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acknowledging the empty space left by their absence. Misha had lost too much of herself. If she ever tried to stare into that void in order to honor her grief she would suffocate. “I don’t think I’m ready either,” I added.
    I had spent the last year as if in a spider’s web. I had watched my sister’s mind rot. I had felt my brother die. I had seen Farrell fall, on the basis of my selfish words, and now I was witnessing the death of the Obsidian guild. There was too much to mourn, and so little of it could be acknowledged aloud.
    “You were closest to him,” Torquil said. “If you need to wait, then we will wait. But when the time comes, tell me we will come out here, to the woods? We won’t go somewhere like the mourning hall in the palace.”
    “We’ll honor him in the open air, just as he always lived,” I assured him. “Has Misha said otherwise?”
    “She thinks we should have the ceremony after the coronation, in the palace, because it was Farrell’s dream to see us all there,” Torquil whispered.
    I shook my head, just a fraction, and tried to repress a shudder.
    “Misha forgets,” I said, “that a child of Obsidian kneels to no king, or queen, even one of our own blood. If Farrell had lived to see Misha take the throne, he would have watched her coronation with pride, and then walked back into the woods. He would not have bowed before her.”
    Torquil nodded, but there was a new wariness in the response. His tone was guarded as he asked, “And do you expect us all to do the same?”
    I blinked at him, aware of the sudden tension between us, but not sure I understood it.
    “I’ll miss the stars,” Torquil said carefully, “but I joined the Obsidian guild because I crossed Julian and the dancers’ guild, and refused to beg their forgiveness so they would let me stay. Once Misha’s in charge, I’m not going to object to having four walls around me when the winter winds blow or a roof over my head when it pours. If fate finally grants Aika and me children, I don’t want them to grow up resigned to cold and hunger and fear.”
    It was clearly important to him that I understand his motivation; he didn’t realize I never could.
    “Four walls and a roof,” to me, might as well be a cell. I had no misty, sentimental memories of walls or a roof over my head.
    But the others had lived different lives. Kadee had been raised in a home with loving parents. Vance had been raised with beautiful walls made of colored glass. Aika had kept a home once, and Torquil had lived in the dancers’ nest, where the food and wine flowed like ambrosia and the central fire always burned.
    Did they all dream that, once this dirty business was done, we would return to those fantasy lives?
    “I guess I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” I said honestly. It had never occurred to me that the others might see the palace as an end in itself, instead of just the means to one. I fell back on the old creed, though in this context it felt like paste in my mouth. “But either way, why would I be contemplating
your
future? You’re a child of Obsidian. If you wish to live with your family inside palace walls, that is your choice to make, not mine.”
    I supposed a child of Obsidian even had the right to follow a king and queen if he chose; our way was one of freedom, not limitations. That wasn’t a choice I could ever comprehend, because there wasn’t a monarch alive I had ever viewed as anything but abusive and selfish, but Torquil would make his own decisions—and I would make mine. He would follow Misha even if she claimed a crown. I had other plans.
    In the end, that was all that mattered.

THE CAMP LAY
under a smooth bed of snow and ice and the serpents within it ringed tightly around a feeble fire. Finding dry wood had been difficult after the early-winter storm caught them all off guard.
    Malachi stared into the tiny, flickering flames. Around him, he could vaguely sense the others moving, but his mind was far