Chapter Thirty-Two
They lit the pyre.
Kreya stood with her hands clasped behind her back as the flames coated Eklor. She kept her eyes on his face as his skin blackened and shriveled. She didn’t intend to stop watching until it was finished.
In her ear, Zera murmured, “I am half expecting him to sit up.”
“It’s over this time.”
“I’m not sure I believe in ‘over’ anymore. You remember that ballad about us from the Bone War, the one that ends with us watching the sunset together over the plains?”
Of all the ballads, that had been one of the least cringeworthy tunes. It had gotten about half the facts right, which was better than many others. “Sure. But I’m not going to sing it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Zera smirked. “I’d pay money to hear that. You have to do the alto part, though—remember, you’re not a soprano. But my point is: the song ends when the sun sets. Really, though, you know what happens when the sun sets? It gets dark. Stars come out. The temperature drops. Eventually, you sleep. And then thesun rises again, and it’s another day, and when you look back on your life, you don’t know if you’ve made all the best choices or said all the right things, but it’s not like it ends on the final ballad chord. It ends when it ends.”
Kreya thought about that, as the burning man began to crumble in on himself. Soon, he’d be ash, and the wind would scatter the last speck of him across the city he’d nearly destroyed.
She had three more years of her story after the sun set today.
It would be enough.
Out in the city, the constructs lurched to a halt.
Every inhuman soldier, every monstrosity cobbled together from flesh and metal, every nightmare that had crawled out of the mist-coated valley and poured up from the bowels of the mountain, stopped simultaneously.
Jentt let his knife fall to his side. He sagged against a broken lamppost. Around him, he heard ragged cheers, between the cries for help. He took one more breath, and then, limping, without the benefit of any talismans, just with what strength of will he had left inside him, he moved from construct to construct, yanking out the bones that powered them so that they could never come back and kill. He didn’t stop until he had reached every single one in the street before him. Only then did he look toward the guild headquarters.
At the top of the headquarters, flames licked the sky as the pyre burned.
She did it,he thought.
We did it.
And maybe, just maybe, we all came out of this alive.
There were so many dead.
As they left the guild headquarters, Kreya saw pyres lit in every square on every tier of the city. Gripping her by the elbow, Zera pulled her through the streets. “Move quickly, and don’t make eye contact,” Zera advised.
“Eklor intended to save them. We could do the same.”
“Bykillingcountless others. Even if you do it your way, taking life from the willing, it’s a very bad plan. Don’t even think about it. You’d be arrested and added to the pyres before you even finished explaining the cost.”
But if she didn’t try to save them, did that make her as bad as he was? On the other hand, did she have a choice? Zera was right—there was very little chance she’d be allowed to complete the spell. She’d be killed too.
Quickly and efficiently, Zera handled everything. Dropping gold in the right shop, she obtained a crawler. Slipping silver into the right hands, she located Jentt, Marso, Stran, and Amurra, and the relief she felt at seeing them was palpable. All of them piled into the crawler and left Cerre before the fires burned out.
Kreya worried silently as they traveled: Eklor had called the resurrection spell a “gift,” and now she was the only one alive capable of giving it. But it was a gift that should never be given.
Yet I made an exception for Jentt. And for Amurra.
Was it morally wrong to deny that same choice to others? Or morally wrong to offer it? She’d always believed the knowledge of the spell should die with her... but after seeing the fires in Cerre, now she questioned that.
What if there was no right answer? That was a horrible thought. What if she never knew whether she was making the right decisionbecause there was no right decision? She kept turning that over and over in her mind.
At nightfall, they halted and slept outside beneath the stars. Without talismans, it was a multiday journey, but none of them complained. Jentt hunted for rabbits, which Stran skinned and cooked. Zera insisted on bathing in a stream and returned happier and cleaner but with dampened silks. She didn’t seem to mind the lost fashion.
They talked about minor things as they ate: tasks that Stran and Amurra would need to complete at the farm, whether or not the winter would be mild, how much better Stran was at cooking than he used to be. Eventually, they spread blankets out on the needles and moss.
