So Ash stood now on the Sky Altar, looking out over the railing to the everblack beyond. Taking a moment to breathe. Aelius had said this was a place where the walls between the world and the Abyss were thinnest. That the perpetual night now wheeling above her head wasn’t really the night at all. The benches and chairs behind her were empty. The air about her, silent and still. She had a clay cup, a bottle of fine goldwine taken from the kitchen’s larders—Albari, as it turned out, Mia’s favorite label. Quenching her thirst with a burning mouthful and mourning the taste of her girl, dimming on her tongue. Staring out at that Abyss and wondering if it stared back. Pondering what the night might look like if the Moon ever returned to the sky.
Part of her was still afraid Mia might change her mind. Still afraid the chronicler would convince her of the madness of his plan. But the rest of Ashlinn Järnheim, the part of her that knew Mia, trusted Mia, adored Mia, knew better.
Night be damned. Suns be damned. Moon be damned.
Mia Corvere wanted to live.
With me.
Ash felt the smile curling her lips, tingling all the way to her toes. Thinking of the house her father built in Threelakes. Flowers in the windowsill and a fire in the hearth.
And a big feather bed.
Ashlinn never thought she’d have anything like she had now. Never even dreamed it. She’d been born the child of a killer, just like her brother, Osrik, and Torvar Järnheim had fashioned his son and daughter in his image. Her childhood was thievery and thuggery and the promise of a life of death in service to Our Lady of Blessed Murder. Remorse was for weaklings. Regret was for cowards.
She remembered the turn her father had returned from his captivity in Liis. The offering that ended his tenure as an assassin. The mutilations he’d suffered in the Thorn Towers of Elai had left him forever marked. Forever bitter. For even though Marielle had mended the wounds Torvar had endured during his torture, the weaver couldn’t replace the pieces of him that had been cut away entirely.
His eye. His manhood. His faith.
Ashlinn’s father had lost more than his bollocks and his belief on that offering. He never smiled the way he used to after he came back from it. Never kissed her mother like he used to, never hugged his children like he’d once done, never slept without waking, screaming from his nightmares. Something inside Torvar Järnheim had broken in Liis and never properly healed. And the Red Church, for all their power and all their piety, couldn’t give it back.
Ashlinn had hated them for that.
So Torvar had turned his children against the Church, and his children had dived right in. The man fashioned them to be weapons against the temple that had left him a ruin. To bring down the house of the Goddess who failed him. They’d planned it well, too. She and Oz had come so close. They’d lied and stolen, murdered Floodcaller, Carlotta, Tric—all to get Lord Cassius and the Ministry in their clutches. And though their failure had ended in her brother’s death at Adonai’s hands, in the last few turns, Ashlinn had seen everything she’d worked for finally come to pass.
The Ministry shattered, and the Red Church along with them.
Torvar Järnheim would have been proud of his daughter. And if she had some unfinished business with Adonai, well, that could keep for another turn. Because truth told, much as she loved him, her big brother had been something of a prick.
And so Ashlinn stood there on the Sky Altar. Staring out into the black beyond the Mountain. The night that wasn’t a night at all. The Mountain quiet as graves around her, the Ministry all sleeping in their unmarked tombs. She pulled the tie out of her hair, rivers of blond spilling over her shoulder as she shook it loose, reveling in the feeling of freedom. Pouring another cupful of goldwine, Ash raised it to the dark.
“Cheers, Da, you miserable old bastard. And cheers, Oz, you snotty little whoreson.”
She drank deep, and hurled her empty cup out over the balcony.
“I got them for you.”
“HELLO, ASHLINN.”
Her heart stilled in her chest. Ice-cold butterflies thrilled through her belly. Ash kept her face like stone as she turned from the railing to find him behind her. Tall and strong. Beautiful as a statue, wrought