by Rachel Dunne
Though he still dreamed of fire and bubbling flesh, though he often found himself clutching his elbows and pressing tight against the roiling in his gut, though the thought drifted through his mind not infrequently, How can you live with yourself?—still, Keiro could not bring himself to want to die. He had walked shoulder-deep into a far-off ocean, and had not been able to walk any deeper. And if he did not wish to die, he had to fight for every moment of life.
“I will be sure to tell you anything you need to know in order to perform your duties,” Keiro said to Valrik, and Sororra smiled amicably, and did not invite Valrik to join them. Fratarro, after a moment’s hesitation, bent to pluck the stuffed horse from where it had fallen and tucked it into his shirt, where it would be unseen but not forgotten.
Fratarro would have led them beneath the ground, to the cave he had made into his home, but Sororra laughed. “Brother, we spent centuries belowground. Why would I ever go back there?”
And so Keiro led them away, through the long grass that would warn them of any who dared try to follow them. Keiro thought it might have been the first time Fratarro had truly explored the world since being freed—as far as Keiro knew, he’d spent all his time in the tunnels and caves, working with Keiro or surrounded by his mravigi, who adored him. Because of the trepidation he could see on Fratarro’s face, Keiro led them to one of his favorite places: where butterflies whose wings glowed blue would rise fluttering into the night when their slumber was disturbed.
He didn’t realize until they arrived how tainted the place would feel: the last person he’d brought here was the mage Nerrin, whose life had been taken—given—in order to restore some measure of power to the Twins when they were still bound. The butterflies had made Nerrin so happy, and it had lightened Keiro’s heart to bring a measure of joy to the poor mage’s life. She had laughed the same way Sororra now laughed, spinning in place with arms outstretched as the glowing butterflies spread around her.
There were so many people he had tried to protect, and failed. With the mask that was shaped like his face, Keiro smiled.
They sat among the butterflies, Keiro and his two gods who wore the bodies of children, and young Cazi, who always trailed after Keiro. That, at least, brought a smile to Fratarro’s face—Cazi curled in Keiro’s lap, but resting his chin upon Fratarro’s knee. Sororra spoke at length, not needing anything besides a listening audience. At the end of it she held her brother’s hand, the one he could not move, and she told him it didn’t matter. She looked to Keiro and asked, “You told them what to do? The Fallen?” Keiro nodded; the instructions she’d given him to pass along had burned through his mouth, clear goals for all the mass of the Fallen even now likely reaching the edges of Fiatera. It would begin, very soon. Sororra squeezed her brother’s hand. “You see? All will be well, Brother. We will be well.”
Fratarro pulled in a deep breath and slowly released it as he lifted his good hand. It shook slightly, and for a long moment nothing happened—and then a butterfly shimmered into being on his palm, its wings white-speckled black, like the mravigi, like the night sky. It fluttered uncertainly upward until it found its balance, and then it swirled among the multitude of blue. Fratarro met his sister’s grin with a smile of his own. He said, “I’m ready.”
Keiro left them with Cazi at his side, feeling like an intruder. Sororra had given him his instructions, and there was nothing left that they needed to share with him. There was much he had to do among the Ventallo: they needed to be ready to leave by the moon’s next rising, for there was nothing left to keep them in the Plains. The Twins had shattered the sun, and brought the Long Night, and it was time for them to go forth and do all that they had promised.
Keiro found Terstet and brought the mage with him before he went to speak to all the others—Keiro had learned that reminding them of the power he had brought to bear never hurt. Terstet stood shaking at his shoulder as Keiro assembled all the others, the Ventallo and the blades for the darkness and the mages, and told them to make ready to leave. “It is time for the Twins to return to their homeland,” he said, “and we will be their escort. We will lead them back to their home, and to their glory.”
Keiro was not surprised when Valrik stepped forward, his face tight with fury. “Did you not think,” he asked, the words edging closer to a shout, “that I should be told of this first?”
“No,” Keiro said. “I didn’t. The Twins bid me prepare the remaining Fallen to leave. It seemed a task I was perfectly capable of handling.”
