He walked for as long as he could, greeting soldiers and touching hands, until he managed to slip down a quiet lane of tents. He lay down on a cot under a shelter. And then, on second thought, he rose and pulled the cot out underneath the sky. He watched the heavy blanket of clouds, so near to them in the darkening sky. When the first snowflakes began to fall, he closed his eyes and felt their cold, delicate kisses on his cheeks. On his eyelids and lips.
He opened his eyes once more, stirred by a commotion near at hand. He heard Po’s roar come down from up above. He saw the dragon’s dark shadow pass above, and then heard the answering calls from his siblings. His eyes almost fluttered closed, but then a man yelled. There came the crash of something being knocked over, and then a series of snaps, the clink of metal rings and grunts of agitation.
Aliver understood what was happening before he knew why he understood. Po flew riderless above, calling on his kin to join him. The other three were tearing off their harnesses. He heard their wings unfurl, that loud concussion of clicking that was like nothing else in the world, and then swoosh as those great wings grabbed the air and lifted them upward. He heard the panic in people’s voices, but he did not feel it. Corinn had written,
As long as I live they will be true to us
. After that, she said, they would be different. Listening to them chatter to one another as they rose into the snow-heavy night, Aliver knew that change had begun, and he knew that his sister had gone before him to the afterdeath.
“Corinn …” He had been so consumed by his own work, that he had almost forgotten her battle with the Santoth. He remembered it now, and knew that she had been triumphant.
Eyes closed again, he lay there a long time, feeling the snow build a blanket atop him, thanking his sister. It was not just her saving the world from the Santoth that he was grateful for. He thanked her for himself, for allowing him to know, in the end, that she was wonderful, that he loved her completely, without reservation. As a brother should.
A little later he stopped feeling the snow. He stopped feeling anything. He had a thought that would have made him laugh, except he no longer had the lips to laugh with. Aliver Akaran, he thought, look what you’ve done. You’ve made it so that they’re going to start calling you the Snow King again. He did not really mind. He had always liked the ring of the name. Before, he just had not deserved it. Now, perhaps he had earned it.
The flutes played the noon hour. They started high in Acacia, at the top of the palace, and then the tune cascaded down toward the lower town. Beautiful. A sound that Mena had never really believed she would hear again. She stood on the balcony of Corinn’s offices, amazed at the view of the island in the brilliance of the spring light. How was it even possible that a sound so wonderful lived in this world, in the same one that had just been filled with the din of war, with arctic winds howling and men and women crying in pain and rage? It did not seem possible that the images that had comprised her life the last half year could be real if this was real; or that the view out across the spires and down toward the glistening sea could be anything but a dream if that other version of life was a reality. She would need to spend a great deal of time coming to terms with this and finding a way to face it alone.
She was home, but Aliver was not. Corinn never would be. Dariel and Melio had gone out of the Known World and nobody could say a word about their fate. She was alone. At least Aliver’s body worked its slow way home, escorted by the army that loved him. His body, encased in a simple casket, took one last meandering trip around the Mainland. Mena hoped Aliver would have welcomed that. She thought he would. She thought he would like it very much that his body was being carried the entire way on the shoulders of former slaves who had just weeks before stood in the army that opposed him. So many of them had chosen to stay and had begged for the honor of bearing Aliver home to Acacia. There was a rightness to that, a closing of very old wrongs.
Yes, she thought. He would have liked that very much.
Hearing someone enter, Mena stepped back into the room. Rhrenna, her sister’s former secretary, stood at attention, a collection of papers held to her chest. She bowed her blond head. “I have news,” she said, “from Alecia.”
Of course she did. Rhrenna had nothing if not news. Since Mena’s return to the island a few days before, the Meinish woman had acted as if she were Mena’s personal assistant. She had been a great help, really, leading the princess through her own palace as if she were a visitor new to it. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she had not come back the same and would never feel the same. Or perhaps, with Aliver and Corinn both gone, Acacia itself was not the same.
“I would rather you had news from the Other Lands,” Mena said. “One fair word about Dariel or Melio would be all the news I need for some time.”
“Still nothing from there, I’m afraid. This news, though … Your Majesty, perhaps you should sit down.”
