Chapter 51
Chapter
Fifty-One
Two Weeks After the Collapse
The last time the Yirian clans stood before so many funeral pyres, Kai had been a child, and they’d all sworn it would be the last.
That day, Kai had grieved friends from behind young eyes that couldn’t unsee the damage to their bodies. It hadn’t mattered that they’d been cleaned up and laid upon the stones in their finest leathers and furs. Eyes closed beneath sacred prayer beads.
Through it all, Tse held her small hand in his. His towering body had shielded her from the tundra’s cruel winds. And he’d carried her when her legs refused to move.
“Come, brightest star,” he’d said. “I’ve got you.”
Today, she stood among Silver Wolf, no longer a child. Somehow, she wasn’t a warrior or a wife, either. Only a sister.
A daughter.
Her leathers felt heavier than usual beneath her white ceremonial cloak. Her hands ached to hold something. Anything. A blade. A banner.
Her father’s hand.
But there was nothing left to hold.
Tse lay cold. Pale. Alone. He couldn’t hold or support or carry anyone.
Not anymore.
He’d taken thirteen blades for his wives. That was what it took to stop him. And Kai knew, he would have taken thirteen more. His love was bottomless. His devotion, unshakable.
Someone lit the pyres of the four dead matriarchs first: Bronze Raven, Crimson Wing, Steel Arrow, and finally, Rising Moon. The rest of the dead followed, one by one. They set fire to the old wood and dry moss. Flowers shriveled and burned around the bodies.
Kai couldn’t take her eyes off Tse, his hair combed and braided, hands folded over his chest. Still powerful, even in death.
Beside him, Sitsi lay wrapped in soft linens and warrior leathers. Flowers wreathed her hair. Charms circled her wrists. Twin braids framed her pale, beautiful face.
Flames caught their clothes.
Still, Kai didn’t look away.
A fresh burn built in her throat. Two weeks without a single tear. She hadn’t screamed. Hadn’t broken.
But now—
Flames stole a piece of her heart she couldn’t ever reclaim. Grief clawed at her chest. Smoke rasped the back of her tongue until the taste turned to ash, and Tse’s braids blurred.
Prayers rose around her, chants to the ancestors to welcome their loved ones home. Drumbeats echoed from the frozen ground to the highest peaks.
Kai stood through it all. Until the flames grew too thick to see beyond, and the smoke clouded the sky.
Only then did she finally let her tears fall.
Silence wrapped Stoneheart Hall in a shroud of grief. Even the younglings sat still.
Death had touched them all—but it was fear that filled the chamber now. They’d barely survived the first collapse. This one might end them.
Atsadi assured her every day: “The mines are recoverable, and we can fix the aqueducts. All we need is time.”
Time they didn’t have.
Kai lingered near the rear pillar, arms crossed, too weary to speak and too restless to sit.
From the dais, the Matriarchs listed off every immediate complication. Damaged aqueducts. Flooded caverns. Collapsed mines. Everything they’d faced before—only much, much worse.
She couldn’t bear to hear it again. Her mothers had been talking about it for two weeks. Atsadi was practically living in the tunnels. Mapping the damage. Devising solutions.
Worse, everyone was speaking in circles around why this was a problem in the first place.
She caused the explosion.
She brought her people to the brink of death.
Hindsight offered no mercy. Surely there’d been another way. But she couldn’t see it.
Not that it mattered. It was too late. The poison took eleven of her warriors, and more than three dozen may never be recovered from those buried chambers.
Tse and Sitsi would remain dead.
Kai turned her back on the Hall and the ten Matriarchs on the central dais. Four were the untested, just as she would be one day.
Drakaa sat beside Shadi, occupying the tenth seat now and for as long as her people remained.
Tenth Clan.
Just beyond the Hall, Atsadi and Fala took her hands. No one spoke. Somehow, they found themselves beneath the stone arches of the healing pools, breath mingling in the steam.
In that silent, comfortable space, they took the time to undress each other with hands that memorized everything. Atsadi palmed Fala’s nape. Fala traced Kai’s old scars. And Kai—she outlined the mountain peaks inked across Atsadi’s chest.
Three heartbeats finding the same rhythm.
At last, they sank into the pool’s warmth, Atsadi’s arms circling them both. When they spoke, it was in whispers. Stories that brought only laughter.
For just a little while, Kai forgot her grief and guilt, and simply—finally—breathed.
