Helena hadn’t realised how much time and consideration Kaine had devoted to thinking about killing Morrough. The strategy it would require. As if he’d spent the years on the island waiting for Lila to ask. Perhaps he had. Or perhaps he would have gone and tried to do it himself if he’d been physically able to, but he wasn’t. He’d never fully recovered from the torture Morrough had last inflicted on him. Under stress, his tremors were worse than Helena’s.
“You should put your name on this,” Lila said when Helena finally gave her a design for the bomb. “Even if people think you’re dead, you should get credit for your work. Luc always used to say you’d be the one to outshine us all.”
Helena shook her head. “I don’t want anyone to wonder about me or to look too hard. It’s not worth the risk. Just say you took the design when you escaped, and you don’t know who developed it.”
Pol came to slowly understand that his mother was leaving. He was five by then, and he and Enid had birthdays close together. As an early gift, Lila and Pol went to one of the larger islands and returned with a leggy white shepherd puppy named Cobalt, named for his father’s horse.
“He’ll keep you company and keep you safe until I come back,” Lila said. She’d let the dye in her hair fade, letting it grow blond again. It was braided and pinned around her head, because this was how she wanted Pol to remember her. “I won’t be able to send letters, but I’ll send messages sometimes, all right? And whenever you see Lumithia, that means I’m thinking about you, and when you see the sun shining, that’s your dad, watching you for me.”
Lila’s eyes shone with tears. “And you’ll look out for Enid? She’s your best friend. You have to stick together, because that’s what best friends do.”
THE HIGH NECROMANCER, MORROUGH, ONCE known as the first Northern alchemist, Cetus, died on a spring day.
According to the newspapers, the underground stronghold was breached by an elite team of Novis and Hevgotian military, accompanied by Paladin Lila Bayard, the last surviving member of the Order of the Eternal Flame. A mysterious pyromancy bomb was used in the initial attack.
The blast caused the famed Alchemy Tower to collapse, and the wreckage was painstakingly excavated and infiltrated as the team was mobbed by necrothralls.
Many were killed in the attack. Lila Bayard was nearly killed. The general leading the attack ordered that everyone fall back, but Lila had refused. She went on alone.
Newspapers across the continent featured a photo of Lila Bayard emerging from the rubble of the Alchemy Tower, helmet gone, face filthy, her armour streaked with blood. The brutal scar across her face was starkly visible, sharpening the look of cold triumph as she dragged the remains of Morrough’s mutated and rotting corpse behind her.
There was no denying Lila Bayard’s heroism. She had done what a dozen countries had failed to do.
Having a living, breathing member of the Eternal Flame who had done the impossible made it harder for the allied nations to treat Paladia as an utterly failed nation that needed external control. Lila was offered all sorts of ceremonial roles, but she refused them.
She had not come back to rule. She wanted those lost remembered, and she wanted the tragedy of the war confronted, not buried, so that it could not happen again.
IN LILA’S ABSENCE, POL AND Enid grew intensely attached to each other, to the point that Helena and Kaine began to watch them with worry.
“She’s not going to handle it,” Helena said as they watched Enid and Pol run from tide pool to tide pool. “She’s so much like us. I don’t know if it’ll be better or worse to begin preparing her for it.”
Kaine nodded as the children teased a large crab which then chased after them, scuttling sideways. Enid and Pol both tripped, shrieking with laughter as they tried to drag each other away from the pursuing claws, and Cobalt barked wildly.
Word had come that Lila was leading reconstruction efforts to have the Alchemy Institute reopened. There would be a new Tower, a new school, but not all Northern alchemy would be funnelled through the narrow admissions rate of the Institute. Generations of knowledge and alchemy had been destroyed; the continent was in desperate need of more alchemists, as many as could be trained. Alchemy certification would no longer be exclusive to Institute students but overseen by external bodies and given to anyone who could pass the necessary resonance tests and exams.
The Institute would return to its original purpose of new heights and advancements in alchemy.
After fierce debate, vivimancy was added as a field of alchemical study at the Institute. Lila had insisted on it. Healers had been vital to the Eternal Flame during the war. The potential of the resonance was being villainised and wasted by superstitious paranoia; it should not be an ability exclusive to those willing to abuse it. Paladia’s discriminatory treatment of vivimancers had played a role in how easily the Undying had recruited them. Paladia had to evolve.
It took a year and a half, but finally Lila returned, but she had not come to stay. She was taking Pol home.
Helena tried to change her mind, but Lila would not be moved. Luc’s son had to go to Paladia and see what his family had built.
The only consolation to Helena was that Pol would never be the Principate, for there would be no more Principate.
The world had seen Lucien Holdfast grovel at Morrough’s feet and beg for immortality before his execution. Even with claims that perhaps he’d been coerced, promised leniency for the rest of the Eternal Flame, the mythos surrounding the Holdfasts and the idea of a lineage of divinity had been irrevocably shattered.
Pol would go to Paladia as a Holdfast, and he and his mother would rebuild what had been dearest to his family’s heart. The Alchemy Institute.
“Come back with me, Helena,” Lila said as Kaine took the children on a walk along the cliffs. “You can run the vivimancy department; think of what a difference you could make. You’d be establishing a whole new formalised field of alchemy. You’d be perfect for it.”
“How would that work?” Helena asked. She could tell that reality was setting in for Lila, the realisation of all the politics and pressure that were the price of her choices.
“Do I leave Enid here? Or take her with me while I try to clear Kaine’s name?”
Lila looked away, staring out at the sea. “You can’t clear his name. It’ll never happen. I know you think he’s a tragic hero with no choice, but he’s done the most terrible things. People talk about Morrough, make jokes about him, but do you know who no one ever jokes about? The High Reeve. People look sick at the mere mention of him. His signatures and seal are everywhere. He was involved in everything. There was nothing that happened in that regime that Kaine didn’t know about.”
Helena’s throat tightened. “Well, that’s the thing about being a spy and destabilising a regime. You have to know about things. How else did you expect him to do it?”
Lila’s shoulders drooped. Helena understood why Lila did not want to be a sole survivor, the lonely hero. In Paladia, she was still surrounded by vultures, watching her, waiting for any mistake, some means to tear her apart, just as they had when she was a paladin.
Now Pol would be in their clutches, but even knowing that, Lila couldn’t leave her family, country, or legacy. It was not in her nature to give up a fight.
“I’m not going to leave him,” Helena said after a pause. “There’s no version of me that survived the war without Kaine. I was loyal to Luc, and I know you want Paladia to remember him, but that country killed him, as much as Morrough did. I can’t go back to it.”
Lila nodded, starting to turn, but then stopped.
“I know I said I wouldn’t say anything else, but I have to say this before I go and leave you here.” Lila’s throat dipped, her scar growing stark on her face the way it did when she was upset. “You’re all I have left besides Pol. I know you love Kaine, and he loves you, I don’t deny that. But I don’t think you realise how inhumanly cold he is to anyone who isn’t you or E. The rest of the world could burn and he wouldn’t care. I don’t think he’d even notice. Is this really what you want?”