45. Tabitha
Tabitha
For about ten minutes after Alex turns to ash, I let myself just stand in my own courtyard and be a person who’s survived something.
The realm knows what’s happened. I feel it, the whole of it, that current running through me both ways now that the throne’s mine and the ghost is gone.
The demons that were Mordecai’s, the ones his death didn’t scatter, they don’t attack.
They kneel, out there in the wastes, feeling their Queen claimed and their enemy dead, and I feel them turn towards the Palace like plants towards the sun.
My subjects. Actually mine now. It’s a strange, enormous thing to feel a realm decide it belongs to you, and I don’t have time to feel it properly, but for ten minutes I let myself feel it anyway.
“You did it,” Luka says, wonder in his voice, arm tight around me. “All of it. The throne, the ghost, him. You did it, kitty cat.”
“We did it.” I lean into him, into all of them, filthy and burned and alive in the ash of my own courtyard. “God. Is it over? Please tell me something’s over. One thing. I’d like one thing to be over.”
“One thing’s over,” Valerian says gently.
“The oldest thing. Mordecai’s grief has been eating at this realm since before you were born.
It’s done now. He’s at rest. Tabeitha’s at rest. That’s three centuries of rot, gone, because a bookseller wouldn’t quit.
” His blue eyes are wet, and he doesn’t hide it.
“You’ve no idea what you’ve given us, little kitty.
Any of us. What it is to be free of it.”
I press my face into Gavriel’s chest for a second, and Azaan’s hand finds mine. I let myself have it, the ten minutes, the being alive, the being done with the ghost and the ex and all of it.
And then the light changes.
I feel it before I see it, the way I’ve learned to feel everything in this place now. The warmth goes out of the air. The red goes thin. And on the northern horizon, spreading along the whole edge of the world, a bruise of cold clean white blooms and starts, unmistakably, to grow.
Not days away anymore. Not the Oracle’s someday. Now.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I say, to the sky, to the realm, to whoever’s in charge of my life and clearly hates me. “Ten minutes. I asked for one thing to be over and I got ten minutes.”
“The Sorcerers,” Gavriel rumbles, going still, reading the horizon.
“The Sorcerers.” Valerian’s already moving, already grey with what it’s going to cost. “The darkness after Mordecai. They’ve felt you claim the throne.
They know the realm’s fully awake now, and they’ll want it unmade before you can dig in.
” He turns to me, and there’s no despair in him, just the old strategist coming online.
“Which means we don’t get to rest. We get the book working, we get your lives back, we free Gavriel, and we do it all in the time it takes that white to cross the wastes.
Because when it gets here, my Queen, we are not going to be ready.
We’re going to have to be enough anyway. ”
I look at the cold coming for my realm, my ten-minutes-old realm, the one I bled three lifetimes to claim. And I feel something rise in me that isn’t fear. It’s the other thing. The thing that’s mine.
“Then let’s not waste the walk,” I say, and turn for the Palace, for the book, for the last fight. “Come on. I’ve got a realm to keep.”