Tam could see the Duran brothers fighting alongside Tash Bakkus, known throughout the five courts as the Iron Maiden. She picked out Warfire’s flaming swords as they chopped their way through the white-eyed dead. Courtney and the Sparks were part of Rose’s entourage as well. They’d been among the bands to defeat the Heartwyld Horde at Castia and were doubtless wondering how the hell they’d found themselves embroiled in yet another hopeless battle against overwhelming odds.
Brune was leading the way, snapping and snarling, using his body to bludgeon a path for those behind him. He was raked by talons, slashed by knives, pummelled by mauls and clubs and fists—but he endured, heedless of his mounting insurmountable injuries.
Tam remembered Cura warning her that some among them would need to sacrifice everything so that others might survive, and the summoner’s words suddenly seemed like a premonition.
Brune wasn’t concerned with survival, leastways not his own. He was fighting for his bandmates. His pack. He’d surrendered himself to the beast within—another sacrifice laid at Rose’s feet—and Tam found herself envying him the chance to do so.
Neither she nor Brune saw the mammoth falling until it was too late. The beast had been wading through the crush beside the shaman when one of Rose’s doppelgangers mounted its head and drove the spiked butt of her battle-axe into its skull. It toppled sideways, crushing Brune’s hind legs and pinning him beneath it.
Tam cried out, supressing the urge to leap from her balcony and rush to his aid. Even Rose might have stopped to help had Freecloud not shouted something that spurred her on. They were so close now, hardly a stone’s throw from the woman whose death would put an end to all of this.
Sunlight streamed from Vellichor’s blade as Rose raised it overhead.
Madrigal tolled like a temple bell as it slipped from its scabbard.
Slowhand was so intent on the battle below that he’d neglected to pass Tam another arrow, and Bran—
—was staring, dumbstruck, at the crude tip of the bone sword jutting from his stomach.
Tam turned slowly, as one entombed in freezing water, to see Hawkshaw’s nightmare rictus grinning back at her.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” he grated.
She’d been about to reply when something that looked like a fist but felt like a hammer caught her chin, and the dark came swirling down.
Chapter Fifty-eight
The Spark and the Snowflake
“Tam.” Her mother’s voice called from beyond the door. Tam’s eyelids twitched. Her mind roused itself from sleep, sluggish as a cat caught in the sun.
“Tam, get up.” Her father this time. Insistent. What time was it? Why was it so damn cold? Had she left the window open?
And speaking of cats, she wondered, where is Threnody? Tam turned her head, expecting to feel her pet’s fur tickle her neck. Instead, she felt a sharp stab of pain. Pain? That doesn’t—
“Tam!” The voice was more insistent this time, but it did not belong to her father. It was Uncle Bran.
“Tam! Get up!”
Her eyes fluttered open. Grey light. A roof, but not her own. A sound like ten thousand people screaming from the bottom of a well funnelled into her ears, growing louder, and louder, until it crashed over her like a bucket of ice water.
Tam bolted upright, wincing at the ache in her neck, the throbbing in her head, the stinging soreness in her jaw where Hawkshaw’s fist had—
Hawkshaw!
She was looking through the open balcony doors, where two figures were wrestling in the gloom of the White Lion’s upper commons. The larger of the two hurled the other over a table before turning to face her.
“Are you okay?” asked Slowhand.
“I am,” Tam said, without actually knowing whether she was or not. “Bran …”
“I’m here!” her uncle croaked. He was lying on his side, still impaled by the Warden’s sword.
“You’re alive!”
Bran grimaced. “For now. I swear on the Summer Lord’s Beard, though, if that fucker’s hurt my liver …”
“Tam!” Slowhand shouted over her uncle’s rambling. “You’re here to kill the Queen, yes?”
She nodded.
“So do it. I’ll handle this—” He winced as a chair flung by Hawkshaw broke across his back. “I’ll handle—” He flinched as a spinning bottle struck his shoulder, shattering on impact. “I’ll—” A second bottle smashed against the back of his head. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he swore. “Go save the world, will you?”
