Chapter 3
LYRA
I woke with blood dried beneath my fingernails and someone saying my name like they were afraid I wouldn’t answer.
My first thought was Irelia. My second was Maia.
I tried to move before I opened my eyes and pain went through me so hard my stomach turned.
My knees. My palms. My throat where the wraith had held me. My ribs. My lungs. Everything hurt.
Smoke had settled into the back of my mouth, bitter enough to make me gag when I breathed.
Heat pressed against the right side of my face while the left rested against stone.
For one confused second, I thought the light was still there because brightness pulsed behind my eyelids.
Then I opened them and saw fire. Edenlo was still burning.
What remained of the fire tower had collapsed across the square in blackened beams, their centers glowing red beneath ash.
Half the festival tables were gone. The ribbons we had spent the afternoon hanging had burned into drifting strips of black that caught on rooftops and bodies.
Nara’s bakery was a broken stone shell with fire moving through the ruins where the ovens had once been. One of the cottages along the western road had no roof. Another had no front wall.
People moved through smoke carrying buckets, blankets, children, bodies.
Someone was crying near the fountain. Someone else was calling a name over and over even though no one answered.
I could not hear any wraiths. I could not feel that unnatural cold.
I could not feel the vast thing beyond the ridge either.
There was only fire, smoke, and the ordinary horror of what remained.
“Lyra.” Tomas was kneeling beside me. Blood covered his shirt from collar to waist. I stared at it until I realized most of it wasn’t his. His face was gray beneath the soot, his eyes red and swollen. “Can you hear me?”
“Where’s Irelia?” My voice came out raw enough to hurt. Tomas went still. Every part of me understood before he answered.
“No.” I pushed myself upright. The square tilted so violently I nearly fell back down. Tomas reached for me and I knocked his hand away. “Where is she?”
“Lyra—”
“Where is she?” His eyes moved toward the meeting hall. I stood too fast. My knees nearly folded, but I caught myself on one hand and forced them straight.
Tomas grabbed my arm. “Wait.”
“Let go of me.”
“You can barely stand.”
“I said let go.” He did. I walked toward the hall because if I ran, I knew I would fall. People watched me as I crossed the square. Some of them stopped what they were doing. A woman with a burned sleeve pulled her child closer.
Ferin sat against the oak with his shoulder wrapped in blood-soaked cloth, and when he looked at me, I saw fear there for the first time.
Not fear of another wraith coming through the smoke.
Fear of me. A man carrying two buckets stared at my hands until the water spilled over his boots.
I lowered them against my sides and kept walking.
The meeting hall had no front door anymore. One side of the frame had burned black. The protection mark above it had split clean through the center. Inside, the floor had disappeared beneath wounded villagers and blankets. The air smelled of blood, smoke, sweat, and metallic beneath all of it.
People moaned against the walls. A man prayed beneath his breath.
A woman pressed both hands against the stomach of someone I couldn’t see while blood soaked between her fingers.
Elder Rina stood near the rear with her hair half loose, trying to organize the living while bodies lay along the eastern wall.
Irelia was not covered.
She lay several feet away from the others on a blanket that had gone dark beneath her.
Someone had straightened her legs. Her rust-red dress was torn open along one side and stiff with blood.
One sleeve had ripped nearly to the shoulder.
Her braid had come completely apart, dark hair tangled around her face and matted near the temple where she had struck the road.
Dirt streaked one cheek. Her left shoe was gone.
Her hands rested where someone had placed them over her stomach, but one had slipped sideways onto the floor. I stopped. The room kept moving around me. Someone walked past carrying water. A child cried. The fire outside cracked. Irelia did not move.
“No.” I crossed the distance and dropped beside her. “Irelia.” I touched her cheek. Cold. Not wraith-cold. Human cold. Dead cold. “Irelia.” I put my fingers against her throat.
Nothing. I moved them and pressed harder.
“No.” I leaned over her and checked again because I had to be wrong. I had found pulses weaker than this. Maia had shown me where to look. Two fingers. Just beneath the jaw. Wait. Don’t panic. Wait.
Nothing.
“Irelia.” My voice cracked. “Wake up.”
Elder Rina appeared beside me. “Lyra.”
“No.” I put my hand over Irelia’s chest. Maybe there was a heartbeat I hadn’t felt. Maybe I had missed it. “She was alive.”
“I know.”
