To clear the bodies, they had to split into two groups: Will went with Grace to the courtyard, while Violet took the corridors and inner rooms, including the great hall. Cyprian and Sarah went with her. Violet was strong enough physically to move bodies by herself, but Will had seen the hollowed-out look in her eyes. No one should have to enter inner rooms for the first time alone.
He forced his mind to the grim reality ahead of him. Collect the bodies and bring them to a place beyond the wall. They ought to start in the main courtyard, which had been crowded, then move to the outbuildings and stables. The funeral pyre should be lit away from the main buildings. The smell from the fire would be terrible.
He had never spent much time with Grace, but she was a hard worker. It took two of them to lift the bodies. They used a wheelbarrow. It was thirteen trips to clear the main courtyard.
Grace took an arm of the wheelbarrow alongside him and pushed. Her lean face and spare body looked as if its lines had been carved. She was reacting very differently from Sarah, who’d taken on a nervy, flightish quality, like a spooked horse. It was Grace who had found them on the Elder Steward’s orders. When the Elder Steward had asked to die, it was Grace who had brought the knife.
And when they stopped to take a brief rest, it was Grace who spoke.
‘I know she was like a mother to you.’
‘Don’t,’ said Will.
‘She took me in when I was an orphan too.’
‘I said don’t.’
His harsh voice ran over hers. Her words felt like a knife, pushing into him. He tried to shut them out. To focus on the wheelbarrow, the task. One foot after another. That was how you survived.
‘All right,’ said Grace.
They had reached the stables. Walking this way was so familiar to him that for a moment he forgot why he was here. Farah, he thought, as though at any instant she was going to come crunching down the path, teasing him for spoiling his horse.
Will had worked in the stables long enough to know all the Steward horses, ethereal creatures that ran like bright foam on a wave. Justice’s horse was a silver mare with a high tail. Will had fed her an apple once, when Valdithar wasn’t looking. It had felt illicit. She had whuffled it up and raced off to join the others, while they kicked up their heels and ran for the joy of it, wheeling this way and that, graceful as the flitting turns of a school of fish.
It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.
Silver and pearl, with soft velvet muzzles and slender legs, they lay across the muddy field like clumps of snow lingering after a melt. Their tails, like long, silky banners, flowed out across the earth. They would not gallop now with the wind at their back, tails high and manes flying. They were still, strewn like silver coins discarded by an uncaring hand.
‘She fought to save them,’ said Grace, and Will saw Farah, her face upturned, her sword knocked from her hand. Dead, of course. She hadn’t saved them. He supposed she had fought as hard as she could. He supposed everyone had.
Exhausted, Will looked at the twelve giant pyres and the shapes that lay on them. They had dragged together all the stocks of fuel and kindling that they could find – from woodpiles to torn hangings to clothes to splintered furniture – raiding the armoury for tar and pitch and the kitchens for oil. The pyres were immense. It had taken almost as long to build them as it had to collect the bodies.
They had worked past nightfall. The eerie marshland in the space beyond the walls but within the wards was dark. The torches that they held were the only light.
It was enough to see the dirt and fatigue on everyone’s faces, the orange light dancing in their eyes.
Will didn’t know the Steward funeral traditions, but he imagined it was a ceremony, a phalanx of Stewards in white bearing the body to its flame, the High Janissary speaking the ritual phrases while the Hall looked on in regimented formation.
Instead, the five of them stood, a huddle of faces in the cold. There was no one to say the words. Cyprian took a long, shaky breath, and stepped forward.
Will tried to imagine what he would say. You took me in, and you died for it. All those years of fighting … You did it because there was no one else. You kept the light burning as long as you could.
So much lost: lives ended, and with them, knowledge that would pass from the world forever.
‘Go into the night as light, not shadow,’ said Cyprian. Above him the sky was high and cold, with a scattering of distant stars. ‘Never again fear the dark.’
Cyprian reached out and struck his torch to the pyre.
Fire raced through the thatched kindling, searingly fast, curling the twigs and the fabric of shrouds. Beside him, Will saw Violet stepping forward to Justice’s pyre, where he lay like a knight carved on a tombstone, his sword placed atop his wrapped body. Before Will lost his nerve, he went forward to the thatched pile in front of him.