“Right,” she said. “And Slowhand …”
“Mm?”
She jutted her chin toward Hawkshaw. “He’s the one who shot Gabe.”
Something hardened in the old merc’s face, and his huge hands curled into fists. He said in a voice freighted with quiet menace, “Did he now?”
Tam didn’t bother watching what happened next. But if the Warden could be killed, she figured that Clay Cooper would find a way. She grabbed her bow and scrambled to Branigan’s side. “Uncle, are you okay?”
The old man’s eyes floated a moment before landing on her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“There’s a sword in you.”
“Ah, well … there’s a sword in all of us,” he said, then winked as though he’d said something profound. Which, to be fair, he kind of had.
Doing her best to ignore the grunts and thuds behind her, Tam stood to assess the bedlam below. It was almost impossible to tell the living from the dead, since Astra was raising mercenaries as fast as they fell. There were ten thousand battles raging all at once, so it took Tam a few seconds to find the one she was looking for.
Rose and Freecloud were on their own now. The company escorting them had dissolved into separate bands, each of them fighting on the fringes to keep the Horde at bay. By now every thrall surrounding Astra was a fallen merc, forcing Rose to hack through several clones of herself as they closed on the sorceress.
Madrigal sang like a choir in Freecloud’s hands. Vellichor seemed light as a feather in Rose’s. She and the druin fought in perfect unison, slashing and spinning like dancers in the midst of a brawl.
They were untouchable, unstoppable, possessed of a savage grace that Tam, watching from on high, could define only as elemental. Like a landslide, or a tidal wave, or a wildfire raging unchecked, Rose and Freecloud crashed through Astra’s thralls, gaining momentum with every step.
A loud crash yanked her from reverie. Tam glanced over her shoulder to see Hawkshaw rise unsteadily from behind the bar. Shards of glass clung to the Warden’s skull, glinting like some grisly mosaic as he clambered over the countertop.
“Why do I always get the stubborn ones?” she heard Slowhand growl.
Beside her, Bran was lying with his eyes closed and his chin slumped on his chest.
“Uncle!”
“I’m just resting my eyes.”
“You’re not resting your eyes, Bran—you’re dying!”
He blinked, suddenly alert. “Dying? I’m not dying! Why would you even say that?”
“Then talk to me,” she insisted, blowing through her exposed fingers to try and warm them. “Sing me a song.”
“Sing?” His agitation ushered in a fit of violent coughing. “Blood of the Gods, girl, can’t you see I’m dying here!”
She chose an arrow from the crate, checked to make sure it was straight and sound. “Hum, then. I don’t care.” She nocked the arrow. Sighted down its length. “Just let me know you’re still alive.”
Tam watched in awe as Rose sheared through two of her undead doubles at once. She pivoted on her heel, plunging Vellichor through the chest of another. She let go of the hilt and activated her bracers; her scimitars leapt from their scabbards, and Rose sent them spinning away. Thistle sank into the chest of a red-bearded merc and carried him off his feet. Thorn cut the wing from a diving harpy—the bird-woman veered wildly and thumped off the roof above Tam.
Mere seconds after she put it there,
Rose reclaimed Vellichor from the thrall in which she’d buried it and whirled away, hewing its head off on the backswing. She leapt to take on her next opponent, the dazzling glare of a sylvan sun flashing from her blade.
The light scythed across the face of the Winter Queen, drawing her eye. Tam saw the sorceress flinch as she recognized first the Archon’s sword, and then, a split second later, the woman wielding it, whose golden hair gleamed like a new crown.
The entire Horde hitched on a stolen breath, and for a moment Astra’s labyrinthine concentration faltered. Her fliers hovered in the sky, and a thousand listless corpses were stuck down as they froze in place, a mirror of their mistress’s stupefaction.
The sound of splintering wood threatened to derail Tam’s concentration. The muscles in her arms were complaining that she’d held her shot for too long, but she kept her eyes on Rose, waiting for the signal she knew was coming. Bran was humouring her, humming a weak, wavering rendition of the song that was his sister’s lasting legacy.
