The seventh day came as all endings did. Dawn had barely touched the sky when we left the village. Ash carried a shovel she had borrowed from Tom the night before. I carried the Darkness Binding folded across my arms, the way I had seen others carry the dead.
We did not go far. A clearing past the treeline, close enough to find again, far enough that no idle wanderer would stumble upon it. Ash chose the spot -beneath a broad oak with a split trunk, the kind of landmark one could find twice.
“This will do,” Ash said. She drove the shovel into the earth. The ground was soft from the week’s rain, and it gave easily. She dug in silence, and I stood and watched the hole deepen.
This was a tactical consideration. That was the reason for this. Our backgrounds and our marks were already suspicious, the Inker’s unease had been plain last time. My Darkness Binding was a marvel amongst marvels. Ash’s green armor was also fine, I could admit. Arriving in armor as extraordinary as ours would only invite questions that had no safe answers. We would retrieve these when the time was right. Someday.
That was the reason. It was a sound one.
Eventually, the hole was deep enough. Ash set the shovel aside and reached for her own armor first. She placed the pieces inside the hole one by one -the green plate, the greaves, the pauldron. Each piece she set into the earth with great care. The Hero’s Sword she kept. That much I expected. A Hero without a sword was simply a woman, and even stripped of her Class, I did not think Ash was ready to be simply that. Besides, the sword no longer had its power or its glow. Without them, it was just fine steel.
She stepped back and looked at me. I knelt at the edge of the hole. The Darkness Binding lay across my arms. I had worn it for many years. It had turned aside the blows of Heroes and the wrath of Gods. It had been the last thing many had seen before the end.
It was just armor now. Its special functions were all but gone. The power that had once made it indestructible had faded with the System that had named it. What remained was just a very durable garment of black and red. I suspected that if I wore it, it would settle over me as uncomfortably as Martha’s garish clothes once had. I set it into the hole, beside Ash’s armor. The black lay against the green.
Ash picked up the shovel. She paused. “Are you alright?”
“I am fine. Most of the ache is gone. I can draw in ambient mana-”
“That is not what I asked,” Ash said softly.
I did not look at her. “Fill it,” I said.
Ash did not press further. Instead, she did as I’d asked. The dirt covered the green first, then the black. When the last of the Darkness Binding disappeared beneath the earth, something inside my chest shifted. Was this grief? No. I did not feel such a thing, and certainly not for a mere object. I was lighter. That was all. As if a weight I had been carrying for a very long time had finally been set down. Ash patted the earth flat. We stood over the unmarked packed earth and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
I was dressed in the clothes Martha had set out for me today. A brown dress, simple and worn. Ash wore a similar thing in a faded blue. They were not bad garments. Certainly not garish. We walked back to the village in silence.
Hamel was awake when we returned. Doors were open and people moved through the paths with an urgency that I had not seen before. They knew what day it was then. I saw him from across the square.
Marin sat on a low wall near the well, his legs dangling. Sara was beside him, talking. Saying something I could not hear. Her hands moved as she spoke, shaping something in the air that I could not make out from this distance. The boy was listening. His head was tilted toward her, and he was nodding. His eyes were open, and they could see. I watched for three seconds. Perhaps four. I turned away before either of them could notice my gaze.
Martha caught me before I entered her hut. She was holding a small satchel, packed tight. The golden egg was already inside, nestled in a layer of white cloth. Beside it, folded neatly, were several changes of clothing.
“I did not ask for this,” I said. I had only come to retrieve the egg.
“No, you didn’t.” Martha pressed the satchel into my hands. Her grip was firm for a woman her age. “There’s a dress for warmer weather at the bottom and one for when it’s cold. You’ll want both, where you’re going…and where you might go after that.”
“You do not know where I am going.”
“I know you’ll be cold eventually lass.” She smoothed the strap of the satchel against my shoulder. “You just eat when hungry…don’t skip meals. Think I taught ya a little, at least enough to make something that’ll pass for food. Ya eat properly, you hear me?”
I heard her. “That is…noted,” I managed.
Martha looked at me. It was the same look she had given me every day since I had first sat at her table and eaten four bowls of stew. I still did not have a name for it, but now I was starting to recognize its shape, somewhat. “You’re a kind girl, Lily,” she said. Her gaze went past me, finding Marin and Sara where I had left them. It returned to me again.
