Page 60 of Tomb of Ancients
Khent waited for me at the castle door, leaning against it, hiswounds making him slump with fatigue, all the more because he had taken up Mother’s body and now carried it across both shoulders. Together we left the ruins behind, walking in silence down the grassy hill to the road, where the carriage and horses waited to take us back to Coldthistle House.
It would take time, I knew, for this new dark will in me to settle. But it was nothing like Father’s influence, jarring and foreign; this new voice, new perspective, felt entwined with me naturally, as if it had been there all along, a dormant fire waiting to be stoked. Mother’s spirit had changed when it became mine, and briefly I considered that, just like Father, she really was, in some sense, broken. That gave me pause, but then I sat with it, joining Khent in the driver’s box, the wind harshly cool against my face as he took us back, and I decided that yes, Motherwasbroken.
And so was I. So were we all. Death had changed her. Her peace had turned to passion, and now that ardor was mine to bear. If we had left the tomb unchanged, then why enter it at all? Our story was the only one to survive the tomb. I had looked into the face of the one that made us all and found only contempt, and I knew that I could not let my own folk, my own friends, look into my face and see the same.
I would play the Binders’ sordid game of lives and loss, but I would—must—change the rules. Mother taught me that. My dear, dear friends taught me that, too.
“How do you feel?” Khent asked, his voice lost amid thethunder of hooves and whistling winds.
I took the pack from my back and laid it across my lap as we chewed the ground, making haste back toward the mansion. “I only feel... hollow.”
“Hollow? I had meant your arm, but very well. Yes, hollow. That is all right, to be hollow. That can be filled up with hope. Or with grief.”
“Grief. Hope.” I puzzled over those words, then smiled into bracing cold. “Instead I shall choose resolve.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1247, Unknown
There are things best left unsaid in the hours after defeat. The heart is weaker in those hours, when a vague sense of consequence becomes truth. Becomes life. Henry has asked me to try once more, to join as they travel east, following the jade caravansalong the Silk Road. There are rumors—and there are always rumors—of a woman in Si-ngan who has heard the remaining riddle.
But I will not be going east. I will not be going anywhere. I cannot watch Ara bandage her eye once more while Henry writes obsessive notes and insists, first to himself, then to us, that this journey has only just begun. When I refused, he called me a coward, but this time it did not sting.
Henry, if time or circumstance or some foolish trick of luck ever brings this diary into your possession, I would have you know something. There is, in fact, one more riddle, and it goes like this:
What is a tree that needs the sun but bends and grows away from it? What is a flower that craves rain but only blooms in the desert?
You can run to the ends of this world, Henry, search in every dusty corner, ask every passing merchant, and chase down every idle rumor, but you will not find what you seek. The answers to your questions are not in a hidden tomb or an ancient book, and while my sight dims as I turn away from Roeh and my people, your sight failed a long time ago.
Your riddle is not at the end of a long road. The riddle lay before you all this time. Why live? Why go on? Why choose creation over destruction? I am glad to leave the dog with you, because perhaps, dear friend, you will one day see it in his eyes. Why choose to go on? Because that which is unconditional iseternal. You were made to be eternal, and I love you for it, if only you loved yourself with my same true heart.
As you travel east, I will go west. I think I will seek out poets and sit in their presence and listen to their sad rhymes, wondering always what cutting critique you would offer them. One day Roeh will call me back to service, and I shall go, and I will lament, over and over again, that the request has not come from you.
The house, not in turmoil but in silence, looked shattered against the fields. Not a single window remained intact, and the east tower, that closest to the border with the shepherd’s property, had collapsed. When the carriage stopped and I was on the drive again, I at last felt the extent of the damage to my body. I was bruised in places I had never been bruised before. My arm vacillated between stinging needles and numbness.
Khent lifted Mother’s body out of the carriage proper and carried her along beside me as we circled back toward the site of the battle. Corpses littered the lawn, but not our friends’. I wondered if they would stay there and rot, and I thought with weary resignation that it would fall to me to see them all on. It would do everyone good to see a display of butterflies after so much blood.
“They’re back!” Poppy, who had been resting on the ground with Bartholomew, jumped up and ran to us. “But you are hurt, Louisa, and the purple lady, too.”
I saw no sign of Niles or Giles. Or Mr. Morningside and Mrs. Haylam, for that matter.
“Oh dear!” Mary, Lee, and Chijioke emerged from the kitchen at the sound of Poppy’s shouts. They rushed over and helped Khent lay Mother down on an unstained patch of grass under the kitchen awning. Mary’s eyes drifted to the bag on my back.
“It’s our book,” I told her. “The shepherd is gone and the white book destroyed.”
“Aye, they all dropped out of the sky the moment it happened,” Chijioke said. His hands were burned from the rifle muzzle, and his shirt was stained with soot. “I can’t believe you did it, that it... that it could even be done.”
“I saw the place where the books are made,” I explained. “There were... complications. To destroy the book, ours had to be remade, which meant my spirit had to be removed, which meant—”
“Another soul was needed,” Chijioke finished. It was his area of expertise, after all, and he bowed his head, sighing. “That cannot have been easy.”
“Easy!?” Mary cried. “Look at her arm! We should get you inside, and Khent, too. We can see to all your injuries and find you something to eat. Giles was badly wounded. He’s upstairswith Fathom and his brother. I do so hope he survives.”
“In a moment,” I said. “Only, is there something I could use to bind my arm up? It hurts to let it swing so.”
Chijioke patted Mary on the shoulder and then trotted into the kitchen. He returned shortly with two white sheets from the pantry and carefully lifted my arm, bracing it against my middle before using the sheets to wrap it and then swaddle me diagonally across the shoulders to keep it firmly in place.
“Thank you. Where is Mr. Morningside?”
