The Shattered Sun
Page 41
When Joros ran out of tale to tell, his people were happy to leave, and the townsfolk were happy enough to see them off—Joros wasn’t entirely sure any of them had actually believed a word he’d said, but it didn’t matter. They’d gotten food and rest, the bone-cutter had pronounced nothing severely or overtly wrong with Avorra—and, too, the townsfolk had given them a shroud for Aro, and a sling to make carrying him easier. Rora had watched them wrap her brother with a stricken look on her face, as though realizing his death all over again. It was a hard thing to see.
Most importantly, his people had all learned they could survive human interaction—which was good, because there was more of it to come.
They could avoid some towns, but the tale needed to be told. The people needed to hear, and know what had happened, and know who had saved them. And, when the sun set, they needed to believe that it would come back.
When Avorra woke, she simply blinked, and said nothing. If she was spoken to, she would turn to face the speaker, but she wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t, perhaps.
It distressed Etarro far more than Joros would have expected—there had always been so much tension between the twins, like oil and water mixed. He would never have described them as close. But when his sister wouldn’t acknowledge him, would only blink at him owlishly, he choked on a sob and fled her side.
When they resumed their journey, gentle tugging could pull Avorra to her feet, and she would walk where she was directed. Where before Rora and Etarro, hand in hand, had silently led the group, they now added Avorra. Just as silent, walking with her hands strung between the two of them, walking wherever they guided her.
Like everything had been since they’d defeated the Twins, returning to the estate was as terrible as it was a relief.
It finally gave them a true and well-earned rest, but meant telling the tale over again—and for the first time, Joros had no part in it. That was with good reason, as he’d played the largest role in Aro’s not returning to them alive. The rest of the pack, Sharra Dogshead particularly, could hardly stand to see Joros there even when he remained perfectly silent. He couldn’t blame them for it, not really. Maybe one day they’d accept that it had been Aro’s doing, Aro’s choice, but the wounds were too fresh for that sort of acceptance. Let them have their hatred.
Rora was given the open-armed welcome she hadn’t received from her pack for more than a year. Grief, it seemed, was enough to wash away any lingering grudges. No telling if that would last, but Joros saw relief on enough faces that he suspected it might. Somber Etarro and silent Avorra were given similar welcome—for all their harsh ways, Joros had noted a particular softness among the pack when it came to children. Sharra Dogshead, weeping openly, crouched before the twins—a slow and painful process with her bad leg. She spoke to them too softly for Joros to hear, her eyes drifting frequently to Rora, to Aro’s shroud. At the end of it, she held both her hands out to the young twins. Etarro gripped one with tears standing in his too-old eyes, and then reached over to lift his sister’s hand into Sharra’s other.
Joros remained at the periphery of it all. For the first time, he hadn’t been thinking past the next step, the most immediate goal. Get them back to their home. With that done, Joros wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. He had no more plans, no more goals, nowhere else to go.
Once she’d finished her weeping, the Dogshead stood on her crippled leg and called for everyone’s attention. “You’re all welcome to stay here,” she said to those who were not her pack, “for as long as you need.” Her eyes settled on Joros, and immediately communicated two things: that the invitation did not extend to him, but that she would not call him out specifically. She would only make him feel unwelcome, without the trouble of actually throwing him out the door. If he wanted to, he could choose to ignore the first part and impose on her hospitality. It was his home, after all.
But he looked at the others in their little knots of grief and camaraderie, and he knew that staying would never draw him into any of those circles. He was sick of being scorned and abhorred until he was needed to do the difficult things they couldn’t stand to do; he was not some tool that could be kept locked away until he was useful.
His eyes found Deslan in the crowd, but she wouldn’t look at him. She’d been avoiding him, intentionally, ever since she returned from the mountain.
So he left, feet re-stirring the dust that had just begun to settle on the sun-touched road. He had no path and no purpose; nowhere to go, and no one to go to. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he was alone. That was fine; he didn’t need anyone but himself. Other people had only ever gotten in his way.
He had won, he had succeeded—and all it had cost was everything he had, everything he was. It was simple arithmetic. It was the way of the world.
Epilogue
The ocean stretched before Keiro, waves lapping gently at soft sand. He wore heavy clothes, fur-lined, but they didn’t completely fight off the chill in the air. Still, the cold was worth it—he didn’t want to miss a moment.
