37. Wren
One moment there is the thin mattress beneath my bones and the hush of the hallway beyond the door. The next, I am standing in ash. It drifts from a sky the colour of old bruises. It gathers in my lashes, on my tongue. The air tastes of smoke and iron.
Ahead of me, Evander sits at a table surrounded by knights. They laugh around him. A face turns, still smiling, and my heart leaps.
It’s Riverspire. He’s alive. I haven’t killed him.
But then his face freezes when he turns towards me, and fire pours from his open mouth.
He burns to death in front of me and the whole world goes up in flames. Charred beams jut like broken ribs from the ground. The cobbles are split and blackened. The river runs thick and dark, choked with soot.
And the ash at my feet begins to move.
“I can’t,” I whisper, backing away. My heel catches on something brittle and crumbling. “Please. Don’t.”
The ash lifts in slow spirals. It gathers itself into shapes I remember too well—shoulders, hands, faces. Skin the colour of smoke stretches thin over bone. Eyes glow from hollow sockets.
They circle me.
Riverspire, the knight who laughed with me. Grima, a fey who never did. Gladebrook, a friend of Evander’s. Lore, who I danced with once at a revel. Algie, the serving boy who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of them.
All of them.
“You promised,” Lore rasps. His voice is the hiss of embers. “You said you would end it.”
“I did!” My voice breaks. “I ended it.”
“You ended us,” Grima says.
They step closer. Ash puffs beneath their feet, but they do not crumble. They hold, they endure.
“Free us,” Riverspire whispers. “It hurts.”
“I can’t!” I clap my hands over my ears, but the sound pushes through bone and blood. “I don’t know how!”
“You burned us,” someone says.
“You can unburn us.”
“I can’t!” I wail. The word tears out of me. “I can’t!”
A new sound splits the air.
A baby’s cry.
It cuts through the murmuring like a blade.
The circle parts.
Amma stands before me, her dress blackened, her hair loose and matted with soot. In her arms, swaddled in grey, is Baby Holly.
Holly’s small face is streaked with ash. Her eyes are too clear and too knowing.
She opens her mouth to wail again—
But the sound that comes out is not a baby’s.
“You killed my father.”
The voice is thin and high and wrong inside that tiny body.
My knees give. I fall into the ash. It swallows my hands.
“I didn’t mean to,” I sob. “I didn’t know it would— I didn’t—”
“Then fix it,” Holly says.
Her little fists curl.
“Fix it.”
The circle tightens.
“Fix it,” Amma echoes, though her lips do not move.
“Fix it,” Riverspire hisses.
“Fix it,” Algie breathes.
The word spreads, catching from mouth to mouth like flame.
“Fix it.”
“Fix it.”
“FIX IT!”
They scream it now. The sky cracks with it. The ash whips into a storm around me, scouring my skin, filling my lungs.
“I can’t!” I scream back. My throat feels flayed raw.
The baby’s cry turns shrill, piercing.
“FIX IT!”
The ground splits beneath me.
I am falling into fire.
I wake with a strangled gasp.
The room is dark. The small window shows only the faintest wash of pre-dawn grey.
For a moment I don’t know where I am. Smoke still fills my lungs. My hands claw at the blanket, half-expecting ash to sift through my fingers.
But there is only coarse wool, only the narrow bed and the half-stolen room.
My chest is tight, as if something heavy sits on it. My body trembles so violently the mattress shivers beneath me.
It wasn’t enough to fix Cassiel. I was a fool to think it would be.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until sparks dance behind them.
Nothing I ever do will be enough.
My victims are still dead. Evander is still dead. My grandmother still lives, the queen still sleeps, and Cassiel is still broken in ways I do not know how to mend.
I drag in a breath that won’t quite fill my lungs.
I can’t fix anything.
The words from the dream echo, no longer shouted but whispered from somewhere deep inside me.
Fix it.
Fix it.
Fix it.
“I can’t,” I croak into the empty room.
No power stirs at my call. I feel scraped hollow, magic and marrow alike.
I curl onto my side, drawing my knees to my chest like a child.
I can’t even fix myself.
Dawn inches higher beyond the window, pale and indifferent.
And in the small, borrowed bed, I lie awake, shaking, waiting for the world to demand something of me again.