“You killed my sister!” Nova wailed. She wasn’t using Werran’s scream, but her own voice was nearly as wild.
Eril-Fane heard and understood. He might almost have been waiting for this. That didn’t mean he wanted it. If he hadn’t always been sure, now he was: He wanted to live. That didn’t mean he believed he deserved to, but he wanted to, so very much. He even thought that he might be free, finally, of Isagol’s curse, because as he faced his reckoning, there was no more shadow to his love, no maggots feasting at its soft underside, but only love so pure it burned.
Whatever happened to him, though, he would protect all the others as he had failed to before. Azareen, the children. He had another chance to do that, at least. “Get out of here, all of you,” he told them. “Go!”
Little Sparrow was beside him. He gave her a nudge back up the walkway toward the door. She grabbed Ruby’s hand and tugged her along, both of them clinging to the railing as the walkway shuddered underfoot. Lazlo was still on his knees, Sarai crouched beside him. Eril-Fane took his daughter’s arm, pulled her upright, and urged her, “Go,” as he pulled Lazlo up, too. He was a commander. His voice brooked no dissent. Feral wrapped a protective arm around Suheyla and braced her between himself and the railing as they made their way back toward the door. Azareen did not leave Eril-Fane’s side.
He said to the goddess, in her language—how he hated the feel of it in his mouth!—“They are innocent. Please. Let them go.”
Azareen didn’t understand the language, but she understood his fixed footing well enough. He wasn’t retreating. Why wasn’t he retreating? “Come on.” She pulled at him but couldn’t budge him. His eyes were riveted on the goddess.
Nova was beyond thinking. The whisper had become a roar. TOO LATE. TOO LATE. Grief, formless and rampant, was sucking at her and pounding at her till she could hardly feel her own edges. She was entangled in dark mist with her eyes on fire, spilling out wrath, pain, and power. And all of it, right or wrong, was directed at her sister’s killer.
Azareen saw the burning gaze, and she felt her husband’s stillness. She looked back and forth between the two. Her eyes were open very wide, rings of white showing full around her irises, like someone who’s just bolted upright from a nightmare to find the nightmare real all around her. She’d known something was coming. Since she saw the bird’s shadow fall over Eril-Fane, she’d known and been powerless to stop it. Wasn’t there anything she might have done? Fought harder, raged harder, made him listen? She shook her head, still trying to deny it. She shook her head and shook it as though she couldn’t stop, would never stop defending him or defying fate or waiting for him to come back to her.
Nova raised a hand. The energy of the mesarthium surrounded her. She conducted it like music. The wasp ships were on the wall. Their stingers were as long as spears and as sharp as needles. At the lightest touch of her mind, they disengaged and hung poised in the air.
Eril-Fane and Azareen saw at the same moment. At least, they saw one of them. And as it shot like an arrow, Azareen raised her sword and stepped in front of her husband.
A deep horror filled him. He roared, “Azareen, NO!”
The stinger was a blur.
Azareen’s hreshtek blurred to meet it.
There was a sound, too small and sweet, almost like a bell’s chime, as she knocked the stinger away. It careened, spinning, off course, hit the wall, and fell to the floor.
Eril-Fane’s roar of protest died. He said, with an edge of desperation, “Azareen, go with the others. Please.”
She shook her head, grim, and adjusted her grip on her sword.
He remembered the first time he’d handed her a hreshtek, in the training cave when they were just children. He remembered her look of wonder, and the first awkward clash of their blades, and he remembered the first desperate touch of their lips, and he remembered her screams in the sinister wing, and he remembered her hollow-eyed after it was all over and the gods were dead and she needed her husband but he couldn’t even hold her because his soul was filthy. But she had never forsaken him, and he knew she never would. She would share his fate, whatever it was.
And she did. She shared it exactly.
The second wasp was on the wall behind them. They never saw the stinger coming.
If Azareen hadn’t stepped in front of him to deflect the first, she would still have been at his side, clear of the path of the second stinger when it hit between his shoulder blades and cut right between his hearts to burst out of his chest, slicing through his armor with an eruption of blood that painted her red in the instant before it cut through her, too—as though they were as insubstantial as Wraith, as ethereal as Sarai. But they were neither smoke nor phantom. They were flesh and blood and bronze, and the stinger ripped through them. It was moving with so much raw power it didn’t slow, but shot across the chamber to strike the far wall with a faint, bright tink! before rebounding to cartwheel backward in slow motion, spraying blood as it spun.
The two warriors dropped their swords. The blades hit the walkway and clattered off to fall to the floor down below. Azareen was close to the edge, and the force of the blow drove her back, so she teetered at the edge and almost went over. But Eril-Fane caught her and reeled her to his chest, even as he lost the strength to stand and fell to his knees, taking her with him.
Blood was flowing from the holes in their armor, pumping out in spurts and mingling between them, catching and pooling where they pressed together. Azareen thrust her hands against Eril-Fane’s chest to try to keep his blood inside him, as though she didn’t notice her own was escaping. But her hands were inexplicably weak, and she couldn’t even get to his wound to apply proper pressure. His armor was in the way. The hole in the bronze was so small. Metal jutted out, sharp, where it had been pierced. She sliced her palm on it. His blood pushed out through her fingers, slicking down her wrists, all the way down her arms. Her own blood was mostly hidden, sluicing down inside her armor, her back and belly slick with it. It was so hot and there was so much and it was emptying them like spigots. His eyes were vague and her vision was swimming but she saw him clearly when he fixed on her and rasped, “Azareen. I wish…”
He pitched forward, as though he were falling asleep. She caught him, but couldn’t hold him upright. Her arms were numb, and he was so heavy. She collapsed to the side, and he slumped down over her. “What?” she asked, desperate, with her shallowing breath. “My love,” she pleaded as his eyes went dull. “What do you wish?”
But the time for wishing had passed.
Eril-Fane died first, Azareen just after.
Chapter 43
Violent Radiance
Sarai saw it all. She’d reached the doorway and spun to look back, surprised to see her father and Azareen still at the end of the walkway. Had she thought they were following? She hadn’t thought at all. She’d just panicked and done as he’d ordered.
Now she screamed. Lazlo couldn’t. His strangled throat could only croak. Suheyla couldn’t, either. She couldn’t even breathe. Feral was all that was keeping her upright. Ruby and Sparrow were sobbing. The unnatural quiet of the heart of the citadel echoed with gasps that were part scream, part sob.
Nova heard none of it. Something had come undone in her mind. She had hung on so long by a single filament of purpose, and the moment she saw Kora’s death, it snapped. The whisper broke free. It filled her head, her body, her soul, like the black water of the sea under ice, many worlds from here. Everything was roaring. Everything was slow. Kora’s killer died. Nova felt her own blood pulsing in time to his arterial spurts, and even in the roaring slow motion of her shock, she thought he died far too quickly.