* * *
I blinked. Light and sound came in waves; everything felt thick, like I was underwater. My body hurt, but I wasn’t burning. I sat up and almost vomited. My brain lagged a hand’s width behind my head and then ricocheted back into my skull moments later. I rubbed a hand over my head and found it covered with dust and shards of glass. I got my bearings: I hadn’t fallen far, but part of the wall below the dome had been blasted open, exposing now-damaged stone behind the decorative paneling.
“Jov!” Tain’s voice sounded distant, but his hands peck-pecked at me, plucking at my attention, and I turned my head—slowly this time—to see that he had climbed up the broken wall to me. Though his mouth and nose were covered with cloth still, his grin crinkled around his eyes. He gestured up, and I followed the line of the rising smoke out the massive hole in the dome. A rope fashioned from clothing hung from a distorted protrusion of metal at the edge of the blast hole, and the men were using it to help scramble up the rough ladder of rubble formed by the damaged wall.
Tain hooked my arm over his shoulder and put his around my waist. “Come on, my friend,” he shouted. “We’re getting out of here.”
* * *
I went to see her one final time. She’d have heard the commotion, and presumably guessed from the fact that no one had come down here to release her that it hadn’t gone as planned.
“It really is over this time,” I told her wearily. My ears were still ringing and it was an effort not to cough. I would show her none of it. “I just wanted you to know. Your people are dead or arrested. There’ll be no big rescue, no heroic escape. There’s no revolution and certainly no military leader taking over the country.” And no more fears that her loyalists are hiding in the army. “But we can make things more comfortable for you if you tell us who funded you.”
Aven sat in the cell, her hand still treated only roughly with Hadrea’s bandage and obviously causing her pain. She listened without speaking, then shut her eyes, took a breath, and relaxed in one fluid wave. I had to admire her sheer willpower as she took control of herself, almost as if she had switched off the pain entirely. Her eyes snapped open, seeking me out through the bars.
“Did you want to know how your sister died?” she asked, and aside from the extra throatiness to her voice, she might have been asking about the weather.
I said nothing.
“I was feeling a bit bad about it earlier,” she said, her black eyes boring into me. It would have been the kind thing to do to just kill her cleanly. “I’d just found out our precious Heir was alive, and I’m afraid I might have taken out my frustration on your wee sister, Jovan. But now … well. Now I know she somehow managed to ruin everything so comprehensively, I rather think she deserved everything she got.”
“I don’t really care what you think about much of anything,” I said, and hoped she would hear the flat honesty in my tone. I wasn’t sure if I could care about anything anymore.
“Don’t you want to know what I did?” Aven asked, a tiny, icy smile turning up the corners of her mouth. “I think you do. You gave me something in my tea earlier—I guess you must like hearing me talk. But you can’t control what I talk about.” She lifted her chin, somehow looking comfortable despite the indignity of her pose. “Such a pity dear Kalina was a little weakling, but she caused me so much trouble, I thought I might cut her in half.” She grinned. I thought, numbly, that it was the worst thing I’d ever seen. “I was going to hack her little head off, but honestly that earther afterlife nonsense isn’t worth worrying about. And anyway, I wanted her to feel pure terror before she died.”
My hand gripped the bars. I realized my whole body was shaking. But inside I couldn’t even properly feel the fury, the devastation her words wrought. I knew it was there, but it was like it belonged to someone else.
“Her body’s at the bottom of the river now,” Aven added. “There are all kinds of beautiful fish in there that would have loved eating out her intestines. Maybe she even felt their little teeth before she drowned.”
One part of me wanted to respond, wanted to lunge, my animal to take on hers. The two guards to either side of me eyed me warily, perhaps contemplating stepping in. But in the end, the cold won. My eyes like sand and my throat a fraction of its normal size, I forced myself to meet her gaze without expression. “You know what, Aven? Dead is dead. She was too smart to fall for your lies, so you killed her. It doesn’t much matter to me how you did it. She’s gone either way.
“But it matters to you, doesn’t it? You’re still trying so valiantly to pick a fight. The big plan failed, and now you don’t want to waste your life away in jail. But didn’t you hear what I said earlier?” I dropped my voice and she leaned forward as if compelled to hear my words. “No warrior’s death for you. No fight. No clean stroke of a sword. By the time you die, no one will be watching you, no one will care about you. Maybe no one will even remember you.” I drew back. “You’re going to lie in a jail cell, getting weak and frail and irrelevant. You might even live for years, like that.
“But death comes to us all. My uncle, for example, and the Chancellor, both died horribly. Without dignity, without comfort. You did that to them.” I stood, letting my lips split wide into a semblance of a smile. “I have the last of Marco’s poison now. I hope that’ll help you enjoy your food and water in prison over the years. Anticipation … it’s better than spice.”
Then I turned and walked away.
* * *
My apartment was empty, all of my “guests” gone, just the debris of their passage to give sign of all that had changed in this house. I tidied up the rooms, one at a time, but took no comfort in the routine.
Our country would survive this. In the long run, it would be better for it. We had Aven and the surviving mercenary chiefs in custody, and we would work out who else was involved in her plan. We would untangle it all, and we would come out of this a better people. Tain had grown in this siege, nourished by the trauma, into someone new, someone stronger. I had confidence he would be the leader we needed.
I just didn’t know where I fit anymore. This war had torn apart everything that had been important to me: my family, my job, my honor … maybe even my relationship with my best friend. I wasn’t sure I could look at Tain without seeing, in all too graphic detail, what had happened to my sister. I had lied to Aven, of course. Dead was dead, but even thinking about the pain Kalina must have suffered at her hands was like tearing apart the edges of a wound. So I pressed the thoughts back into the cold stone and continued my tasks, wishing I could clean up the pieces of my life as simply as I could clean my home. The silence, broken only by my footfalls, echoed around me. Once a place of peace and warmth, now the apartments seemed big and cold. The war had taken my home from me as well.
But the war had given me something, too, if I was willing to reach out and take it.
She found me there, in Etan’s kitchen—it would always be Etan’s—and joined me in my cleaning without words. Sweeping the floor while I scrubbed the bench, we worked together in the silence for a while.
Then she stepped up behind me and slipped her arms around my waist. I froze. Part of me wanted to turn into her, to take the comfort she offered. But I just stood there, awkward, unable to respond, until she let go and stepped away.