by Rachel Dunne
Keiro’s greatest regret was that, if they killed him now—and he had no delusions about what his punishment was to be—it wouldn’t save the Starborn. Perhaps he should have continued to play along for a little longer, done his best to assure their safety . . . but what was done was done. He had a lifetime of regrets, and one more weighed only a little heavier.
The crowd parted again, allowing the Twins to pass through. They were shorter than most gathered, child-tall, and their faces weren’t visible until they were very near to the front of the crowd. Keiro watched them come with his back straight and his chin raised.
“Keiro,” Sororra called out when she stood before the dais, her voice ringing around the more-than-half-empty chamber. “You once showed loyalty and an enduring faith. We judged you, and we saw you were a shining example of what humanity could be. But now you have shown the truth at your rotten core: disobedience, faithlessness, and sedition. Keiro, you are judged a second time, and you are found wanting.”
Sororra stepped onto the dais in a single wide but graceful step, and made a sweeping motion to her generals; one of them kicked the back of Keiro’s leg, another drove his fist into Keiro’s kidney, and he fell heavily to his knees, held upright only by the generals still holding his arms. Sororra stood before him, taller now than Keiro, though not by very much.
“You know our goals,” she called out. She still faced Keiro, speaking to the crowd at her back. “In darkness, all are made equal. In the Long Night, all can be judged for who they truly are. We see Keiro now for what he has become: a different man from the one we once trusted, a man who seeks now to place himself above you all, who seeks to question our rule. Keiro has shown that he is no better than the worst of your kind, and his presence here makes the world a worse place for us all.” She turned to face the Fallen, and raised her arms into the air, and called out, “What becomes of traitors? What is the reward for apostates? What waits for those who are judged, and found wanting?”
In one voice, the gathered Fallen answered, “Death.”
“Death,” Sororra agreed, and she was met with an explosion of sound: cheering and jeering and murmuring, a few cries of surprise, even fewer cries of outrage.
Keiro closed his eye briefly. He had known, but he still did not think he was ready. Could one ever be, though? He had chosen this path, and he would walk it with as much poise as he could muster.
He heard Fratarro whisper, “Sister . . .” and when he opened his eye, Fratarro stood at the edge of the dais before his sister, and there was a hard uncertainty written across his face.
She made a sharp, silencing motion, and Fratarro said nothing more. There was sorrow and sympathy in his eyes when he looked at Keiro, but those were not coins he could spend. Perhaps Keiro had hoped that all his time with Fratarro—working patiently with him, the long and scattered talking in the hills, the shared fears—he’d hoped, foolishly, that that might mean something. But Keiro was only a man, and what was one mortal life to a god?
Selfishly, he wished for Cazi at his side. The Starborn had been his truest friend, even at the depths Keiro had sunk to.
The crowd began to part again, this time to allow three blades for the darkness to approach the dais with heavy footfalls and hands on hilts. Keiro swallowed, and didn’t let himself close his eye. He wouldn’t let them remember him as a coward.
He did look, though, when a high screaming began near the back of the crowd.
“They’re coming,” the voice wailed. “All of them, they’re almost here. Etarro, they’re coming for you, they’ll—they’ll—” The babbling dissolved into a mindless scream, and Keiro saw the commotion as the screamer flailed forward, as others tried to hold him back. Keiro recognized the man’s face—the eyeless mage, the one with the stuffed horse. Anddyr. Keiro had always known the mages’ names.
Fratarro had half turned to see, but he was too short to be able to make anything out. He reached for the dais, perhaps meaning to climb up for a better view, but he went rigid all over, as though struck by lightning and frozen in place. His eyes grew huge and unfocused, and his mouth fell open ever so slightly. After a long moment as the screaming continued, Fratarro blinked rapidly and turned his head, finding his sister, meeting her eyes. It was a child’s voice, rather than a god’s, that whispered, “They’re going to kill us.”
Sororra had always protected her brother. Championed him, fought for him, killed for him. All the old stories from before the Fall were full of inconsistencies and chaos, but there was always a constant, no matter the tale, no matter who told it: in all their interminably long lives, Sororra would do anything for Fratarro.
Sororra’s voice snapped like a whip. “Go. If there is danger, find it, and destroy it.” The generals moved rapidly, and Keiro’s arms fell heavily to his sides as the generals leaped from the dais and into the crowd, pushing their way through, gathering aid as they went and racing up the central spire, scattering down various hallways. Much of the crowd dispersed, seeking to help or to hide. Some select blades and mages stayed nearby, moving closer to the dais, ready to offer their protection if needed. The mage—Anddyr—still screamed fragments of words and sentences that hardly made any sense, but the crowd had managed to restrain him though he still fought, straining toward the dais.
And amid it all, Sororra knelt down at the edge of the dais, and pressed her hand to her brother’s shoulder, and leaned down to put her face close to his. Keiro couldn’t hear the words she said, but Fratarro shook his head—not in denial, but as though to clear it, and his eyes looked once more as they always had.
“Something is coming,” he said in his own voice, with conviction, but with a touch of confusion as though he weren’t sure from where the conviction came.