Out in the water, sea monsters frolicked. At least, that was what the locals called them every time they caught a glimpse of the mravigi playing in the waves.
They had taken to the sea of their new home more happily than they ever had to the grass of the Plains. They could burrow into the soft sand, or bask on its sun-warmed surface. The forest nearby was full of tall trees that never lost their foliage, no matter how cold it got, no matter how deep the snow that covered the sandy beach. Their claws were good for climbing, too, and for perching. Keiro knew that the higher they climbed, the more they could feel the sea-born wind racing past their faces.
There were some in the trees even now, no doubt, but many of them had taken to the water, slim bodies winding like otters, diving down and then surfacing with great sprays of water. It would be too cold soon even for them, winter on the approach, and they were enjoying their fun while they could.
Keiro watched them, smiling, one hand shading his eye from the orange light of the setting sun. Its reflection stretched across the water, and turned the waves into the bright colors of a painting—yellow turning to pink as one of the Starborn breached, ripples of orange and purple to mark where one had disappeared.
The Starborn were in high spirits. Across from the slow-setting sun, a pale disk against the pink sky, the rising moon was full.
The sand shifted behind Keiro, but he didn’t turn. He knew the sound of those feet. The familiar form lay down beside and behind Keiro, curved loosely around him, and Keiro leaned back companionably against Cazi’s flank. The Starborn made a good cushion—he’d grown over the years, and was now nearly as big as any of the others.
“You should be out there,” Keiro chided gently.
The forked tip of Cazi’s tail flicked against Keiro’s knee, less gently. “I am fine here.”
They watched together until the sun had gone beyond the far edge of the sea, and pulled its painted blanket behind itself. There was always a small, quiet moment of fear in Keiro’s chest when it left, even now.
The mravigi emerged from the water, singly and in groups, the salt sea traveling in rivulets among their star-dotted scales. They flowed by Keiro with murmurs or nods, all moving toward the forest at his back. Cazi rose to join them, wordless, but Keiro waited a few moments longer. The beach was quiet and peaceful, and the cold had sunk into him so that he could hardly feel it.
Keiro finally stood and stretched, shaking feeling back into his hands and feet, and turned to the forest. The moon, nearly at its zenith, showed him his path. His bare feet slid on the sand, and crunched over twigs—old habits were hard to break, though he had boots at home awaiting the first snowfall.
Within the forest was a clearing, and in the clearing, the mravigi gathered.
Their black scales were turned gray by the moon’s light, but the white scales glowed to rival the moon. They stood eternally patient, faces turned skyward. Keiro did not cross the border of the
tree line into the clearing—this was a part of him, but he was not a part of it.
When the moon hung directly above the clearing, broad and beautiful, its light shining down like a gentler sun—then the Starborn began to sing. At their center, voice raised proudly, loudest, was Straz, first of the mravigi, who had spent centuries below the earth guarding his bound gods. He sang of lost years and found hope and the ever-flowing tides, and his vast family sang with him.
The locals might hear; let them. Let them hear beauty. Let them hear the sound of joy.
At the height of the song, a small form shot up from the center of the Starborn. The gray-scaled body of a youngster, though her white scales glowed as brightly as any other’s. Breathless, Keiro grabbed at his throat, at his pulse pounding a frantic hope. And as the song crescendoed, the young mravigi’s wings snapped out and caught the breeze from the sea. They bore her ever upward, and her happy scream threaded through the song below.
Keiro fell to his knees and could not help the laughing sob that burst out of him. If he could sing, he would have sung with them. Instead, he simply watched the young mravigi discover the joy of flight, of the wind racing past her face. He watched her discover the wonder she had been made for, and in that moment, nothing else in all the world mattered.
About the Author
Living in the cold reaches of the upper Midwest with her beast of a dog, RACHEL DUNNE has developed a great fondness for indoor activities. Her first novel, In the Shadow of the Gods, was a semifinalist for the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and was followed up by The Bones of the Earth.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Rachel Dunne
The Bound Gods Novels
In the Shadow of the Gods
The Bones of the Earth
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the shattered sun. Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Dunne. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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first edition
Cover design and photo illustration by Tony Mauro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition DECEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-242821-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-242819-6
Version 10312018
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