“She was alive when the light came.”
“I know.”
“She was moving.” Elder Rina didn’t answer. I looked up at her. “She was alive.”
Elder Rina’s face broke around the truth before she said it. “She was gone when we reached her.”
The words didn’t make sense. “What?”
“We found her after the light. She was already gone.”
“No.” I looked back at Irelia. “No.”
“Lyra.”
“No.” I put my fingers against her throat again. “You didn’t check right.”
“We checked.”
“You didn’t.”
“We checked more than once.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Elder Rina flinched, but I didn’t care. “She’s not dead.”
“Lyra.”
“She’s not dead.” I grabbed Irelia’s shoulder and shook her. “Wake up.”
“Irelia.” I shook her harder. Her head moved with the motion. Her hair dragged over the blanket. Nothing else.
“Lyra.”
“Wake up.” My voice climbed. “Irelia. Wake up.”
Someone touched my shoulder. I tore away from them. “Don’t touch me.”
It was Tomas. His face was wet. I stared at him. Tomas didn’t cry. Not in front of people. Not when his father died three winters ago. Not when he split his hand open on a harvesting blade. Not when Nara’s bakery collapsed and he dragged me away from it. He was crying now.
“She was alive,” I said.
“I know.”
“I saved her.” His face crumpled. I looked back at Irelia. The light had reached the wraith above her. I remembered that. I remembered the darkness coming apart. I remembered knowing I had done it. I remembered thinking I had made it in time.
I had not.
“No.” I bent over her and pressed my forehead against hers. Her skin was cold enough that my own heat had nowhere to go. “No.”
The sound that came out of me didn’t feel like mine.
It tore through my chest and scraped my throat raw.
I held her face between both hands and cried against her because there was nothing else left to do.
Dirt smeared beneath my palms. Blood from my hands marked her skin.
I wiped it away immediately and made it worse. Her hair stuck to my fingers.
“I’m sorry.” I pressed my face against hers. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer. I had destroyed every wraith in Edenlo.
I had filled the square with enough light to turn night into day.
I had refused to choose between her and Maia because some stupid, desperate part of me had believed refusing would matter.
The world had chosen for me anyway. Someone began pulling a blanket over her legs.
“No.” I caught it. “Not yet.”
The woman stopped.
“Please.”
She let go. I sat beside Irelia while the hall moved around us.
I didn’t know how long. Time became smoke.
At some point I noticed the small tear along the hem of her dress where she had caught it on the garland table that afternoon.
I remembered her sitting beside me beneath the awning.
Her fingers undoing one of my knots. Her hand in mine when the birds fled.
Her face when the first wraith stepped onto the road.
Every ordinary piece of her remained inside me while the body beside me became another thing the village would eventually have to bury.
“Tomas.” My voice barely worked.
He crouched beside me.
“Where is Maia?”
His eyes shifted toward the rear of the hall.
“She’s alive.” I looked at him. “For now.”
That was enough to get me moving. I kissed Irelia’s forehead and hated the cold of it.
Then I pulled the blanket over her myself.
Her face disappeared last. I stopped with the edge beneath her chin and looked at her one final time before covering her completely.
Then I stood. My legs shook violently. Tomas caught my elbow. This time I let him.
“Where?”
“In the back room.”
The storage room had been turned into whatever passed for a healer’s ward. Maia lay on a narrow pallet beneath the window. Someone had cut away part of her dress. Cloth was wrapped tightly around her middle and soaked through nearly black. Her right arm had been splinted against her body.
One side of her face had swollen badly where she struck the well.
Her skin had the pale, waxen look I had seen too many times while helping her tend the dying.
Her lips were almost colorless. Her breaths came thin and shallow, with spaces between them that were already too long.
I knew before I reached her. I knew and still dropped beside her as if knowledge could be wrong if I refused to believe it.
Her eyes opened. “Lyra.”
I reached immediately for the bandage around her middle. Maia caught my wrist. Barely. “Don’t.”
“I need to see it.”
Her fingers tightened with what little strength she had. “You already know.”
I did. I could see it in the blood already soaking through fresh cloth. In the gray beneath her skin. In the way her chest struggled for each breath. I had watched Maia sit beside enough deathbeds to recognize one when I was kneeling beside it. I had just never imagined hers.
“No.” I pressed both hands over the bandage anyway. “No, I can stop it.”