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The ghostlight of the single lamp showed them a chamber the size of a nobleman’s atrium, with a ceiling so high it was lost in the shadows. Except for a grimy patch around the basin in the middle of the room, the floor and walls looked scraped and new, as if they had just this morning been hacked out of the bedrock. The air felt fresh and abundant.
The foundation lay motionless beneath them. The whole world was still.
Chapter Thirty-seven:
Madeleine
Later, Madeleine could barely remember how they made it home. She knew that part of the time she walked, stumbling along with a drunkard’s erratic gait, and part of the time Reese carried her. At some point, Reese was helping her into a vehicle, but she had no idea if it was his or he had just commandeered it from some hapless passer-by. She didn’t care. She collapsed gratefully on the front seat and immediately twisted around to peer at the people riding in the back.
“Tellme,” she demanded. “Tell me what happened.”
Holding a sleeping Aussen in her arms, Jayla filled her in on Tezzel’s arrival and Pietro’s mad theory. Cody added a few helpful details, while Madeleine gasped in disbelief. She was so exhausted and so dizzy that she had to wonder if she was hearing them correctly or if she might be dreaming the whole thing. She was in the middle of asking a question when she fell asleep.
She woke up as Reese was carrying her into her house, where it seemed like fifty people were awaiting her, all crowding close and calling out her name. Choking back a sound, she buried her face in Reese’s jacket. She heard him reassure everyone—“She’s all right, she’ll be fine”—and felt him run upstairs, taking two steps at a time.
Not until he laid her carefully on her bed did she nerve herself to ask about the final actor in this wretched drama. “What did you do with Tivol?”
“I left him in his house with the guard. Two more of my men are on their way to help watch over him.”
“What will happen to him?”
He gazed down at her soberly. Jayla had been the one to subdue Tivol, but Reese looked like he’d been in a fight. His face was flushed with remembered fury and his shirt was ripped to shreds. One of his sleeves was completely missing. “I don’t know. I imagine the Council will determine an appropriate punishment.”
“I told him,” she whispered, her low voice breaking into a sob. “I told him I’d have a baby—but I wouldn’t let it be killed. I saidIwould be the sacrifice when the time came.”
Reese caught his breath, then leaned in and enveloped her in a fierce hug. Too tight; her ribs protested. But she didn’t want him to let her go. “You won’t have to,” he said. “Can’t you feel it? The quakes have stopped. The world stopped shaking while we were making our way back.”
“Pietro did it?” she asked in a wondering voice. “Are you sure?”
“Pietro did—or Aussen’s mother. They put the world back together.”
The reprieve was so profound that it felt like a blow, like a bolt of electrical current that left her momentarily senseless. “Then I—” she said. “Then we—”
He bent down and kissed her tenderly. “Then you get to live,” he said very gently. “And we get to be happy.”
She fell asleep in his arms, too tired to savor her joy, but woke up maybe an hour later at the sounds of a muted celebration downstairs. She was alone; Reese must have left her to take care of some of the hundreds of details this night would have left undone. Her entire body ached and her head was still spinning, but her chest felt curiously weightless, as if someone had pulled out half of her ribs and replaced them with sparkling chemlights. It was so easy to breathe. So easy to smile.
She pushed herself out of bed, determined to see what all the noise was about. A glance in her mirror left her horrified, but she was too impatient to spend more than a few minutes freshening up, though she did wind a scarf around her throat to cover the clumsy bandages. She stepped out of her room and paused on the balcony, looking down at the scene in the atrium below.
There appeared to be dozens of people deployed in concentric rings. Reese’s soldiers formed the outer circle, staying out of the way. The household servants made up the middle circle, smiling and clasping their hands and, in Norrah’s case, wiping away tears. Cody and Jayla stood beside the cook, their arms looped around each other’s waists, leaning against each other as if only the angle of the other’s body was keeping them upright. Jayla’s face looked as open and peaceful as Madeleine had ever seen it.
In the center were two small figures, so tightly entwined they might not ever be able to loosen their grips and let go. Madeleine could see very little except a wild knot of curly hair, a pale flash of a freckled cheek, but their emotion was so raw and dense it seemed to paint the very air. Madeleine felt her heart flutter in her chest with something too powerful to be pain. She gripped the bannister with both hands as if to keep herself from falling.
Reese was the only who saw her, and he came leaping up the stairs. “Are you all right?” he asked, standing behind her and placing his hands over hers where she clutched the bannister. “Your face is so pale.”
She laughed and leaned back against him, lifting her mouth to kiss the underside of his chin. “I’d forgotten what it feels like,” she said. “Or maybe I never really knew.”
“What what feels like?” he said.
She didn’t think she could list all the ingredients. Some were subtractions from what had become her daily life—jittering terror, gnawing guilt, limitless despair—all gone, all wiped away. Some were additions that seemed just within her grasp—the promise of love, the possibility of joy—threaded through with an iridescent counterpoint she thought must be hope. Some were emotions she took for herself, laying them into the contours of her heart like tiles in a mosaic. Some were reflections from the people around her, glancing through her own bones like refracted light. She shook her head and tried to distill it into one word. “Happiness.”
Chapter Thirty-eight:
Jayla
Never in her life had Jayla experienced the level of exquisite pain she felt when Tezzel rushed into the atrium of the Alayne mansion and folded her daughter in her arms. Jayla knew the emotion was joy, but it hurt so much it was almost devastation. Maybe because some other, barely averted confluence of events could have led to tragedy instead of elation. Maybe because Jayla was so unfamiliar with euphoria that she still had to learn how to breathe in its sharp and hallucinatory scent.
She swayed on her feet, finding her balance unreliable, and Cody instantly put his arm around her to steady her. “I’m usually not much of one for crying,” he said. “But that’s a sight that would break anyone, I think.”