I had returned to the hut last night in…an unfortunate state. Ash had carried me to our room. I had assumed that Martha and Tom would both have been asleep. I had assumed wrong. Martha had been waiting for us. I opened my mouth. There were many things I could have said -many corrections, many objections. The words that came were not any of them. “Your stew was adequate,” I said. “I will remember it.” I will not miss it.
Martha smiled, and her eyes were wet. She touched my shoulder one last time. Then she turned and went inside, and the door closed behind her. I stood there for a moment longer than I should have.
The sound of boots reached us before I saw them. Then the creak of armor. Then the Inker appeared at the northern edge of the village, his soldiers arrayed behind him in the same formation as before. He had brought almost twice as many men as he had before, that much I could tell from a distance. This was no escort. Or at least, this was an escort that could become something very different, given the chance.
Many of those men and women in silver stood at the village’s gate. The others formed another line, a twenty paces behind the first group. I stood at the center of the square. Ash stood beside me. The satchel hung from my shoulder. The Inker looked at us as he approached, stopping halfway between us and the men he had brought. He gazed at the scorched earth that had not yet fully healed. Something flickered across his face. He smothered it. If he had any questions, he did not ask.
“You said one week,” I said. “It has been seven days.”
The Inker composed himself and straightened his robes. “So it has, and here you both are. You are both ready, I trust?”
“We are,” Ash said. She stepped forward. “We gave our word and we mean to keep it. We’ll come willingly.”
The Inker stared at us and he nodded slowly. Something drained from his soldiers, and there was that greed in his eyes again. He smiled widely, turned to his soldiers and raised a hand.
That was when Tom stepped between them. The old merchant planted himself in the dirt path with his arms folded across his chest, his round belly jutting forward. He was shaking. “Now hold on,” Tom said.
The Inker’s hand stopped. His eyes moved to the merchant, and there was a sneer across his face.
“T-these two saved this village,” Tom said. His voice wavered on the first word, found its footing on the second, and by the third it was louder than I had ever heard it. “Some beast came down on us from the sky, and your soldiers weren’t here. They were, and they saved us folk.”
“Tom.” Martha’s voice was sharp behind him. When had she approached?
Tom did not stop. “You want to drag them off like criminals? After what they did for us?”
One of the soldiers near the gate took a step forward. Tom did not move. His shaking got worse, but his feet stayed exactly where they were. Then Martha was beside him. She put her hand on his arm. I thought she meant to pull him away. She stood next to her husband instead. “The man’s a fool,” she said. “But he’s not wrong this time. These two lasses ain’t no criminals.”
The guard from the wall -the woman who had tried to fight the phoenix and had run- stepped out from behind a hut. She said nothing as she joined Tom. The man whose fence I had mended was next. Then the woman from the well. Then a man I did not recognise, and another, and then there were a dozen of them. Two dozen. Half the village, standing in a loose and terrified line between the Inker’s soldiers and us.
None of them were warriors. The strongest mark among them was a Spark. I had seen men face insurmountable odds before. They had always been facing me. I had never understood why they fought battles they knew were pointless. I did not understand it now either, but now it made something inside me ache.
The Inker stared at this display. His lip curled. He seemed to be weighing scales only he could see. One of the village men stepped forward and unsheathed a pathetic wooden sword. The Inker raised his hands, and I saw both of his marks start to glow. His mouth opened.
“You fools!” I said. The village turned and every face found mine. “You absolute blithering, suicidal fools.” My voice carried across the square. I looked at Tom, who was still shaking. At Martha, whose hand had not left his arm. “Step aside. Do not leave the children with-” My voice caught. I crushed the obstruction and continued. “You would die for nothing. We already agreed to go and we are going. Stand aside, all of you, before I lose what little respect I have left for this miserable hamlet.”
Nobody moved. Ash stepped forward. Her hand found my arm. Hers was a brief touch. “Please,” Ash said to them. Her voice was gentle. “We’ll be alright, we chose this. Let us go.”
Martha looked at Ash, then at me. Something passed between us that I barely understood. Slowly, the line parted. Tom was the last to step aside. He looked like he wanted to say something. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.
“You come back, you hear?” His voice cracked on the last word. “Both of you…Ash, Lily. You come back and you eat my wife’s cooking and you tell us how it went. Don’t matter how long it takes, just come back someday.”
I did not answer. I did not trust myself to. Ash dipped her head. “We will.”
The Inker watched all of this in silence. When we approached, he glanced at our clothing and said nothing. Whatever the man had thought of what had just transpired, he buried it. He gave a signal, and the soldiers started to move. I walked past him and past his first line of soldiers. I walked past the last hut at the edge of the village, until I was almost out of the gate.