Rhrenna had been nothing but courteous to her. She had not called her Majesty before, though.
“Why, do I look so ill as that?” Mena glanced down at the dress she wore, and nearly started. A dress! A garment of light cotton that flowed all the way to the stone floor, pressed and clean, embroidered with gold thread. This will take some getting used to, she thought. It had been a good thing for her to return directly to Acacia on Elya. She needed time to remember how not to be at war, how to wear a dress and wake in a mild clime and not think constantly about the lives that depended on each decision she made.
“You look very well,” Rhrenna said. “It’s just … the decrees were opened and read before the Senate. They … may surprise you.”
The secretary had her attention now. Not knowing how to read her face, Mena felt a tingling of fear, familiar trepidation. “What’s happened?”
“It’s not anything that you expected.” Rhrenna looked around the empty room. “I feel like somebody should be here with us when I say this.”
“Just speak it.”
“Aliver and Corinn … have made you queen.”
Mena stared at her.
“They both conceded that their children, being illegitimate, should not inherit the throne. That’s how they explained it, at least. You are the only direct, legitimate heir. Only you are married, with the potential to produce a legal heir.” Rhrenna paused, searching Mena to see if she acknowledged that logic. “The Senate agreed. They’ve reratified the decrees already. They had no choice. They had already accepted the decrees Aliver gave them in a locked box. Remember I told you about that? He did that before he flew to meet you. And now, considering the way the people love the Snow King, nobody disputes his and Corinn’s wishes. You are to be queen of Acacia. Nobody opposes it.”
And what if I oppose it? Mena thought.
“There’s more.”
Of course there is.
“You should read it yourself.”
The secretary offered it, but Mena made no move to accept it. After a moment, Rhrenna continued. “Aliver and Corinn have called for an alliance of nations, not an empire. They called it the Sacred Band.” She stopped again. “Do you really want me to—”
“Rhrenna, just tell me, please!”
“It’s a plan to be implemented over time,” Rhrenna said, skimming the pages. “Right now, you are to be queen of the empire. You are to oversee the five provinces as they each form governments. In ten years—or after ten of peace, calm, if all is going well—they gain self-governance. They’ll still be within the empire, I think. But after twenty years the nations are to become truly independent. There are details. More to it than that, but that’s the thrust of it. Eventually, Acacia will be one nation among others. Among equals.” She set the papers down on the desk. “Now that I think about it, I can see why the senators wouldn’t want to interfere with this. Self-rule. You know how many new kings that will make?”
What a grand confusion that will be, Mena thought. But even as she thought it she felt lifted on a tide of relief. It was right. A confusion, but confusion that would no longer rest on a single pair of shoulders. Hers. They trapped me and freed me at the same time. Aliver, you did say you were going to ask a lot of me. Now I understand. Or, I’m starting to.
Later that afternoon, Mena gathered Aaden and Shen from their lesson with Barad. They took it up at the same open-air classroom in which she and her siblings had received lessons from Jason. Mena ushered them away quickly, thanking Barad but not wanting to stay too long with the memories of the place, or with him. Not that she could escape memories in the palace. Barad’s eyes, though, saw into one. Yet another thing she would have to get accustomed to. Another topic on which she would need to slowly come to trust her older siblings’ wisdom.
The children were unusually quiet as they walked. Only when they reached Elya’s terrace and heard the creature chirrup a greeting did they find voice to ask about what Barad must have told them.
“Is it true?” Aaden asked.
“Many things are true. Which one are you asking about?”
“You’re to be the queen,” Shen answered. She did that sometimes, and Aaden did the same for her, finishing each other’s thoughts as they shared them.
Like twins, Mena thought, looking at them. A pale-skinned boy with light eyes; a brown-skinned girl with dark ones. So different, and yet not. Not for the first time since joining them, she wondered what her child by Melio would have looked like. It was too difficult a thought, though. She pushed it away, knowing that she faced a lifetime of wishing she had had that child with him when she had the chance.
“That’s what I’ve been told,” Mena said. “I never planned that. I don’t … know what it means, really. I don’t know.” She looked at the two of them helplessly. “I’m sorry, but it’s too new. I just don’t know.”
