21. Can’t even grieve in peace #2
But when I tried to take the basket from him, Maksym clasped his free hand over mine and fixed me with that amber stare. “At this moment, I don’t. Humor my curiosity, Miss Wynn, and teach me about your people’s ways with their fallen.”
A thousand different protests sat on my tongue, but I sighed and nodded instead, and Maksym released the basket into my hold.
To some relief, the body beneath the first sheet I worked back wasn’t a soldier I knew well.
But he was young, quite fresh in his service, and that alone stung, never mind the reminder his horrific burns served. He probably had parents or siblings who would grieve for him for the rest of their lives, without a body to bury to bring them an ounce of closure.
“We normally bury our dead at first light,” I said, my voice a little more uneasy than I would have liked as I opened a pot of paint and wet my brush.
“And the night before, the family and friends get together to prepare their loved one to finish their passage. If there isn’t anyone to claim the dead, it’s usually a mage or a volunteer who will prepare the body. ”
I painted the first few lines of paint along his charred fingers and continued them up the back of his hand, joining them at the soldier’s wrist. From my side, Maksym watched in silence.
“The most devout Odessans believe death causes a temporary separation of the body from the soul, and the first stop you take after death is the river of aether, which carries your soul to the gate to meet your body for judgement.” I painted one thick line up his arm, intersected by a circle at his elbow and topped by one at his shoulder.
“Since the goddess Elja is responsible for meting out that judgement, we paint the bodies of our dead to resemble Her skeletal familiars, hoping She will think them her own creatures and allow them to slip through the gate to join their body in eternal rest.”
After I painted lines across the top of his chest to resemble his collarbones and ribs, I moved around the structure to work on his other side.
“What do you believe?” Maksym asked. Even when I glanced over, his amber eyes never left the body between us. “You said the most devout, not we. I take it you don’t count yourself among their numbers?”
What an incredibly loaded question.
I pursed my lips as I shifted the sheet, but I found most of my peer’s other arm burned to the bone. I sighed and lowered the sheet back down. After wetting my brush again, I started working on painting a skull-like mask on his sooty, charred face.
My voice was quiet as I said, “I know that we rot, like everything else when it dies, but I’m not sure what I believe.
It’s not like we commune freely with the pantheon, even though they created all that Odessa is.
They like their comfort hidden away in the enclave.
Everything my people believe is just a theory, or a hope, or something half-legible scrawled on an ancient text from when the gods once humored us with their presence.
I’m not sure I like any of those odds enough to base the direction of my life around them.
” I half shrugged. “I’ll find out when I die, I suppose.
If anyone is around to see me carried over properly. ”
When I glanced up, I found Maksym nodding slowly. He had a remarkably thoughtful look on his face when he asked, “Why bother with these rites then, if you don’t believe in them?”
“Because I’d rather be safe, for their sake.” A small smile tugged at my mouth. “My falling out with my faith is my problem, not theirs. It’s the least I can do. Especially since…”
Goddess.
I couldn’t even put it into words.
There was no inkling of a doubt in my mind anymore that Streja had saved my life.
That those fragmented memories I had of her talking to me and carrying me meant she had known something, and she’d put my life above her own.
I was so devastated she had, and the thought of voicing it made my empty stomach churn something fierce.
Maksym cocked his head at me, but I shook mine. The concerned pinch on his brow didn’t settle in the least.
“The flowers,” I said, praying he would take the divergence as I moved on to making quick work of painting the soldier’s legs.
“They say Elja has Her workers maintain vast gardens at the gates, to give Herself a pleasant view as She waits to dole out judgement. Mourning vine, apparently, grows abundantly there, even on the gate itself, and Her workers like to adorn themselves with it. So, we do the same to give them a better chance at passage.”
I hadn’t expected the king to sigh.
“I’m sorry, then, that we didn’t have it for you.” Maksym rubbed the back of his neck with a look of frustration. “Even more so that very little of this is right.”
I came back around and extended the second jar of paint to him. “Don’t apologize. They would have been out there alone otherwise. Rotting. Being picked apart by scavengers.”
I shook my head. “And they didn’t deserve that at all.”
