by Rachel Dunne
As Edro supervised the Fallen being taken prisoner, Scal put his back to the scene. He walked from the mountain of the dead, toward the town of the dead. He did not know what he would find there, but waiting would not make the learning any easier.
You sound like a person who is waiting to die.
Rora, Aro, Vatri, Joros. He needed to know what had become of them.
He was not the only one who left Edro to his work. There were steps behind him, and a glance showed him a number of the pack, who had come to fight with and for Rora and Aro, who did not care for the fallout of the victory they had helped bring. There were some of Scal’s people, mostly the older ones who did not have the same hunger as the young ones. There was Deslan. He wondered if she followed for him, or for Joros.
She came to his side, and her eyes widened when she truly saw the boy at his side, the girl in his arms. She froze for a moment, Scal walking on without her, and then she rushed forward again, demanding a question she did not have the words to ask, a frantic and worried babble of sounds.
“It is done,” Scal said, silencing her confusion and her concern. “They are not what they were made.”
For a time she remained silent, and she remained at his side. She was studying the young twins. Intently, intensely. Scal waited, and finally she reached the same end he had. There had been enough killing. These children were not a danger. They had suffered enough. Deslan, for all that she did not have children of her own, had a mother’s heart. She pulled a waterskin from her belt and offered it to the boy; when he had had his fill, she made Scal stop so that she could work water down the girl’s throat as well. Gently she asked their names. Etarro and Avorra. Sensing the boy’s wish for silence, she asked nothing more.
The dead-town approached, roofs shining in the light of the sun. All the villagers laid out, given to the darkness, given needlessly, and now lying under the sun. It was obscene. Heartbreaking.
At the outskirts of the dead-town, Rora knelt weeping over her brother’s body.
Etarro rushed forward, still unsteady on his feet, but determined. Joros, standing nearby with his back to Rora, startled when he saw Etarro. Fumbled at his waist, had his shortsword half drawn before he noticed the others. Noticed that the boy did not charge with fury, did not charge to kill. Etarro dropped down next to Rora and flung his arms around her waist, and their heads pressed together, and new sobs tore out of Rora. The pack joined them, making a loose circle of grieving around their fallen member. Someone, he did not know who, had told him that their packs were closer than family.
Scal looked for a place to set Avorra down where it would not look like he was laying out another corpse. Deslan took her, kneeling down and cradling the girl half sitting, speaking softly to her of normal things though the girl still slept.
Only one of the pack had not joined the grieving circle, a woman he thought was called Harin, though there were tears clear in her eyes when she marched to stand before Joros. She was not angry at him—not yet. Scal knew, by the lines of her body, that she was looking for a reason not to be angry. “What happened?” she asked.
Joros, for once, seemed unwilling to meet her eyes. Unwilling to stand before a battle of words. “What happened was what was necessary.” All the leaders—Joros and Vatri and Neira and Edro, and Scal and Rora and Aro at the edges—had decided it was best not to tell their people of the deaths they knew would come from the battle. Everyone knew some would die—a war could not be fought without deaths. But the leaders had known that certain lives must be given to win. They had known from the start of this path that Rora and Aro would need to die for the Twins to die.
Only Rora had not died. Like Scal, like the one-eyed man in the mountain, she stood with breath in her lungs and life in her hands when she should not. She lived, and there was an emptiness beside her where her brother did not.
“He asked me,” Joros said, “made me promise. They didn’t both need to die, and he wanted—”
Rora had always moved so fast, when she wished to. Scal blinked, and she had borne Joros to the ground, screaming and tearing and choking. Scal was not alone in trying to pull her off, but she was strong for her size, and she had nothing to lose. She did not stop fighting him and them until Etarro said softly, “Rora, stop. It won’t change anything.”
The words reached her, somehow, and she slumped as though they had robbed her of the last of her energy. She let herself be returned to her brother’s side, and Joros was wise enough to say nothing more.
So much was wrong, for a day when everything had gone right.
And a last thing: Scal did not see Vatri. Among the four they had left behind in the dead-town, there was no sign of her. He knew, somehow, that he would not find her if he looked for her. He had asked her to shape him, and she had. Shaped him to her purposes, shaped him to something useful. Her purpose was complete, his usefulness done. There had never been anything more.
“There is nothing left here,” he said aloud. The words were for the others scattered around in their small and their large griefs, and the words were for himself as well. Words that would move past his lips, words that he could bear to speak. There was a breaking here. A fracture in a slab of ice, spidering slowly but unstoppably outward. There was an ending waiting for him, somewhere. He had done all that he had needed to do, all that he could do.
He watched them stand slowly. Watched them gather the dead, and gather the living. There was nothing left for them here. The others left at the mountain would follow. Some few began the long walk back to the looming shadow, to share the rest of what had happened, to help with what still needed to be done there. The rest went in the other direction, away from the mountain, away from the death. Rora helping to carry the body of her brother. Etarro beside Deslan, who carried his sister. The pack. Joros, lingering, and following.
