After Lei climbed from the passage, hollow-eyed and bloody, yet miraculously calm, she’d helped Wren to her feet and together they had gone to get help. They found their soldiers in the halls of the King’s fortress. They’d won. The battle was over. The Ancestral Hall was now a terrible morgue, but they’d done it, they’d taken the King’s demons down.
Lei told the first soldiers they came across where to find the King. Neither of them wanted anything more to do with him. Wren knew Lei would have preferred to leave his body there, let him rot in darkness the way he’d made them feel, like ruined things, too stained for the light. But… that wasn’t quite true.
There were moments when that was all there was. In the deep of night, when she recalled with painful physicality the mass of the King’s body atop hers. And at random, when she wasn’t prepared for the sudden rush of memories, and she’d be stopped in her tracks, gasping and trying to calm her wildly beating heart. Wren had had a lifetime of crafting poise and confidence and power, but that could be all it’d take to unravel her: the recollection of the way the King smelled, or moved, or touched, or licked, or claimed. And when she thought how he’d done the same to Lei and the other girls—how many more girls?—it would blow the breath right out of her.
Yet sometimes, when her fingers brushed through Lei’s hair, or she’d hear Nitta’s laugh, or take a deep lungful of sunlit air, the King didn’t intrude. He didn’t have all of her. He never had, and never would. Wren hoped in time he’d have less and less of her, and less of Lei and the other girls, and everyone else he had branded, until the memories that now felt like freshly made tattoos—still stinging and raw—would, like tattoos, fade.
With magic, Wren had learned how to heal wounds. Perhaps there was a way to heal these kinds of wounds, too, with a different kind of power. One everyone could access. A normal, everyday magic, so simple but so potent a blend: of friendship, patience, kindness, mercy, perseverance, respect, and of course, love.
The magic Lei had taught her. That Nitta and Bo and Hiro and Lova and Kenzo and Shifu Caen and Ahma Goh and the other Paper Girls and even Merrin and her father had each taught her in some way.
At least, if she never got back her Xia powers, she would always have these.
Wren thought she could live with that.
She would be so lucky to live with that.
There were things to do after a battle. With her father dead, authority seemed to have passed to Kenzo and Lova, though when they were reunited outside the King’s fortress, after hugs and tears and words shared in voices not quite like their usual ones, both of them deferred to Wren. She was the new clan leader of the Hannos, after all. The new leader of… whatever this was.
Ikhara. Not exactly a kingdom, anymore. But not yet something else.
As exhausted and battered as she was, and wanting nothing but to lie down somewhere quiet with Lei, Wren couldn’t shirk her responsibilities. Still, she was in no fit state to do much. She told Kenzo and Lova to keep on, trusting them fully, while a team of doctors swarmed upon her and Lei, seeing to their wounds.
There were more reunions. They were fleeting. There was so much to do, and the real conversations would happen later. Still, Nitta passed by, helped by Khuen, since Naja had destroyed her chair when she’d been captured. She’d fought in the Ancestral Hall on the back of the Demon Queen—another visitor who came to thank Lei for freeing her.
The Demon Queen—Shala, as Lei introduced her—was quiet and wary, perhaps unsure of how the others would perceive her. Wren ordered her clan members to work on removing her collar and to find her a quiet space to rest.
Royal Court was a hive of activity, the surviving Hannos and their allied clans using it as a base to tend to the wounded and pass out supplies. They still had to secure the palace, and there were hiding soldiers and councilors, maids and workers to round up.
Not to kill. Gods, no. But their allegiances were murky, and so for now they’d be kept in the barracks of Military Court, guarded by Hanno soldiers. Wren had given them strict orders to provide the palace’s residents with everything they needed to be comfortable. It wasn’t perfect, but until they could figure out who they could trust, it was the best she could do.
Some palace residents didn’t need to be detained.
The Night House panther demon Darya brought Lill to visit Lei, and they stayed, Lill curled in Lei’s lap, Darya tipping her head back to the wall they were propped against, removing the ribbon at her neck, the necklace that marked her as a concubine with a long, slow sigh. The other courtesans were also freed, many of them going to help with the cleanup effort.
After the reunions came the thing Wren had been dreading: those they were too late to save.
Wren and Lei heard the news from various sources. Commander Chang had perished outside the palace walls, crushed under one of the stone pecalang. Kiroku, one of their bravest allies, who’d suffered through so many years tending to Naja’s whims, had been killed when the fight reached the Inner Courts. A Hanno soldier told a crying Lei and a shell-shocked Wren he’d seen Kiroku fighting bravely against the King’s forces before she fell.
Then there were the shamans.
Lova explained how, after Lei and Wren had left them in Ceremony Court, she’d led a bunch of her cats into the walls of Temple Court. They’d found royal soldiers slaughtering the shamans. With magic gone, the King had ordered them dead. Wren suspected he’d probably been fearful they’d turn upon him given his treatment of them. Lova and her cats stopped the massacre, though not before hundreds of shamans had already been killed. Now, Kenzo was overseeing their liberation with orders to send news if Ruza was found, the shaman boy who’d helped Lei and the girls escape. It was a mammoth task. There were tens upon thousands of shamans chained within Temple Court, and with no magic, each collar had to be broken manually.
But it was getting done. They would be freed.
For the first time in two hundred years, the palace walls would lie empty. They wouldn’t be a prison anymore. Wren made a vow to herself that whatever they decided to do with the Hidden Palace, those terrible walls would be torn down so no one would ever have to feel caged by them again.
The sun was setting. Wren had drifted into a half sleep when a cry made her start.
For one awful moment, she thought they were being attacked. Then she saw Lei jump up, flinging her arms around a petite figure, a familiar face peeking past Lei’s shoulder.
Blue.
Blood-splattered, injured, dazed, and exhausted—but still Blue.
She’d made it.
“Don’t get used to this, Nine,” the girl said. Her arms wound slowly around Lei’s back. But they hugged for a long time, only pulling apart at the sound of cheers.
The bustling crowd of Royal Court was parting, making way for a group of soldiers carrying something on their backs.