Maksym’s fingers brushed mine as he took the paint and gave it a thoughtful glance. “I’ll give it my best.”
With the small smile that graced his sharp features and the curt nod he gave me, I had no reason to doubt him.
And I quickly found out that where Maksym clearly lacked in some measure of artistic capability, he made up for it in his lengthy limbs and his lack of emotional attachment to the bodies he was helping me prepare.
Whereas I had to work my way around each side of the pyre bases to paint my comrades’ limbs with their skeletal masks, he could simply reach, pull back the sheet, and use his height to his advantage.
And whereas I had the steady pressure of threatening tears wearing away at me as I moved from body to body, the peaceful stoicism never left Maksym’s face. He paused once to retie his hair after it slipped loose and didn’t even notice or care that he streaked the inky strands white.
It should’ve made me smile, but it happened just moments before I pulled back the sheet on Streja’s battered body. There she was, burned half beyond recognition, but not anywhere near enough for me to write her off with the rest.
We’d laughed together. Drank together. Cried together.
Dozens of times.
Sometimes—often, actually—all three at once.
Our childhoods aside, we’d suffered through the early days of training together—drills and rotations that felt as if their only purpose was to see who was best fit to handle acts of torture.
But what for? Streja had always dreamed of getting a permanent assignment out on Odessa’s eastern coast, where soldiers fought for posts in the sleepy seaside towns.
All these years of hard work and dreaming, and she was going to end up nothing but ash, scattered over the water in a place that was never her home.
A place that was not home to any of these people.
The pressure of those threatening tears reached its breaking point, and I wiped at my cheeks with the back of my hand. How I had any more moisture left in my body after all the goddess-damned crying I’d done was beyond me.
“Fuck,” I whispered, staring into Streja’s lifeless eyes.
In my periphery, Maksym’s attention snapped over, and he took a few steps from the body he was working on, but I refused to look his way.
Rude, maybe, given everything he’d done so far, but any more pity would be my undoing.
So, I worked as quietly as I could through Streja’s painting, trying to keep my sniffles to a minimum and praying to the gods I hadn’t left my face streaked with paint.
By the time we’d finished—Maksym’s six compared to my four—and set out to tuck a bundle of white flowers in the arms of my fallen comrades before replacing their sheets, I’d regained a somewhat tenuous hold on my ever-fraying emotional state.
It still felt like it could slip at any moment, and Maksym would have to decide if he wanted to scrape me off the stone or leave me there, but my tears had finally dried.
It was a damn good thing, because the king would not stop looking at me with growing concern as the moon made its presence known and lit the plateaus in a silver glow, washing out the pale flicker of nytefire lanterns scattered about the area.
“Are you ready?” he finally asked me once we’d redressed the last pyre and taken up a post at the end of the two rows.
As if I had much say in that matter.
At least he’d answered a question budding in the back of my mind. I had noticed no materials to light the pyres in any of our supplies, like the flint or tinder boxes found by every mantle and hearth back in Odessa.
It had been easy to make an assumption, but I knew nothing about Maksym or what magic he wielded, other than vague comments Eilir made about the late king fearing his own son.
“You’ll light them yourself?” I asked, glancing up at him, and Maksym nodded. “Be my guest then.”
He held my gaze for a moment that felt necessary before he stepped forward and splayed his hands at the rows of pyres. He rolled his shoulders as if he were working out a little knot of tension before he muttered, “Acta Incendia.”
Brilliant blue nytefire licked across the ground in front of Maksym as the tail end of the words left his lips, as if someone had dropped a match in a streak of oil.
I gasped as it tore out and engulfed the first pair of structures, taking one set at a time in a crackling wave and pulling away from the rocky ground as it went.
When the final set of pyres was engulfed, I backed up to get a bit of reprieve from the heat that poured off them and the heavy scent of char that filled the air. Maksym didn’t budge for a long few moments, though, like he was taking in the breadth of his work, before he finally turned back to me.
“Nytefire is incredibly destructive, but it’ll still take a couple of hours for them to burn through entirely,” he said. His expression softened significantly as he added, “Would you like me to stay? I don’t mind. But I understand if you’d prefer to be alone.”