She stopped him by beginning to write. I did intend it. They are monsters, but they are our monsters. Use them. As long as I live they will be true to us. I sang that into them before they were even born.
“After that?”
I cannot say. After I die it will be different, but trust them until that. She paused a moment, and then wrote, I don’t deserve this day. The fullness of it. The time to talk with you, even like this. I don’t deserve it
“Of course you do.”
Corinn exhaled through her nose. I’ve planted nothing but evil seeds. Now they have sprung to life, none of them as I imagined.
Aliver’s hand stopped hers. He had been reading as she wrote. “Don’t. That’s the past. I look at you and I see so much to admire. It means a great deal to me that you treat my daughter with love, and that you are kind to Benabe. I barely knew her, yet… still, it matters. And I know that the sister I had but a few days ago would have seen only challenge in them. Only foes and dangers to be clipped and controlled. You don’t have to explain that to me. That’s what it means to be siblings. I do know the worst of you, whether you like it or not.” He smiled. “But I also know that you would not be here as you are today, with them sleeping over there after such a wonderful day, if the love that you are showing wasn’t in you always. That’s why I cannot be angry with you. Anger would be a waste of the moments we have, and it would make us weak in the face of the things we have yet to do.”
It sounded so good when he said it. She sat with that a while, hoping it was true.
After a while, she wrote, Did you love her? She pointed her chin toward Benabe, who slept with her arm over Shen.
“I might have. I was too young to know.” He thought a moment. “She was very beautiful. Still is, really.”
If we had more time.
“Yes, if we had more time.”
Still later in the night Corinn sat at a table not far from the others, quills, paper, and ink at hand. She had a note to compose.
Hanish stood with a hand on her shoulder. “You didn’t tell him about the hard part,” Hanish said. “About the fact that you’re planning to lure the Santoth into the worm’s mouth as well. That will not be ‘easy.’ ”
She thought, No need to worry him. That’s for me to deal with. Now, be quiet. I have only a few hours to write everything I can for Aaden. You can watch over my shoulder but don’t say anything.
When she had confirmation that he would not, she lifted the quill and considered what she wished most to say. She knew how she would begin and how she would end it. The same phrase. The truth. It was all the things in between that would take some sorting.
She wrote his name, and then, I love you. In all the long life that you have before you, I hope that you find love in all its complicated variations. And each time it confounds you and surprises you, hurts you and heals you- remember me, for the love I mean includes all those things.
Pausing, she wondered how much she should say, what she should withhold. It pained her to think of some of the lessons she had given the boy, things she did not believe now and doubted she ever had, not completely. Hopefully, some of that would fall away from him. Hopefully, he would be better than she had taught him, less afraid, more trusting. It was dangerous to be all those things, but it was even more dangerous to be as she had been. One cannot be whole unto themselves. She knew that now. She would tell him as much. She would tell him everything she could, so that this letter spoke to him in the years to come.
She dipped the quill, and continued writing.
T he next morning she and Aliver met as the sun rose. They laid out the future as they agreed it should be, had it put in writing, sealed and official, and then locked away. The business of it took every moment up until the expiration of the single day.
Corinn kept her parting brief. Private. It was not vanity that stopped her from addressing the populace. She would proudly enough have stood before them. She was still herself in Aaden’s eyes, so no one else could hurt or embarrass her. Nor did she mind asking Barad to be her voice to the world. He had a good voice. She had always liked it, and the fact that he gave it to her of his own free will did much to comfort her.
The reason she said good-bye to her family in private was that she wanted no pomp on her departure. She did not wish to speak grandiose words, to instill either hope or worry. Aliver would stay after her to speak with the people in ways that brought the best out of them. What she needed to do, she had to do alone, so that’s how she set out.
Or… almost alone.
“You’re finally going to let me ride on your blessed mount?” Hanish asked. He stood beside her as she made last-minute checks to her straps, harness, and supply satchels.
I never stopped you. You were just nervous. You don’t like it that he can see you.
It was true. Po’s eyes did follow Hanish. He was not a particularly curious creature, but he seemed to recognize something unusual in Hanish’s presence. He squinted one eye and then the other when looking at him, as if testing something about his vision. There was no aggression in it, though. Corinn sensed that the dragon recognized that Hanish was somehow a part of her, that they were related to him through the magic that had shaped them.
She hugged everyone. She held Shen’s face in her palms and stared at it a long time, and she had Hanish and Barad explain to her that there was absolutely no blame on her for bringing the Santoth to Acacia. That was Corinn’s responsibility. Shen should never feel another moment of guilt for it.
In parting with Aaden, she slipped the folded and sealed note into his hands. She told him not to rush to open it. Read when he was ready. Wait as long as he wished.
She pressed Aliver’s hand in hers and asked him to speak the truth of her to Mena when he reached her. Let her know that in the end, at least, she tried to be somebody Maeben on earth would be proud of. And then, before emotion could get the better of her, she mounted Po and they leaped into the air. She did not look back until she was some distance away.
“So what do we do first?” Hanish asked.
First, we find the Santoth. Who knows what they’ve gotten up to, or how cross they’ll be now that they know Calfa Ven does not contain what they seek.
“And then?”
And then we destroy them. If it’s possible, we destroy them. We make things right again.
Hanish, with his arms around her waist and lips close to her ear, said, “All right. Let’s do that.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
Rialus worried to no end about the frostbite that damaged the tip of his nose and the skin of his cheeks. It did not go deep, but he feared that Devoth or Sabeer or Allek-annoying Allek-would notice it and question him. To him, the dead flesh, which went red and painful and peeling as it warmed in his room, wrote his whole escapade right there on his face. He would cave at the first query. Where had he been that first day of battle? Why had somebody seen him trekking across the snow? Was that where he got that frost damage to his skin? Had he really thought he could desert them, and that his people would want him back?
It all felt like such a great folly. Shuffling away from the enormous torches that were the burning towers; stumbling into the dark; fearful every moment of discovery; and then, eventually, alone in the howling arctic night. How foolish. And then he had been found, bundled into the Acacian camp, surrounded, interrogated. As cold and as miserable as he had been, joy had sputtered to life, a single candle flame of heat and light within him. How foolish. He had spoken to Princess Mena in the flesh, offering his pathetic bits of information, thinking he was saved. He was with Acacians again. He was with his people! How foolish. Scarcely an hour of hope, and then back to the ice again, sent away by people who loved him not, back into the jaws of his enemy.
He would have liked to believe it was a nightmare, except that the proof of its reality was right there in the bits of flesh that Fingel trimmed away from his face, right there in the wounds she treated with an alcohol ointment that kicked his eyes back into his head with the scorching pain of touch. He could not tell if she enjoyed hurting him. She worked, actually, as if the pain did not occur to her at all.
“Fool Rialus!” he said. “Why even have your face tended? Let it fester and go green and kill you. Death, you
