“I hope I wasn’t presumptuous to expect—”
“That’s next,” she said. “I’m greedy. I want to be with you in every way tonight.”
It was surreal to talk so lightly about her death. But she was right. She usually was.
“A number of scouts have come back, actually,” he said. “Piracy is rampant across the entire sea. Some new pirate queen named Pasha Mimi has got the Aborneans paying her to keep the Narrows open while they build their own fleet. She, naturally, is using the fortune they’re paying her to build her own fleet. My scouts looking for the White King seizing bane all came up empty, but it’s a big sea. They do report many superviolet bane storms, but it could be because so much sub-red is being used elsewhere in the world with so few superviolet drafters to balance that. The storms could be natural.”
Of course, neither of them believed that. Aliviana had become the superviolet goddess, Ferrilux.
“I’m sorry, dearest,” she said. “You saved her life and helped her win her freedom. How she uses it…”
As if there were any meaningful choices after you bound yourself to dark forces.
“I should have raised her better. Told her more,” Corvan said. “But… not tonight. Let’s not… Not tonight.” He forced a smile and set that grief aside that he might focus on this brief blessing before it too turned to grief. “What about Ironfist?”
“He either is or will soon be on his way to the Chromeria with a heart full of rage. For him and those who love him most, I see only sorrow now.”
Corvan fell silent. Their last night together, and he was picking at these future scabs. But he couldn’t help it.
“Dazen?” he asked, hopefully. As if she wouldn’t have told him right away.
“I tried again. I still couldn’t See him, Corvan.”
So either he was wearing a shimmercloak all day every day, or he was hidden from her sight by some magic they’d never encountered—which was possible with the enemies he had! Possible, but not likely.
Or he was dead.
“One chance in five, you said?” For Aliviana, he meant.
“She’s a Danavis. They’re a tough breed.” She squeezed his hand.
There was nothing more to say on that. “Has Kip seen the trap?” he asked.
“No. He’s still marching in the wrong direction. He may save the city.”
“And lose the war. Dammit. It’s like he read all my books for nothing,” Corvan said.
“Not everyone can be the best general of their time,” she said.
“By definition I suppose there can only be one.”
His wife, his daughter, his best friend, and his ward—it was as if Orholam was determined to take every light out of his life.
“I have something to ask,” the Third Eye said. “Will you give this note to Karris?”
“Of course. What’s it about?”
“Locusts,” his wife said.
He raised his eyebrows, but she said nothing as he tucked it away. She didn’t always intend him to understand. “Very well, then,” he said.
“I just left things… I was unfair to her, I think.”
“I’ll tell her so,” he said. They stood for a time, watching the sunset and the sea. She made the sign of the seven, and, unbeliever though he was, he made it, too, tapping heart and eyes and hands: what you believe, what you behold, how you behave—each leading inexorably to the next.
“Now make love to me, and then go.” She smiled as if to soften the apparent command. “You have much to do tonight elsewhere. I’ll be fine until morning without you.”
And then he understood. She thought the assassin was already in the room. She was telling the Shadow that Corvan would be gone soon, that she would be alone and vulnerable, if only he would wait.
Corvan blew out a long breath, trying to get a hold of himself. She’d told him that if he tried to kill this Shadow, he would die. Period. She had told him the greatest gift he could give her this night was his total attention.
So he blocked out his rage, and his indignation that some killer was watching this private moment, and everything but his wife and his love for her.
They made love, and they shared breath and body. It was tenderness and desperation and clinging and resignation and acceptance. It was joy at what they’d had and sorrow at its brevity. It was golden heartbeats of pure unthinking pleasure pierced by iron arrows of grief.
After a long time, after all too brief a time, they held each other. She sat in his lap, arms and legs embracing him. She didn’t lie down, though she was winded and sweat glistened on her skin. These were to be her last minutes. She wouldn’t waste them in seeking sleep.
She touched her forehead to his, and kissed him. Then she reached one finger up to the yellow eye tattooed in luxin on her forehead. It went dark, and then frayed and disappeared.
“I have run the course set before me,” she said. “I have finished the race.” Then she whispered in Corvan’s ear, “Polyhymnia.”
A lone tear coursed down her cheek, contrasting with the brave smile on her lips.
It was what she had laid down when she had taken up the title and duties and sacrifices of being the Third Eye: it was her name.
“Go with my love, Corvan Danavis, my Titan of the Great Fountain.”
It was an epithet he’d never heard. A glimpse into his own future, perhaps, a benediction and a farewell.
He rose, tears blinding him, and dressed in silence, strapping Harbinger on his hip, not trusting his voice, not trusting his rage. His breath came in little gasps as he struggled for control. When he looked back to her from the door, she didn’t meet his eyes. She had thrown on a thin robe and sat, legs folded, hands resting in her lap, her back straight and proud.
Her face as cool and peaceful and beautiful as a statue of the saints, she faced the eastern window, praying, waiting for a sunrise she would never see.
Chapter 64
It can’t be that big, was Kip’s first thought as he first saw Dúnbheo in the low light. From his maps and many descriptions of it, Kip knew exactly what Dúnbheo looked like. But as with so many things in life, there’s a difference between knowing and knowing.
Unlike most cities, there had been only a few buildings outside the walls. The population of Dúnbheo had shrunk so much over the years—and been so huge before the Chromeria’s rise—that land inside the walls was cheap. The inns and food stalls that had set themselves up outside the walls for the convenience of travelers had been burnt or cannibalized for lumber and stone by the Blood Robe besiegers months ago.
It made for an odd scene: the attackers set up in a wide crescent around the walls amid the great stumps of all the trees they’d cleared, their boats anchored in a neat crescent outside the river gate, and then the vast, incomprehensible greenery of the wall itself.
Kip had seen the creation of one of the wonders of the world in Brightwater Wall, but the Greenwall surrounding Dúnbheo was something on a completely different scale. Kip had assumed Greenwall was a screen of impressive trees in front of a wall itself. When told the trees were the wall, he’d thought there must be fortifications stretched between each tree.
That was wrong, too.
Massive sabino cypresses made towers to heaven every thirty paces, and the gaps between them were filled with millennial cypress and other trees, trunk to straining trunk, growing more thickly than should have been possible and also more closely to their neighbors. But no branches hung out into the space over the invaders. Every limb had instead grown back into the mass of the wall itself, as if guided by some chelonian intelligence to make it impregnable.