“We will fight it together,” Sororra said, squeezing his shoulder.
There was another constant, one that burned less bright, that often flowed by unnoticed: Fratarro never truly understood what his sister was capable of.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
They had all gathered in the longhouse—there were few enough of them that it was possible, though space was tight. Joros would have preferred to gather outside—at least outside it wouldn’t have smelled rank and sour with so many unwashed bodies, and outside the sound of everyone chattering and whispering wouldn’t have echoed among the ceiling beams. Then again, the outside was full of rotting corpses . . . but at least the dead knew how to be properly peaceful.
Inside, though, gave the veneer of safety, and that was something their motley little army desperately needed, if only for a few moments. They were scared, all of them. They’d been scared, for a very long time, and that was no way to go into battle.
Joros had never led a fighting force of any size—but these weren’t fighters, by and large. They were just ordinary people, farmers and peasants and thieves, and Joros knew people. There was no fire in their eyes, no surge of passion in their hearts—they would fight well enough, but they would break. Saving the world was too nebulous a concept, too big to latch on to. They were scared, and they had nothing concrete to fight for.
If they left this way, they would ruin everything he had worked so hard for.
Joros looked out over the restless, shifting, nervous, stinking crowd. Most of them hardly even knew him. Some of them hated him. But they all stared back at him, waiting, attentive. “I’m sure you don’t need to be reminded what we’re fighting for,” he said to them. “But indulge me. We all have families and friends and homes beyond these walls. Perhaps they are waiting for us to return triumphant. Perhaps they were taken from us, and this is why we fight—for what has been lost. Either way, there is more—much more—than what is in this room. There is so much more than simply us.
“So fight for yourself. Fight for each other. But fight for your children and parents and siblings, fight for your friends, fight for your homes. Fight for the people and the places you love. This battle is not for us. It’s for all the people we left behind, and all the pl
aces we hope to return to. Fight for them. Fight to see them again in the light of the sun.”
They cheered as loud as they dared to. They were still nervous, but at least there was fire in their eyes now, the cause given a face in each of their minds. They would still die, but they would die fighting to their last breath, and die feeling as though it had been worth it.
The words felt like they had come from some hollow, empty place inside him. They might all have homes and families to fight for, but Joros didn’t. He never had, and even defeating the Twins wouldn’t change that.
He hadn’t expected, teetering so close to the end of the world, to be overcome with simple melancholy.
Neira, curiously absent her usual cloud of smoke, stepped forward and urged them all to their posts—best to keep them moving while the passion still burned through them. As the longhouse began to empty, she approached Joros, her head tilted and an odd smile on her face. “That was nicely done.”
Joros snorted. “Most of them can count. It’s easy for them to figure the odds if they take a moment to think about it. They need to be reminded why the odds don’t matter.”
“As I said, it was nicely done.”
Joros couldn’t find the trap in the words, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Rather than stumble into it, he simply grunted and waited for her to leave. She would be leading all the fire-eyed fighters still streaming from the room, leading them along with Scal and Edro into the heart of the newly made mountain itself. She would be gone soon.
Joros stayed in the longhouse, along with the few others not going to directly assault the mountain. Aro, who stuck to Joros like a burr, and Rora who, catlike, was trying to pretend it was all some cosmic coincidence she happened to be in the same room. Vatri was also staying, but if she could channel the power of the Parents as she claimed, it would be worth putting up with some of her nonsense.
Just the four of them—they couldn’t afford to trim the numbers of the main force any more than they had to.
Joros’s scanning eyes found someone staring at him, and he briefly met Deslan’s gaze across the room. She quirked her mouth and gave him a single nod, which he returned. Strange, that he found himself hoping she returned; stranger, he realized, that the feeling extended to the other familiar faces—Harin and Trip and the other pack who’d gone with him at the start, Edro giving bracing shoulder slaps to those who streamed out the door past him, even Scal, who always looked so tormented. They were only pawns, pieces on the game board of his grand machinations, tools to be used and discarded. None of them mattered.
Still. He hoped they returned.
The realization made him feel uncomfortable—Twins’ bones, melancholy would turn him to a weakling—and so he summoned his three charges. “We should go outside as well. We have preparations of our own to make, and we don’t want to be caught unprepared.”
None of them said anything, but he couldn’t blame them, not really. They followed him out, and that was the important thing.
They stood watching until everyone else had left, watched until the night swallowed their backs, and then they got to work.
There was a clear space just outside of the village and back from the road, where they could see the road in both directions and see the smudge of the new mountain against the sky. Neira had said it would be the best spot for them, and Joros had reluctantly admitted she was right. She’d planned everything out, obsessively, and cornered each of the commanders to go over each piece of her plan in exhaustive detail. Her spitting intensity would likely give Joros the crawling chills for all the rest of his life—whether that proved to be five hours or five decades.
As they began to walk, a hand gripped Joros’s arm and Aro’s voice hissed, “Remember,” and then the boy peeled away. Joros stared after him, and felt a surge of anger. He had made a promise. Did the boy think he was so dishonest that his word meant nothing?
