My chest constricts with an irrational pain. He’s talking gibberish, and uneasily I fear he might be beyond help. His hand falls limply to his side, and my insides fall with it. No, no, no—

“Stay alive,” I shout at him, hysterics thinning my voice. “You hear me? I haven’t given you permission to die, Lucien!”

“Luc!” a sudden voice bellows. Malachite comes sprinting out from a wall of fire, the flames rolling off his skin and chainmail like water off oil. He grabs the whole of Lucien’s body from me and throws him over one shoulder, the prince’s deadweight nothing to the beneather. “This way!”

Too tired to question, I follow his long-eared, hazy outline through the smoke. The world spins, but I clutch at Malachite’s hot chainmail, looping my fingers through it as a lead even as it scorches my skin. There’s a break in the fire thanks to a stretch of old stone buildings, and by the time we get through it and into a street dotted with confused, wailing citizens watching the flames, my dizziness is gone.

Malachite puts Lucien into a waiting carriage and motions frantically for me. “We have to get him to a polymath! Hurry!”

I grant myself one moment of staring at Lucien’s resting eyes, his eyelashes against his cheeks, the outline of his slack body on the carriage seat. He wanted to save his people. He drove himself to this edge to get them out of the fire. He’s maybe died for them.

But me? I can’t die at all, and the fire still rages.

“Go on without me.” I wave. “Go!”

Malachite doesn’t need to be told twice. He slams the carriage door shut and the driver maneuvers around the crowd at an alarming speed. I watch them go, and then turn back, walking into the fire and the flaming buildings the prince was so worried about.

killing yourself for him, to the very end.

…

I manage to get four more people out of the top level of their buildings, drawing on what little I can of the hunger to push beams aside and pull grown men over the cobblestones. Finally, as the fourth person staggers away, I collapse in the entryway of a building, the smoke making the world go black. Faintly, through my dying eyes, I feel burning and see the black fire spreading up my legs, over my body. It burns. I can feel my hair burning up, blood and pus and fat baking beneath my skin.

“Fire…” I whisper. “For their thralls.”