She said that she was not.

“It is done, Princess?”

“No,” she answered. “How could I kill the father of my child? If I do that, he will have brought me down to his level. He’ll have debased me. I just looked at him and knew that if I drew this blade through his flesh, I’d relive the moment over and over again for the rest of my life. I’d never be free of it. I’d see him in my child’s face. Do you understand? He would rule me, even in his death. So I could not do it.” She turned her eyes away from the small man’s, not liking the familiarity taking shape in them, surprised at how readily that confession had poured out of her. Enough of weakness. She said, “So instead, Rialus, you will do it. Here, use his own blade against him. I give this as a gift to you.”

Rialus took the weapon and stared at it, incredulous, the sliver of metal curved like a lean moon. He looked from it to her and then back to the blade again. He could have been a dealer in Meinish artifacts, so intently did his gaze drift over the lettering engraved in the collar and across the twisted metalwork of the guard and down the ridged contours of the handle. But Corinn, studying the slow evolution of thought behind his features, knew that his mind was not on the details of the weapon at all. He was rushing back through his long list of grievances against Hanish. He was recalling the ways he had been belittled, mocked, shunned over the years. He was thinking how powerless he had been and how much he yearned for revenge.

“Can you do it?” she asked.

“Is he…secured?” Rialus asked.

Corinn said that he would give him no trouble. He was secured. He was waiting. Nodding, Rialus turned and moved toward the passageway. “Yes,” he said, just barely audible, “this I can do, Princess, if it is what you wish.” He walked with short, hesitant steps, a man dazed by an act of fortune so complete he had never imagined it and doubted it yet.

Once he was swallowed by the shadows, Corinn turned back to the churning chaos at play in the southern heavens. She had never seen anything like it. There was fury in it, but it was muted by distance. Of more note was the beauty of it: the way the high reaches seemed aflame with liquid fire, dancing with colors she could not even recall the names of. With colors that she was not sure she had ever seen before. She could not help feeling the display was meant for her, that it somehow marked the change in the world that she had just arranged. She wished that she felt more joy than she did, more relief, more solace, but something about the sight touched her with melancholy. She could not put her finger on it. She did make sure to refute what Hanish had said, though. He was wrong. She was not like him at all.

“I am better than you.” Corinn said this aloud, although there was nobody around her, nobody but herself to convince.

End of Book Three

It was a chill afternoon, windblown and low clouded, the sea all around Acacia whitecapped and desolate. The memorial procession left the palace via the western gate and followed the high road toward Haven’s Rock. They walked the winding ridges, a long, thin line of mourners. The hills around them dropped down into valleys that tumbled headlong into the gray waters of late autumn. Mena strode near the front, with her remaining siblings and the small, cobbled-together remnants that passed now for the Acacian aristocracy. She followed an ornate cart that carried two urns of ashes. In one were those of Leodan Akaran. Thaddeus Clegg had secretly kept them hidden all these years. In the other urn were the remains of Aliver Akaran, a boy who became a leader the ages would remember, a prince who never quite became a king.

It had been nearly ten years since Mena last traversed this route. She still remembered that earlier occasion, riding horseback with her father and all her siblings. At the time she could not have imagined her father’s death or Aliver’s or the strange, diverse lives they had lived between those two terrible events. Progressing in silence, she could not help recalling the child that she had once been. Looking at the plumage dotting the landscape, she remembered that she’d once been afraid of acacia trees. It would have seemed a silly thought-a tree is but a tree-except that she knew she had replaced those childish fears with new ones.

Now she feared her dreams. Too often in them she faced Larken again, her first kill. Each time the experience was much like the event had been in reality: she full of certainty, moving with purpose, able to slice the flesh of him without any inkling of remorse. It was the same with her reveries of the battles in Talay, especially the afternoon after Aliver’s death three months ago, when she had killed with such abandon that it had seemed she had been designed for no other purpose. On waking, the details of all the deaths she had caused hung before her like hundreds of individual portraits, floating between her and the world. She knew such things would haunt her for years to come. It was not exactly this that she feared, though. The frightening thing was knowing that in an instant she could and would slay again. She really had taken a bit of Maeben into her. It would always be there beneath the skin. Her gift of rage.

She was not the only one to emerge scarred from the war. Dariel trudged just behind her, Wren at his side. The young woman seemed ill at ease in the formal dress the occasion required. She had been a raider all her life and she looked it still, her joints loose and her posture casual in a manner that was slightly aggressive. But Mena liked her and hoped that she would bring her brother happiness for a long time to come. Dariel needed joy. He was still quick to laugh, nimble with jokes. He had a mischievous beauty when he grinned, but he seemed to think himself solely responsible for Aliver’s death. When he thought nobody was looking at him, he wore the burden of it like a cloak of lead. Mena had yet to present the King’s Trust to him. He was not ready, but he would be someday.

Others had not emerged from the conflict at all. Thaddeus Clegg had been inside the palace when the Numrek had attacked. He apparently died in the slaughter that Corinn ordered. Why he was there and whether or not he had come close to finding The Song of Elenet might never be known. There was no sign of it. Corinn even questioned whether the volume existed at all. There had been a note in a pocket next to his chest that told where he had hidden King Leodan’s ashes, which he had kept safe all these years. He was the only reason they had the king’s remains now.

Leeka Alain’s fate was shrouded in still more mystery. A few swore that they had seen him trailing behind the Santoth when they turned from their destruction and retreated into exile again. If these ones could be believed, the old general ran behind the sorcerers, wrapped in the great confusion surrounding them. Perhaps he had become one of them. Or maybe he had just been vaporized by their fury. Either way, no trace of him remained in the Known World, except the high regard he would always be held in, rhinoceros rider that he was.

And the world itself had not been the same since the Santoth were unleashed. Mena could not pinpoint exactly what was different or how it might affect the future, but she knew the ramifications of that dreadful day in Talay were not completely behind them. At times she could feel the rents they had torn in the fabric of creation. At other times it felt like the seams holding the world together threatened to burst. The passing days eased some of the confusion in the air, but it was not gone completely. The Santoth had let spell after spell out on the battlefield that day. They had only spent a few hours weaving magic, but who could say how the remnants of the Giver’s twisted tongue would change the world?