Forty-Nine
There was ash on my lips and blood on my hands, and no force in this world could cleanse me. The fire burned lower and lower, embers red as the rising sun, and the last support beam snapped. I shuffled forward, all fractured bones and stitched-up skin. Heat licked the hem of my funeral clothes.
The brimstone stench of burning hair and the bitter taste of bone dust crept under my new mask till each breath was thick with death. I’d never attended a proper pyre—no funerals for Nacea and no money for the felled members of Grell’s gang. I’d never known the taste of ash.
Not like Elise had.
“He hated tawny wine,” Emerald muttered.
Amethyst tossed her glass of it into the fire, mask streaked with soot. “He loved wine. He hated funerals.”
I poured my wine on the ruined shirt in my hands, Ruby’s dried blood dark as night against the white silk, and threw it into the fire. It caught in an instant.
Dead and gone and never coming back.
I peeled back my sleeve and took out my knife, scoring seven long marks down the inside of my arm. Seven dead by my hands, seven bodies left to burn, and seven ghosts howling in my head. It wasn’t justice.
It was necessity.
There was no peace without death, and there was no justice at all. Nothing true. Nothing real. I was what Erlend had made me—killer to Our Queen—and they were what history made them. The lords screaming for my head were what I’d made them with Five’s death.
Fernando.
His name was Fernando. He was like me, and he was dead.
I dropped my arm, blood dripping around my feet. I could bleed for years and never clear their names from my soul. I deserved nothing but the weight of their deaths. Elise deserved so much better.
“How do you live like this?” I asked. “How do you live and look at other people when they know what you’ve done?”
Elise was too caring for me. For the callous lands of Erlend.
They’d eat her alive. They’d break her down bit by bit, till she was jaded as they were, and she’d never recover. Winter might not kill her, but he could use her to further his needs, and they knew what she meant to me, and that might…
I shuddered. Elise couldn’t die—not yet. She’d so much to do, so much she deserved. She’d be a better noble than her father ever was, and she’d turn the old Erlend traditions on their heads. She’d do everything to stop a war.
Elise had fought. Claw marks lined the wall where her father dragged her away, nails tearing through paint till she bled. I’d so many better memories of her—ink and ice and orange blossoms—but all I dreamed of now was her face framed against the stars. Her screaming.
And unable to escape the never-ending echo of her crying my name, I broke as bones break.
“Carefully. Sadly.” Amethyst wrapped an arm around me, pulling me to my feet, and wiped away the tears dripping down my neck. “Because we must. Because those who care to know us understand.”
“Because if it wasn’t us, it would be someone else.” Emerald unclenched her hands, copper nails now tipped with red.
I sniffed, throat tight, and nodded.
Amethyst sighed. She lifted my new mask to the top of my head and wiped the sticky mess of tears and wayward ash from my face. “We are the Left Hand of Our Queen, no one else. You are Opal. We’ve a sad, sorry job that should not exist, but this is our world and we are what we are.”
And I was what I was—what Nacea had made me, what Erlend had made me, what Our Queen had made me. There was no innocence left in this world, left in me, not after all we’d done. I’d killed seven people, wiped them from this earth, and I’d kill more. I had to.
I could not let someone else, someone clean, someone who didn’t wake at night with a weight on their chest and no air in their lungs, the ghosts of those they’d killed clawing at their throat, know the terrible unease deep within my bones.
I would be Opal from now till I died so no one else had to be. I would kill the lords whose heritage was built on war and hate, and I would never be free of it, but the world would be free of them.
Amethyst slipped my mask back on and squeezed my shoulder. She turned me around.
Our Queen nodded to us. “Are you well enough to be walking?”
“Well enough, Our Queen.” I knelt, Amethyst on my right and Emerald at my left, the only three to stay by Ruby’s side till the sun rose and his pyre crumbled to smoldering ash. Our Queen’s voice and quiet footfalls left me shivering. “I had to see him off.”
The three days since my fall and Winter’s betrayal felt like three decades to my shattered arm and fractured ribs. I moved so slowly that the world passed me by with each blink.
“I’m glad you are well.” Her fingers traced the edges of Ruby’s bloodstained mask. “You are new, my Opal, but you know the troubles that plague our young nation and threaten the peace so many died for.”
I winced. My blank mask only twitched. “Yes, the war criminals you let fester in your court have finally risen against you.”
Emerald’s hand closed around my arm. I swallowed. Elise had been spirited away by Winter to the ice-ridden peaks of old Erlend for some last-stand war she wanted no part in, and if Our Queen had even tried, Winter and his cohorts wouldn’t still be alive. No forgotten Nacea, no lords threatening chaos and war, and no civilians left floundering under Erlend rules.
“Yes, they have.” Our Queen waved Emerald off. She wore no gauntlet today, no metal corset. Soot and mud hemmed her plain gray funeral dress. “And it is time they were purged from our lands. You will bring me their heads.”
Emerald and Amethyst nodded. I only stared, bones aching and rage gnawing away the last of the fear within me.
“Emerald, tell Nicolas and Isidora I need to speak to them.” Our Queen dismissed her with a nod and a frown, not taking her eyes off me. “Please wait by the gate, Amethyst.”
She might’ve freed our land from the grip of magic, but she used us as a substitute. We were little different from her shadow, taking her every order, killing who she pleased, and whispering secrets in her ear. She’d lost nothing and gained a throne.
“I have a job for you, Opal.”
“Your wish is my command, Our Queen.” I bowed, back straight and broken arm snapped to my side despite the pain.
Eight out of ten, surely, if Ruby were not ash and bone.
“Is it really?” She shifted forward, dark dress littered with dried ash. The runes across her eyelid folded. “You’ve lost so much, Sallot, and I—”