44. Tabitha
Tabitha
Mordecai’s on his knees in my courtyard when I come out, and his army of the dark is gone, dissolved back into the shadows the second the realm turned to me, and he knows.
I can see it on Alex’s face. He knows he’s lost her, lost the ghost, lost the three-hundred-year plan, lost everything, all at once.
“She’s gone,” he says. It’s not a question.
His voice is hollowed out, three centuries scraped raw.
“I can’t feel her. You...” He looks up at me, and there’s no dark left in him now, just grief, endless and old.
“You didn’t destroy her. I’d feel that. You claimed the throne. You just, what. Evicted her.”
“She’s at rest,” I say. “Which is more than you ever offered her. You wanted to pour her into a vessel and own her. I let her go.” I stop a few feet from him, my men closing ranks at my back, and I feel the book, my book, the Arcane Tome, waiting in the spell room, humming now that its Queen is claimed, ready to give me back everything I’ve lost. “It’s over, Alex. ”
“Don’t.” He gets to his feet, slow, and the grief on his face hardens one last time into the thing it always curdles into.
“Don’t call me that with her voice. With her face.
” Cold fire gathers in his hands, the last of him, the dregs of three centuries.
“If I can’t have her, and I can’t have you, then I’ll take the one thing left.
I’ll take you off that throne and I’ll burn this realm to ash before I let a bookseller rule what she died for. ”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I know you will. That’s the difference between you and me, sweetheart.
You’d burn the world because you lost. I’d burn myself to save it.
” I let my HellCat rise, full now, the whole of her, gold fire and a thousand years of a claimed Queen’s power.
“You broke up with the wrong cat, Alex.”
He throws everything he has left at me.
And it’s a lot. Three hundred years of grief and shadow and an ancient demon’s power, and it comes at me like a black tide. A month ago it would have ended me.
It doesn’t end me. I meet it. The shadow crashes over my gold fire and for a moment we’re locked, his three centuries of grief against my one year of getting up, and I feel him pour everything he is into it, everything he’s been saving for the day he got his Queen back and instead got a bookseller who wouldn’t die on cue.
His darkness gutters my fire at the edges.
Cold sweat, gritted teeth, my boots sliding on the ash.
He’s older than me, and stronger than me, and he’s fighting for the only thing he’s ever wanted.
But I’m not fighting alone, and he is. That’s the whole of it, in the end.
“NOW,” I shout, and my family hits him with me, and the balance breaks.
But I’m not the woman from a month ago. I’m the claimed Queen of Sanguisca, whole, with her realm running through her and her family at her back and a thousand years of inheritance settled in her bones, and I meet his darkness with my fire and I do not give one single inch.
“Now!” I shout, and my men move with me, the bond blazing, five as one. Luka’s hellfire. Azaan’s storm. Gavriel’s shield. Valerian’s blood-magic. And my gold fire at the centre of all of it, drawing them in, folding them together, more than the sum of us.
We hit him together, one strike, everything, and Mordecai’s darkness breaks against it like a wave on a cliff.
For a second, at the end, the fire burns the disguise away, and it’s not Alex anymore.
It’s Mordecai, the real face, ancient and horned and terrible and, underneath all of it, unbearably sad.
A creature who loved a Queen a thousand years ago and never once, in all the centuries since, learned any way to hold love that wasn’t a cage.
“Tabeitha,” he says, one last time, reaching for a ghost that isn’t there.
“She’s gone,” I tell him, not unkindly. “You can go too. Rest. Both of you. It’s done.”
And I let the fire take him.
He goes without a scream. That’s the thing I’ll remember.
At the very end there’s almost relief in it, the same relief I felt in Tabeitha when she finally let go, three centuries of grief guttering out.
Then he’s ash on the wind of my courtyard, and the man I loved for six years, and the demon who wore him, are both, at last, at peace.
The courtyard goes quiet.
I stand there breathing hard, the fire ebbing out of me. Luka’s arm comes round my shoulders, Azaan’s hand finds mine, Gavriel exhales like he’s been holding his breath for a year, and Valerian, my Valerian, presses a kiss to my temple and murmurs, “Well done, my Queen. Well done.”
“Is it weird,” I say, and my voice cracks, “that I’m sad? He was awful. He lied to me for six years and tried to erase me and burn my realm. And I’m still sad.”
“It’s not weird,” Azaan says gently. “It means you’re you. It means the thing he loved, the thing that was real, was real. You can grieve the lie and still be glad it’s over. Both. At once. That’s very you, little one.”
I lean into all of them for a moment, in the ash and the quiet, and I let myself be sad, glad, tired, and alive.
And then I straighten, because there’s no time, there’s never any time in this dimension, and I look north, to the horizon, where the cold white light has spread all along the edge of the world and is no longer days away.
“Right,” I say. “The book. Val, the book, now. Give me my lives back, free Gavriel, and then.” I look at the coming white, and I feel my realm at my back, awake and armed and mine. “Then let’s go and win a war.”