Page 71 of Beds and Blades

Chapter twelve

Pyre

Skip held me for a long moment. Then he took my hand, and it vanished entirely inside his.

He looked down at it as if it required study. As if my hand, small and still trembling from the bloodshed, was one more impossible thing the day had delivered.

He bent and pressed his mouth to my forehead.

I had been running on adrenaline since the boom from below. Through the corridor. Through Mira. Through the blade leaving my hand. Through the impossible second when everything in me had moved before thought could catch up.

Now, standing in the quiet aftermath, with his mouth warm against my skin, I felt the adrenaline begin to drain out.

What came in behind it was the full weight of what had happened, arriving all at once and without the courtesy of spacing itself out. I let it arrive.

Boots sounded on the stairs. Armored soldiers moved fast, then stopped at the exact moment they reached the corridor and understood what was in it.

Blood on the stone. Mira’s body. The two of us standing in the middle of it.

The soldier who spoke was very young. His voice was steady, which told me something about the garrison Skip had built. “High Commander. Are you safe?”

Skip straightened. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, and I watched the High Commander assemble himself around whatever was underneath. Then he turned to face his soldiers.

“We are safe.”

One of the younger soldiers crossed the corridor and retrieved the sword from Mira’s body.

He held it out to me.

He was looking at me the way soldiers look at other soldiers. Not like a civilian who needed to be kept back. Not like a woman from another world who had to be protected, managed, explained around. Like a peer.

Something had shifted in that corridor. He knew it. I knew it.

I had arrived at Outpost Ely as a curiosity. The woman from another world, kept safe, kept out of the way, handled with the careful courtesy extended to civilians inside a military installation. That was no longer the category I was in.

There was blood on the blade. For a moment, I could do nothing but stare.

The young soldier beside me reached into a pouch at his belt and offered me a square of rough cloth without a word. I took it.

The motion was not graceful. My hands were not entirely steady. I wiped the blade clean before I sheathed it, lingering over every trace of blood because my hands were still unsteady.

Then I slid it back where it belonged. At my belt. Where it was going to stay.

The sword had done exactly what Skip said it would do. It had answered when I reached for it. It had crossed the distance my body could not. It had saved my life. I was going to carry it for the rest of my life in this world.

Skip looked at Mira.

The grief was not gone. It had only moved. It was beside him now instead of in front of him, which was the only rearrangement available.

He looked at her for a long moment. He had been carrying something for years. And now, finally, he had set it down.

“Take her,” he said. “There will be a funeral pyre.”

The young soldier hesitated. “But, High Commander, she’s one of them. We could…”

“There will be a funeral pyre.”

His voice dropped into the quiet register that meant the conversation was over.