12. Pyre
Chapter twelve
Pyre
Skip held me for a long moment. Then he took my hand, and it vanished entirely inside his.
He looked down at it as if it required study. As if my hand, small and still trembling from the bloodshed, was one more impossible thing the day had delivered.
He bent and pressed his mouth to my forehead.
I had been running on adrenaline since the boom from below. Through the corridor. Through Mira. Through the blade leaving my hand. Through the impossible second when everything in me had moved before thought could catch up.
Now, standing in the quiet aftermath, with his mouth warm against my skin, I felt the adrenaline begin to drain out.
What came in behind it was the full weight of what had happened, arriving all at once and without the courtesy of spacing itself out. I let it arrive.
Boots sounded on the stairs. Armored soldiers moved fast, then stopped at the exact moment they reached the corridor and understood what was in it.
Blood on the stone. Mira’s body. The two of us standing in the middle of it.
The soldier who spoke was very young. His voice was steady, which told me something about the garrison Skip had built. “High Commander. Are you safe?”
Skip straightened. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, and I watched the High Commander assemble himself around whatever was underneath. Then he turned to face his soldiers.
“We are safe.”
One of the younger soldiers crossed the corridor and retrieved the sword from Mira’s body.
He held it out to me.
He was looking at me the way soldiers look at other soldiers. Not like a civilian who needed to be kept back. Not like a woman from another world who had to be protected, managed, explained around. Like a peer.
Something had shifted in that corridor. He knew it. I knew it.
I had arrived at Outpost Ely as a curiosity. The woman from another world, kept safe, kept out of the way, handled with the careful courtesy extended to civilians inside a military installation. That was no longer the category I was in.
There was blood on the blade. For a moment, I could do nothing but stare.
The young soldier beside me reached into a pouch at his belt and offered me a square of rough cloth without a word. I took it.
The motion was not graceful. My hands were not entirely steady. I wiped the blade clean before I sheathed it, lingering over every trace of blood because my hands were still unsteady.
Then I slid it back where it belonged. At my belt. Where it was going to stay.
The sword had done exactly what Skip said it would do. It had answered when I reached for it. It had crossed the distance my body could not. It had saved my life. I was going to carry it for the rest of my life in this world.
Skip looked at Mira.
The grief was not gone. It had only moved. It was beside him now instead of in front of him, which was the only rearrangement available.
He looked at her for a long moment. He had been carrying something for years. And now, finally, he had set it down.
“Take her,” he said. “There will be a funeral pyre.”
The young soldier hesitated. “But, High Commander, she’s one of them. We could…”
“There will be a funeral pyre.”
His voice dropped into the quiet register that meant the conversation was over.
The soldier did not hesitate again.
***
We stood in the courtyard while Mira burned on the pyre.
Skip’s arms were around me from behind, his chin at my temple, and we watched the pyre together without speaking. The moon was high and full—the Mytharo moon, smooth and crater-free in a way I still had not entirely adjusted to, hanging in a sky so dense with stars it looked like a painting.
I had been in this world for five days, and I still stopped when I saw that sky. I could not help it.
The heat of the pyre reached us where we stood. I was glad for the warmth.
“You never got to say goodbye,” I said.
“No.” He was quiet for a moment. “After a battle, we leave the fallen in the field. It is safer—they may turn. The protocol is decapitation. To prevent it.”
He stopped.
“I did not follow protocol with Mira. I knew the rule. I had given the order myself, more times than I can count. And I stood in that field with her, and I could not do it. I told myself she was already gone. I needed to believe she was already gone.”
He was silent long enough that I understood he was choosing the next words carefully.
“I was wrong. After years of following protocol, I failed to follow it with the one person for whom it mattered most.”
“What was she like?” I asked. “Before.”
A faint, painful fondness moved across his face.
“Stubborn,” he said. “The most stubborn soldier I ever commanded, which is saying something because I have commanded a great many stubborn soldiers. She had opinions about tactics, and she was not shy about them. Mira was usually right, which made the opinions harder to argue with.”
His voice roughened on her name, worn thin by years of repeating it only to himself.
“She laughed at the wrong moments. During briefings, sometimes. When something struck her as absurd. She could not help it, and she did not try very hard to. I realized that I was in love with her during a briefing. She laughed at something I said, and I looked at her, and that was the end of that.”
I held his arms where they crossed around me and said nothing. The fire crackled.
“She was a better soldier than she was a civilian,” he continued. “She did not know what to do with herself when there was nothing to defend.”
That was why he had blamed himself for missing it.
“You couldn’t have known,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “But I have known it was not my fault for two years, and it has not helped as much as I expected it to.”
In the firelight, his face looked hollowed by relief. He had been carrying something for a very long time. Now he had set it down, and he was still deciding how to stand without it.
“She was a soldier first,” I said. “The best one you ever commanded. You told me that.”
His eyes closed briefly.
“That is how I will think of her,” I said. “If that is acceptable.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “It is acceptable,” he said quietly. “It is, in fact, exactly right.”
We stood with the fire until it burned lower.
“I loved her completely. I want you to know that. She deserved to be loved completely, and I did.”
“She knew how deeply you loved her. She also knew you believed she was gone,” I said. “That thing used that knowledge because it was the sharpest weapon it had. But she knew.”
He was quiet for a moment. The fire settled. Then he turned me gently, his hand at my jaw, tilting my face up toward his. He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke.
“I love you,” he said.
No preamble. No qualification. No, you must know, or I think, or I feel like—the hedging language of men who are not entirely sure of what they are saying. Just the words, in his voice, with settled weight.
I had heard those words before. My ex-fiancé had said them with the frequency and conviction of a man fulfilling a social obligation. The way you say drive safe or have a good weekend. The words were correct and the meaning was entirely absent.
Skip said it differently. He said it with certainty and no apparent interest in revisiting the position.
I felt it land.
“I love you too,” I said.
He kissed me. My hand found his arm—warm, solid, real—and the contact registered through my entire body with the focused insistence of a nervous system that had been through a great deal this evening and had opinions about what it wanted next.
I analyzed the situation.
The man I had just told I loved had, within the last hour, freed the woman he had claimed from the darkness she had been imprisoned in for years. He had watched her body burn on a funeral pyre. His eyes were still slightly wet. The fire was still burning.
I filed my nervous system’s opinions under the heading: The body’s objection is noted and respectfully overruled.
We went inside when the fire burned low. Skip poured two cups of moonroot.
It was darker than tea and richer than deeproot, but where deeproot sharpened the mind while easing the body, moonroot asked nothing of either.
Its warmth spread slowly, carrying with it the unmistakable instruction that the day was over and I was permitted to stop surviving it.
It tasted like hot chocolate designed by someone who took the assignment seriously.
The calm moved through me in one deep, warm wave, loosening muscles I had not realized were still braced. Sleep waited just behind it.
We sat with the cups and looked at the stars.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
Skip nodded.
“When did you know? About me.” I paused. “Specifically.”
He did not hesitate. “The horse.”
I had suspected this.
“That was the first day.”
Skip smiled knowingly.
“You decided on the first day?”
“I decided on the horse,” he said.
I considered this.
“My body decided on the horse,” I said. “My brain required an extended peer-review process. The conclusions were consistent.”
“You are thorough,” he said. “I did not mind the wait.”
I laughed.
The moonroot carried us to bed before either of us thought to argue with it.