Thought I was the frightening one,” a weak voice said from behind Anya. “But that’s not true. You’re much more frightening than I am.”
Anya whirled, the burning within her dimming at once, and found Tieran pushing himself upright with a pained look on his face. He was a disaster in his human form, all blood and soot and alarmingly pale skin, but a bit of his color was returning, and for Anya he managed a rueful smile.
“What are you doing?” she asked, unable to hide her shock. “I thought he’d killed you.”
Tieran stifled a groan and attempted, unsuccessfully, to stand. Anya was at his side in a moment, keeping him seated with gentle hands.
“Ridiculous boy. Don’t get up.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted. “Or I will be in a minute. Don’t you know it takes some doing to kill a god, Anya Astraea?”
“You’re not a god,” she scoffed, though tears were blurring her vision. “And killing one was straightforward enough, once I really got down to it.”
She fixed her eyes on Tieran, and he must have seen the fear still lingering in her—that she would suffer one more loss, and it would be him, and she would not be able to bear up under it.
“Don’t look so,” Tieran said softly, brushing the tears from her face with his thumb. “We’re gonna be just fine, you and me.”
Anya nodded, but despite her resolve, she’d never really expected to succeed in the task she’d set for herself—it wasn’t for Weatherell girls to triumph. They broke, or sometimes died. They did not emerge from the cavern of the god whole and victorious. It would all take a great deal of getting used to.
“Do you have another knife?” she asked.
Tieran’s smile widened. “Course I do.”
“A big one?”
Fidgeting, Tieran procured a blade that was halfway to a short sword.
Anya frowned. “Where did you—no. Never mind.”
Squaring her shoulders, she returned to the remains of the god and stared down at them dispassionately for a moment. He had only been a monster, after all. Only a twisted thing made of malice and lust for power, without anything truly divine at his core. He had not been enough to stand against her, and had never deserved the pure-hearted sacrifices of all the Weatherell girls who came before. Had not deserved Willem, or Ilva, or any of the others, or the piece of Anya’s heart she’d never regain in the absence of her sister.
Stooping, Anya gripped Tieran’s keen blade tight and cut the god of the mountain’s head from his shoulders.
“I’m not finished yet,” she said to the thief, heaving the god’s head up by one curling horn. It was ponderous and awkward and would be a burden to drag down the mountain, but the god weighed less on Anya in death than he had in life. “There’s still something left for me to do.”
“Frightening,” Tieran muttered. But there was devotion in his eyes when he looked at Anya, encumbered by the weight of the god, and she knew there was boundless affection in hers when she looked back at him.
At the center of Banevale, as in most cities or towns across Albion, there lay an open square. It served for a market and a meeting place, where the Elect taught or dealt out judgments and itinerant preachers spoke of wrath and fire. Lackeys of Lord Astraea levied taxes there or enlisted new youths for his private guard. People learned their news in the square; they conducted business and gossiped and bickered and wooed one another within its busy confines.
At the edge of that square, Anya hesitated. Though they’d passed a day and a night on the mountain and it was only a little after dawn, a crowd milled about already. A motley assortment of hawkers and the working poor and girls with half-healed burns, of well-clad merchants and gray-robed Elect, of liveried guards and, on horseback, tending to some unknown business, Anya’s father himself. The moment she stepped out of the shadows, Anya knew every gaze would be trained on her. Every listening soul would hang upon her words.
Her hands began to tremble and her stomach to turn over.
“Tieran, I’m afraid,” she breathed.
“I know,” he said reassuringly. “I know, but you can do this. You got to do this—if you don’t get up there and say something, Lord Nevis or the Elect’ll do it for you. They’ll twist what you done, and find a way to use it to their own ends. But I’m right here. Be waiting for you and watching you, all the time.”
Anya shut her eyes for a moment, wishing the crowds would be gone when she’d opened them. But the waiting masses remained resolutely there, along with the increasingly burdensome weight of what she’d taken from the god of the mountain, now wrapped in her indispensable oilskin coat.
Fanning the embers of her courage to life once more, Anya stepped forward.
The crowd parted before her like water, leaving a broad clear path for Anya to travel. At the center of the square stood an empty and unattended wagon, and Anya scrambled onto its bed. She got to her feet and pulled the oilskin from the god of the mountain’s severed head, then let it fall onto the wooden planking, which it hit with a low, thunderous sound, as if it still held the power to shake the earth.
