Page 200 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Riasha and Tisaanah had spearheaded the initial recovery efforts, and though everything was still a mess of rubble, it was beginning to look more like a settlement and less like a battlefield. The recovered bodies burned beyond the edges of the city. The rebels had secured wine from the inside of the Zorokovs’ palace, and though it was midday, the streets were full of drunken partying—one part funeral reception, one part freedom celebration, one part exhausted release.

I found Sammerin in a house not far from the one that Tisaanah and I were staying in, which he and another healer had formed into a makeshift hospital. He sat on a bench outside, head tipped back to rest against the outer wall, smoking.

“You look horrific,” I said.

“Thank you. So do you.” He let out a long puff of smoke and regarded me up and down. “Though fairly unremarkable looking for someone who has now ended three different wars under strange and mysterious circumstances.”

I gave him a smile and a very polite, “Fuck you.” I took a seat on the bench beside him, and he offered me his pipe, which I declined.

“That’s terrible for your health, you know,” I said.

“Oh? Is it?” Sammerin gave me a deadpan glare and took another defiant puff.

I nodded to the door. “How’re things in there?”

“About what one would expect.” He glanced at a group of people nearby who wielded half-broken instruments to make joyously horrible music. “Big contrast between out here and in there.”

“Victory is expensive.”

Sammerin let out a scuff of a laugh, like this was a cruelly funny joke—and it was, wasn’t it?

For so many, today was the happiest day of their lives. For others, the most tragic.

I looked down at my hands. They hadn’t stopped shaking since the battle. The pads of my fingertips tingled, like they still felt the remnants of the heart’s magic.

I swallowed past a lump in my throat and shook away the image of those rearranged bodies.

“How’s Tisaanah?” Sammerin asked.

I didn’t know how to answer that. “She’s… alive.”

“Oof.”

“Right.” I rubbed my temple. “She’s resting.”

“She’ll be furious when she realizes that you didn’t wake her up.”

“She’ll get over it.”

He gave me a look that said,Really? Will she?

I shrugged. “Someone’s got to keep her from working herself to death.”

“Maybe that’s how she wants to go.”

He only sounded like he was half-joking, and the image of Serel curled up in his grief flashed through my mind and refused to leave. I felt a little sick, because it was too close to being true. I knew what it was like to place no value in your own life. I knew it well enough to see that in Tisaanah—the fact that she’d be willing to sacrifice everything, anything, for her cause.

I couldn’t make those kinds of jokes today.

“You might want to go see Brayan,” Sammerin said, mercifully changing the topic. “He seems a little lost.”

An unsupervised Brayan was never a good thing.

I found him helping to clear some rubble in the back of the city. He, like everyone else, looked tired.

“Congratulations,” he said, when he saw me. “You’re a hero. Again.”

My stomach turned.Hero. Sure. How come that word was only applied to me when a bunch of people were dead? I wanted to say,Are we looking at the same city?

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