Page 97 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

It should’ve made me smile, but it happened just moments before I pulled back the sheet on Streja’s battered body. There she was, burned half beyond recognition, but not anywhere near enough for me to write her off with the rest.

We’d laughed together. Drank together. Cried together.

Dozens of times.

Sometimes—often, actually—all three at once.

Our childhoods aside, we’d suffered through the early days of training together—drills and rotations that felt as if their only purpose was to see who was best fit to handle acts of torture. But what for? Streja had always dreamed of getting a permanent assignment out on Odessa’s eastern coast, where soldiers fought for posts in the sleepy seaside towns.

All these years of hard work and dreaming, and she was going to end up nothing but ash, scattered over the water in a place that was never her home.

A place that was not home to any of these people.

The pressure of those threatening tears reached its breaking point, and I wiped at my cheeks with the back of my hand. How I had any more moisture left in my body after all the goddess-damned crying I’d done was beyond me.

“Fuck,” I whispered, staring into Streja’s lifeless eyes.

In my periphery, Maksym’s attention snapped over, and he took a few steps from the body he was working on, but I refused to look his way.

Rude, maybe, given everything he’d done so far, but any more pity would be my undoing.

So, I worked as quietly as I could through Streja’s painting, trying to keep my sniffles to a minimum and praying to the gods I hadn’t left my face streaked with paint.

By the time we’d finished—Maksym’s six compared to my four—and set out to tuck a bundle of white flowers in the arms of my fallen comrades before replacing their sheets, I’d regained a somewhat tenuous hold on my ever-fraying emotional state.

It still felt like it could slip at any moment, and Maksym would have to decide if he wanted to scrape me off the stone or leave me there, but my tears had finally dried.

It was a damn good thing, because the king would not stop looking at me with growing concern as the moon made its presence known and lit the plateaus in a silver glow, washing out the pale flicker of nytefire lanterns scattered about the area.

“Are you ready?” he finally asked me once we’d redressed the last pyre and taken up a post at the end of the two rows.

As if I had much say in that matter.

At least he’d answered a question budding in the back of my mind. I had noticed no materials to light the pyres in any of our supplies, like the flint or tinder boxes found by every mantle and hearth back in Odessa.

It had been easy to make an assumption, but I knew nothing about Maksym or what magic he wielded, other than vague comments Eilir made about the late king fearing his own son.

“You’ll light them yourself?” I asked, glancing up at him, and Maksym nodded. “Be my guest then.”

He held my gaze for a moment that felt necessary before he stepped forward and splayed his hands at the rows of pyres. He rolled his shoulders as if he were working out a little knot of tension before he muttered, “Acta Incendia.”

Brilliant blue nytefire licked across the ground in front of Maksym as the tail end of the words left his lips, as if someone had dropped a match in a streak of oil.

I gasped as it tore out and engulfed the first pair of structures, taking one set at a time in a crackling wave and pulling away from the rocky ground as it went.

When the final set of pyres was engulfed, I backed up to get a bit of reprieve from the heat that poured off them and the heavy scent of char that filled the air. Maksym didn’t budge for a long few moments, though, like he was taking in the breadth of his work, before he finally turned back to me.

“Nytefire is incredibly destructive, but it’ll still take a couple of hours for them to burn through entirely,” he said. His expression softened significantly as he added, “Would you like me to stay? I don’t mind. But I understand if you’d prefer to be alone.”

I knew immediately what I preferred, but I cast my attention back out to the pyres, trying to give Maksym the impression I was giving his offer thought. Finally, I sighed and said, “I’d prefer to be alone. Thank you, though. For all of this.”

He nodded in my peripheral vision. “Take a lantern with you on your way back? The path can be tricky in the dark.”

“I will.”

There was a long beat of silence before Maksym said with a heavy dose of remorse, “Take care of yourself tonight, Miss Wynn.”

His presence left my side a moment later, and I blew out a slow breath as crunching footsteps contended with the crackling of the pyres and trailed away behind me. I waited until I could no longer distinguish his footsteps before I took a glance back across the split in the cliffs.