We could have saved them.”
“We were never going to save them,” Serel said, softly, and the calm resignation in his voice twisted a knife within me.
“We could have tried,” another man said, and Serel answered, “She did try.”
Filias shook his head, jaw set. “Trying would not have been enough.”
Gods. That was the truth. Trying was not enough.
I had to force the words up my throat.
“When I told you we would save them, I believed it. I wanted to believe it.” I pressed my hand to my heart, and for a moment, my lips parted and no sounds came out.
Everything was too close to the surface. Too raw. And this terrified me, because I lived my life carefully guarding what I presented to the world.
“Those lives,” I choked out, “are my family just as much as they are yours. There is nothing I wouldn’t have sacrificed to save them. Nothing. Because they deserved better. They deserved so much better.”
The crowd had gone silent. They stared at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to answer for my mistakes or tell them what we would do next. Both their trust and their disappointment weighed just as heavily.
I was dizzy. And before I realized what I was doing, I was on my knees.
“I have nothing to say for myself,” I said. “I wish that I could tell you that I had a secret plan or enough power to will this away. But the truth is, I have no performances left. No tricks. No magic shows. No red dresses. Not even promises. Their lifespan is too short. And I know that many of you likely look at me and see a Nyzrenese witch. That is fair. Perhaps we have nothing in common but the name of the man who chained us.” I let out a humorless scoff. “What a thing to bind us. I’d rather that we be tied together by a shared dream for the future rather than a shared terrible past. And I so wanted to give us that future. I still want to give us that future. But…”
My throat closed, but perhaps they heard the words I couldn’t say:
But I don’t know how.
My palms were pressed to the ground. Here, there weren’t even cobblestones. Instead the road was simply made from earth packed down beneath thousands of boot soles and cart wheels, pounded down so many times that it was nearly stone.
I saw a pair of shoes enter my vision. I looked up to see Riasha before me, lowering to her knees. Tears streaked her weathered cheeks, but her voice was steady when she asked, “Do you know how to sing the Drifting Songs?”
I shook my head, unable to speak. I wished my answer was different. The Drifting Songs were an intricate series of hymns sung at funerals. But only priests knew all the words, and we had none in our dwindling village of escapees. Perhaps once, long ago, I had heard them sung. But it was a part of my Nyzrenese blood that had been lost forever. One of the countless, priceless things that the Threllians had taken away from us — even the ability to mourn.
Riasha pressed her palms to the earth, her hands settling on either side of mine.
“You must have been so young when we all fell. A child raised in the remnants of nations, like so many. But it is good to root ourselves in what we once were. The Drifting Songs were not just Nyzrenese, you know. All of our gods lived beneath the earth, and we all sang our versions of the Drifting Songs to send our dead to them.”
Then Riasha opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was raspy and unpracticed, words off-key, and yet they were the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
In the beginning, you tethered us.
Our feet are tied to your earth,
Our food borne of your gifts,
Our lives lived ‘neath your shelter.
I have nothing to give you but a weary soul.
I have nothing to give you but imperfection.
Let it be enough.
I felt a hand fall over mine on my left side. Then my right. I didn’t have to look — couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because my vision was so blurred from unfallen tears. Max was kneeling beside me on one side, fingers intertwined with mine, and Serel on the other. And I didn’t need to look up to know that the others were there, too, all pressing their hands to the earth, the world gone silent except for Riasha’s voice singing our lost songs.
Oh, my gods who flourish beneath our feet,
How very far I have wandered.
I have searched for you in my victories and my mistakes
In my love and my hatred.
I have crossed seas and mountains.
I am so very far from home.
But let me return to you.
My fingers curled, handfuls of dirt ground against my palm. I could almost feel them — feel something, even if it was not the gods. Perhaps there was something deeper still that bound us all, not in the aspirational hope of the sky, but the grounding constance of the earth.
Beneath us, this unfamiliar land swallowed up our grief.
I had nothing to give them but my hope.
But gods, let it be enough. Let it be enough.
I have nothing to give you but my life, Riasha sang.
I have nothing to give you but scars and heartbreak.
But let me return to you.
I have nothing to give you but my love and piety.
But let me return to you.
Let it be enough.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Max
Tisaanah’s eyes were red-rimmed by the time we left the apartments. Night had fallen. We would need to return to the Towers at some point — we now had nowhere else to go. But neither of us were in a rush to get there, so we walked back through the city, taking in the silence of the winter night.