But there was nothing of life in it, and no fire gleamed from those filmy, dead eyes, which had once beheld so much of sacrifice and done so much wickedness.
Anya cleared her throat and clasped her hands before her, so that the gathered watchers would not see how they shook.
“This is your god,” she said, and it seemed a miracle that her voice rang out clear and true. “My name is Anya Astraea and I crossed Albion for a sacrifice. My mother, Willem, and my sister, Ilva, both went before me. My mother gave her hands to the god of the mountain. My sister’s life was stolen by him. So I set out on my sister’s behalf, to make right what others have called her failure. But I never intended to serve as an offering myself—my intent was always to exact one, on behalf of every girl the god has marred or broken. So here he is, what’s left of him, and here I am. Maybe it was blasphemy, what I’ve done. But my Arbiter spoke of how someday, justice would run down the mountain like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. I think what I undertook was right and just, and if it was wrong you can lock me away but you can’t undo it. I’m glad of that. Right or wrong, I’m glad no other girl will ever have to make that climb and give up some of who she is to buy peace for us all.”
Anya caught her breath and for a moment, the square was utterly silent. Orielle had appeared at the head of the crowd, her expression unreadable, and Jonus Astraea watched Anya from astride his tall black horse, with something calculating behind his eyes.
“Anyway, that’s everything,” Anya said, with a trace of Tieran’s stubborn sullenness. “I’ve done what I came to do. Whatever happens next is up to everyone else.”
Turning, she scrambled back down from the wagon box. Every soul in the square stayed rooted to the spot, their eyes fixed on the remains of the god of the mountain that Anya had left behind.
“Was that all right?” Anya whispered to Tieran as she reached him at the edge of the square.
“Yeah,” he said anxiously. “It was perfect. You were perfect. But we got to get going, I think we only got a moment before—”
He grabbed Anya’s hand and broke into a half run, away from the square and its crowd as ripples of raised voices began to spread. Like wildfire, pandemonium broke loose, but Tieran was quick and clever, and had them away before it had truly caught. Flurries of running feet and shouts echoed here and there, but the thief dodged through the streets with Anya in tow, until they reached a shadowed alley and an even dimmer recessed doorway.
“Got to get you out of this city and off the high roads,” Tieran said, half to himself, as they stood huddled together. “Lucky for us I know some people what take care of that sort of thing.”
“Tieran?” Anya said.
“Hm?” He glanced nervously past her, at the head of the alley. But there was no one there besides a shadow that resolved itself into Midge, brought to them by her incomprehensible internal compass and transparently happy as she pressed herself against Anya’s legs.
“Tieran?” Anya said again.
“Yeah?” This time it was the boarded-up doorways the thief scanned, as if a contingent of guards or flock of grayrobes might come pouring out of a hitherto abandoned building.
“Tieran,” Anya insisted.
His sly hazel eyes met hers at last, and both of them stilled.
“If I go back to my Weatherell, and to the others, would you come with me?” Anya asked. “I don’t expect you to stay, not always. But I need to see my mother and tell everyone what’s happened—they won’t let all the other girls brought up for sacrifice know otherwise, I don’t think. I want to be with you, though, whenever and wherever I can. And maybe later, to be with your wanderers.”
Tieran nodded. “Where you go, I go. That’s it for me from now on. Never gonna want to stay long in a place if you’re not there. Can’t promise I won’t disappear for a day or two now and then, but I’ll come back. I’ll always come back to you.”
“I love you,” Anya said earnestly. “All of you.”
The thief grinned. “And I think you’re all right, Weatherell girl.”
With Midge lying watchfully at their feet, Anya stood on her toes and kissed Tieran until his smug look and underlying wariness had gone and he was aware of nothing but her. For her part, Anya sank into the warmth and light being near him woke at her center. Only for a moment did her attention waver, as a pale glow flickered to life across the alley.
Ilva stood there, and her ghost was no longer a gaunt and decaying thing. She looked as she had the day she set out from Weatherell—eager, and full of expectation. As her eyes caught Anya’s, she smiled, raising a hand in farewell.
Be brave, little moon, the air itself seemed to whisper. Hold on to your courage without me.
Then Ilva faded, and for the last time, vanished.
The sorrow that rose in Anya as she went was no longer enough to overwhelm. It came with a bittersweet pang and softened into the comfort of memory, and left Anya hungrier than ever for the business at hand.
For life.
For joy.
For an ending that might, perhaps, not always be happy, but that she knew unshakeably was just, and right, and good.