Chapter 45
REDEMPTION
SAERIS
Total infected: Unknown
THE SUN BLED red across the horizon.
Scores of votive lanterns rose to meet the dawn, released by sleep-starved residents of Inishtar hoping to buoy their dead loved ones’ souls toward the heavens.
By the cliffs, gulls squawked, dive-bombing the satyrs who’d gathered there to work, angry that the commotion was disturbing their nests. We nearly didn’t make it in time.
“Wait! Wait, stop!” I cried. Two of the satyrs—males with thick, shaggy brown fur covering their legs and proud horns curving away from their brows—both wobbled precariously, nearly toppling over the edge of the cliff themselves as they clung to the body they had been about to toss over the edge.
“What the hell are you doing?” the one on the right snarled.
“We need that body,” I panted.
“It’s one of the unclean. It doesn’t even have a head. What could you possibly want with it?”
“The ones . . . with the armor,” Carrion said breathlessly. “Are there any more . . . like that?”
“Yes,” the satyr on the left answered, no friendlier than his companion. “They’re all down there, though.” He jerked his head over the side of the cliff. “You’ll have to climb down the bairn’s track if you want them.”
I peered over the side of the cliff, my stomach rolling at the drop that stretched away from me .
. . and then again at the sight of all the bodies that lay contorted into unnatural shapes on the black rocks below.
The dawn light glinted off burnished golden armor—the very same golden armor that had started all of this.
White foam rolled in, submerging the bodies from sight from a moment, then rolled back out again, revealing the macabre scene once more.
Carrion peered over the ledge, too. “You actually go down that path?” he said, eyeing the cliff face nervously.
“We do,” the satyr on the left said. “You don’t. This place wasn’t built for clumsy Fae feet.”
An oxymoron if ever I’d heard one. The Fae were far from clumsy. They were preternaturally light-footed in my experience, but it seemed the satyrs were nimbler still. I couldn’t even see a clear line that led down to the rocks below. The cliffs were fucking vertical.
“Don’t even think about asking us to go down there for you,” the satyr with the curlier horns said. “We don’t hold with looting corpses. The fallen should keep their possessions. They’re death-touched.”
“We don’t want to loot them,” Carrion said, disgusted. “We need something from one of them. In your shoes, I can see how, well, no, wait, satyrs don’t wear shoes, do you. Let us check that body, and we’ll be out of your hair. I mean fur. I mean—”
“Carrion, stop talking.”
Carrion stopped talking.
I stepped forward, careful to keep my hood drawn up over my head.
Thankfully there were few external signs that I wasn’t wholly Fae, but my skin did tend to smoke a little in direct daylight.
The high bloods had rarely left the Blood Court—the people of Inishtar probably hadn’t seen one in centuries—but I didn’t want to risk someone spotting me and making assumptions about my intentions.
“We’re not crows. We don’t want to take anything valuable.
Not . . . traditionally valuable anyway.
Can we please just see that body for a moment, and then we’ll leave you in peace. ”
“Fucking Fae,” the satyr on the left hissed. Both males eyed us malevolently as they dropped the body they were holding; it hit the ground with a clang.
“Do as you like,” Curled Horns said. “But be sure to roll it over the edge when you’re done. We don’t want it haunting us because of something you took.”
The satyrs had strange beliefs. Turned out, they also weren’t very fond of the Fae. I bowed my head, agreeing to their terms, and the two of them darted away, expertly clambering up the rock face to the left.
“So mean,” Carrion mused. “How can you be so angry when you have a view like that to look at all day?” He nodded toward the staggering sight of the ocean, but I trained my eyes on the guardian’s corpse at my feet, refusing to look at the vista.
I couldn’t. Not with Fisher missing. Nothing was allowed to be beautiful in the world without him.
Carrion’s smile faded as we flipped over the body. As if he knew precisely what I was thinking, he said, “We will find him, Saeris.” And then he let out an excited whoop that startled the gulls.
“Gods, Carrion, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Your heart doesn’t even need to beat. And anyway, aren’t you happy? Look!”
We’d gotten lucky. Very lucky. The object we’d sprinted down here hoping to find was right there, still strapped to the guardian’s belt.
