Maybe this was for the best, he thought. If I’m being looked after by somebody, I’m alive, and the Plan must have worked, and everyone must have the situation in hand. I should stay this way a while. I can be done without, for a while.

I killed the Emperor. I killed the City. I—may have killed the Empire.

Maybe I’ve earned some rest.

But he couldn’t quite bring himself to feel happy about it. He’d witnessed the annihilation of a City that was centuries old. It was horrible. What if there had been people trapped there? What if not everyone made it out? What if the Elementals from Below didn’t stop there?

Was he screaming again?

Then he was warming up inside again. It was so hard to tell what had become of him.

What have I become?

Epilogue

“ . . . So then we set the Gates in the Imperial City to accept everyone and everything living that came through them, even if they had no talisman,” said three Dolls nearest him, as he carefully sipped wine, propped up on cushions on the roof of the living barge he and Isla would share. With their boys, their three boys, a family at last. “For those that had no talisman, the destination was random—to whatever Gate outside the City that did not have something or someone in it. You told us you wanted as many saved as you could. I think that most, if not all, escaped.”

And thus the word that the Imperial Capital had fallen to monsters was spread directly to every corner of the Empire. Well . . . that was efficient.

“It was efficient,” said the third Doll, Rose, echoing his thoughts. It was easier to tell them apart now; Star was covered in scorch marks, imperfectly covered by the clothing someone had given it.

The Dolls were staying. They were counting on him and his collection of mages to figure out how to free them, yes. But, Star told him, they were also staying because they liked him and his people. “Even when we are freed, this one thinks that you will not be seeing the last of us.”

Mostly, he’d been told, the only people coming here had been those he’d intended to come. The hostages, the people of Valdemar, and the people of Valdemar who’d slipped talismans to friends or relations outside of Valdemar. The dissidents had ended up here too, though, which could be a future problem—one he was too tired to address right now.

The sun setting over the lake, the smell of cookfires and campfires, and all the boats, some of them painted up gaudily for the Regatta they never reached, made things look and feel deceptively peaceful.