A fresh burn built in her throat. Two weeks without a single tear. She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t broken.
But now?—
Flames stole a piece of her heart she couldn’t ever reclaim. Grief clawed at her chest. Smoke rasped the back of her tongue until the taste turned to ash, and Tse’s braids blurred.
Prayers rose around her, chants to the ancestors to welcome their loved ones home. Drumbeats echoed from the frozen ground to the highest peaks.
Kai stood through it all. Until the flames grew too thick to see beyond, and the smoke clouded the sky.
Only then did she finally let her tears fall.
Silence wrapped Stoneheart Hall in a shroud of grief. Even the younglings sat still.
Death had touched them all—but it was fear that filled the chamber now. They’d barely survived the first collapse. This one might end them.
Atsadi assured her every day: “The mines are recoverable, and we can fix the aqueducts. All we need is time.”
Time they didn’t have.
Kai lingered near the rear pillar, arms crossed, too weary to speak and too restless to sit.
From the dais, the Matriarchs listed off every immediate complication. Damaged aqueducts. Flooded caverns. Collapsed mines. Everything they’d faced before—only much,muchworse.
She couldn’t bear to hear it again. Her mothers had been talking about it for two weeks. Atsadi was practically living in the tunnels. Mapping the damage. Devising solutions.
Worse, everyone was speaking in circles aroundwhythis was a problem in the first place.
Shecaused the explosion.
Shebrought her people to the brink of death.
Hindsight offered no mercy. Surely there’d been another way. But she couldn’t see it.
Not that it mattered. It was too late. The poison took eleven of her warriors, and more than three dozen may never be recovered from those buried chambers.
Tse and Sitsi would remain dead.
Kai turned her back on the Hall and the ten Matriarchs on the central dais. Four were the untested, just as she would be one day.
Drakaa sat beside Shadi, occupying the tenth seat now and for as long as her people remained.
Tenth Clan.
Just beyond the Hall, Atsadi and Fala took her hands. No one spoke. Somehow, they found themselves beneath the stone arches of the healing pools, breath mingling in the steam.
In that silent, comfortable space, they took the time to undress each other with hands that memorized everything. Atsadi palmed Fala’s nape. Fala traced Kai’s old scars. And Kai—she outlined the mountain peaks inked across Atsadi’s chest.
Three heartbeats finding the same rhythm.
At last, they sank into the pool’s warmth, Atsadi’s arms circling them both. When they spoke, it was in whispers. Stories that brought only laughter.
For just a little while, Kai forgot her grief and guilt, and simply—finally—breathed.
Later, when they made love for the first time, Kai understood Drakaa’s early words—that this marriagecould be more than duty. Atsadi wasn’t a foreign addition. He fit in ways she never dared imagine.
He accepted their burdens as his own and filled in the spaces where she or Fala could not. He was the reason she didn’t retreat. Didn’t wall herself off as she had so many times before. He held Fala steady when the grief became too much. When the deaths nearly took her to her knees. And when the mark of his clan grew too heavy, they held him in return.
Together, they were the mountains and the stars and the streams that ran in between.