The pious fucker had been stupid enough to carry around one of Madra’s ridiculous plague bags on his hip.
But she was the one arrogant enough to believe herself a god.
The plague bags were full of ashes from the sacrifices who were burned in Madra’s honor . . . but they also contained her hair.
We rolled the guardian’s headless body over the edge of the cliff as we had agreed to.
We watched the golden clad corpse tumble through the air and land on the rocks without saying a word.
There were those who might have deserved a prayer to the gods as their body was laid to rest, but not him.
Whoever he was, whoever he had been, he had served a monster, which made him a monster, too.
We were walking back up the steps, away from the cliff face, when I noticed the figure sitting alone by a large chalk boulder that jutted out over the drop to our right. I knew him straight away.
It was Tal.
I pressed the plague bag into Carrion’s hand. “You go on without me,” I told him. “Get this to Iseabail and Te Léna as quickly as you can. Let them know I’ll be back soon. There’s something I need to take care of.”
I was wrong.
He wasn’t alone.
A body lay next to him on the chalk, red dress torn and dirty, blond hair pooling around her head.
Zovena looked like she was sleeping, but I had seen enough death by now to recognize its subtle hue creeping into the female’s pale cheeks.
Tal sat on the very edge of the cliff with his legs dangling over the side.
He wasn’t touching Zovena, though he must have carried her here and laid her down.
The wind blew his silver hair about his face, the strands glowing orange and red, reflecting the bloody sunrise.
A sword rested on the ground beside him. His hands were covered in cuts and scrapes; he absently twisted the chunky ring he wore on his thumb around, around, around as tears streamed down his face.
He didn’t look at me as I took a seat beside him, letting my legs dangle over the edge, too. “The fates scorn me,” he whispered airily. “Every time I try to die, they rob me of my peace.”
“What are we doing, Tal?”
The muscles in his neck worked as he swallowed.
I had only ever witnessed the male in shadow, his features carved in monochrome or maybe washed green from the evenlight.
The morning had painted him in peaches, purples, and pinks as soft as silk.
He had been remade. His heart pumped warm blood around his body for the first time in centuries.
For a second, he looked so young. But then he turned to look at me, and there was that ancient sorrow in his eyes.
“I was having Fisher send me home so I could die there instead. At Bayland’s End.
The inconvenience of that unpleasantness would have served my mother right.
But then we were in the middle of a battle, surrounded by feeders, and for once .
. .” He choked on the word, biting back a strangled sob.
“For once, I got to fight on the right side.” He shook his head, batting away fresh tears before they could fall.
“I found this sword in the grass and picked it up. I ran straight at Death, then. I knew that he’d take me.
But every feeder I faced, I killed. And then there were no more, and . . . I found her in the dirt.”
His gaze went back to the rising sun, smudging light across the rippling surface of the ocean.
He did not look at Zovena. “She was a horrible person,” he said, letting out a cracked bark of laughter.
“I found myself laughing at the insanity of it all the time. I do know it was insane,” he said, nodding.
“All of it. Imagine . . .” He squinted, for a moment seeing something I couldn’t see.
“Imagine loving Kingfisher. Imagine not being able to stop yourself. And then imagine that he couldn’t give a fuck about you, and he took pleasure in hurting you every opportunity that he got.
And then imagine selling your soul to the devil so that you could follow him into hell.
” I couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying now. “Willingly! Hah!”
“Tal—”
“She was already dead when I found her. Drained dry.” He sniffed loudly.
“And when I looked at her, I stood there, waiting for the grief to land, to absolutely destroy me, and do you know what?” He threw back his head, closing his eyes and sighing loudly.
“I didn’t feel . . . fucking . . . anything.
It was always a game to her. I don’t know how she did it.
If it was magic, or . . . or . . .” He shrugged helplessly.
“It wasn’t real. It was a game, and now I feel as though I’ve woken up, and all the sacrifices I made were for nothing. How fucking stupid I was.”
“You’re not stupid, Tal.”
“A thousand years . . .” He stared blindly off into the distance, lips parted, as if the gravity of it all had struck him dumb. “So I came here to give her to the sea. I came here to die . . . and once again the fates have snatched back my peace.”
“What do you mean?”