Later, when they made love for the first time, Kai understood Drakaa’s early words—that this marriage could be more than duty. Atsadi wasn’t a foreign addition. He fit in ways she never dared imagine.
He accepted their burdens as his own and filled in the spaces where she or Fala could not.
He was the reason she didn’t retreat. Didn’t wall herself off as she had so many times before.
He held Fala steady when the grief became too much.
When the deaths nearly took her to her knees.
And when the mark of his clan grew too heavy, they held him in return.
Together, they were the mountains and the stars and the streams that ran in between.
The brisk wind still carried the scent of ash.
Kai gripped Dryja’s reins, scanning the path ahead as the Stormguard flanked her in loose, silent formation.
Three weeks since the collapse, there were few places left that felt normal. Out here, on the frozen tundra, was one of them. The mountain itself felt wrong.
Every day was more of the same: weeping stones and creaking tunnels. Trials.
Death sentences.
Usti was gone. Unfortunately, his legacy remained.
To his followers, the destruction was proof. The dead, the hunger, the broken stone—confirmation that Usti had been right all along. New leadership was needed.
But not all of Rising Moon opposed them. Some worked tirelessly to stabilize the tunnels. Many, like Atsadi, barely slept. He and Shadow Water worked to reopen the ancient aqueducts, diverting water where they could.
But none of it mattered if they couldn’t feed the people inside.
So Kai did the one thing that made sense—the one thing she knew by heart.
She patrolled their frozen lands.
“Riders,” Otekah called from up the trail.
Kai urged Dryja up the ridge and squinted through the morning frost toward the winding path below. It had been some time since a wagon traveled this way, and the road was thick with unmarked, glittering snow.
Three wagons creaked into view, piled high with tightly bound crates. Oxen hauled the load, flanked by unarmed men in layered wool and worn cloaks. Their hair was shorn at the sides, their beards braided to their chests. Their clothing bore the sea-salt blue and jade green of Eslodel.
“Merchants.” The word shot from Kai’s chest like a relieved breath, and her heartbeat kicked.
She signaled to her Stormguard, and the six of them rode until they reached the base of the ridge, meeting the convoy.
The lead wagon slowed, and a broad-shouldered man with streaks of gray in his braided beard raised both hands. “It’s been a long time, Kai Silver Wolf.”
Once, she’d have invited him in with a hug. Some of her fondest memories were of beer-soaked tavern tables, laughing over mugs of ale.
That was before his people betrayed them.
“Vali.”
Dryja’s ear flicked at Vali’s name, as if the oxbeast too remembered the old summers of full granaries.
Vali’s smile faltered. In two decades as envoy and brother to Eslodel’s high chieftain, he’d never been met with such frost.
Belatedly, Vali motioned to the three wagons. “I bring a peace offering.”
“You come now, after months cowering to the whims of the mad Perean king? And still, with the man dead and gone, you refused us aid.”
Vali lowered his chin. “Steinar sends his regrets and…this.” He stepped forward, pulling folds of parchment from a pouch at his side. “New terms for trade—”
“We have nothing to trade.” The words landed in her stomach like stone. Like the mountain itself had dropped inside her. “We won’t for a long while yet.”
Vali stepped forward, his thick brows drawn together. “Tell me what’s happened.”
And because he’d once been a friend to her people, she told him. The barest bones of it—Perean’s role. Usti’s sabotage.
“Much of our mines are under rubble and water,” she explained at last. “We must stabilize the mountain and reroute the water before we can begin production again.”
Vali nodded. “Until then, Eslodel will see to it that your people want for nothing.” He motioned to the wagons. “Food, medicine, fabric, grain, tools. And if you wish it, hands to help you rebuild.”
To Shadi Silver Wolf, Matriarch of Yiria
From Dimitrios Vidalatos, heir apparent to Perean
Grand Matriarch,
I write to you not as a crowned man, but as the one whose name will be used, by the design of others, if we allow other men to make a war of this.
The Perean soldiers who crossed into your lands did not move on my order.
The commander now in your custody sailed under instructions through my council chambers while I was being kept from my throne.
The paper trail exists. It begins with the now-deceased High Chancellor and runs in a straight line to the hand of King Titos Demakis of Soterra.
Upon your request, I can show you muster rolls and correspondence between Titos and Leonidas, all but naming their goal: a move so reckless it would make me look incompetent as king, and force Perean’s rule to another by the will of the people.
In short, they intended to provoke your retaliation, then lay the ruin at my feet.