Dawn came to Carosso as it comes to every battlefield: indifferent, and beautiful, and far too soon.Ethan had not moved from the place where Seraphina fell, except once, before first light, to go down to the eastern stair and come back up again. They had taken her from his arms in the end, gently—Eileen and Nina, and the young acolyte from the Free Hospital, weeping without a sound—to wash her and wrap her as the saints of the Light were wrapped. But Ethan had stayed, kneeling in the ash at the top of the keep where her wings had blazed and gone out, because moving meant the night was over, and the night being over meant she was truly gone, and he was not ready. He was not sure he would ever be ready.The sun came up on a ruin. Half of Carosso was ash: the eastern quarter that the turned wards had burned and Gorvath had torn through, the outer rings, the northern wall Kharvok had died to break open. Smoke still went up in lazy columns into a clean cold morning. And through it the surv

They held the funeral three days later, when the roads were clear enough for the outlying villages to send their mourners and the masons had cleared the streets that led into the Cathedral square wide enough for the crowd that came.It was the largest gathering Carosso had ever seen—larger than the arena crowds on the last day of the tournament, larger than anything the city had ever turned out for a king. Farmers stood shoulder to shoulder with nobles. The relief column from Ironroot had stayed for it, and Rurik had brought, unasked, a small carved stone meant for the grave itself, with runes worked into its face in the old mining tongue. He translated them for Ethan as she dug where others wouldn't. Fu Rong stood at the head of the Yanling lances she had brought down the forest road before the siege, every one of them in mourning white instead of crimson, with Leon silent and grave at her shoulder. Even a scattering of refugees from Avelline had come. They remembered the Silverleaf,

Seraphina had sat at a council table exactly once: at the round table in the great hall, on the evening the violet first showed on the horizon, wrapped in a shawl, and she had spent most of it listening.Her counsel had never lived there. It had lived in smaller rooms. It lived in the quiet moment before Ethan signed an order that would cost lives, when she would ask, gently, whether he had looked at the whole of the price. It lived in the way she could take apart a captain's casual cruelty without ever raising her voice. Most of all it lived in the steadying fact of her at his shoulder in the hours when the seal in the Prince's box stopped feeling like a trust and became a weight with no bottom.He had not understood, until she was gone, how much of his own judgment he had built around checking it against hers."You keep stopping," Celestia said.It was the third day of the reconstruction planning. He was standing at the table in the solar with a requisition order in front of him—grai

It happened in a sparring match three days after the dedication, in the training yard Garrick had rebuilt first of all the Guild's ruined buildings, on the grounds that soldiers who could not train were soldiers who would die sloppy.The yard still showed the haste of it. Raw new timber stood pale against the smoke-blackened posts that had somehow come through the siege, and a length of the eastern fence was still propped rather than rebuilt. Garrick had drilled the city guard hard all morning.Celestia had not held a practice sword since the siege. Ethan knew why, and knew she knew he knew. Every morning since the dawn on the keep she had tried the flame in her palm, and every morning it had come up orange, and she had closed her hand on it and gone to breakfast. A palm was one thing. The old fire had always run truest along steel.So she had asked for the match herself, against one of Garrick's newer captains: a solid, unremarkable swordsman named Orin, nothing like anything she had

The first letter came twelve days later, by a half-frozen courier who had changed horses three times to make the mountain road in good time. Ethan read it standing in the receiving hall.On the fourth day of her absence, a second caravan was found on the western road, a day further out than the first and in nearly the same state: the wagons standing in the road with their shafts down, every scrap of food and leather gone, no drivers, no bodies, no blood, no birds. The scouts Garrick had kept on the western road since the first one brought back one thing more. The yoke-pole of the lead wagon had been bitten through. Not cut. Bitten, clean, by a mouth wider than an ox is long—and the splinters at the break had still been wet.Ethan spent two days with the scouts and the Guild's maps, drawing lines from the two wagons to every place the fled host had last been seen. None of the lines met.On the sixth day, the keystone garrison came home.They came in through the south gate in the late af