the attack, I saw the mound of bodies, horses and humans alike. The snow was a map of death, red streaks showing where the carcasses had been dragged. Our soldiers had tried to burn the bodies, but the snow and the wet wood had hindered the flames, and most of the corpses were still whole. The snow had stopped them from rotting, I guessed, as well as burning—there was none of the rancid scent of decay. Instead, just the raw tang of blood, overlaid with the richness of charred flesh. Near the edge of the piled bodies, a fox, emboldened by its feast, stood watching us. He was not twenty feet from where our horses passed. I tried not to look at his red muzzle.
“Simon ordered the bodies dragged there,” said Zoe. “It was the best option. Apart from anything else, it’ll make it harder for the Council to use the hillock for cover if they mount an attack.”
All I could think of were Zach’s words: What are you offering them? You’re offering war. Thousands will die.
I couldn’t see any of the white-shrouded bodies that Elsa and I had prepared. “What about the children?” I said.
“They’ll be burned,” said Zoe. “The Ringmaster wanted them brought out here with the others. Said it was a waste of time, and oil, to burn the bodies properly. But Piper argued with him. He’s got troops building pyres now, just inside the northern wall.”
Piper had saved my life many times, but I had never been as grateful as I was for this gesture.
As we rode on, I stopped myself from staring back at the unburied dead, but the snow beneath us on the plain continued to testify to what had passed there. A spray of blood, next to a broken sword. A boot lying empty. Elsa grabbed my waist more tightly when our horse skidded on a patch of red-edged ice.
It was a relief when the first of the burned trunks began to pierce the snow.
“Nobody’s going to be coming here for a picnic for a long time,” said Elsa, as we crossed the threshold of what had been the forest. “The two of you really did a job on this place.”
The forest was only the beginning of the charred trail that I had left on the world. Now there were the half-burned bodies, too, as well as those killed on the island. I wondered whether the Council soldiers had buried them, after the massacre, or if the dead still lay in the courtyard, baring their bones to the sky.
There were the bodies of the children, too, wrapped in white and stacked in the wagons like candles in a drawer. My twin had done this, not me. But they were bound to me now, as inexorably as he was. Perhaps Zach had been right when he’d said, on the road, that I was poison. It was hard to argue with the bodies that I had left behind me. I was a walking emissary of the deadlands, spreading ash wherever I went.
Elsa’s breath was warm on my ear as she continued. “When the forest was burning, even with the wind blowing from the north, we could hardly breathe for days—the smoke was so thick. But it slowed them down, all right. Between that and the protest at the market, we had the diversion we needed to get a few more people out of the town. At least a few that I knew of, wanted by the Council for various things, managed to get out when it all kicked off.” She leaned the side of her face into my back. “When I saw the fire, I knew it was you and Kip.”
It took us a long time to find the tree. Elsa directed us straight to the forest’s eastern flank, but the years and the fire had changed the place so much that she couldn’t recognize the usual landmarks. We dismounted, leaving the horses with the guards, and wandered together among the black stumps and the few trees that had withstood the flames.
Elsa found it in the end. Before the fire, when the smaller trees around it were still standing, the Kissing Tree would have been less distinctive. Now it stood almost alone, the largest tree within sight. Like the trees that had surrounded it, the top of the tree had burned away, but its thick trunk wasn’t so easily purged. We approached it, while the guards fanned out to form a loose circle around us,