“I knew a demigoddess, too,” he said. “But she was not the type who made friends with our kind.”
“With our kind. Listen to yourself! A moment ago, the fairies were your people, now you speak as though you remember your true blood! You’ll have to make up your mind, Barrick Eddon.”
“You do not understand. The Fireflower ...”
“Oh!” She turned and walked away, fighting back her anger. “Yes, things have happened to you. To me as well. Zoria’s mercy, Barrick, I killed Hendon Tolly with my own hands! If you have been burned by Heaven’s fire like the Orphan—well, then, so have I! We are both changed! But you haven’t changed all that much—your suffering still must be unequaled by any other’s… !”
He turned, his face tight with rage. “Don’t talk to me about suffering, Briony! You will marry that prince—I have seen him moon over you like a calf following its mother. You will be the queen of Syan and the world will bow to you. What do I have? Do you even care?”
“Barrick, that is foolishness ...”
“Do you know what is ahead for the Qar… and for me? Saqri, the queen of the People, is dying. She sacrificed herself so that Zosim could be defeated—dozens of arrows and rifle balls pierced her. Only her will and her love for her people keep her alive. When she is gone, half of what has kept the Qar race alive will be gone, too. Think of that, sister—when you are planning your marriage, I will be burying my queen and my beloved… !”
“Your beloved… ?” Briony could only stand and gape as if struck. “Who are you talking about—not that Saqri?”
“You don’t understand anything,” he said bitterly. “Come. Come and I will show you.” He beckoned Briony to follow, then led her to a side chamber where a pair of female creatures in garb like Aesi’uah’s, but whose angular shapes were less human, knelt in silence beside a makeshift bed of straw. On it, scarcely visible in the dim light of a few candles, lay a small, slender girl who could not be even as old as she and Barrick were.
“This isn’t Saqri,” she said. “This is the girl that was in the boat with you.”
He stood over the head of the bed, looking down. “Saqri is in the center of the camp, surrounded by her people. This… this is the only person who truly cared whether I lived or died during this entire terrible nightmare. Her name is Qinnitan. For a year she was in my dreams and in my thoughts. She was my companion, my friend, my ...” He stopped and shook himself angrily. “Now she is dying… and we never even spoke face-to-face. Never touched ...” He turned abruptly and walked out.
Briony stood for a moment, gazing down at the motionless girl. If she lived, it was impossible to tell. She showed no movement of breath, no sign of the animation that plays over a sleeper’s face even in quiet slumber.
Who are you? Briony wondered. And what were you to my brother, really? Would you have loved him? Would you have cared for him?
“How long will she live?” she asked the two Qar women, but although they both looked up at her words, neither answered.
“I’m sorry, Barrick,” she said when she had found him again. “I didn’t know. But that is all the more reason ...”
“Cease, Briony, I beg you.” He moved away when she would have touched his arm. “You will say it is all the more reason to cleave to the family I have, but you do not understand. I am no longer one of you.”
“What? An Eddon… ?”
He laughed harshly. “Oh, I am an Eddon all right. Everywhere I go others suffer in my stead. You must know that by now. How many of the men who came with you died so that you could regain Father’s throne? How many others because the Tollys wanted it in the first place? And how many of the Qar have died because our ancestor stole Sanasu from her own family?”
A memory struck her, from the last time she had talked to their father. “There is something you must know ...”
But Barrick did not seem to hear her. “In fact, now that I think on it, the number of current victims doesn’t matter, because eventually the Qar will all have died because of what our family did to them. So if I can repay even a little of the debt that the Eddons owe to Saqri and Ynnir and even Yasammez, then that is what I must do.”
The memory was washed away by anger. “You speak of Yasammez that way? The bitch that murdered so many of our people?”
He waved his hand. “Go away, Briony—you cannot understand. We have no more to say to each other. Soon enough the Qar will be gone from here and I will go with them. You can rebuild your houses in peace—we are too few to trouble mankind again.”
“When I saw you, I wondered at how much you had changed, Barrick,” she told him. “But now I see that in the most important ways you are no different. It’s still your own sorrows you care about and no one else’s, and you still turn away from love and kindness as though it were an attack.”
Her brother’s pale face showed nothing—he seemed as unmoved as the sea itself. Briony turned and walked out of the cavern.
46. The Guttering Candle
“… He told Zoria that if she could lead him out of Kerniou, the Orphan could return to the world and the sun, but if she faltered or failed, he would have to remain among the dead forever.”
He could feel her trying not to be amused, although he did not know why. The exact nature of what Saqri found funny often eluded him. Your sister has departed. Did it not go well?
You know it didn’t. You know it as well as I do, I’m sure.
I was not with you. I felt you, but at a distance. Still, the emotions were very great!
Even as she teased him with that strange indulgence she had begun to show toward him since she had been struck down, he could feel her fighting against her own growing weakness. Unlike Saqri, he was only just learning how to politely not notice things. Don’t mock, he told her. I am in pain.
Of course you are. But it is unnecessary. The People have ended. Never was it promised that we would all meet our ends in the same instant, but I doubt not this will be our last generation, at least for those of the long-lived. A few of us shall straggle on for years, but the Defeat has finally come. Your people do not carry quite the same burden as we do, so you likely do not understand that knowing the end has arrived is almost a relief to us. I am sorry I will not be here to see the last, bright flowering that will come of it—I am certain the art and music will be glorious and frightening in a thousand subtle ways!
But if there is no longer a People, Barrick Eddon, there is no need for you to sacrifice yourself. The Fireflower of all our mothers will be gone soon. Then someday soon, even if your time is elongated by what has happened to you, it will happen to you, too, dear manchild—the last Fireflower will flicker and die. Without the Fireflower’s light, the Deep Library will become a stagnant pond. And without the memory of who we are, we will dwindle and die like any mute creatures. The song will go on without our voices.…