Freecloud, inexplicably, ignored a thrall’s clumsy chop at his ribs as he moved to close the distance between himself and Rose. The blade bit into his side, yet he charged past without bothering to retaliate.
What? Tam frowned. What is he doing?
The druin sliced through one enemy while blocking the incoming hammer of another with nothing but an upraised arm. The blow snapped his limb like a twig, but the druin bowled his opponent over and staggered on. He put Madrigal through the face of another thrall and leapt over its falling corpse without bothering to retrieve his sword.
Tam’s eyes flickered to Rose, who was too busy fending off phantoms of her former self to see Ios, Telltale’s undead baroness, lunge at her from behind.
Oh. Realization rocked Tam like a punch, except it hurt so much more than a fist. A part of her, she realized, had always known it would come to this.
Rose dispatched the last of her adversaries and turned, too late, to defend herself.
Freecloud leapt between them, his back square to the assassin’s thrusting blade.
Bran’s humming filtered through the sudden, soul-cleaving silence, a terribly appropriate underscore to the tragedy unfolding below.
Every battle has a cost, Freecloud had told her once. Even the ones we win.
By the time Tam blinked tears from her eyes it was over. For a heartbeat Rose and Freecloud stood frozen face-to-face, so close they might have shared a single breath between them, and then Freecloud was falling, dying, dead at her feet, and the assassin was headless, tipping backward as blood fountained from the stump of her neck.
Rose didn’t stop to mourn, though her heart must be breaking.
She didn’t scream, though her soul would be crying out loud.
She let grief and fury and love drive her onward, lifting her blue-sky blade like a pennant as she hurtled toward the Winter Queen.
Astra stepped to meet her, a sneer pulling at her lips. “Now …” she seethed.
Rose summoned Thorn to hand.
“… you …”
She hurled the scimitar at Astra’s head.
“… are …”
It missed, of course. Because you couldn’t kill a druin by attacking it directly.
“… mine!”
Their swords clashed. Sparks and snowflakes dissolved between them. Rose’s impetus carried her through the space Astra had occupied a moment earlier. She skidded, spun, lashed out again.
The Winter Queen reeled under Rose’s assault, and Tam, whose whole world was pinned to the point of an arrow, saw black smoke curl from Astra’s lips as the dead began rising around them.
Rose attacked, and attacked, and attacked—unable to overcome the druin’s prescience. A wild swipe knocked the blackmetal crown from Astra’s head, but left Rose hopelessly exposed.
The Winter Queen turned an evasive step into a deadly counterstrike. Her banshee blade cut an inexorable arc toward Rose, who twisted, turned her face toward her bandmate on the balcony above, and nodded.
Bran’s humming fell silent. The clamour of Slowhand’s fight with Hawkshaw ceased to exist. Tam’s muscles relaxed. Her heart constricted like an hourglass, until the space between one trickling heartbeat and the next stretched on forever. She’d been aiming the arrow already. All that remained was to let it go.
She drew a breath.
She let it go.
“Sorry?” Tam had asked a short while earlier.
Rose stepped closer, lowering her voice. “I said you’re going to kill the Winter Queen.”
“That’s impossible.”
“They said killing the Simurg was impossible.” Rose grinned. “We did it twice.”
“But she’ll see it coming,” Tam said. “If I shoot her, she’ll just dodge it anyway.”
Rose put a hand on her shoulder, leaning closer still. “Then shoot me.”
Tam’s aim was true. The arrow went streaking toward Rose, who should have used her sword to parry Astra’s strike, but instead she raised it like a shield and angled the blade just so.
The steel-tipped shaft deflected off Vellichor and tore a ragged hole in the Winter Queen’s throat. Astra tried to speak, but could only gasp around the black ichor boiling from her ravaged neck. And Rose, her side split open by the druin’s sword, rammed Vellichor through the part of Astra’s chest where her heart used to be. The sorceress died that instant. Her glamour faded, pale flesh succumbing to the wrath of centuries as she sagged to the ground.
