There was no stopping Sedetnet’s death; I could not have so much as slowed the knife with my injury dragging at my every movement. As it was, I had to hold my arm to keep it from dangling as I scrambled to his side. So much blood... here was the last of the sacrifices of a previous age, deferred but finally paid. I gathered his hand in mine as he bled, until at last he bled no more and his body dissolved into a dust that clung to my fingers and glistered. So Sihret passed to his reward and, I devoutly hoped, the welcome of his waiting king.

I closed my eyes, holding cold fingers to my cheek, and bent in pain both physical and emotional. Antagonist and mentor and enigma—there was so much yet I did not know, and now I would never. “Sihret,” I whispered. “Sedetnet. Farewell.”

And then I sat back on my heels and looked up to see what his death had wrought.

The darkness had peeled back from the firmament to reveal a blue sky straggled with clouds, and cool autumn sunlight was spreading in pools over a field heaped high with bones. The dead had fallen, deprived of their animating source, and while their passage had churned that sward to brown mud the wind that gamboled over it was clean and bright and smelled poignantly of fallen leaves and high, cold places. The reprieve was so complete I could barely encompass it....could only kneel there, and feel the breeze tug at the hair matted to my neck and brow.

My friends were still alive. They approached now, hesitant; I expected one of them to speak, but it was Tchanu, whom I knew least, who broke the quiet.

“Is it over, Prince of Elves?”

“It is,” I said. “Sihret, who was prince before, made a choice, and his choice banished a demon.”

“Is that how it works?” Radburn asked. “You just... decide not to carry a demon around, and that’s it?”

“It is as simple,” I said, “and as difficult, as that.”

Ivy said, “You’re hurt.”

“I am,” I said. “I could use your help, my dearest, if energy you have to heal.”

“Not as much as I could wish,” she replied. “But enough to keep you until I do.”

As she came to me, Kemses crouched alongside the dust. “The remains, my prince?”

“I don’t think it will linger long,” I said. “It is no normal sediment, to be trammeled into an urn.” I paused, rueful. “If indeed this is something elves do. I confess I have no notion. Do you burn your dead?”

“No, we inter them, just as you do,” Kemses said.

“As we used to,” Chester murmured.

“As humans and elves once did, when we lived here together. Customs have changed... as have we all,” Tchanu said. I looked up from the work Ivy was doing, exposing the gash in my midriff. “My prince. We were exiled to the Archipelago, and most of us remain there yet. But we once lived here. Where then shall we call home? Are we to return to our exile?”

Had I thought our plight resolved with the banishment of the demon? Sedetnet had opened a Door and led the elves to it; the dead had walked, had probably been walking elsewhere—I prayed the Church’s knights had put paid to them; and without question the elves had been revealed, if not by this fight, then by the academics at Vigil when they’d sent their urgent messengers abroad. I pressed the flat of a thumb over one brow, wondering if the nascent headache was blood loss or the revelation of all there was yet before us to be done.

“This is home,” I said at last. “And our rapprochement is long overdue.”

Kemses and Tchanu began overseeing the disposition of my companions on the drake; as they did, I crouched amid the grass, following the gleam of glass. There I discovered, as I knew I must, the fragment that had broken off a fallen prince’s wing: that had tasted a redeemed prince’s blood. Wrapping it carefully in part of my cloak, I took it with me.

On the flight back, Kelu said, “You’re going to have trouble.”

“God forfend I have otherwise,” I replied. “I should hardly know what to do with myself.”

We returned to a city in the throes of impromptu celebration. Had I nursed any misgivings at the contemplation of the unlikely mixing of two such alien populaces, the sight of elves and humans alike sharing what rations they had and laughing around the fires put paid to them. Even the genets moved among them, subdued but present; their effacement was a matter of habit, not of grief, for they would not have known Almond well enough for anything else, and the death of a genet was, after all, a matter of course for slaves accustomed to the whims of cruel masters.

“Didn’t take them long to set that up,” Radburn observed as the drake bent down to allow us to disembark.

“The fires were there already,” Guy said. “No reason not to use them for a bacchanalia.”

“Ah, now, when you put it that way—” Radburn paused, then grinned. “Come to think of it, we finally found those horse-eared lasses Morgan was holding forth about lo so many months ago, didn’t we? No offense intended,” he added to Tchanu, who was watching him with perplexity. “I’m very fond of horses.”

