Nadia #3
Children in the square. Bread cooling in windows. The ordinary, stubborn life of a place that had survived by being useful to travelers and kind enough to be remembered.
Instead, the town was burning.
I saw the smoke first. Black. Oily. Too high. The wrong kind of smoke, the kind that came from buildings that had been burning for hours with no one left to save them.
Then I saw the bodies.
In the square. In the road. In the doorway of the witch’s hall. Over the fountain’s stone edge. Half-hidden in the broken mouths of houses the fires hadn’t finished eating.
Nothing moved but smoke. Nothing sounded but the slow crackle of dying flames and the terrible quiet of a place that had stopped being a place.
Sugar stopped beneath us.
Behind me, Lorenzo made a sound—a low, broken thing dragged out of him before his ironclad discipline could catch it. The sound of a soldier counting bodies he hadn’t reached in time. The sound of a prince looking down at his own province in flames.
He was off Sugar before I fully understood he’d moved.
He didn’t look at me.
Didn’t speak.
He started down into the valley with a long, ground-eating stride that would’ve been a run if running wouldn’t have cost him control.
I sat frozen for half a breath too long. Then I gathered Sugar’s reins and followed.
She picked her way down the slope behind him with the grim, careful sense of an animal that understood something ahead was wrong. My thigh throbbed with every shift of the saddle, but I ignored it.
The smoke thickened as we descended, gray and bitter, clinging to my throat and the backs of my eyes. I'd been a mercenary a long time. I knew what fire and bodies smelled like after a bad night.
This was worse. Older. Steeped into the stones and soil, left long enough to settle into everything.
At the low stone wall marking the edge of town, I dismounted, my thigh forgotten.
The first body lay just beyond it.
A young woman. Mid-twenties, maybe. Face down in the road, one hand stretched toward the gate as if she’d been running when the blade took her. Her apron was scorched. The knife that killed her was still buried in her back.
Lorenzo stopped. For one long moment, he only stood there. Then he knelt. Slowly. Carefully. Like this, too, was a duty he refused to do poorly.
He touched the back of her head with a gentleness that made my chest hurt and turned her face just enough to see who she’d been. His eyes closed for one breath. Then they opened again.
“Mira.” The name came out hollow. “She baked,” he murmured, the words dragged from somewhere deep enough to draw blood. “The second time I came through here, she gave me a loaf and wouldn’t let me pay. She would’ve been a child then.”
There wasn’t a single thing I could say to make this better. Not one platitude to fix what had been broken.
He stayed beside her a moment longer, his hand still on her hair. Then he stood, drew the knife from her back with terrible care, and wiped it clean on the edge of his coat.
He didn’t throw it away. He held it. Then he walked into the town.
I followed him, watching his back. Past the second body.
The third. The burned-out shell of the inn.
The body in the fountain. The witch’s hall, where the door had been broken inward and the woman inside had clearly made them pay before they killed her.
The market stalls overturned in the ash.
The baker’s shop, where someone had tried very hard to keep small bodies behind a locked door and failed.
Lorenzo stopped in the middle of the square as the ash drifted down across his shoulders.
He stood with the dead around him and the stolen knife in his hand, and the iron came over his face in a way I had never seen before.
Not to hide pain. To contain rage.
This wasn’t the controlled fury of a prince insulted, or a commander crossed, or a man with blood on his hands and grief in his throat. This was colder. Older. A thing with talons and teeth.
For one terrible second, I understood exactly why his father hadn’t named him heir.
Then Lorenzo sank to his knees in the ash and blood. He laid the knife across his thighs, both hands resting on the hilt, and bowed his head.
The smoke moved between us.
A roof beam gave way somewhere nearby with a soft, final sound. The sun slipped behind the hills, dragging the last light out of the valley. The fires guttered lower, almost done with their work.
I stood ten feet behind him in the ruin of his town and felt every cruel thing I’d said over the last three days settle in my mouth like ash. I had nothing to give him. I had made sure of that.
I’d refused his food. His coat. His hand. His name. Every soft, careful thing he’d tried to offer after breaking me in a bath and hating himself for it.
I had been right—I knew I’d been right. But I regretted it, anyway.
He knelt in the ash of his own people, and I couldn’t touch him because I had spent three days teaching him that I wouldn’t. So I closed my hand around the hilt of my dagger and stood guard.
That was all I had left.
The sun went down behind the hills.
Lorenzo didn’t move an inch and neither did I.
And in the silence, the dead kept their own counsel.