They would be the first to share the story with the world. They will sing songs of us, and our names will be carved into the stone of history. People would ask, happy and unbelieving, and they would tell the tale, because they must. We will be remembered as the ones who brought back the sun.
Scal did not want to be remembered. He turned his eyes in a different direction, as all the others faded away.
He had always thought his death would be waiting for him among the snows of the North. That the snow and the ice would swallow him, and would not spit him out once more. Perhaps it was not his death that waited for him there, but something waited. Something called to him, strong and powerful. He would find it, or he would find his death there after all.
Chapter Forty-Four
Keiro sat where they had left him, alone at the heart of the mountain the Twins had built—their new home, their show of defiance, their reminder to the world that they were back and would not be forgotten.
All for nothing, in the end. All of it, everything Keiro had done—everything he had been forced into, and everything he had done by his own choice. He had let himself become something other than the man he had always wanted to be, let himself change until he could no longer recognize his own self, and it meant nothing.
The victors would return soon—the Twins’ mountain was like a boil on their world, and they needed to cleanse it. They would round Keiro up with all the rest of the Fallen, and if he was very lucky, his punishment for being a traitor to the country and to the world would be service in a prison camp for the rest of his life. He couldn’t stand the thought of just sitting there, waiting for them to find him, waiting for them to shape the course of the rest of his life . . . but he couldn’t think of anything else to do. There were scores of exits from the mountain, but none of them would allow him to leave unseen. What, then, was the point? If he could have gone with the young twins, gone to ensure their safety . . .
There’s a different path for you, Etarro had told him, but Keiro could not see the road, could not find his way out.
He sat holding the stuffed horse Etarro had taken from the dead mage, stroking his thumb along its yarn m
ane. He didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know what he was meant to do with it. But Etarro had wanted him to have it, and that was more than nothing.
Something pressed lightly against his elbow, and Keiro turned to see stars amid the darkness of the mountain.
Cazi stood there, with a dozen other mravigi arrayed behind him. “Come,” Cazi said, gently, expectantly. Since they had met, Cazi had been trailing behind Keiro, always following, always ready. It seemed only fair that Keiro follow when asked. He tucked the stuffed horse into his robe, where it sat securely above his hip.
There was a place at the edge of the dais, hidden in shadow, where the wall of the mountain had been dug away—dug away by sharp claws that had not been shaped for digging, but that had served well enough when survival was at stake. Keiro followed Cazi into the tunnel that was barely big enough to fit him, crawling on elbows and knees, scraping his shoulders and hips as he went. The other Starborn followed, smooth and lithe and blessedly patient with Keiro’s scramblings.
“Where are we going?” he asked at one point, and the simple answer he was given was, “Away.”
The tunnel ended at a cavern, and the cavern was full of mravigi—all of them, he would hazard, every last one who had followed them from the Plains, every one who had survived Patharro’s scorching fire, every one who had searched so long to find their creator . . . only to lose him again. Keiro felt a thickness in his throat. Had they gathered to mourn Fratarro’s passing yet again?
No. Cazi had told the truth when he’d said they were going away. As the last of Keiro’s escort filed into the room, a pair of mravigi began pawing away at the far wall, scraping the stone and dirt that had been piled there to reveal the mouth of another tunnel, this one sloping upward—and this one filled with sunlight. And as Keiro sat staring, the Starborn began to file into the tunnel, one by one.
“You’ve been preparing for this from the start,” Keiro said wonderingly, to no one in particular.
His answer, though, came from the giant white-scaled Starborn who stood supervising it all. “We have been preparing for many things,” said Straz, first of the mravigi, who had been shaped by Fratarro’s own hands so long ago. “We had been hoping for many different endings. This one will do.”
“Why? Why . . . me?”
“We have been so long gone from the world. What we have seen of it has not made us wish to return. You know the world; you have traveled far in it. We are hoping you know of a place that will not revile us.”
Dumbstruck, Keiro watched the rest of the mravigi filter from the cavern, until it was only he and Straz and Cazi. The younger Starborn nudged him gently toward the exit, and Keiro went obediently, crawling up the tunnel, shielding his eye with one hand as he went against the brightness of the sun that felt so unfamiliar. When he emerged, they were far from Atura, the mountain a looming shadow in the distance. When he emerged, all the Starborn were looking to him, waiting, patient, expecting.
All of Keiro’s life had been walking. He had found such peace in a journey without end, a road that could lead anywhere. His heart had never been so happy as when there was firm ground beneath his feet and the sky stretching endlessly into the distance.
He hadn’t thought to have that chance again. With everything he had done, everything that had changed . . .
Keiro swallowed, and straightened his back, and began to walk toward the slow-setting sun, with all the Starborn arrayed at his back. He didn’t know where he was going, where he would take them, but he knew this was the path he had been meant for.
Chapter Forty-Five
As they walked, Joros held a hand over his chest, finding it hard to breathe even an hour later. And he knew that an hour had passed, because it had worked. Somehow, it had worked. The sun had returned, and the Twins were gone for good. It hadn’t come without a terrible cost, but what were a few lives when held against the sum of the world? That was an arithmetic his father had taught him well, one of the precious few things he’d taught Joros. A single life was nothing. A handful of lives had no significant cost. The number of deaths before it began to matter, before it began to mean, was a high number indeed.
