Soren stared at Caris through fading starfire, something like pity in his gray eyes. “She was right. There’s no alchemy in the world that can save him.”
Caris choked on an ugly, cracked sound before the world blurred from her tears. She turned her head around, staring down into Nathaniel’s rapidly paling face as the fight amongst the soldiers around them raged on beyond the ring of defensive starfire Soren held up, the screams of denial from the Daijalans ringing through the air. All of it seemed so distant in that moment as she held Nathaniel close, her tears falling onto his face to mingle with his.
“Please don’t leave me,” Caris begged.
Nathaniel’s shaking hand curled over her wrist, fingers resting against her pulse, his grip barely even there. “My darling, I love you, and I would have lived for you, but there is no living with a broken heart like mine.”
“I love you,” she said, voice cracking around the sob that tore through her, fingers pressed to his throat, searching for a pulse that was fading away like the last bits of magic giving him unnatural life. Nathaniel had promised her, once before, that he would love her until his heart broke, and he kept that promise to the end of his road, there in her arms. “I will walk this road for the both of us.”
“You will make a grand queen. I so wish… I could have seen it.”
Nathaniel’s mouth curled into a smile that had only ever been for her, the fractured song in his broken clockwork metal heart fading into nothing, its silence ringing in her ears as he slipped away into a peace she could not follow.
Caris stroked his cheek, staring into eyes that saw no more, and choked on her breath, on her tears, on the grief that welled up in her like a bitter funeral dirge. When she opened her mouth, nothing came out but a scream that matched Eimarille’s in its wretchedness of knowing one would have to live a life alone.
“Caris,” Blaine said from far away. “You have to let him go.”
“No,” she cried into Nathaniel’s hair, clutching at him, at everything she’d hoped to keep after the war and would now no longer have. “No!”
Strong hands gripped her wrists, and she fought them, not wanting to let Nathaniel go, but they pulled her away from him anyway. She keened, some animalistic sound of loss that carried no words. Blaine’s face, when she finally recognized who held her, was full of grief and sorrow.
“Honovi will watch over him, but we have to get you to the starfire throne.”
She hated Blaine in that moment for asking her to leave behind the only man she’d ever loved. For reminding her of the fighting still happening in the capital and outside it, of the war that had been fought in her name and Eimarille’s, and all the death that lay in the wake of her road—a road that was much lonelier than it had ever been before. But if she turned away now, it would be a betrayal to everything and everyone she’d lost, to all the newly empty spaces in her own broken heart.
So Caris let Blaine pull her to her feet, let him carry her forward while she carried her burdens and grief. She leaned against him, staring blankly at the pool of blood spreading away from Eimarille’s body, too tired and heart-sore for hate to take root.
“Why?” Caris asked, voice raw from screaming, throat burning from overuse.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Blaine said quietly.
Soren held out his hand to her, his poison short sword still dripping with their sister’s heart’s blood. TheKlovodlay sprawled on the ground some distance away; alive or dead, she couldn’t tell. “Come. You have a duty.”
She didn’t want it. She never had. But Caris still took his steady hand with hers that shook. Soren gave it a careful squeeze before leading her out of the circle of starfire he’d been holding up. Caris looked back at where Nathaniel lay at Honovi’s feet as Soren burned their way forward, until Blaine urged her to turn away. “Your road leads ahead, not behind.”
Caris was barely cognizant of their run to the public park that held the starfire throne, their soldiers pushing Eimarille’s back. It burned there in the remnants of the old palace’s throne room, a beacon that had set the course of war before Caris had even known she was Rourke. But she knew who she was now—grief-stricken and broken-hearted, but a Rourke, forever and always.
When she finally stood before the starfire throne, that seat of power that had torn her life apart since her birth, whether she’d known it or not, Caris wanted to look away. She’d lived her entire life in the shadow of the shattered legacy it provided, walking a road that was always going to return to it. “I don’t want it.”
“I know,” Blaine replied, quiet and sad. “I’m sorry.”
Caris let go of her brother and her witness, walking forward on a road she’d only ever walk alone from here on out. She approached the starfire throne with stumbling steps, the heat of that ever-burning decree drying her tears. She came to a stop in front of it, holding out a hand so that her fingers trembled a hairsbreadth from a star god’s eternal power.
Caris pressed her lips together and stepped into starfire, pushing the searing heat aside, making space to sit on the throne. Starfire flared bright and hot and golden all around her, blocking out the world for a moment. Then it sputtered and died out, leaving behind the throne and Caris and a kingdom that was now hers alone to rule. She stared at Soren and Blaine, at the remnants of their soldiers approaching, at the desperately wounded Daijalans beyond, all of them bearing witness to her right by blood.
Then Caris bent over her knees, held her head in her hands, and cried.
