All the Things He’d Never Get a Chance to Say

Sefia didn’t know how long she remained on the watchtower, holding Archer’s body, but when she looked up again, the sky was ribboned with fire—scarlet and tangerine and gold in the light of the sunset.

The tower was mostly empty now. The flags no longer flew.

The defeated candidates were gone. Tanin was gone, only a bloodstain marking where she’d died. The Black Navy soldiers who’d defended the ramparts were gone.

Only Sefia and the bloodletters remained.

Scarza was there, sitting beside Sefia with his chin on his knees, his gaze never leaving Archer’s body. Frey and Aljan were there, perched on the parapets, her head on his shoulder. Many of the others were there, on the watchtower, talking or crying quietly.

But not all of them had made it. They’d been nineteen in number. Now Sefia counted only fourteen.

Among the missing was Keon.

She remembered seeing him by the tower door, defending Griegi, crumpling under the candidates’ onslaught like a sapling under an avalanche.

She didn’t ask what happened to him. She didn’t think she could handle hearing it.

Not now.

Not after this.

Not after Archer.

In the hours since his death, he’d gone stiff and cold in her arms, so he didn’t even feel like Archer anymore. But if she laid him down, if she let him go, she knew she’d never have the chance to hold him again.

Scarza touched her shoulder. “Are you ready, sorcerer? We should take his body soon, before it gets dark.”

At his words, the grief doubled her over again, fresh and painful. Her hair, which had come loose from its clip during the battle, fell across her face. Tears spilled from her eyes. “I’ll never be ready,” she said.

Scarza said nothing.

In the silence, a breath of wind, smelling of dust and thundershowers, brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead.

The movement was so familiar it made her shiver.

She lifted her head, looking for someone she knew wasn’t there.

Because he was in her arms.

Because he was dead.

But as she searched the damaged battlements, the stricken faces of the bloodletters, the colors fading from the sky, she felt something else.

A kiss—tender and strong—that echoed her first kiss, under cloud-swept skies, with the moonlight skittering across the waves.

A kiss for all the things he felt for her.

For all the things he’d never get a chance to say.

“Archer?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

But he was there, somehow, against everything she knew to be true, against all the laws of life and death. She’d never touch him again, not really, never see the light in his golden eyes or hear him speak her name. But he was there, somehow.

With her.

In the only way he could be.

Wiping her tears, she kissed his forehead one last time and, folding her first two fingers, one over the other, laid her warm hand over his. “Always,” she said.

As if responding to some unspoken signal, the bloodletters—the ones who had survived—gathered around them. Kneeling, they bowed their heads and crossed their tattooed forearms, and, in broken voices, they murmured, “We were dead, but now we rise.”