FOR TWO DAYS 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.
It was not rest. It was something less.
When I closed my eyes, I saw faces. Wil first, patient even in death, his blood dried 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. He didn’t speak. He didn’t accuse. That was the worst of it.
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 turn. 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. One word was all. But that one word held me to the waking world when letting go would have been so much easier.
On the third morning, Taeylia came to my mat. Her weathered face was still kind, but now it carried something firmer too. She lowered herself to sit beside me with the careful movements of age, and when she spoke, her Aturan came rusty as a door that hadn’t opened in years.
“You must go,” she said. The words were final. “We have done much. The desert has little to spare.” She paused then, her fingers moving as if she could pluck the right words from the air. She chose the next ones the way you choose footholds on loose stone. “Grief is hungry. It will eat more than we can give.”
She was right, and I told her so.
Taeylia’s hand touched my shoulder, gentle as falling sand. “Your woman is at peace,” she said. “We sang her to the stars. It is done well.” She studied my face for a long moment, her dark eyes steady on mine. Then, more gently, “But you are not done. The living must walk.”
Another of the Tahl stepped forward then, a younger woman with sun-dark hands. She pressed warm bread into my palm and held out a waterskin, already full, 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 in careful Aturan mixed with the gestures her people used when words failed. 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 watched me leave from a careful distance. Taeylia stood at their head, her face unreadable as the desert itself. No one waved. But as I passed the camp’s edge, 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 that cost them dearly. I walked away carrying all of it, and left nothing behind.
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.
Renere was not the city I remembered.
I arrived at the gates with my clothes in tatters, my feet bare and bleeding. Even my shaed had suffered, its darkness faded to gauze by the desert sun. The guards didn’t look at me. They looked through me. No one in Renere was looking at anyone, not really.
The city had learned a careful silence, the hush of people who know that words can be dangerous. Merchants whispered their trades and hurried away. Children played in alleys but watched the streets. Everyone 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.
Rebellion is a weed that spreads from cuttings. The Maer’s soldiers knew this, or should have. They walked the streets in pairs with lanterns held high, their white and blue livery bright against Renere’s gray stones. They stopped anyone who walked alone too long. They scraped names from walls. But every name they scraped away left raw stone that begged for fresh paint, and the city had already chosen its loyalty. It wasn’t to the new king who wore a stolen crown.
The Blind Beggar stood where I’d left it, wearing its shabbiness like comfortable clothes. The windows were boarded, the door marked with that same red paint. “Feyda.” Even here, rebellion had found purchase.
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 and the bed still held the shape of bodies that would never return.
No message waited. No sign of passage. Bast was simply gone.
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. The hand I’d raised fell back to my side.
“Bast.” The name left me as a sigh.
He stepped from darkness wearing that grin of his, the one that promised trouble. Then his gaze found my ruined hand, and the grin died. “Reshi, your fingers.” He barely got the words 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 grin sharpened. “The other half bought me a room and no rest at the Brewer’s Rest.”
I gave him a look.
Bast’s expression didn’t change, but something entirely unrepentant flickered behind his eyes. Then the lightness left his face like heat leaving iron. “Twelve days, Reshi. I stepped out that morning to get our things from the Blind Beggar. Gone an hour, maybe less. When I came back to the Willow Blossom, the room was empty with blood on the floor and no note. 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. But she disappeared the same day you did.”
Of course. Bast didn’t know. How could he?
“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.
I looked away. 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, seeking safer ground. “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.”
“Oh, it gets better. He reminded them how you killed Lord Vatis in the courtyard. How you 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, 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. “That’s how I found them both.”
“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.
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