“Lys!”
I stopped and turned. Sara had broken free from somewhere behind me. She ran toward me and skidded to a halt, nearly losing her balance on the dirt. Her face was flushed and her breathing was quick. She was holding something in both hands. She thrust it toward me before I had time to speak.
It was a cord made of thin leather, the kind the villagers used to tie bundles. Threaded onto it was a single clay bead, small enough to sit in the center of my palm. I looked at it. The bead was rough and lopsided. It had been shaped by small hands into something that was not quite round. Two small points jutted from its top, curving slightly inward. They were horns.
They were horns.
The girl had shaped the bead to look like horns. My horns. They were uneven, and the left one was thicker than the right, and the curve was wrong in a way that made them look more like the ears of one of those long-eared vermin, but I knew what they were meant to be. Something pressed against the back of my eyes. I held the cord up and looked at it in the morning light.
“Is this…ade-quit?” Sara asked. The word came out broken and careful, as if she had been practicing it and still could not get the shape of it right.
I paused. My Cradle Line was humming. The Inker huffed, his soldiers shifting restlessly, but I did not care. I crouched down. It was a slow motion, careful, the way one might approach something fragile. My hand rose toward the girl’s head. It trembled, and I did not try to stop it.
I placed my hand on her hair. It was soft beneath my fingers. The girl did not flinch. She leaned into my hand instead, the way those small creatures by the river had leaned into each other. “It is more than adequate,” I said, and meant it.
Sara’s face broke into that smile. The one I had not earned and could not seem to refuse.
I lifted the cord over my head and let the bead settle against my chest. It was light and warm from where she had been holding it. I tucked it beneath the collar of the dress, where it rested against my skin. I looked at her. There was more to say, and I did not know how to say most of it. I looked at the green Spark on her arm. It was small and faint. “You will practice,” I said. “That mark of yours -you will grow it. You will be stronger when I see you next.”
Sara nodded fiercely, so hard her whole head was bobbing, her jaw set with a seriousness that looked absurd on her young face.
“You are my first retainer in this new world,” I said. “Do you know what that means?” Sara shook her head. “It means you serve at my side. That you carry my name and my…trust.” It had never been thus before. “It is a position of some importance.” I held her gaze. “This is not something given lightly.”
Sara’s eyes were wide. She did not understand a word of it, I was sure, but she straightened her back all the same. She puffed out her small chest. “I’m a re-tainer,” she said, testing the word. Then, louder, “I’m Lys’s retainer!”
I should have corrected her. Should have explained the weight of the title, the centuries of tradition behind it, the blood that had been spilled to earn such a position in my court. “Yes,” I said instead. “You should be proud.”
Sara beamed. She threw her arms around me and the force of it nearly toppled me. Her grip was ferocious for something so small. I did not embrace her back. I placed my hand on her head again, and I let it rest there.
Ash was watching from a few paces away. She had an expression on her face that I could not read. “Lys?” Ash said quietly. She had heard the girl say it before, and now she was asking.
“I prefer it to Lily,” I said.
Ash nodded seriously as Sara let go. The girl stepped back and wiped her nose with her sleeve. I rose to my full height.
“Wait for me,” I said. “I will return someday. No Queen would ever abandon her retainer and deserve the name.”
The girl was crying. I saw that now. She was crying, and trying very hard not to make any sound at all. Perhaps because of me. I could not face her then. I turned and walked south. My hand found the bead beneath my collar, just for a moment. Then it fell to my side. Ash fell into step beside me. The Inker and his soldiers led the way ahead, and behind us, Hamel grew small. All of it.
The huts, the low wall, the village that had stood between us and a small army. The oak where Sara liked to sit. I carried a satchel with an egg. Around my neck, was a clay bead shaped like horns by a child who thought I was pretty. These were the possessions of Lysanthia, formerly the Demon Queen, the strongest to have ever lived. It was not a collection that inspired much fear.
The road stretched ahead. Ash walked beside me, her sword at her hip. She did not speak. The silence between us had changed over the past week. It was now truly something that did not need filling. There was a warmth in my chest that had nothing to do with the Cradle, or the egg, or the afternoon sun. It sat behind my ribs and would not leave. I did not know its name.
Fools. Every last one of them.
I did not look back, but I wanted to. That was new. At some point, Hamel had turned from nothing into something.