“I know,” she said. “But in a way, Florihn was right. You are not one of us. Not anymore.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but no words came. Tears ran down Rahvey’s cheeks, and she smiled sadly when I, after a pause that might have been a lifetime, nodded.
She embraced me then, and as we separated, she hesitated, to trace the thin scars on my cheeks with her fingertip. The wounds had closed, but I suspected the marks would be there forever.
“I’m sorry about your face,” she said.
I remembered the day Florihn had made the cuts with her knife so very long ago, and I said now what I had said then. “It doesn’t matter.”
Then I turned and walked back to the carriage, eyes streaming, parting the crowd before me as Vestris had once done.
I knew then that I would never return, not really, and the pain was deep and exquisite, as if a fine blade had slit a thin, cruel wound in my heart.
*
AT WILLINGHOUSE’S URGING, MNENGA and his brothers were given the Bar-Selehm Medal of Citizenry, an award by which they were both amused and baffled, but they bowed and thanked the people they were supposed to thank, and pleased the press and other onlookers with how little they cared about the whole thing. Since their activities were deemed related to exposing the theft of the Beacon, they also got a cash reward, some of which they bestowed upon their village as an investment in their community’s future; they put the rest toward financing the Red Fort’s monument to that community’s past. It was, I supposed, a satisfying vengeance on Gritt and people like him. When reporters expressed amazement that they were keeping so little for themselves, Mnenga shrugged.
“There isn’t much to buy in the bush,” he said.
*
TWO NIGHTS LATER, A little after midnight, with the moon a vast and smoky yellow disk in the perennial fog, I scaled the tower of the Trade Exchange. Willinghouse, Andrews, and two armed officers stood guard in the street below, but there were no press, no cheering crowds. Replacing the Beacon was to be as stealthy an act as its removal had been.
Tanish served as my apprentice, lugging tools and ropes, checking fastenings and harnesses. There was a lot he still couldn’t do, and he stayed on the top of the tower as I began the steeple climb, but he had insisted on being there. I worked my way up, using a leather loop around the narrowing column of stone to brace myself as I walked the spire, leaning back and out into nothing. It felt quite natural, a relief after all my other activities over the last two weeks, and I smiled to myself as I climbed. This was my life, a part of who I was, and regardless of what else came my way, that would always be true.
At the top, I opened my satchel, removed a hammer and chisel, and opened up four carefully spaced holes in the old mortar before calling to Tanish. As he winched up the pot of moist, fresh mortar, I positioned the brass plate Willinghouse had commissioned two days earlier. It was a simple piece etched with ladder trim, which was the sign of the steeplejack’s trade, and in the center it read, BERRIT’S SPIRE.
There would be no announcement, no unveiling, and very few people in the city would ever know the plate was there, but I would know, and that was what mattered right now. Only when I was happy that it was securely in place did I call to Tanish for the larger bag. I opened up the iron gate of the great glass globe that was the steeple’s crowning glory and, when the bag reached the pulley beside me, snapped the smoked lenses of my goggles down and opened it.
The goggles made little real difference, and I had to work with my eyes shut, fitting the massive chunk of luxorite into position on little more than memory, fumbling with the new and elaborate lock once I had the door closed. Before I descended, I looked out across the brilliantly lit streets of the city, gazing out over Bar-Selehm from Berrit’s Spire as if I were the god who’d brought starlight to the world, as in Papa’s story.
Once on the ground, I looked up to where the urban shadows of the night had been driven into nothing by the hard, white light of the Beacon. Bar-Selehm would wake to its comforting glow, and the world would seem a little closer to being as it should be once more. I wasn’t sure what I thought of that. Too much had changed for me to believe that things would ever be the way they had, though I suspected that much of that change was in me, and that most people wouldn’t notice it.
“Content?” asked Willinghouse as I reached the bottom. He was watching me closely with those penetrating green eyes as I untied my hair, and in the bright light of the Beacon, his scarred face looked strangely tender.
“Content,” I said. “Is there anything else to do?”
“Always,” he said. For a moment, he gave me a searching look, and I was sure he was going to say more, but then he was turning and leading me back to the carriage and whatever else the city had in store.