Maren's hand is on my back. I feel her pulse through the bond, close and warm, and her other hand is on my arm.
She is here, she is here, and the berserker is nowhere.
I hold my brother's body in a ruined hall under a broken sky and I break.
Not the berserker's breaking. Not rage. Just grief.
The grief comes and I let it come because she is beside me and the bond holds and I am just a man holding his dead brother and crying.
Maren doesn't speak. She wraps her arms around me from behind, her face pressed against my back, her hands gripping my shirt. She holds on while the grief moves through me and she doesn't let go.
The fire burns down. The stars turn overhead through the broken roof.
She holds on.
MAREN
Iwake to birdsong.
Not the sound I expected. I expected silence, or wind, or the settling groan of old stone. But there are birds in the ruins. Small ones, nesting in the cracks in the walls, and they are singing because the sun is up and the thing that lived here is gone.
Kovren is beside me. Still sitting upright against the hearth, still holding Rodvek's body. He hasn't moved all night. My arms are still wrapped around him from behind, my hands numb from gripping his shirt, my face stiff where it was pressed against his back.
I let go. Slowly. My fingers don't want to uncurl.
“Kovren.”
He doesn't answer. His eyes are open, red-rimmed, fixed on his brother's face. Rodvek looks smaller in the morning light. Peaceful. The sharp features are relaxed in a way they probably haven't been in eight years. He could be sleeping, if you didn't look too close.
“We need to bury him,” I say.
Kovren's throat works. He nods.
I stand. My body protests everything. The cold stone floor has locked my joints, and the anchor drain from last night has left me hollowed out, weak somewhere deeper than muscles. My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs until they stop.
The garden. Between the training yard and the mess hall, where the mountain sage still grows. I don't have to say it. Kovren already knows.
He carries Rodvek himself. Lifts him from the floor of the great hall, one arm under his shoulders, one under his knees, and walks through the rubble to the narrow strip of earth where they used to sit together after training.
He moves slowly. Not from the weight. The body is lighter than it should be, hollowed by eight years of the berserker burning through everything that wasn't bone.
I pull the shovel from Mother Sanque's pack and Kovren reaches for it. His hand closes around the handle. Opens. Closes again, white-knuckled, and for a moment he has it. Then the tremor takes his whole arm and the shovel drops to the frozen ground between us.
He stares at his hand like it belongs to someone else.
I pick up the shovel. He doesn't fight me for it. Not because of his injuries, though the gash on his shoulder from Rodvek's blow needs stitching. Because something in him has broken open and his body knows it even if he won't say it.
So I dig. The earth is half-frozen and full of roots and stones, and the shovel is too big for my hands.
But I dig. Because this is what needs doing, and I am here, and the man I married can't.
Kovren sits beside the grave with Rodvek's body in his lap. He doesn't speak. Sometimes his lips move, but nothing comes out. I think he's saying goodbye in a language that isn't meant for me.
When the grave is deep enough, he lays Rodvek down. Gentle. The same care he uses for everything, the same measured control, even now, even broken open.
He folds Rodvek's hands across his chest and straightens the torn remains of his armor. The armor is just metal now. Not fused, not living. Just old, dented plates of steel.
I fill in the grave. Kovren kneels beside it and doesn't move until the last shovelful of earth settles.