Tam heard a heavy thump behind her, and assumed that Hawkshaw, whether or not he deserved it, was finally at peace.
The entire Horde was collapsing at once. Without Astra’s magic to compel them, they slumped like puppets cut from their sorcerous strings. Wyverns and wolfbats spiralled from the sky as the fires in their eyes blew out.
Rose was still on her feet. The Winter Queen’s sword was lodged in her side, and Tam (watching in grief and disbelief past the blurred arc of her bow) winced as Rose pried the blade free with bloodied fingers. She pitched forward, but turned her momentum into a lurching step, then another, stumbling around broken bodies and shattered arms until she stood over Freecloud, lying dead on a bed of bloody Roses.
The whole city seemed frozen but for snowflakes falling, and falling, and falling.
And Rose fell with them.
Epilogue
The Promise
The following is an excerpt from The Wyld Heart, the first memoir of Tam Hashford. Select passages can be found in the song titled The Ballad of Bloody Rose, widely believed to have been written by Tam Hashford as well. The Wyld Heart was later adapted for the stage by Kitagra the Undying and retitled Fable: A Love Story.
Conthas burned to the ground. Apparently, this is a regular occurrence. Every few decades or so a fire goes unchecked and razes the entire city to ash. The locals think of it as a time of renewal. A chance to start over, to sweep away the old and build something new.
New taverns, for instance. New pubs, new scratch-dens; new gambling holes and fighting pits. New ale-houses, dice-houses, tap-houses, and whore-houses. From what I understand, Conthas is like some drug-addled, sex-crazed, booze-swilling phoenix that refuses to stay dead.
But not this time. This time, it died for good.
Everyone’s got a theory as to why this is. Cura blames the weather. She says that everyone smart enough to skip town before the Horde arrived had settled in Brycliffe or Fivecourt by the time spring rolled around, and couldn’t be bothered to return. Roderick thinks that since more monsters are being bred in captivity and less captured in the Heartwyld, it was inevitable that Conthas—for decades a staging point for bands brave enough to enter the forest—would eventually outlive its usefulness.
I’ve got a different theory: I think it’s haunted.
Now, I’m not saying there are ghosts and ghouls kicking through the ashes every night (although there probably are), but something about it just feels … off. All told, nearly two hundred thousand men, women, and monsters di
ed in that valley, and while the fire took care of their bodies, I suspect a part of them lingers still. There’s an almost palpable sense of recrimination in the air. An eerie disquiet that begs the question, “How did it come to this?”
There is nothing, I think, so wasteful—or so pointlessly tragic—as a battle that should never have been fought in the first place. All of us lost something at Conthas. Some more than others. Some so much more than others.
We waited out the winter at Clay’s inn, which the Horde had left untouched as it came south. Coverdale, too, was spared its wrath. Astra didn’t care about destroying our homes. It was our souls she was after.
Both of Brune’s legs were broken when that “damn dirty elephant” (as he puts it) fell on him, so he spent the following months recuperating by the fire and drinking Clay’s whiskey while swapping stories with Roderick and Uncle Bran—whose liver had, in fact, fallen victim to Hawkshaw’s blade. Luckily, Moog happened to know a surgeon who successfully replaced Bran’s skewered organ with one belonging to a recently deceased orc.
If you’re interested in the benefits associated with having the liver of an orc, feel free to find my uncle and ask him for yourself. Seriously—he won’t shut up about it.
Cura wasn’t much for company in the weeks after the battle. She would sleep for days, and sometimes stare at nothing for hours at a time. Often, I’d find her touching fingertips to her skin, tracing the scars that were no longer visible. Not to me, anyway. Her inklings—the memories, and the people they represented—were such an intimate part of Cura’s past, and so deeply ingrained in her persona, that I wonder if she’ll ever get used to living without them.
She and I … Well, it’s complicated. I won’t get into it here, mostly because I’m not sure how to explain it myself. She makes me happy. I try to do the same. We laugh together, cry together, and sleep together. Need we call it anything more?
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