“Time to go.”
Vienh started to harangue them when they returned to the dock, but stopped when she saw Xinai and Adam’s grim face.
“Will she live?” he asked Isyllt, easing her down.
She touched the woman’s shoulder carefully. Bruises and scrapes, strained muscles, a broken arm and fractured ribs. But no damage to the heart, no poison in the blood. “I think so. She needs rest, medicine, but no miracles.” She glanced up. “Are you going to stay with her?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw. “No,” he said after a moment. “She made her choice.” He nodded toward the Tigers. “They can look after her. And I promised to see you back safe.” He glanced at her sling. “Or as close as I’ve managed.”
She gave him a lopsided smile. “Close enough for government work.”
“I’m not rowing you to Selafai in a storm-cursed longboat,” Vienh shouted across the quay, kicking the boat in question. “Let’s go.”
Isyllt turned to Asheris. Her arm itched and she’d started to shake; her voice was dying fast and taking her wits with it. “If you’re ever in Erisin-” she said at last.
“Yes.” He smiled, took her hand and pressed a kiss on her filthy knuckles. “Or come to Assar. I’ll show you the Sea of Glass.”
“If it’s anything like the mountain, please don’t bother.” She grinned, squeezing his hand. He didn’t flinch from her ring this time.
His smile stretched and he leaned down to kiss her brow. “Go home, necromancer.” It sounded like a benediction.
She couldn’t wish him the same. “Good luck,” she said instead. She turned toward the waiting boat and didn’t look back till they’d crossed the river’s shining veil.
Epilogue
The news beat them home. Only days after the destruction of Symir, Rahal al Seth, Emperor of Assar, was dead. He and several of his mages had burned when a palace laboratory caught fire. No one knew what had started the fire, but it was assumed to have been a spell gone wrong. It occurred during the demon days before the start of the new year-always an ill omen.
His half sister, Samar al Seth, would be crowned before the month was up, and already promised aid to devastated Sivahra.
Isyllt smiled when she read it. For a time she considered walking the labyrinth beneath the temple of Erishal and releasing the rest of the ghosts in her ring. Pragmatism won, however, and she settled for opening a bottle of Chassut red and toasting the embers falling in her hearth.
The physicians at the Arcanost opened her hand and stitched it up again full of silver pins. The damage was too great for even their most cunning surgeons, though, and she’d left it too long untreated. She retained the use of thumb and forefinger, but the two middle fingers curled uselessly and the smallest followed them, muscles already atrophying. She wore a ridge of scar tissue in the shape of a man’s hand around her left wrist-that would last longer than the payment sitting in her bank account. She began to wear her ring on her right hand, and learned to wash her hair one-handed.
The pain and guilt in Kiril’s eyes whenever he saw her might have given her a vicious pleasure only a month ago. Now they were just another little sadness. As Adam had said, what was the use in arguing?
The next courier ship came a month after the first and carried reports of the new Empress’s coronation, as well as news of an investigation into embezzlement and financial mismanagement in the military. Several generals had hastily retired and the Empress had not yet replaced them.
The ship also brought a package for Isyllt, delivered by a ruddy-faced dockrat. After cursing and fumbling with the nailed crate, she finally produced a smaller box. She raised an eyebrow at the seal; not the Imperial stamp, but the crest of the family al Seth. This box was sealed with a spell and the latch lifted when she touched it. Inside the padded coffer were a note and a velvet pouch.
Isyllt opened the bag and laughed as a stream of opals poured free, gleaming with iridescent fire.
More people than I can count offered help and support during the course of this book. Just a few include Elizabeth Bear; Leah Bobet; Jodi Meadows; Jaime Lee Moyer; everyone in the Online Writing Workshop and its Zoo; all my blog readers who endured my cursing and struggling; the circulation department of Willis Library; my husband, Steven, who survived at ground zero; my fabulous agent, Jennifer Jackson; and my equally fabulous editor, Dong-Won Song. Thank you!
Amanda Downum was born in Virginia and has since spent time in Indonesia, Micronesia, Missouri, and Arizona. In 1990 she was sucked into the gravity well of Texas and has not yet escaped. She graduated from the University of North Texas with a degree in English literature, and has spent the last ten years working in a succession of libraries and bookstores; she is very fond of alphabetizing. She currently lives near Austin in a house with a spooky attic, which she shares with her long-suffering husband and fluctuating numbers of animals and half- finished novels. She spends her spare time making jewelry and falling off perfectly good rocks. To learn more about the author, visit www.amandadownum.com.
I’ve been a book buyer for a medical bookstore and a library supervisor, and spent years as a retail minion. I’m currently dayjobbing as a bookseller in a used-book store, which isn’t at all a bad way to spend eight hours of a day.
Besides selling other people’s books, I make jewelry and rock-climb (outside whenever I can, but mostly indoors). I’ve tried gardening, but that turned out to be depressing for me and deadly for the plants. My next hobby may be something involving sharp objects, like knitting or crochet.
My mother read me Tolkien, Lewis, Le Guin, and L’Engle as a child, and they carved permanent channels in my brain. Later on I discovered Lovecraft and binged on horror novels, and now magic and monsters are pretty much my favorite things. My favorite modern writers are Elizabeth Bear, Barbara Hambly, and Caitlin R. Kiernan.