“You impudent whelp.” Valrik took a step closer, fists clenched at his sides, and then another step. “If you think—”
“Terstet,” Keiro said, steadily and clearly. The mage at his shoulder jerked forward, obedient. Keiro’s heart was slamming within his breast, and he left the rest of the threat unspoken, hoping it would be enough.
But Valrik laughed. “You think your pet scares me? The mages are mine, and they will heed me above all else. Sit,” he commanded Terstet, and the mage sat. The certainty in Valrik’s voice was so strong that Keiro knew he would fail if he tried to give Terstet an opposing command, and so he stood silent with racing heart. He would not make a fool of himself before all these people. Valrik went on, “The mages are mine. The blades are mine. The Fallen are mine. You have nothing and no one—you are an apostate, cast out, and you will never lead the Fallen. It is time for this charade to end.” He took another step.
Ever since finding the Twins bound below the earth, Keiro had been fighting—fighting for them, certainly, but fighting, too, for his own life. They had named him their most loyal follower, they had chosen him, but they had not given him any tools beyond their faith in him, which rang a hollow thing when faced with weapons of steel and magic.
All his life, he had never wanted anything more than to walk and share stories and find simple joys. He had never thought to find his gods, or to become their voice, or to be shaped into their tool. He had not wanted any of this.
As Valrik took another step forward, Keiro took one stumbling back. It was not in his nature to run from things—he would rather walk away bruised and beaten, but with his chin raised. But the racing of his heart made his breaths come short, made his vision swim with rising panic, and he could feel his legs tensing, ready to flee, because the only other option was to stand still and wait for his death to find him.
Another step bumped his hand against Cazi’s waiting snout, and the Starborn pressed reassuringly against his palm.
A cry of some sort nearly burst out of Keiro, but it stayed behind his teeth. He had been there when Fratarro and Sororra had taken Cazi’s wings, had stolen his ability to fly in nearly the moment of its discovery; Cazi was not large, but perhaps if his wings had not been taken, he might have been able to get them to safety. Instead he was as trapped as Keiro, though surely Valrik and the others would not be so foolish as to kill one of Fratarro’s own creations—surely they would not stoop to profane so vilely the race shaped by their god’s hands.
“Cazi,” Keiro murmured around the heavy scream in his mouth, “I’m sorry.”
The mravigi pressed his snout firmly against Keiro’s hand once more, and then the press of it was gone, Cazi’s light-speckled body streaking forward.
There was the half-moon, and the stars in the sky, and the faint glow of Cazi’s scales, but all that was not enough to clearly see what happened. Keiro heard a cry, and a gurgle, and Valrik fell to the ground. Keiro’s racing heart stuttered as the moonlight outlined Cazi, crouched atop Valrik’s unmoving form. Stopped, as Cazi turned to face him—moonlight turned red blood black, but Keiro could see it around Cazi’s muzzle, on his deadly-sharp teeth when he opened his mouth to say, “I am sorry.”
The frantic racing of Keiro’s heart resumed, and the scream behind his teeth battered for freedom, and he wanted to run until his legs fell from his body. But his feet stayed still, and in his mind he felt a gentle tug, a careful twist, and a certainty that this was an opportunity.
> With his heart shattering in his chest, Keiro swallowed his scream, and he stepped forward to Cazi’s side, to Valrik’s. The leader of the Fallen was dead—that was obvious at a glance. Fratarro had shaped the mravigi for beauty, but he had not neglected their safety. Sharp teeth and powerful claws were more than enough to kill the fragile humans that the Parents had shaped. Cazi gazed up at him with glowing eyes. It felt like another failure, another Keiro had vowed and failed to protect—
The mask settled on Keiro’s face once more. His heartbeat slowed. He faced the Fallen, who stared in shock, unable yet to process what they had seen. Keiro said, “I have told you that I am the voice of the night, that I speak for the Twins, that my actions are their actions. If you doubt me, then take this for proof: Fratarro shaped the mravigi, and they know his heart better than any save Sororra. The mravigi have found Valrik wanting. The Twins have found Valrik wanting.” His hand was steady as he reached down to rest it atop Cazi’s head, where the Starborn perched on his kill. “If there are any yet who doubt me, please—now is the time to speak.”