“Well done,” Chester said. “I doubt highly a single one of those lasses will want anything to do with you now.”

“I’ve a mind to find out!” Radburn glanced at me. “You need us for anything?”

“No,” I said. “Go, enjoy.”

Radburn scrambled down off the broken wall. Guy folded his arms and said, “I’ll keep him out of trouble. But you aren’t to make off without us, you hear?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied, mouth twitching.

“Mmm. See that you don’t. Ivy? See that he doesn’t. If you can’t inspire him to more diverting dreams we’ll have to replace you with one of those horse-eared lasses, see if she does any better.”

Ivy’s laugh choked her on the way out. “Guy Du Roi, you are vulgar and ill-bred. A complete lout. And if you try to replace me with a horse-eared lass I’ll stab you.”

“Violent woman you’ve taken up with there,” Guy said. “Thank God, given the life you seem to have stumbled into.” He tossed off an insolent salute and ambled after Radburn.

Tchanu drew near, enough to stand next to me. At last, she said, “I understood not a word of what the young man said.”

I managed a laugh. “Probably for the best, e Nudain.”

She smiled a little, but her puzzlement was amusing. I had expected her to dismiss my human companions with the high-handed scorn I’d witnessed so frequently while in Serala, and was relieved to be wrong... while also wondering why I was.

“By your leave, my liege,” Kemses said, joining me.

“Go,” I said, “Take your leisure. We have earned a day’s rest from our labors.”

“As you say.” He inclined his head, and he and Tchanu left.

“A day’s rest from our labors,” Chester said. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

“What should he call it?” Ivy asked.

“Buying time, I imagine.” Chester glanced at me. “Yes?”

“A little,” I admitted. “But even if it wasn’t... I need a bath and a full night’s rest.”

“You all stink,” Kelu agreed.

Ivy laughed. “Thank you, Kelu.”

Her smile was tight, but she managed one. “You’re welcome.”

“I think I will go down to the bonfires first,” Chester said. “And have a little of whatever they’re having.” He canted his head. “It would probably do you good to join us.”

Would it? I tried to imagine drinking, laughing, dancing, failed utterly. Almond had died to summon an angel. Sihret had died to banish a demon. I was exhausted. What I wanted, more than anything, was sleep. “Another time.” At his hesitation, I said, “There will be other times, Chester.”

He inclined his head.

After he’d gone, I said to Kelu, “And you? Off to the bonfires?”

“No,” she said. “I’m just off. And I don’t want company.”

I called to her receding back, “So long as you return.” She stopped, though she didn’t turn to face me. “I will need your help. No one else keeps me from dwelling on my own consequence with such aplomb.”

Her ear flicked back, then forward again, and she kept going, out of sight.

“And that leaves us,” Ivy said with a sigh, leaning into my side. “And if you say to me you want to find a corner and sleep for twelve hours, I will follow you without complaint.”

“As I was just about to say so, you are in luck.” I caught up her hand and kissed the palm, tasting her beneath the dirt and blood. “How well suited we are! Most providential.”

She laughed. “Oh, Morgan. For God’s sake.” Tugging on my hand. “Come on. I’ve a notion where we might lay our heads down without interruption.”

But she did not lead me to a dark corner; instead, I found myself once again in the stables, where the few horses tenanted there ignored us as we passed to the back of the building. And there, as Ivy lit a lamp, I exclaimed, “God Almighty, the bath’s still here!”

“I’ll bring the water,” she said. “You shall warm it.” At my quizzical glance, she said, “Water being a thing not of flesh and bone, and thus your province now. Wish it warm and clean and we shall have our reward.”

“Oh shall we,” I said, reverent.

I helped her with the water. The bath was just as I remembered it, but far more welcome, and it was true: my touch could warm it, and whisk it clean. We shed our clothes with haste and went to it together, and I washed her hair and she my back, and when she kissed me I answered her. Needed to answer her, a clinging to life and goodness, a memorial for my first lover, and a promise to Almond... and, overwhelmingly, a gift given and received from Ivy, who held me when I began to sob at last.

We slept in the stables, in a room emptied of anything but a meager few bags of feed and some tack. Some hours later, I woke long enough to observe that we’d been joined by Emily and Serendipity, and that my brother was sleeping against the wall and Chester by the door. Reassured, I set my head back down beside Ivy’s and slept again.