He tamped down the anger. It hardly mattered anymore, and wouldn’t matter for much longer anyway. He had already spoken to Vatri, and her eyes had been hard and strange when she’d nodded agreement. Joros had made a promise.
At their designated spot, Joros set down the small pack of supplies he carried. He paused, then—Neira’s obsessive planning hadn’t covered who would do the actual physical labor, and so Joros was left waiting for one of the others to offer themselves. It didn’t happen, though—Vatri began to arrange wood for a fire, and Aro stood slack-jawed and twitchy, and Rora had put her back to the entire affair. Muttering unhappily, Joros retrieved the eight heavy wooden stakes and a mallet to begin pounding them into the earth. After a moment, Aro joined him, surprisingly, retrieving the other mallet but not making eye contact with Joros. Each blow of the mallet seemed to say, Remember. You. Promised.
As the steady thumping filled the night, Rora sat down with her back to the rest of them, wrapping her legs inside her arms and staring at the mountain. Vatri, frustratingly, began to murmur prayers—but Joros quelled his anger at that. He needed her, and he needed her supposed link to the Parents to work. They were all dead otherwise. If that meant withstanding some of her prayers, then so be it.
The stakes were in place. Joros pulled the lengths of rope from the pack, and cleared his throat. That got no reaction, so he finally said, “It’s ready.”
Rora pushed herself up to her feet and spent an inordinate amount of time brushing dirt off her breeches for someone who was about to go lie back down on the ground. Aro dithered even longer, and Joros couldn’t tell if it was his creeping madness or if the boy was ten steps from fleeing. To be safe, he commanded softly, “Aro, go lie down.” The boy obeyed. Joros saw how that made muscles jump in Rora’s clenched jaw, but she said nothing. As Joros began tying Aro’s wrists and ankles to the stakes, she lay down in her space beside him. It was the closest Joros had seen the pair to each other in months.
As he finished tying them, Vatri was lighting her small fire. She’d carried tinder and branches and a few small logs, and when Aro had sheepishly offered to carry more, she’d said she wouldn’t need much. A small fire would do. Its light gave their spot an eerie cast that Joros didn’t care for at all.
Joros finished his knots on both twins and stepped back, hovering near their heads. There was nothing left for him to do yet—nothing for any of them to do yet. Now it was waiting, and that could be the hardest part.
“Rora,” Aro whispered, but among the four of them and the silent night, he might have been shouting. “I’m scared.”
For a long while, his only answer was silence. Joros, deeply uncomfortable, kept his back to both of them and wished he could seal off his ears. This was his command, his post, his subordinates, but he felt like an intruder.
Finally Rora said, “I know, Aro. Me, too.”
Vatri’s praying continued, and they all stared at the mountain, and waited.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Quick as breathing and quiet as hope, they moved to the mountain.
Scal led. It did not seem fair, to ask others to go where he would not lead. And though there were some hunger-pained faces of the pack, these people were Scal’s. They had chosen to follow the Nightbreaker.
The blind preacher Neira walked at his side, though he did not need her direction. The mountain was a hard thing to miss, dark shadow against dark sky, calling. He would need her when they got closer, need her to get inside the mountain, but for now she was a distraction. Scal wished to be alone. He was preparing to die.
There was a thing he had said to Rora. You sound like a person who is waiting to die. Always they had understood each other. Always he had seen a piece of himself in her, and of her in him. They could fight, and they could survive, and they could bear a great deal. There was an understanding, among those whose lives were shaped by the blood of others. Things that were true of Rora could be true of Scal as well.
In the village of the dead, where they had rested before marching on the mountain, Scal had chosen a small house to sleep in. He had
looked at all the trinkets, all the collected pieces of a life lost, and he had started a fire in the cold hearth. In the North that had birthed him and shaped him, a dead man should be burned, and his most treasured belongings beside him. Scal could not burn the man who had lived in the borrowed house, but he could burn the man’s belongings.
Later, when he was alone in the empty room, in the sinking light of the well-fed fire, the door to the house had opened. Scal had been praying prayers without words, soundless hope and silent fear, and so he had not turned to see who entered. Yellow-clad legs had knelt at his side, and after a moment a hand had covered his own. Heavy with old scars, fire-seamed.
In the night before the end of it all, Vatri had sought out Scal, not Edro.
“There is so much danger here,” Vatri had said, and in Scal’s mind a different voice had whispered, There is danger in being alone . . .
“There is always danger,” he had said.
“If we fail in this,” and her fingers had tightened around his, desperate, “then we will all die.”
“We will all die anyway.”
She had whispered, “I’m not ready to die yet.” It was easy to forget that she was so young, still, hardly older than Scal himself. She had never seemed young, not before.
“Then we will not, yet.” Scal had turned his hand so that she could twine her fingers through his, gripping his hand as though he were the tether holding her to life. Together they had prayed, before the flickering fire that had eaten the remains of a dead man’s life.
And Scal had seen the flames move. Scal had seen his own death, rolling toward him like a quiet storm.