The scorched earth, her discarded sword, her melted armor – the only things that remain.
I scramble up onto my feet and run that way, the silence heavy, everybody watching me.
“She’s gone,” I shout out to everyone when I reach the place she was. “She’s gone. Defeated.”
I wait for the Shadow Army to start attacking us again, to throw their shadows our way. But there’s fear on their faces. No, more than that, terror.
What they’ve just seen is like nothing they could ever have imagined, and it petrifies them.
Suddenly, they’re displacing, one at a time, the air bristling around us as they disappear.
“Stop them!” someone cries out.
But it’s too late. They’re all gone.
And I’m racing over to my four mates instead as they pick themselves up from the ground, Thorne scuttling over the tower of rubble, and the four of them come to meet me together.
“Are you okay?” I ask anxiously, scanning their faces for signs of damage, for traces of that pain still there, reaching out to touch their faces, their hearts, their hands.
All of them are injured in some way – blood on their faces, their clothes ripped, their hands and knuckles scuffed up, their knees too. But they’re all smiling at me.
“Fine,” Beaufort says, taking a grip of my arm. “But are you? Are you okay, Briony?”
“Am I okay?” I say, almost spinning around in delight. “We did it! She’s gone. Or… she is, isn’t she?”
I peer over my shoulder back at the place where the Empress had stood only moments ago. I can’t help but grin.
And then I remember, she wasn’t just any enemy. She wasn’t just the killer of my sister. She’s Beaufort’s mother too.
The smile falls from my face, and I turn my head back to him.
“I’m sorry, Beaufort,” I whisper. “I wish there could have been another way.”
“There wasn’t,” he says. “She made that choice.”
“I know, but still?—”
“No, Briony. It had to be this way.”
“I’m still sorry for it,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “Because you’re a good person, Briony. And only a good person could have done all this.”
“So it’s over?” I ask all four of them.
“It’s the beginning of the end,” Fox says. “There will be work to do. It’s the beginning, really. The beginning of something different.”
I can’t help smiling again, the grin stretching across my face. A laugh breaks free. Tears fall from my eyes, and I pull all four men toward me, attempting to wrap my arms around each of them.
They laugh in return, although Beaufort’s eyes are wet too, and Dray’s.
We hold each other like this for several moments, none of us wanting to be the first to let go.
The Professor is right. Thisisonly the beginning, really. But for a moment, I just want this – us – and no one else.
But it has to end eventually.
Someone’s calling my name, running my way.
