Most of all, Diana was safe and here, with me. I looked over at her and felt a shiver go through my body. It was part joy at being with her and part fear at the thought of losing her. But there was guilt, too, a wrenching guilt that made me ashamed of feeling happy whenever I looked at Kaz and saw the scar that marked his loss. Now that I really had joined in this war, much of the time joy and fear, life and death, decision and responsibility were jumbled together. Things were intense, awful, terrible, and then sort of majestic when it was all over and you forgot the dirt, smoke, and stink, and were grateful you were alive. I had never thought about being grateful for life before: it was just there, like air and water. Now, it felt like I owed it to the dead, even to those who had yet to die in this war, to be grateful for the simple grace of drawing breath.
Captain Seaton poured again, filling our glasses. I watched him and saw lines in his face that hadn’t been there a few weeks ago. Maybe it was better for him now, knowing Daphne’s killer was dead. Maybe not. Maybe it was just better for me, I don’t really know, and I wasn’t going to ask.
“I have a toast,” I said, pulling out a tattered paperback from my pocket. “It’s from an old Viking poem, from a place like Nordland. I think it’s about the promise of justice.”
I cleared my throat and read from the page words that had haunted me since I first saw them. I know a hall whose doors face North on the Strand of Corpses far from the sun.
Poison drips from lights in the roof; that building is woven of backs of snakes.
There heavy streams must be waded through by breakers of pledges and murderers.”
I set down the book, the three Vikings with swords drawn still marching in the same direction, toward battle.
“Let them beware,” said Kaz, with a dark look as he raised his glass.
We drank.