There had been a high cost for this. In the great ledger book of life, it had all been worth it ten times over. But Joros felt very much like he had been robbed at knifepoint, and what had been paid did not feel insignificant.
All those around him looked similarly plundered, and some more than others. Those of Scal’s followers who hadn’t wanted to return to the madness of the mountain looked dazed—they’d likely seen a large number of their fellows fall in the battle, perhaps people they’d become friends with over the long weeks of traveling. Because they hadn’t gone back, they were easy to identify as the sort for whom grief was like a smothering shroud, rather than a spark to tinder.
And the pack . . . they all had the look of people who’d been beaten and left for dead. Joros had wondered if Aro would make any sort of farewells to those who had been so ardently interested in his well-being, and if he had, he’d done it subtly enough that they hadn’t been prepared to find him a corpse.
Rora, of course, was worst of all, but that was only to be expected. They’d managed to convince her she didn’t have to help carry her brother’s body, so now she stumbled along ahead of it, where she wouldn’t have to see the body, the boy Etarro walking at her side with his hand in hers.
His own sister was still unconscious, still in Deslan’s arms. She must be getting tired—she was a strong woman, Joros knew that well, but Avorra was practically old enough to be called a woman rather than a girl, and she’d never been skeleton-thin like her brother. Joros adjusted his steps slightly to move to Deslan’s side. “I can carry her for a time,” he said, softly, because breaking the grieving silence that surrounded their group felt like irreverence.
Deslan glanced over at him and then away. “I’m fine,” she said just as softly.
Joros felt his jaw tighten. He’d caught a glimpse of her face, back in the dead-town, where she’d sat cradling Avorra as all the others had pulled Rora off him. There had been so much in her face, and he’d looked away before his mind had a chance to process all of it, but there had been so many similarities with the looks on the faces of the pack. He’d been hoping he’d imagined it all on her face, at least.
He wondered if he should have stayed—gone with the hotheaded youngsters back to the mountain, to wreak havoc and revenge. So long ago, before all his plans had shattered to pieces, that had been his goal—position himself for greatest advantage once the Fallen had fallen to their lowest. It would make it so easy to step forward and place himself as their leader, a veritable army to do his bidding, to do anything he wanted, to accomplish all his goals—
But what would he do? He had no goals—the only thing, the last thing, he had planned for: accomplished and done. The Twins were gone, he had done that—but what next? He had no path and no purpose; nowhere to go, and no one to go to. He had nothing.
The melancholy had sunk deep into his bones.
Ahead, Rora stuttered and stopped. Those walking immediately behind her barely managed not to run into her. Joros saw what had brought her to a halt: the sunlight, shining off the rooftops of a town ahead.
They’d avoided all towns on the way to the mountain, on the way to battle. But returning . . . it was Deslan who gave reluctant voice to what no one else was willing to say: “We should rest for a while. We haven’t slept or eaten in . . . gods know how long. And”—she shifted her arms significantly—“someone should look at the girl.”
They all nodded or murmured agreement, but still, no one moved. A town meant people, and people meant talking and explanations and celebrating when they all felt half dead. Perhaps worse, there was the potential they would find another dead-town, and more death seemed unbearable. The safer thing would be to avoid this town and all others, to simply make it back to the estate, where they could nurse their wounds and bury their dead.
Etarro finally t
ugged gently on Rora’s hand, and they started forward once more, toward the town.
They could hear the celebration even from far off, which at least meant the townsfolk were alive—mixed curse and blessing as that was. It swelled outward to draw them in, and then faltered. Joros wondered what it was that gave the townsfolk pause: whether it was the corpse, or all the grim looks, or the unavoidably matching faces of two sets of twins.
The Long Night was only an hour gone. It took longer than that for people to refind the trust that had been stolen from them in the darkness. It took longer than that to refind humanity.
Joros stepped forward from the cluster of their group. Robbed as he felt, he was wise enough to know he was in far better condition than most of his companions.
He swept his arm back in the direction they’d come, where, in the far distance but still disconcertingly visible in the sunlight, the mountain lay dormant. “The Twins are dead,” he told the townsfolk. “The Fallen are broken. We were there when it happened; we are part of the force that defeated them. If you can give us an hour of rest, and if you have a bit of food and water to spare, we will tell you all we know.”
That was a safe trade, and an easy choice to make. From the perspective of the townsfolk, at worst they were looking at feeding, housing, and being entertained by a ragtag group of vagrants who were in no condition to fight. There was little at stake for them.
As food and water were passed around, and the town’s bone-cutter was trotted out to take a look at Avorra, Joros sat at the center of the crowd of townsfolk, weaving the tale for them, mixing the grandeur of killing gods with the reality of a battle hard fought. He could have held their attention for as long as he chose to—they all gaped like fish, and his hands held the lines that had hooked them. It gave his people the time they needed to rest, largely ignored by the townsfolk. It gave them the relief of not having to tell their own part in the story.