CHAPTER 461: 461: MOSQUITOES AND ONE PROMISE PART THREE

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There are many kinds of endings. Some are loud. Some are wet. Some are clever. This one was none of those. It was thorough. It was an accountant sweeping the last coins into the correct box and writing a line under the total and not making the flourish too big because that would be vulgar.

Kai set the last man down with a hand on his throat and a small adjustment of wrist that said, Stop thinking you matter to our story, not unkindly, not with contempt, just with a tiredness that belongs to men who have turned too many pages like this. The body sighed and obeyed.

Silence tried to arrive. It didn’t quite manage. Men still breathed hard. A woman sobbed once and then turned it into a cough. Someone’s blade clinked against a stone because hands shake after they have been calm too long.

Alka settled with a rush of hot air and the smell of feathers rasped by wind. She looked pleased in the way a hawk looks pleased when the kitchen is full and there are no thieves near the meat. Above, Skyweaver let the wind unstack itself in careful layers, a weaver unpicking a heavy cloth without letting it sag.

Mia took two steps before she let herself run.

She went to him the way you go to water after a day’s march: not stylishly, not with any pretense, holding herself together only as long as courtesy demanded. She did not jump. She did not fling. She went into him and stayed there like a home finding its walls.

He caught her and did the thing he had been refusing to imagine for a hundred mornings. He put his chin in her hair and let out the sound a man makes when the part of the world that marks itself "mine" has stopped being theoretical.

He did not kiss her yet. That will be a grief for songs later and a pleasure for a different Chapter. He held her. She fit. That was the miracle.

Thea watched.

It is a hard thing to be the person a story does not turn to look at. It is harder when your face is the sort of face the world usually looks at whether it has earned the right or not. She stood like a pilaster, hard and unadorned, holding up a part of the ceiling so the better paintings could be seen on the other side of the room.

No one paid her much attention.

Good, a mean part of her thought. This is safer. Bad, another part admitted, scandalized by the honesty and promising to punish it later with a fast three-mile run and a cold river. She looked away from their tenderness because tenderness is a thing you do not watch unless you have been invited to, and Thea had not been invited anywhere except to the part of the story where sharp people stand between other people and edges.

Her eyes found Vexor and Needle and the four others whose names she had learned to spit out like curses to hide the fact that once she had learned them like a sister.

"Why," she said again, lower now, too low for drama, just the right height for anger to sit down and become grief, "are they alive? I don’t understand what’s going on here?"

Needle opened his mouth and then shut it because that is a thing men learn to do when the answer belongs to someone else. Vexor swallowed. He had never been good at leaving silence alone.

"Because a man you call a toy taught us how not to die," Vexor said, not loud, not meek, just true.

Thea flinched, not because he had lied. Because he had been unkind enough to be exact.

Mia pulled back without leaving Kai’s hands.

"This is Kai," she told her sister. "The same one. The only one. My Kai."

Thea stared at him for a heartbeat, as if it would change anything.

"No," she said, but it wasn’t a denial. It was awe, dulled and disguised and made palatable to her pride by being wrapped in irritation. "You do not go from two stars to seven stars rank in four months."

"You do," Kai said, because he had, and that was the end of that argument.

She bristled because bristling is what she does when someone denies her the comfort of being incredulous. Her jaw set. Then her eyes slipped —just a fraction— to his mouth, to the line of his jaw, to the meet of plate and skin, to the way standing near him made the air taste like it had decided to be kinder to lungs. She scowled at her own face for noticing anything in the middle of a field that had been busy hosting knives.

"Who taught you how to be so handsome?" she demanded, as if this were something that could be laid at someone’s door and punished. "And why do you have his name?"

Mia almost laughed. She was too raw for it to come out clean. It came out like a breath that had been held too long finding itself again.

"Later," she told Thea. "Or never, if you can manage that."

"I can manage anything," Thea said, but it was the kind of sentence you say when you are absolutely certain it is not true and you have the good grace not to ask the world to contradict you publicly.

Kai turned from her to the slope.

"Silvershadow," he called. "Report."

The shadow at the base of the ramp detached itself from the work and became a man whose hand had forgotten what it felt like to be unbroken and whose mind had not. He sketched a bow that was not a bow, because this house did not spend respect on creases. It spent it on staying.

"First line intact," Silvershadow said. "Second line intact. Drone injuries: eighty-seven treatable, twenty-one serious, none dead. Yavri’s wedge held the left. Casualties light. Enemy: all quiet."

"All dead," Shadeclaw amended, short and without music.

Yavri did not move, because she had been trained since she could walk to be the place on which other men’s eyes rest and find a wall, not a woman. Her jaw eased when she saw Mia breathe against Kai’s chest once, simply, without effort.

"Good," Kai said to all of them at once and none of them in particular. He did not raise his voice. The ledge carried it. The mountain seemed to listen. "Hold the positions until we clean the field. No one chases anything. Alka—watch the ridge. Skyweaver—keep the altar in your palm. No wing passes you. Luna—Akayoroi—status?"

The thread in his skull opened like a well-oiled door.

—She sleeps,—Luna’s thought came, quiet as a hand over a candle to move it without killing the flame. —The song is low now. We think it will end before dawn. We have not touched her. We will not.—

—The wind is as I like it,—Skyweaver sent, satisfied and fierce. —No eyes from the sky that I do not own.—

—The ridge is mine,—Alka said aloud because birds are rude and do not need threads to be heard. "If any thief comes, I make a story with him."

"Make a short one," Kai said without looking up.

He turned back to Mia.

Now that the knives were quiet, he let himself see the places the knives had spoken. Blood at her jaw, dried half to dust. A tear in the leather where a man had wanted to write his name and had been denied. A slice at the hip, shallow, telling him more about himself than about her — because he felt the old anger try to stand and he put his hand on its head and told it to sit.

"You’re hurt," he said.

"You’re rude," she said. "I was going to say you look—" She stopped because some words should not be given to air that is still thick with what it has carried.

"Alive," he offered.

"Yes," she said, relief making her eyes warmer than caution approved of. "Alive is infuriatingly handsome."

"Don’t encourage him," Thea muttered, and then winced because she was encouraging him by acknowledging the premise at all.

"Why are you here," Kai asked her again, slower now, not a challenge, a curiosity with a hard back to lean on.

Thea opened her mouth to say something about duty and audits and the terrible habit some people have of thinking you can leave your house without finding out which windows have decided to stop fitting their frames. What came out instead was the truth.

"Because," she said, every word like a coin pried up from old mortar, "someone was going to try to kill her. And I...did not want to be late to that."

Mia glanced at her, and for once there was no fight in the look, only the wild, tired affection sisters store in the jars where they keep their wheat.

"Thank you," she said.

"You’re welcome," Thea snapped, like a dog that bites the hand it wants to lick to make sure it isn’t punished for being soft.

Kai nodded. "Then you’ve done well what you came to do."