“Melio will be king,” Aaden said, “when he comes back.”
Mena had not had time to consider that. Melio Sharratt, a king. Love him as she did, that was rather hard to imagine. “Let’s pray he comes back, then.”
“I always do,” Aaden said. “Every morning, I ask the Giver to let Dariel and Melio return.”
The boy turned his face away. He watched Elya preen, pretending to be fascinated. Mena knew better. She heard the emotion trying to crawl over his last words. She almost said that she said the same prayers herself. She wanted Melio back beside her so much she walked with a perpetual emptiness inside. It had been there throughout the war, but she noticed it much more acutely now that she was home. Finding Wren here on Acacia when she returned, with a wee babe whom she had named Corinn in her arms, made things both better and worse. Mena was so pleased to be an aunt a third time, so pleased to know that Dariel lived on in the child, and that Corinn would be honored by her as well. What a father Dariel would have been! She could not imagine anyone better suited to it. Instead, though, it was the likes of Rialus Neptos who would soon be arriving back to meet his daughter for the first time. Maybe he would make a good father, too. Mena could not say. Despite the animus she might always feel for him, he had played a part in saving the nation.
How very strange, the turning of fate.
Shen said, “My mother is happy. She said this means I won’t have to worry about being queen.”
“Would you have worried about it?”
The girl caught the question on her lips and paused to consider it. “I’d rather you did it.”
“Me, too,” Aaden said, glancing back. “Don’t tell Mother I …” The words fell from his mouth and dropped out of the air, the sentence unfinished. He began to turn away again, but his aunt did not let him.
“Oh, dear, come,” Mena said. She pulled Aaden in, hugging him tight, and then looked up and motioned with her fingers that Shen should join the embrace. Arms around both of them, she whispered, “You two are good friends now, aren’t you? That would make your parents happy. It makes me happy. Listen, the world surprises us all. Me as much as you. It even surprised Corinn and Aliver. Again and again it finds ways to surprise. It makes things tough sometimes. That’s what it’s been lately. But it won’t always be so hard. We’ve come through so much. We really have.”
“Aunt, what will become of us?” Shen asked.
Mena drew back to see her niece’s face. “What a question to ask! I don’t know the future, child. I only know what’s been, and what I wish will be. And even then I know that I’ll never even really understand what’s been. It confounds me all the time. Nor will what I wish to be ever come to pass exactly as I imagine.”
Shen crossed her eyes. It was such an unexpected, bizarre gesture that at first it alarmed Mena. When the girl’s eyes popped back to normal, Mena saw it for the joke it was. Smiling, she agreed, “You’re right. Life is confusing enough to make you go cross-eyed.”
“But what do you imagine?” Aaden asked. “I know—it won’t happen just perfectly—but still. Tell us.”
“You would have me lay the future before you, made only of my hopes and fears?” Both children nodded. “All right. Here …” Mena took a seat on a couch and motioned for the children to do the same. She had one sit on either side of her, turned them so that they rested their heads on her lap. Elya stopped preening to watch them.
Mena looked up and away from them all. “What I imagine is that you will live magnificent lives,” she said, “and that you will live lives of quiet disappointment. You won’t be able to explain why, but there will always be some failures. You will strive for greatness and justice, and you will help to make our nation wondrous. I’m counting on that. Don’t let me down. You will both be great, but you will also fail at many of the things dearest to you, and people—even ones you love—will disappoint you. You will know great loves and you will have dear friends and you will be part of the great tree of Akaran. You will never be alone. And yet some of those you hold dearest will betray you, or envy you, or covet the things they perceive you to have that they do not. At times—even within a throng of people, despite the noise and clamor of attention—you will feel strangely lost. You will find gifts that are special to you, but you will never understand why such things were thrust upon you. You may curse the world for always, always spinning, never pausing, and yet this motion will be the music to which you dance. In the end, I hope, you will come to feel that none of the life you led could have been any different, any better or worse. You will find meaning in accepting many things you cannot understand or change. And if you live a long life, you’ll grow tired and that will be all right, because you will have done the best you could during your lives.”