The Drifting Songs lasted for nearly an hour, though something about them made time seem to warp and shift. The grief hung thickly in the air. I had watched Tisaanah, serene even with tears streaking her cheeks, and I couldn’t put a name to the sad pride that swelled in me at the sight of her.
The last time we had been here, when I had watched her Wield he
r magic and their attention with masterful power, I thought I’d never seen anything more beautiful. But seeing her like this, honest and raw, was its own kind of beauty. She let me see these parts of her. I never thought she would let them see it, too. Maybe she never would again.
“I’m proud of you,” I said. We had walked a long way in silence. Tisaanah gave me a startled look.
“Why?”
“I know it was hard for you to show them that.”
She let out a rough scoff. “Being sad is nothing to be proud of. Stopping it from happening would have been.”
“You couldn’t have saved them. You do know that, right?”
She didn’t answer.
Instead she slipped her arm through mine, the weight of her head pressing against my shoulder as we walked the city streets in yawning silence.
After a few minutes, Tisaanah murmured, “I like this. It makes it easy to pretend.”
“Pretend?”
“Pretend we are a normal couple. That is probably what we look like, right now.” Her arm tightened around mine, as if for emphasis, and I chuckled.
“Maybe so.” Yes, we probably did look utterly average. I did have to admit there was something pleasant about the sheer mundanity of it. Like it was something I could take for granted.
“It’s nice,” I said, quietly.
“If we left, we could be this way every day.”
My eyebrow twitched. It was the first time I had heard Tisaanah talk about running away, even in jest.
“We could.”
“Tell me where we would go.”
I paused.
It seemed dangerous to even think of it. And yet so easy, to slip into this game with her.
“We could live on a beach somewhere. Somewhere where there aren’t winters.”
I could hear the wrinkle over Tisaanah’s nose. “A beach? It smells.”
“Not all of them. Just Ara’s beaches. There are islands where the water is completely clear, no seaweed. They’re beautiful.”
“You cannot grow a garden on a beach. And what a great loss that would be.”
“Fair. Alternate proposal, then. We’ll find a forest, somewhere off in… in Besrith, or maybe on one of those southern islands, or something. We could clear out a nice big patch of land. Big enough for a decent garden. Far enough away from society that we can go unbothered for as long as we want.”
“A lake.”
“Hm?”
“It will be near a lake. I want to learn how to be a better swimmer.”
“I’ll allow it. I appreciate seeing you in wet clothes.”
She laughed, though it faded quickly.
“And the most important part,” she added, “is that no one will ever find us.”
“Not a soul.”
What a dream.
A long silence. We were almost at the Towers, those white columns looming over us, when Tisaanah said, quietly, “Would you go? Now?”
I questioned if I’d heard her right. “What?”
“If we could go, right now, would you?”
Yes.
The word rang out, emphatically, in my head. I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t the one to leave my lips when I answered.
“For a long time, I wanted nothing more than I wanted to leave Ara and never look back. But the Orders… they wouldn’t let me go. Those restrictions, after Sarlazai.”
Even when I had begged Tisaanah to leave Ara with me, I technically hadn’t been allowed to go. I had just been so desperate I was certain I’d find some way, any way, to get the hell out of there if it meant keeping her out of the Orders’ grasp.
“Not anymore,” Tisaanah said.
A bittersweet pang twinged in my chest. Yes. Tisaanah had negotiated my freedom when she signed away her own, all of those punishments erased with the slice of a blade over her skin. And yet, I felt more trapped than ever.
“There is nothing stopping us. Even my pact to the Orders has been fulfilled.” Tisaanah wasn’t looking at me, her voice oddly flat.
I stopped short. Turned to her.
“What is this? Is this a fantasy, or is it real?”
“Do you want it to be real?”
Yes. Again, the word came to me fast. But… did I? Did I really?
“I don’t think you do. You care more deeply than anyone I know. You don’t want to abandon them.”
A muscle feathered in her jaw. “Perhaps leaving is the best thing I can do for them.”
“I know what it looks like when people trust their leader. And they trust you, Tisaanah.”
Tisaanah’s careful composure slowly cracked, sadness spreading across her face like fissures through stone. “I don’t know if they should. I don’t know if I trust myself, anymore. It is nice to dream. And I’m just so… tired.”
