FOR A TIME I did nothing but lie on a thin mat in the Tahl’s camp. I ate when they brought food. I drank when they brought water. I slept when the sun grew too hot to do anything else.
When I closed my eyes, I saw faces. Wil first, blood dried across him to the color of old wine. Then Sim, looking at me with those soft eyes that had never held anything harder than worry for a friend.
Denna came differently. She walked through my dreams with her back always turned, always leaving through doors I couldn’t reach. I called her name and she would pause, but never face me. I reached for her and found only empty air. She was smoke. She was wind. She was gone.
But through it all, Auri’s voice followed me. Live, she had said. A single word was all. But that word held me to the waking world when letting go would have been so much easier.
One morning, Taeylia came to my mat. Her weathered face was still kind, but now it carried something firmer too.
“You must go,” she said, the words final. “We have done much. The desert has little to spare.” She chose the next words the way you choose footholds on loose stone. “Grief is hungry. It will eat you here.”
She was right, and I told her so.
Her hand touched my shoulder. “Your woman is at peace,” she said. “We sang her to the stars. It is done well.” Then, more gently, “But you are not done. The living must walk.”
Another of the Tahl stepped forward then, a younger woman whose hands the sun had only begun to darken. She pressed warm bread into my palm and held out a waterskin, the leather still damp from filling. Taeylia knelt in the sand and drew me a map with one weathered finger, tracing the path through the mountains while she named landmarks she had walked herself in careful Aturan. But beneath all this kindness lay iron. I had to go. Today.
I gathered what little I owned. The Tahl let me keep my shade through the heat of the day, one last kindness. When evening came and the air began to cool, I stood. My body moved through the motions while my mind stayed behind, still sitting beside a grave the sand would someday cover. The Tahl gathered at the camp’s edge to see me off, Taeylia at their head. And as I passed, I heard her voice one last time, so soft I might have imagined it.
“Walk well, broken one. Walk until you are whole.”
It is one of the great shames of my life that I had nothing to leave them in return. They had given me water, shelter, time, and songs, all of which had cost them dearly. It is a debt I have never been able to pay.
The stars began their slow opening above the desert, and I walked west. Each step took effort. Not because I was tired, though I was. Not because I was weak, though I was that too. But because some part of me wanted to stop. To sit. To stay. To become one more piece of the desert, worn smooth by wind and sand until nothing remained.
But Auri had told me to live. So I lived. I walked. One foot, then the other. Again and again. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was what I had.
I spoke the names of stars under my breath. It was something to do with my mouth besides scream. Something to do with my mind besides remember.
When I reached Renere’s gates, my clothes in tatters, I was greeted by guards who looked through me. It was a city that had learned silence. Merchants whispered their trades and hurried away. Children played in alleys but watched the streets. Everyone else moved with their heads down, the way you do when you have mouths to feed and no time for trouble.
Then I saw the first sign.
Feyda.
The name was painted in red across a wall, the letters tall as a man. I found it on the next street too, scrawled across a banker’s door. Then on a tavern’s shutters. Everywhere I looked, the dead king’s name, blooming across the city like a rash.
As I watched, two figures emerged from an alley’s mouth. One wore a mask and crouched on another’s shoulders, reaching up with a dripping brush to mark “Feyda” across a shop’s sign. They vanished before the patrol could round the corner, leaving only wet paint and questions behind.
For all that, the Blind Beggar stood where I’d left it, wearing its shabbiness like comfortable clothes. The windows were still boarded, though the door now wore that same red paint.
I slipped around to the side where memory served me well. The window latch yielded to my good hand, and I climbed through into darkness that smelled of dust and cold tallow. Our room waited, still as a stopped clock. The furniture stood exactly as we’d left it, with narrow beds still unmade by friends who would never return.
Though no sign of Bast.
I climbed back through the window and dropped into the alley, my feet finding the ground with barely a whisper.
“You’re losing your touch, Reshi.”
The voice came from shadow, but I knew it before my eyes found its source.
“Bast.”
