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Tared shrugged as he snatched a torch from the ground. ‘They know Lyn survived her last twelve deaths.’
When he’d been the one cremating her and picking her small body from the ashes when the fire died down … My heart clenched violently and without warning.
‘You’re alright?’ he added in a lower voice, watching me closely.
Was I alright?
Ishouldhave been. I should have been bursting with joy. The world had been saved, hadn’t it? The empire had been defeated? This was what I’d worked towards since the day I woke up in my burning village, this was what I’d braved curses and gods and bargains for – and yet …
Yet the contentment wouldn’t come.
Now that the Mother was gone, now that the archipelago was free, everyone would return to their homes and families … and I?
I knew what I wanted.
I just didn’t have the faintest idea where it was.
‘I know,’ Tared said softly, and suddenly the light flickering around him seemed duller, his smile wry. ‘Things will settle. Helps to stay busy in the meantime.’
I swallowed. ‘Right.’
He reached out to ruffle my hair, then pointed a thumb at the baby in Lyn’s arms, amusement sparking back to life in his eyes. ‘You could go say hello to Khailan, for a start. He’s never more pleasant than at this stage in life, if you ask me.’
Khailan?
I threw a slightly more attentive glance at the child Lyn was just handing over to another phoenix female. Plump and pink … but something in the lines of that round, chubby face bore the faintest resemblance to the haughty, sharp-jawed phoenix male I’d bargained with.
‘I think I’ll pass,’ I said and grimaced. ‘He might shit all over me if I try to hold him.’
Tared burst out laughing. ‘A badge of honour, one could argue.’
I couldn’t help a small chuckle. Around us, phoenixes threw uncertain looks our way, apparently doubting whether there would be any sense in telling alf savages or godsworn half fae to behave with a little more civility.
‘I should be leaving you to the work,’ I muttered, looking away from them. ‘See you … soon, I suppose.’
A mirthless smile. ‘See you, little brat.’
I hugged Lyn on my way out, then passed by Khailan’s crib as I left the smoking pyres behind. The oldest phoenix alive, now looking no different from any plucky human baby minutes after birth, lay glowering at the sky in his blankets, his chubby little hands balled into fists. The inside of his wrist …
Empty. Not a bargain mark to be seen.
My heart stuttered as I glanced down at my own forearm and found it equally, flawlessly unmarred, no trace left of the three gems that had adorned my skin when I’d last spent a thought on them.
My bargain with the Mother had ended with her death. So had Khailan’s, presumably. But even that small ruby mark I’d shared with Creon, the bargain I’d carried with me since the very first night at the Crimson Court … It was gone as if it had never been there at all, my promise to help him end the Mother finally fulfilled.
Why did even that observation feel like a raw, visceral loss?
I walked on and stumbled upon a breach in the city wall, finding myself close to the shores of the lake when I slipped out. On the other side of the water, people were combing through the bodies of the fallen, looking for friends and survivors. But where I walked, half-hidden between rows of apple trees, one could almost pretend the devastating fight had never happened at all, the air smelling of earth and ripe fruit rather than the metallic tang of blood.
As if peace was already here.
As if I might soon be able to feel it, too.
I found myself a spot on the banks of the lake in the end, a little way from the path, shielded from the world by a reedbed and a tangle of weeping willows. There I unbuckled my sword,scrubbed the blood off my hands, and curled up in the grass, staring at the blue sky with a mind that seemed unable to go quiet, flashes of empty obsidian eyes and the Mother’s last moments crowding my thoughts no matter how hard I tried to push them away.
The sun drew its slow path over me. Faint sounds reached me from the city every now and then, laments and celebrations, too far away to seem real.
It had to be long past midday when wingbeats finally shattered the quiet, the crackling of twigs beneath boots. A squeak, and then the voice I hadn’t realised until that moment I’d been waiting for with every fibre of my being—