She stepped closer, arms sliding around my neck, close enough I could see every fragment of green and silver in her eyes.
I was tired, too. And I was better at running away than I was at anything else.
I kissed her, gentle and slow. Our faces hovered there, noses brushing, as I murmured, “Ask me one more time.”
One more time, and I won’t be able to stop myself from agreeing.
Seconds yawned out before us as her eyes searched mine.
And then—
“General Farlione!”
“MAX!”
Tisaanah and I jerked apart. I turned to see none other than Moth rushing towards us, his eyes wide. Behind him, several other soldiers — my soldiers — followed. Phelyp Aleor was among them.
“Where have you been?” Moth blurted out. “You just disappeared.”
“I…”
The other soldiers caught up to Moth and as they stood before me, there was something about the looks on their faces that made whatever answer I was about to give Moth die in my throat. The expression they wore was familiar — the same expression I’d see each night before I led them into battle. The faces of terrified young men who were trying very, very hard to present nothing but bravery.
Except for Moth. Moth looked angry.
“I looked everywhere for you,” he said. “No one would tell us anything. And then Sammerin tells me that you had gone home?”
“Do you know what’s happening, sir?” Phelyp asked. His brow was knotted. He’d grown into a more confident, capable soldier, but he still was awful at hiding his unease. “Why did the plans change?”
Dread fell to the bottom of my stomach.
“Change?” I repeated.
The soldiers exchanged a wary look.
“All leave canceled. All leadership called back. Everyone to remain at the base indefinitely. Locked down. We’ve been told to remain prepared for action, sir,” Phelyp said. “You didn’t…know?”
“Is this still about Aviness’s allies?” another asked. “I thought we were done with them.”
“Should be done with them, after all that,” Phelyp muttered. “I heard rumors that it’s something else — maybe even… ah…Threllians…” His eyes fell to Tisaanah, awkwardly clearing his throat, before flicking back to me expectantly.
They were nervous. Of course they were. To call everyone back so abruptly, with so little information, and at such sweeping scale was extremely rare. It happened when the Ryvenai War broke out. At least then, we’d had at least some idea of why.
This? This was a strange measure to take, when a war had just ended. Nura must already be flexing the muscles of her newfound power. She wasn’t even officially Arch Commandant yet, not until the confirmation, but who was going to question her?
The image of her face flashed through my mind — the sheer determination in it.
She believed something horrible was coming, and Nura met formidable opponents with formidable strength. Formidable strength required an army. Would she use that army for a pre-emptive attack? I wanted to think she wouldn’t. But…
I was so lost in thought that I didn’t realize I had just been standing there, silent, as the boys stared at m
e.
“You’ll be returning, right, sir?” Phelyp said, at last.
“There are plans that still need to be settled,” I replied.
They exchanged another glance. They weren’t stupid — they recognized a non-answer when they heard one.
“Is there… any information, sir? Anything?”
They didn’t just want information. They wanted reassurance. Leadership. They had been looking at me like I could give it to them. But this was the moment I had dreaded when I had noticed them starting to hoist me onto that mental pedestal — the moment they realized I couldn’t be what they wanted me to be.
“No,” I said. “Not now. Go to talk to Essanie and Arith. They’re the ones you should be asking these questions, anyway. And if you’re supposed to be in lockdown, you shouldn’t even be this far from the base.”
They did not move.
“I will make sure you get more information,” I said. “As soon as it’s available to you. I promise. Now go before your captains realize you’re gone and you get slapped with three weeks of cleaning duty.”
They gave me half-hearted salutes and shuffled away back toward the city. But Moth remained, giving me a piercing stare that seemed so uncharacteristic of him. It made him look several years older.
“I know that I make a lot of mistakes,” he said. “But I’m not dumb.”
“I never said—”
“They all know you as the general. But I remember what you were like before all of this. And I know what you were like after the first war. You just hid.”
My eyebrows lurched. “Excuse me?”
Is he wrong, though?
“They’d talk about you like you’re some kind of legend. Like we can win anything if we have you. And they’d act like we would always have you, like it was just a given. But sometimes they would talk like that and I’d think…” He swallowed, his jaw tight. “I’d think about what you used to be like. And I’d think about how you could still just run away and leave us to fight alone. Is that what you’re doing? Leaving us to fight alone?”
My mouth, half open already with the beginnings of a response, closed.
Children of Fallen Gods (The War of Lost Hearts Book 2) Page 49