He stepped from darkness wearing that grin of his, the one that promised trouble. Then his gaze caught on the bandage wrapping my left hand, and the grin died. “Reshi.” He barely got the word out.
“Gone.” I tucked my hand against my side, not wanting to explain. “How did you find me so fast?”
“I paid runners to watch this place and the Willow Blossom both.” He gestured at the alley behind him. “The boy who watches nights nearly broke his neck running to tell me someone had climbed through our window.”
“Runners cost money.”
“Only half the coin we had left.” His smile sharpened. “The other half bought me a room and no rest at the Brewer’s Rest.”
I gave him a look.
Something entirely unrepentant flickered behind Bast’s eyes. Then the lightness went out of his face all at once. “Twelve days, Reshi. I stepped out that morning to get our things. Gone an hour, maybe less. When I came back, the room was empty with blood on the floor and your sword in pieces. I searched everywhere I could think of after you vanished. I even went looking for that girl of yours, thinking maybe you’d run off together.”
Bast didn’t know.
“Denna’s dead.” The words came out flat and final. My good hand trembled at my side, that damnable shaking finding the crack in my composure the way it now always seemed to.
Bast shrank into himself, shoulders dropping as if something had been taken out of him. “Reshi.” Soft. Almost bruised. He started to reach toward me, then let his hand fall.
Somewhere nearby a woman called her children home for supper. Ordinary as breathing.
The story of what happened in the desert, of Denna’s last breath under the singing trees, would have to wait. Words would come later, or they wouldn’t.
I turned from all of that, looking away until I could trust my voice. “The city looks ready to tear itself apart.”
“After what happened at the tower, how could it not?” Bast shifted his weight, and I heard the leather of his boots whisper against stone. “After the King died, after Fascino fell, the Maer gathered what remained of Renere at the Citadel gates.”
“Let me guess. He played the grieving ally?”
“Oh, better than that.” Bast’s voice carried the kind of admiration one reserves for particularly clever predators. “He told them you came to him first. That you tried to recruit him into your plot against the crown. He refused, of course. Claimed he raised an army and marched on the Citadel to save Roderic.” Bast let that sit for a moment. “But he arrived too late. The bloodthirsty Ruh had already done his work.”
I almost laughed. “How convenient for him. I appear from nowhere, kill everyone between him and the throne, then vanish.”
“It gets better. He reminded them how Lord Vatis had died in the courtyard. How you’d cut him so he’d bleed slow rather than die quick.” Bast’s lip curled. “Proof of the Ruh’s true nature, he called it. He had answers for every question before anyone thought to ask it. Then, for those still unconvinced, he went one step further.”
“Which was?”
“He brought out priests. Knelt before them in front of everyone. Proclaimed his repentance for not stopping you when he had the chance, swore he’d accepted Tehlu’s iron chains in penance.” Bast’s expression twisted with the particular disgust the Fae reserve for human religion. “Went on about justice in his heart and service to the divine. You know how your kind eat that up.”
“So he crowned himself.”
“Oh yes. Full ceremony, blessed oils, the works.” Bast showed his teeth. “After they crowned him, his first decree concerned you and any who’d helped you. Said you’d all face the same justice as Wil and Sim already had.”
Wil. Sim. Even hearing the names felt like losing them again. That Alveron would use the memory of dead men as a weapon. I pressed my fists against my thighs and said nothing.
“I took work carting bodies after the coup,” Bast continued, his voice gentle now. “I got to them before the new king could put them on spikes.”
“Did you see to them?” I couldn’t look at him when I asked.
“I did what I could. They’re buried together, south of here. I don’t know all your manling customs, but I did my best.” He paused, then added quietly, “They deserved better than what they got.”
I placed my good hand on his shoulder, feeling the solid warmth of him. “Thank you, Bast.”
“That’s not all I learned, Reshi.” His grin returned, bright as a blade. “Auri lives. Hidden. Guarded. But breathing.”
For a moment there was no city around us. No soldiers. No red paint drying on cold stone. Only that word, and what it meant. My good hand shook where it rested on his shoulder, and I let it.