Page 264 of May: Bloom & Bane

Pestilence slithers over, robe trailing through the snow without disturbing it. He stops in front of Ashán, and he looks at him for a long moment with an expression nobody has ever successfully read. And then he bows. Deeply, from the waist, one hand flat over his heart. He holds it long enough that the whole clearing notices. Long enough that Damien’s head comes up, and Kaeran, twenty feet away, stops walking and turns around. Because Pestilence does not bow. Pestilence has never bowed. Not to me. Not to any of my brothers.

He straightens and drifts silently back toward the others.

Death comes last. He doesn’t dismount. He sits on his horse at the edge of the clearing with his hands folded on his pommel.

Without a head, it’s impossible to know that his eyes are on the glittering clover. But I know they are. “Two bonds sealed,” he says.

Damon’s charms chime softly. “One more, Caluxe.”

Andrik comes through the birches with one arm thrown back across Lumi’s body, his antlers lowered defensively. Bundled against his chest, wrapped in layers of wool and one enormous fur-lined coat, is Eirlys. And what a beautiful little combination she is.

Lumi’s eyes dart from the blood to Damien before they land on Eden tucked into the arms of the reaper who was cursed to kill her.

“Lumi!” Eden yells.

She runs toward us and wraps herself around Eden, sobbing into her hair.

Andrik stops a few feet short. One hand still braced on a birch trunk. His eyes settle on me. Three thousand years of grief arrive on that boy’s face all at once.

“Why?” is all he says.

Damon clamps a hand tightly over my shoulder.

“Why was I never worth your love? Why did you never come for me like you did for him?”

Lumi looks over at him, tears falling for an entirely different reason now.

I get up from the ground. “Bimby Button.”

“What does a Mûrvenkae* have anything to do with this?”

“She has everything to do with this,” my voice cracks. “She lit up the night when you were young, so you weren’t scared and alone.”

“How do you know that?”

“I sent her.”

“And Mallow,” I continue. “The reindeer that pulled you out of the whiteout when you were nineteen,” I say. “The snow leopards who hunted for you before you learned how.”

“Stop.”

“And the woman.”

His head snaps up.

“The woman who chased a murderer right to this very forest.”

Lumi’s eyes squint in confusion.

“Who do you think led Mark O’Reilly to your door?” I ask.

Andrik shakes his head over and over. “No. You weren’t there. You were never⁠—”

“I was there for every one of them.”

“Then why didn’t you say something?” he bellows. It rips through the clearing. Eirlys startles against his chest and Lumi flinches. Every bird in the forest lifts off the branches at once. “Why didn’t you say something? You were there? You were there, and you watched me—” He chokes on a sob. “I prayed. I prayed for someone. Anyone. And you were standing right there⁠—”

“I could not!”