“I hate to tell you this, and I know that it is going to come as quite a shock, but Lyam has been found.” She swallowed hard. “He was found dead.”
Darby gasped next to her. Clover’s face hardened into something resolute. Hadrian just looked thunderstruck, as if he hadn’t quite heard her right. But Kerrigan… Kerrigan felt all of her fears escalate in that moment. A low buzzing filled her ears. As if everything was suddenly and inexplicably underwater. Lyam had told her he knew about her visions. He’d followed her out of the party. And now, he was dead… because of her.
“I am so sorry,” Moran said. “It’s a tragic accident.”
“How?” Hadrian asked practically.
“He was robbed, stripped of all belongings. The Guard found his body in a less than savory area of the city with a knife wound in his back. Horrible business, horrible.”
Darby burst into tears and collapsed right where she was standing, falling into a puddle of taffeta. Clover bent down with her, dropping a caring arm around her shoulders and whispering into her ear. Hadrian just looked… blank. Like all the wind had been blown out of his sails.
“Knife wound?” Kerrigan managed to get out.
“A slew of them in that area of town, I’m afraid. I just wish we could have recovered his father’s compass,” Moran said sadly.
“Can I see the body?”
“Dear gods, no, Kerrigan. No one wants to subject you to that.”
“What if it wasn’t an accident?” she asked more firmly.
“I know that you want to find motive in this,” Moran said, putting her hand on Kerrigan’s shoulder gently. “Lyam was a good, kind boy. He didn’t deserve this. But it doesn’t mean it was anything but senseless.”
Kerrigan didn’t believe that.
Maybe it’d be easier if it was just an accident. Just a bad dream that she was bound to wake up from. But it wasn’t.
Fate was spinning its wheels, and people she cared about were getting caught in the spokes.
20
The Funeral
It was just a tragic accident.
That was what everyone kept saying.
Lyam had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything of value had been stripped from him. A robbery. He’d been in the Dregs, close to the… Wastes. Everyone whispered when they said the name. No sensible person would get caught near that den of iniquity.
A tragic… accident.
Even though it didn’t feel like an accident at all.
Her life had skidded to a halt, and yet the world was going on around her. She had been excused from the last two days of task one in the tournament. Fordham had passed through to the next round, but there had been no glint of a knife in the arena. Which would have confused her if she could even concentrate on her vision. She had two weeks until the second task. Two weeks to “recover”—or so everyone told her—but still only a month to find a tribe.
Not enough time. Not enough time for any of it.
She stood with her feet planted in the dirt as Lyam’s body rested on a pyre. Body. His… body. It was hard to even think the words. That whatever had made Lyam… Lyam had been snuffed out so completely that all that lay on top of the pile of wood was a vessel and nothing more. None of his humor or thirst for adventure or sailing knowledge. Just a body.
Someone had arranged him with his arms wrapped over his chest. His eyes closed, his face serene, his body limp and ready to return to the earth. It didn’t even look like Lyam.
Though maybe a touch more than when she had snuck into the depths of the mountain to where they kept him in a cold place to prevent rot. The very thought shuddered through her as her teeth chattered, the deeper she crept. She was glad that she hadn’t asked Darby or Hadrian to come with her. They’d never have made it this far. She hoped to find a clue, to find anything to tell her why this had happened.
But when she got there, she looked down at the body—his skin waxy, his lips blue, the puncture wound deep—and she realized her folly. There was nothing here. Nothing but a wave of grief. She’d fallen to the floor and cried for hours. Lyam was gone. He was really gone.
Darby squeezed her hand, bringing her back to reality. Kerrigan blinked back the weight of that grief. She had heard nothing that the man said, who was there to bring solace to the grieving.
“Would anyone like to say anything?” the man finally asked, addressing the crowd.
Hadrian and Darby looked at Kerrigan. They had apparently agreed that she would be the one to do this, to find a place within her to speak words about the person she had lost. But what could she even say? She hadn’t prepared for this. But she couldn’t send him to rest without at least someone speaking for him.
So, she stepped forward and cleared her parched throat.
“Lyam was not like you and me,” she began softly. Her throat was already closing at the words. But she knew what he would have wanted to say. “Lyam came from very little. His parents were fishermen along the western coast. They had a wonderful life there on the sea. Lyam always kept his father’s compass with him at all times. He said… he said that it showed him the way back to the water. But due to fishing regulations, his family was forced to give up their life and come to Kinkadia, the city of light. They found no light here.”
The crowd surrounding Lyam’s funeral pyre shifted uncomfortably at her words. They were not the words anyone had been expecting. But she knew Lyam’s truth. The tribe system had failed him, as it had failed all the Dragon Blessed. And she was not just going to sit back and let them burn him without knowing what had happened.
“His parents never found work here. No one would
