W hen I first came back to myself, I thought something was wrong with my eyes—and then I realized that the house just looked like this now,
the walls rough-hewn stone, the floors broken and slanted.
I stood up. The house had been rearranged like a dollhouse that had been assembled incorrectly. The bodies that remained here were so broken that I couldn’t even identify what they had once looked like—bodies crushed between walls, bodies pinned to the floor, bodies missing arms, legs, heads. Some were rearranged bloodlessly, like someone had jumbled up limbs and glued them back together.
All of them were clad in what had once been white—all Threllians. I noted this numbly, like I was watching another version of myself make this observation. My blood rushed in my ears, dulling my senses. A strange power still thrummed through me. The heart was still clutched in my hands. Max staggered to his feet beside me, taking the heart and tucking it back away in his pack, but I still felt its power even when it was no longer in my
grasp.
We looked to the east. Beyond the balcony, the Fey moved away from the city in neat lines of green. Retreating.
We walked up what remained of the stairs. The top of the building had once been a dining room that showed off a view of the city below. Now, it was just a slab of stone, open to the elements, with the rest of the house collapsed around it.
The blond hair stood out in the carnage. Lady Zorokov cowered beneath a pile of ruin, curled up like a frightened child. When I approached her, she
let out a sob and put up her hands, which were so badly ruined that they were just a mass of bloody fingers jutting out in all directions.
“Please, no. Please, no.”
I looked at this terrified, pitiful, injured woman, and I felt nothing but hate.
I grabbed her and dragged her out into the waning sun. “Please,” she wept, over and over again.
“Is that what they said?” I could barely hear myself—could barely hear anything but the roar of my own power. It was painful and intoxicating, thicker even than Reshaye’s rage. “Did they beg for their lives when you cut off their hands? All those innocent people? All those babies?”
Tears streamed down Lady Zorokov’s cheeks. “I can give you anything.
I can give you money, influence. You want my title? It is yours.”
“I don’t want your title.” My hand fell to her throat. It was so fragile beneath my grasp, the lingering magic lending me strength. “I could say that this is for them. For every one of the people you murdered. But the thing is, that’s a terrible trade. What good does your life do for theirs? It’s worth so much less.”
Her face crumbled. I forced her to her knees, her back to me, my arm tight across her chest. Max stood silently beside me, his hand sliding into mine on the opposite side.
“Look,” I snarled in her ear. “Look at the country that you worked so hard to steal. When I kill you, this country will fall. And I want that to be the last thing you see, Lady Zorokov. I want you to watch your empire die.”
“Please—” she wept.
It was so easy. I was so connected to this power that Max and I shared, the boundary between our magics erased. The flames understood me like they were the air in my lungs. Lady Zorokov ignited easily. I held her there as she screamed. I wanted to let her burn, wanted to let the heat consume her slowly.
“Tisaanah…” Max’s hand tightened. I knew what he was saying, even though I didn’t want to hear it.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing against the seductive draw of my own rage.
“This isn’t you,” he murmured.
Burning was a slow, terrible way to die. But she had inflicted such painful deaths on so many innocents. I wanted her to suffer. I hated how
much I wanted it.
But Max was right. It wasn’t who I was.
I reached through the flames, gripped her face, and snapped her neck in one powerful movement.
Still, I let her body burn there, high up at the top of her fallen empire. A beacon across all of Threll, signaling the end of an age.
 |
BY NIGHTFALL, the city had gone quiet. There was no one left to kill. Threll had fallen. The Fey had retreated, for now. They would return. That would be tomorrow’s problem.
Today, though, the rebels celebrated. What had been a field of carnage by day turned into a blood-drunk celebration by midnight. Maybe to some they would have looked like they’d lost their minds, laughing to the moon while still covered in battle-drenched clothing. But freedom was a drug these people had been denied their entire lives. It hit a heart hard.
I felt strange, like I was walking through a dream world. I was injured, but didn’t hurt. I smiled at my countrymen, but it didn’t reach my eyes.
Serel.
I staggered through the chaos and debris looking for him. After hours, I found him sheltered beside one of the remaining houses, crouching on the ground, his blood-matted head bowed.
Cradled in his arms was Filias’s ruined body. He looked up at me, and his face crumpled.
“It’s what he would have wanted,” he choked out, barely able to speak through his tears. “He would have been proud to die this way, Tisaanah. He
—”
Suddenly, the bloodthirsty rage, the strange numbness, the intoxicating power was gone. All of it disappeared under the devastating wave of Serel’s grief.
I collapsed next to my friend and wrapped my arms around him, and he abandoned words in favor of heaving sobs.
“It’s what he would have wanted,” Serel kept saying, over and over again, as if it made anything better.
But Filias’s was not some grand cosmic trade. Yes, we had won our country back. But sometime today, a million deadly combinations of a million deadly acts converged in exactly the right way, and just like that, my best friend lost the love of his life.
That would never be a fair exchange.
The night wore on in wild celebration. But I stayed there with Serel and held him as he wept.
|
IT WAS dawn by the time Max ushered me away. Filias’s body was taken by Riasha for the funeral pyre. Serel now cried quietly and no longer spoke. Max and I brought him into one of the remaining houses. I laid him down and watched Sammerin heal his wounds. I kissed him on his forehead as one of Sammerin’s medicines sent him to a merciful, dreamless sleep.
Sammerin healed Max and I the best he could, then pointed to another uninhabited cabin and said we should get some rest.
Max led me there. I was silent as he ran a bath, helped me from my clothes, lowered me into the warm water like I was a child.
“Thank you.” My voice sounded strange. “Thank you for coming for me.”
“Always, Tisaanah.”
He kissed my forehead. My nose. My cheeks, left then right. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing I couldn’t survive.”
His touch lingered on my crooked fingers, on the new marks on my back, on the welts at my neck, but he asked no more questions.
“When this is all over,” he said, softly, “maybe it won’t be about surviving anymore.”
For some reason, I found it difficult to speak past the lump in my throat. “Do you ever worry that you don’t know how to do anything else?”
He arranged himself behind me in the water, so his arms formed a warm embrace around me. “I know how to do some other things,” he murmured, and pulled my hair aside to kiss the back of my neck.
It was such a heartbreakingly tender gesture.
Before I knew what was happening, the tears were coming so hard I couldn’t breathe. My body shook with rough, painful sobs.
Max did not ask why I was crying. He did not tell me everything was going to be alright.
He just took a cloth and washed the blood from my back, stroke by stroke, gentle as a lullaby, and let me cry.
