“Right?”
When she looked at him finally, he cringed. For the same reasons he cringed when he entered a temple. Because there was no judgment in her eye, no pondering, no hope. Just sadness.
“You talk like it’s a checklist,” she said. “Like you can just keep doing it and someone’s keeping score and you can always come back. Maybe it is like that.” She held her hand out, watched the way the sunlight made the edges of her fingers pink. “I think I thought it was like that, too, at one point.
“But then, if it’s all about numbers, how high can you count? How many good deeds equal a life wrongfully stolen? How many people do you get to kill before you lose count?”
He touched his side. The flesh there felt alien, new, someone else’s. “You saved me, though. You and your arm. I got another chance. That means something, doesn’t it?”
“It means I didn’t want you dead. And whatever’s inside me thought that was enough to save you.”
“So. . you forgive me?”
She smiled sadly. “Fourteen hundred, Denaos. I don’t think it matters what I say.”
In all the times he had been cut, she didn’t think she had ever seen so much pain etched across his face.
“A waste.”
Dreadaeleon’s footsteps heralded his arrival before his grumbling did. The boy looked surprisingly healthy. His color had returned, his eyes were clear, he hadn’t so much as looked at his crotch for days. And yet, everywhere he went, he staggered, stumbled fitfully. As he did now as he approached the pyre and swept a disdainful glare over it.
“You managed to find this thing in all that mess?” He snorted. “One broken, twisted husk of something vaguely pretending to be a woman out of hundreds. Meanwhile, I search for a corpse positively bursting with magical power and I find nothing.”
“You didn’t find Sheraptus’s body?” The tension in Asper’s voice was palpable. “Does that mean-”
“It means I didn’t find his body.” He rubbed his eyes. “Or Bralston’s. Thus, I walk away from this with nothing.”
“You’ve got your health,” Denaos observed with a grin. “And with all the water that came, I bet you no one could even tell if you soiled yourself. Small blessings and all that.”
And instantly, Asper saw the mask come back on. All the pain from his face was gone, hastily buried in whatever shallow grave he kept all those secrets and the terrified, pale little boy. Once again, he was smiling and beaming with no cares beyond what he could be drinking and who he could be groping.
Maybe this was the real him. Maybe what she had just seen was an act.
But she had saved him, whoever he was. With whatever she had.
No, she told herself. No more whatevers. You know exactly what it is. She stared at her hand. You heard him speak to you. And he can hear you, the paper man said. She paused, turned her thought upon herself like a knife. Hello? Are you there?
She reached out to him, the thing inside her. As she had reached out to Talanas before, as she had reached out to Taire. And there was silence, but not as she had heard before. No empty silence of a god gone deaf. A tense silence. A moment before a cat pounces upon a mouse. An instant between an awkward laugh and a long, slow kiss. A silence of someone there.
Listening.
And Asper quietly wondered if she would ever miss the days when she thought she was alone.
“Nothing but smoke and ashes.”
She caught Dreadaeleon’s mutter as the boy folded his hands behind his back and watched Xhai burn.
“You can break something like a living being down so thoroughly with only fire. When they’re gone, they’re nothing more than smoke and ashes. And yet, for some reason, the creature you loathed and that loathed you is made a pitiable and honorable thing when they’re reduced so thoroughly.” He snorted. “And by the envy of savages and bark-necks, our knowledge of life and death goes no further than that. A bunch of soot and dust is all we’ll ever know.”
“Look, if you were going to be all dour and depressing, why’d you even come to a funeral?” Denaos snapped.
“It’s not as though I had anything better to do. Gariath is off being hailed as a hero for slaying that colossal fish. Lenk and Kataria are being hailed as slayers of demons. People with no knowledge beyond how to swing a heavy piece of metal are heroes and I. .” He narrowed his eyes. “I am here.”
“You can’t be serious,” Asper said. “We stop a threat to the mortal world, kill a beast that wasn’t even supposed to exist, somehow come out of it alive and you’re upset that no one paid enough attention to you?”
“It just seems a little unfair is all.”
“Well, it’s not like you didn’t get anything out of it,” Denaos chimed in.
“Didn’t I? I couldn’t find Bralston’s body, either. The only person remotely worthy of a graceful disposal of his corpse and he’s washed away on the tide. The Venarium will not be pleased.”
“The Venarium will be one item on a formalized list of guests warmly invited to suck the hairiest parts of my anatomy,” Denaos said, folding his hands above his head as he turned back to the pyre. “We’re alive, miraculously.” He shot a sideways glance to Asper, who looked away. “And we’re here. The only three humans in a world filled with talking lizards and dead fish-things.”
“Three?” Asper lofted a brow. “What about Lenk?”
“If everything Lenk says is true, it’s beyond a miracle that he’s alive. It’s suspicious. And if everything we saw him do in the battle, what with the turning gray thing and speaking in tongues, then. .”
A frown creased his face.
“Whatever he is, he’s not one of us.”
They said nothing more. The fire filled the silence with solemn chatter, crackling and hissing as it slowly carried Xhai away and into the sky on a cloud of smoke and ashes.
“Right here.”
Shalake put his foot down on the earth. It was damp and moist under his scales, the water having reached this far into the forest.
“It was going to have happened right here.” He pointed to either side of the clearing. “See, it’s not a far journey from the wall or the ring. But that’s not the important part.” He pointed up, to the moonlight shining through the crack in the coral canopy. “The moon shines through here just so.”
He walked to one of the openings. “In my mind, it’s always on the walls. I’m repelling some great invasion force. I’m full of arrows. But I’ve left far more dead behind me and my brothers lived because of me.” He took long, trudging steps toward the center of the clearing. “I limp here and stagger.” He demonstrated, leaning on his tooth-studded club. “I can go no farther. All the years of service and bloodshed have taken their toll. I look up to heaven.”
He did so. The shadows of the coral branches blended with the black stripes of his warpaint to paint him almost pitch-black.
“And I whisper my last words.” He sighed, kneeling upon the earth, letting his club fall. “And then, I die. Right here on the ground. One with Jaga forever.”
Gariath watched impassively, crouched on his haunches atop a large stone. Shalake’s one good eye glimmered with mist. His other was wrapped tightly behind a bandage.
“The thing is, I never knew what my last words were going to be. To my father, to Mahalar. . maybe the oaths I swore when I became a warwatcher. Just one more time.” He stared at his footprint in the damp earth. “And when I finally had the chance to utter them. . I said nothing. I did nothing. My brothers were all dead and I couldn’t remember what the oaths were.”
He looked to Gariath.
“Isn’t that strange?”
Gariath rose up. The wounds he had taken just three days ago were already looking old, the foundation for good scars. His eyes were older, darker than a week-long night, as they looked down at Shalake.