"Five more minutes," I suggest.
Her laugh vibrates through both of us, transmitted by the knot that locks us together.
"Five more minutes," she agrees.
We take twenty.
39
Kess
The castle is worsethan I expected.
We finally drag ourselves out of bed near midday, and the walk through the corridors is sobering. Scorch marks climb the walls in places. Whole sections of stone have crumbled, leaving gaps that show grey sky beyond. The smell of smoke is everywhere, thick and acrid, mixed with something darker underneath that I don't want to identify.
Rhystan walks beside me, close enough that our shoulders brush with every step. He hasn't said much since we left the guest chamber—just holds my hand and surveys the damage with an expression I can't quite read.
"How bad?" I ask as we round a corner into what used to be the great hall.
"Bad." He stops, and I stop with him. "Not irreparable. But bad."
The great hall is gutted. The massive wooden table where we shared meals is charred rubble. Tapestries that hung for centuries are ash. The throne—his throne, the seat of three hundred years of cursed kings—is cracked down the middle, blackened by dragonfire.
"Your father did this?"
"The priests, mostly. Holy fire burns hotter than dragonflame." He releases my hand, walks toward the ruined throne. Runs his fingers along the crack. "They were trying to stop the ritual. Destroy anything that might help us."
"They failed."
"They failed." He turns back to me, and there's something in his expression now—grief, maybe, or just exhaustion. "At great cost."
I think of the guards I saw fighting in the courtyard. The servants who must have been caught in the crossfire. The household staff who had nothing to do with curses or rituals or the politics of dragon kings.
"How many dead?"
"I don't know yet." He crosses back to me, takes my hand again like he can't bear not to touch me. "Corvith is doing a count. The mystic is tending the wounded." A pause. "My father's body is still in the courtyard. I should... deal with that."
I squeeze his hand. "We should deal with that. Together."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then nods.
The courtyard is a graveyard.
Bodies everywhere—guards in castle livery, priests in blessed silver, dragons caught mid-shift and frozen in death. The stones are stained dark with blood that's already going tacky in the afternoon air. Crows have gathered on the walls, waiting.
And in the center of it all, Valdris.
Rhystan's father lies where he fell, throat torn out, eyes open and staring at nothing. In death he looks smaller than he did in life—just an old man in ruined armor, not the monster who threatened to kill me and my children.
Rhystan stops at the edge of the carnage. I feel him go rigid beside me, feel the complicated tangle of emotions bleeding through the bond. Grief and relief and guilt and anger, all twisted together into something that doesn't have a name.
"I killed him." His voice is flat. Distant. "I killed my own father."
"He was trying to kill me. And our children."
"I know." He doesn't look away from the body. "That doesn't make it easier."
I don't have words for this. Don't know how to comfort someone who committed patricide, even justified patricide. So I just stand beside him, my clawed hand in his, and let him feel whatever he needs to feel.
