They walked on, and then Tieren said, “It is not a bad word, death.”
And yet, it was heavy enough to stop the king’s legs, to pin him to the path. He swallowed, and looked up. The first green buds dotted the trees, and it seemed unfair that Tieren should be withering, when the rest of the world was beginning to bloom.
“Are you afraid?” asked Rhy.
“Afraid?” echoed Tieren. “No. I am sad, I suppose, that it is almost over. And there is so much I will miss…” And for just a moment, Rhy saw the old man’s throat bob, his eyes go misty, before he pressed ahead, “… but all things end. That is the nature of the world. Death is essential. A laying down. And I admit, I am looking forward to the rest.”
“Rest,” echoed Rhy. “Is that all there is?”
“We are borrowed things,” said the priest. “Our bodies decay, and our essence—well, magic is the stream that waters all things. It lends itself to us in life, and in death calls it back, and so the stream appears to rise and fall, but it never loses a single drop.”
“But what of our minds?” pressed Rhy. “Our memories? What of us?”
“We are a moment, Your Majesty. And moments pass.”
It was not enough. Not after all he’d seen. Not after everyone he’d lost. “So in death we simply cease to be? We come and go, and then are nothing?”
Rhy could hear his voice rising, but Tieren only sighed. Over the years, those sighs had become their own language, and Rhy was fluent in them. A single exhale could be exasperated, tired, infinitely patient. This sigh had something of all three.
“Just because we do not carry on,” said the priest, “doesn’t mean we haven’t been. We live a life, we leave a legacy. But the river runs one way, and we are carried on it.”
Rhy shook his head. “If that were true, I would not be here. You forget, I died,” he said. He did not say that in that brief but solid stretch of death, he had felt nothing. “I died, and you say that should have been the end, but I came back. Which means I was still there. I did not cease to be.”
“Your death was brief,” ventured the priest. “Perhaps you were not yet gone. There is a time, after all, when the flame has gone out but the fire is not cold.”
Rhy threw up his hands. “You speak as if you do not know.”
Tieren sighed, and this time there was impatience in it. “I have never pretended to be wise. Only old. So no, I do not know. But I believe. I believe we do not linger, nice as that would be. I believe that if we do live on, it is in those we love.”
There was a word he left unsaid.
Only.
But if there was nothing beyond the dark, then what of his mother and father? Rhy couldn’t form the words. What of Tieren himself? What of those he’d lost, and those he would still lose? Alucard and Nadiya and Ren? What would become of all they’d seen and felt and known and loved? How could he carry their hearts in his, when he knew he would forget the sound of their voices, the weight of their hands? And one day when Kell died, and so did he, what then? After all that bound them, would there truly be no tie beyond the dark?
These were the fears that followed him to bed each night, and Tieren looked at him, as if every one was written in a cloud around Rhy’s head.
“Love and loss,” recited the dying priest.
But Rhy rounded on him then. “Have I not lost enough?” he snapped.
Tieren looked back, a gentle sadness in his eyes. And then he turned and brought his hand to a low branch, running his fingers over the blossom. “How lucky we are,” he said softly, “that after every winter, we are rewarded with a spring.”
Rhy opened his eyes.
The orchard was dark.
Tieren was gone.
He was alone again.
And yet, something had drawn him out of the reverie. He held his breath, and listened, until it came again.
Footsteps.
Not the heavy tread of soldiers’ boots, but the lightest whisper, the caress of leather on stone. Someone trying to be quiet. The king’s hand drifted to his pocket and retrieved the small blade he kept there, its surface freshly spelled to incapacitate. He had only to draw blood.
Rhy pressed his back into the nearest tree and waited, ready to drive the blade into the attacker’s side, to cut swift and deep, waited as the steps drew near, until the body was close enough for him to hear its breath, and then he rounded the tree, and swung the knife—
And stopped, the blade an inch from the priest’s white robes. And for a moment, even now, his heart quickened, and he thought that if he looked up, he would see Tieren’s face.
But then he did, and there was no white hair, no blue eyes, no patient smile. They had been replaced by smooth skin and a heart-shaped face, black hair carving a faint widow’s peak before running like an ink stain over the pristine robes.
The tenth Aven Essen stared at him, amusement spreading like frost across her face. She glanced down at the weapon. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“Ezril,” he said, the blade falling back to his side. “What are you doing here?”
She spread her hands, white sleeves fluttering. “I am the Aven Essen. I know your heart, mas res. I can feel your mood when it darkens, like the wind turning cold.”
She kept a straight face as she said it, but Rhy had learned, over the last three years, that where Tieren had been unrelentingly earnest, Ezril rarely said what she meant. And sure enough, a moment later her mouth twitched and she nodded back toward the palace. “One of the guards sent for me. They seem to think you have a death wish.”
“Is it possible to have a death wish,” he mused, “when you know you cannot die?”
Her smile wavered. “It is,” she said, “if you insist on testing that protection every chance you get.”
Rhy shot a dark look back at the palace doors. He could see the outline of his guards, within the light. “They shouldn’t have summoned you.”
“And yet, they did. And I am here. Awake, in all my finery. The least you can do is pretend to need my counsel.” And so, they strolled together beneath the branches until the copse of trees gave way to the stone walk that circled the courtyard. To his right, the shining palace. To his left, the glowing Isle. And Ezril at his side.
What a strange replacement she had been, the young Aven Essen.
Ezril was raven-haired, with brown eyes that changed shade like tea, shifting from pale to dark depending on how long it steeped. She had the air of a girl playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes. There was a mischief to her. A coyness to her voice that belonged to the pleasure gardens more than the priesthood. And on top of that, she couldn’t be much older than Kell.
“You are a very young priest,” he’d said the day she strode into the Rose Hall.
But she had simply shrugged and met his gaze. “You are a very young king. Perhaps they didn’t want to keep replacing your counsel.”
Have I not lost enough?
Perhaps this was a parting gift from Tieren.
If so, it was a welcome one. For even though Rhy’s heart would always stutter at the sight of those white robes, and there would always be a moment when he longed to look up and see Tieren’s face, it would have been unbearable to find one that held its similar age and likeness.
Ezril tipped her head back and sighed, smiling when her breath came out in a thin plume. “The season’s turning,” she said. “A nice reminder, isn’t it? That all things change.” Her gaze dropped back to him. “What were you thinking of, before I interrupted?”
“What happens when we die.”