His answer was an echoing silence.
“Good. Then we have wasted enough time. When the moon rises next, we will be gone, and any who are not ready will be left behind.”
Keiro turned and left them—left Valrik where he lay, left Terstet sitting with a blank stare, left the Ventallo and the mercenaries watching openmouthed—and Cazi followed smoothly after him. They disappeared together below the earth, winding through tunnels until they came to the cavern at the center of the hills—the place where Sororra and Fratarro had been bound for centuries, where their first bodies still sprawled. The air was heavy and musty, for the Fallen had sealed the place away once more, and did not visit it. Their gods had new bodies, and the old ones did not matter.
The two bodies towered over Keiro, slumped shoulder to shoulder, burned and empty husks. The faint stench of ichor still lingered—though Fratarro’s limbs had been returned and sewn in place, there was still the black spine that pierced his heart, and that wound still leaked even now. Keiro’s mind and heart were too full of other things to know what to make of that.
In that abandoned place, Keiro curled himself around Cazi, the Starborn’s tail draped around him in an embrace, and they sat together in silence. Keiro wanted to weep, but he could not.
Before their banishment, Sororra and Fratarro had both been considered great leaders. Fratarro had amassed followers who adored him, who prayed to him and for him out of love, who would have cut their own arms for a smile from him. Sororra . . . those who followed her had done so largely out of self-preservation, out of the assumption that if her anger sparked, the fire of it would at least touch her followers last. Her followers had been no less passionate in their fear than Fratarro’s had been in their love.
Keiro had never dreamed of being a leader, had never wanted it—he had always been happy enough in his solitary wandering. But he wondered—if the circumstances were different—which kind of leader he would have become. He worried less that Sororra’s careful plucking at his mind had shaped him into someone different, and more that she had merely peeled back the cover of something dark and festering at his core.
The light of someone’s approach stretched across the cavern far ahead of them. Keiro waited with the patience of stone to see who it was, to see who would have dared start a fire, to see who would dare seek out the old bodies that did not wish to be found. In some way, he knew who it would be before she emerged into the cavern, the light of her torch nearly blinding Keiro. It burned, in the same way his dreams burned.
Yaket, Elder of the plainswalkers, sat down on the ground near him, and planted the torch so that it was between them but to the side, so that he could see half of her face without being blinded, and so that half of her face was gone to the darkness. “You’re leaving,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I am glad.” Yaket’s voice was heavy and full of regret, but the half of her face that he could see was determined. “You are not the man I knew. You’ve changed, and you’ve changed the lives of my people. I think things will be better, when you’re gone.”
Keiro gazed at her as Cazi’s heartbeat thumped steadily in time with his own. He said nothing. What could one say, in the face of their own failures pointed out so starkly? He hadn’t wanted to think about how badly he had failed the plainswalkers—how he had promised them safety and then stood aside as so many of them were killed; how he—the thought didn’t want to finish, he’d trained himself so well to avoid thinking such dangerous things—how he had played a part in their destruction, bringing forth the change in the world that had needed their deaths—
“You have heard many of my stories,” Yaket went on, jolting Keiro from the grim spiral of his thoughts. “Almost all of them, I think. But I know there is one you haven’t heard. Will you let me tell it to you? It is short, I promise.”
Keiro felt his arms tighten minutely around Cazi’s body, and there was a sudden thickness in his throat. He remembered all the nights—when there had been true nights—that he and Yaket had sat up late, sharing stories, laughing and questioning and prying brazenly. She had welcomed him into her tribe that was her family, and guided him. She had shown him the Starborn on the night they gathered to sing to the full moon, had given him that moment of untouchable and indescribable beauty. She had stood at his side when he sought to free the bound Twins. She had let him help put to rest all the plainswalkers who had died in the Twins’ first judgment.
“Yes,” he said again, around the needles in his throat.
