But I didn’t want him to touch Grego. I stepped between them. The eyes of the guns followed me.
Elián pitched his plea over the heads of the squad. “I’m Elián Palnik—the general’s grandson.”
“Yes,” sighed Buckle. “I know who you are.” Her tone suggested that she regretted knowing. If she hadn’t, she simply could have had him shot. Or at least locked up. After all, we had a dungeon.
“I need to see her,” demanded Elián.
“Not me,” I said. I was still thinking of that point vierge moment, the door I’d seen that might get everyone out of this alive. “I want to see Talis.”
“What?” said Elián. “Why?”
Da-Xia turned to me. I saw the quick calculation in her eyes, her guesses, but she said nothing.
“Greta—” said Elián, and he would have said more, except that Buckle cut him off.
“Outside,” she snapped to her squad, and then put her hand to her ear. “Clancy? Wake the general.”
One of the Cumberlanders started to heave up Grego’s body.
“Don’t touch him!” Elián was ferocious and snapping. “I’ll take him, I’ll carry him.”
They let him.
Down the square metal corridor, Elián carried Grego in his arms, as he had carried me. He went like a prince at the head of a procession. Xie and I followed him. The soldiers followed us. I assumed there were guns at our backs, but I couldn’t be bothered to look. I was looking at Grego. The tuft of white hair tucked against Elián’s shoulder. One hand swinging loose.
The whole ship smelled like gunpowder and blood.
And then, suddenly, the night opened up and we were on the gangplank, and then in the grass, with the wild sweet wind blowing around us.
Out there to meet us were more soldiers, and with them Han, Thandi, and Atta.
Atta was leaning on Thandi, his eyes dimmed, blood trickling down behind one ear. Thandi was stormcloud and silence. And Han—sweet, innocent Han, magnificent bastard that he was—was the one particularly guarded, the one clapped in irons.
Nevertheless it was Han who burst from the group and ran toward us. Han who—as he ever did—said what we were all thinking, but did not dare speak. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, no, no.”
He raised his hands to touch Grego’s face. His handcuffs rattled. “Oh,” he said. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” Elián said to him. “I’m sorry. I know you loved him.”
The soldiers around them seemed to shrink back, leaving the three of them—Elián, Han, and Grego—cupped in a small space all their own. “He was so brave, Han,” said Elián. “He was so good. He was so scared, and he was so brave.”
“He went in first,” said Xie.
Slowly, reverently, Elián laid Grego’s body in the rustling grass. Han knelt beside him—it—and then, one by one, the rest of us knelt.
The chamo cloth—and perhaps this was what chamo was for—hid a great deal of the blood. It looked merely like a dark stain, seeping down over his shoulder, front and back, like an officer’s half cape. Only in his snow-white hair was it vivid, and even that was fading. His skin was pale as a lamp shade, and he was unlit.
“Grego,” said Xie. And one by one the rest of us said it too.
His eyes were open, just a little. He had long, long white eyelashes.
Moonlight fell across us. The Cumberlanders drew back, leaving just the seven of us—the six of us, now. The Children of Peace, alone, as we always were.
Atta was swaying on his knees. Xie wrapped an arm around his waist.
“You all right?” murmured Elián.
Atta nodded, but his head was hanging.
“Concussion, I think,” said Thandi, her voice very low. “He blacked out for a second. Threw up.”
“We need to wash him clean,” said Han. He was leaning forward, almost covering Grego’s body, in a world of his own.
“We do,” said Xie. “We do.” She herself was wearing blood like a pair of gloves.
But Han just repeated himself: “We need to wash him clean.”
“What happened here?” said a new voice.
We looked up, and there, standing in the sere grass, was Wilma Armenteros. In her bathrobe.
“Grego’s dead,” said Elián. “Your torturer shot him. He’s dead.”
“Mr. Burr,” said Armenteros.
My head jerked up, but Burr wasn’t there. The Cumberlanders must have taken him away while we’d been taken up with Grego.
“Buckle, where is Mr. Burr?”
“No.” Da-Xia stood up. “No, don’t look for someone to blame. Look at this. Look at him. Look at what you have done.”
And Armenteros—give her this. She looked. At the wind stirring the white hair, tangling it in the grass. At the intensely innocent eyelashes. At the raw meat of the throat.
“His name is Gregori Kalvelis,” Da-Xia said. “Grego.”
“Grego,” said Armenteros. A grandmotherly rumble of a word. She looked away and became a general again. “Who was he? Whose hostage?” She was asking me, of all people.
“He was the son of the Grand Duke of the Baltic Alliance,” I answered.