"Yes."
"Why? You could have ordered servants to do it. Commissioned proper stone masons."
I set down my fork, searching for words to explain something I've never had to articulate. "Because I needed to remember. Every name. Every face. If I let someone else do it, it would become too easy to let them fade. To let them become numbers instead of people."
"You told me about Sina. About your mother." She looks up, meets my gaze. "Tell me about the others. Not all of them—just... help me understand who they were."
I don't want to do this. But she asked.
"Lysa was sixteen," I hear myself say. "The youngest they ever sent me. Her mother begged the council not to choose her, but the lots fell where they fell. She lasted four hours." I pause, swallow against the tightness in my throat. "She spent those four hours telling me about her younger brother. How she'd taught him to fish. How she was worried no one would remember to check his snares while she was gone. She was more concerned about him than herself, even at the end."
Kess is quiet, listening.
"Rhaine fought back," I continue. "Like you. Had fire in her, a wildness that made me hope—" I stop, shake my head. "She broke my nose before my beast took over. Three hours, and then she was gone. But those three hours, she made me work for every inch. I respected her for that."
"Good," Kess says quietly. "She deserved to be respected."
"Thessa was a healer. Came to me with herbs in her pockets, convinced she could find a cure if she just had enough time to study the curse up close. She lasted six days—longer than most. Spent every conscious moment taking notes, mixing tinctures, trying to understand what was killing her even as it happened." My voice cracks. "Her notes are still in my study. I've never been able to throw them away."
"Maybe they'll help. Someday."
"Maybe." I don't believe it, but I appreciate her saying it.
"One more," she says. "Tell me one more."
I think for a moment, sifting through three centuries of grief for a story that matters.
"Neve," I finally say. "She was the thirty-second. Came to me already dying—she'd been sick for months, some wastingillness the healers couldn't cure. Her village sent her as tribute hoping the claiming would either heal her or give her a quicker death than the one she was facing." I pause. "She lived for two weeks. Longest anyone ever survived. She said the curse burned away her sickness, gave her more time than she would have had otherwise. She spent those two weeks teaching me to play chess."
"Chess?"
"She was very good. I never beat her." A ghost of a smile crosses my face, there and gone. "When she finally died, it was peaceful. In her sleep. The only one who ever went that way. I carved her stone with a chess piece—a queen. It's the only one that has anything other than a name."
Kess is quiet for a long moment, turning her wine glass in her hands.
"They weren't just victims," she says finally. "They were people. With brothers and notes and chess games."
"Yes."
"And you remember all of it."
"Every detail. Every conversation. Every moment." The words come out heavy as stones. "I won't let myself forget."
She sets down the glass with more force than necessary. "Has it helped?"
The question catches me off guard. "What?"
"The remembering. The guilt. Carving stones until your hands bleed." She looks up, and there's something fierce in her expression, something almost angry. "Has any of it brought them back? Changed what happened?"
"No." The word comes out hollow. "Of course not."
"Then maybe it's time to try something else."
"Like what?"
"I don't know." She sets down the glass with more force than necessary. "But this isn't working. You're not a monster, Rhystan—you're a man with a curse you didn't choose, doing the best you can with something impossible. And drowning yourself in guilt doesn't honor the dead. It just makes you useless to the living."
The words hit like physical blows.
