couldn’t speak, or move. Her hands seemed waxen in the light.
“It has seen better days, I think. Don’t you?”
There was a moment’s pause, then Hamanu laughed, an incandescent sound that echoed lightly from the trees.
“But I was invited!”
The king extended his hand toward Pavek, who reluctantly came closer. When he was in range, Hamanu ran a clawed finger down Pavek’s neck, hard enough that he could feel its strength and sharpness, but not—he thought—hard enough to break the skin. That, he was certain, would come later, after the king had toyed with him and tired of his fear.
“I never grow tired of fear, Pavek,” King Hamanu assured him with a grin that revealed glistening fangs. “Never.” Then he hooked the inix leather thong of Pavek’s templar medallion, which the king withdrew into the firelight. “A regulator of the civil bureau.” A claw gouged through the marks that indicated Pavek’s rank, effectively eliminating him from that rank and that bureau. Hamanu let the defaced, but intact, medallion thump against Pavek’s breast-bone, in effect proclaiming that he was a templar without a formal rank: a High Templar, if he ever chose to claim that distinction. “The best always slip away, Pavek. Remember that.”
And for a moment Hamanu seemed—he could not possibly be—less a leonine sorcerer-king with sulphur eyes and more a man, an ordinary man with clear brown eyes and a face a woman—Telhami—might find attractive.
Then King Hamanu turned back to the sleeping platform.
“Come back with me, Telhami. It’s not too late. Athas has changed. Borys is gone; the stalemate is broken. Nothing is as it was, Telhami. For the first time in a millennium, I do not know what will happen after I wake up. Come back to Urik—”
He fell silent and remained that way until Telhami closed her eyes. Then he stood up with a sigh of disappointment and age creaking in his bones. “Hold them tight or set them free, they always slip away. Always,” he said to no one in particular and stared at the moons.
“Was this your plan?” the king asked suddenly, his private rumination ended and, apparently, forgotten.
Pavek, at whom the question had been directed, was, at first, too startled to answer. When the shock faded, a single word hung in his mind: “Yohan.”
But Yohan wasn’t there to take the credit for his concentric ramparts. Yohan was gone, and Pavek did not feel better that he was alive instead.
“They die, Pavek. They slip away when your eye’s on something else, and you can never get them back. Learn to live with it. Think of them as flowers: a day’s delight and then they die. You’ll die yourself if you care about them.”
Then King Hamanu walked out through the ramparts, through the trees, and into the night.
Pavek’s gaze hadn’t left the place where he’d disappeared when he felt an arm slip around his back. Silently, Akashia rested her head against his chest. Hesitantly—he didn’t think such things would ever seem easy to him—Pavek put his hand on her neck and soothed the knotted muscles he found there.
* * *
Quraite took a final count of its losses the next day when the sun rose. More than half the adults had died fighting on the ramparts. A dozen groves would languish, unless strangers were drawn quickly across the salt flats or farmers who’d been content with the simple magic of green sprouting through broken ground began to hear the wilder call of druidry. Most of the children—the future—had survived. Akashia took them to her grove where they gathered wild-flowers to place on the shrouds of those who would never see the sun again.
Sprigs of yellow and lavender adorned Yohan’s shroud, where Pavek stood throughout the morning. Friend, Oelus had said; Yohan was a friend. Friendship was stronger than flowers. It seemed to Pavek—though he’d never thought about it before—that a man, especially a dwarf, should take something more than flowers into the ground with him. He found Dovanne’s steel sword and placed it over the flower sprigs.
Out beyond the fields the farmers had dug a common grave where, with Pavek’s help, they carried the remains of Quraite’s dead. Akashia said the simple words of remembrance and peace. Each Quraiter who survived threw a shovelful of dirt into the hole. Pavek stayed with the men to finish the task. When they returned to the village center, a procession was ready to carry Telhami to her grove one last time.
Pavek suspected she didn’t need a half-dozen people to carry the bier