She turned to stare at the old bodies of the Twins, their dark forms lined with firelight. “My people are old,” she began, “older than yours, older than most of the peoples who have walked the earth. We have long memories, and truths as old as the sun.
“My ancestors bore witness to it all. They watched Fratarro build his paradise, and they watched the beautiful creatures he had made soar above the trees. They watched that paradise burn when Patharro unleashed his fury—watched all the land south of their home burn for days and nights, and watched the beautiful creatures burn as they flew. They saw two mighty shapes plummet from the sky, and crash to the earth.
“My ancestors were not of Fiatera. They did not know the full history, and did not know of the politics and jealousies among gods. They knew only that there was trouble, and that they could, perhaps, help.
“I promised you a short story. My ancestors found where the Twins had fallen, a deep and mighty crater sunk into the earth, the ground and their bodies still smoldering. They thought the Twins dead, and so they buried them and built a barrow around them, and it was the undertaking of years. In those days, we honored the gods of others even if they were not our own, and so my ancestors stayed nearby, to guard the bodies of the fallen gods. In time, the mravigi came, those who had burrowed beneath the earth to escape Patharro’s fire, and who had searched endlessly for their creator since. They were welcomed, and lived peaceably beside my ancestors for a century.
“You know the way a story is shaped. You know the Twins were not truly dead. And so it will not surprise you, I think, that some of my ancestors began to hear a calling—a command. They could not help but obey. A group of two dozen went below the earth, and found that the mravigi had hollowed out the barrow around the Twins, that they merely slumbered, that Fratarro bled from the wound through his heart, and that Sororra, in dreaming, could still touch the minds of men.”
Yaket stood—slowly, as though her knees pained her—and retrieved the torch from the ground. She gazed down at Keiro, the light dancing across her face, and said, “Come. Sometimes words are not enough. It is easier to see, and know.”
Cazi uncurled from Keiro’s arms and padded to Yaket’s side, and Keiro followed after them both. Yaket did not lead them far: a tunnel that led off the main cavern and plunged down deeper before opening onto a round room that seemed to be about a dozen lengths across. The size of it was hard to tell, thoug
h, or at least hard for Keiro to determine—for he was distracted by the bones that lined the room.
There were full skeletons posed, and there were individual bones shaped into symbols and shrines, and there were patterned piles. Keiro gaped, unable to think clearly, unable to truly see what he was seeing.
“My ancestors were faithful followers,” Yaket went on softly. “They were true believers, for they knew the faces of their gods. We have always had Elders, who passed down the stories and the tales and the old ways. It was an honor to be chosen as Elder, to learn the ancient stories and older truths. It was a sacred duty.
“There are some things you do not notice happening until they have already happened. When I became Elder, once a year, I would bring one of my people here, as all the Elders had before me. One each year, chosen to leave the tribe on the longest night, chosen for a sacred journey. For long centuries, we have kept our faith in the Twins. Every one of my people I brought before the Twins was struck with awe, with wonder, with devotion. Every one went willingly to the knife. It was an honor, to serve the Twins.”
The torchlight shone off the tears tracking down Yaket’s cheeks, and when she faced him full, the shadows hid her milky blind eye, and showed only the good one, full of ferocity. “It has been a very long time since my mind has been clear. But since you came to the Plains . . . you changed things.
“All my life, I have been the guardian of the Plains and my people and the secrets that lie slumbering beneath the long grasses. But you made me unnecessary. You pulled the attention that had so long been focused on me. And for the first time in all my long life, my mind is clear.
“You are leaving. My people and I will leave as well. We were the guardians of this place and its secrets, but there is nothing left for us to guard. What secrets we have, I would prefer to leave buried here, beside the departed. I am the Elder of the plainswalkers. My people are old. We know the shape of the world. We know the ways of keeping balance.” Yaket shifted, passed the torch to her other hand and made the shadows dance. Now it was her clear eye buried in shadow, so that the blind one stared at Keiro in stark accusation. “You knew, once. But you have forgotten. You have been lost. I do not think I will see you again in this life, Keiro Godson. I will take my people far enough away that we can be sure of it.”