Whichever romantic poet forgot to mention how exceedingly impossible it is to get out of a bed with your lover in it owes me, and I take my payments in gold and endless praise, thank you very much. I manage to dress as he does, our backs turned to each other.

“Is the prince of Cavanos trying to sneak a peek?” I tease. His fluster is immediate.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Likewise,” I chime.

When we make it outside, the pure, fresh snow crunches underfoot like particularly stiff glaze on a sweetround. It’s my turn to lead—I pull Lucien gregariously around the early-morning stalls selling fabrics, beads, wire. A handful of little iron bells, in the Cavanos tradition. Red ribbon. White wood. It won’t be the usual pyre and metal orb carved with an eye placed in the mouth. It’s not the New God’s way. But it can’t be; I don’t have the bodies to burn. Only the memories. Only their faces, pressed like flowers in the pages of my mind.

This is the old way to do things. The non-denominational way, the unfashionable way. The only way I know how, from reading the inscriptions on the mass graves near the Bone Road. The war graves. This is the only way left to me. I won’t be Varia. I won’t be Gavik.

I will make graves for those I’ve killed.

In a little teahouse, over steaming cups of chocolate, Lucien helps me, pulling the bundles of white wood sticks tight, wrapping them with red ribbon, and attaching a single bell to each silken strand. Fourteen bundles for fourteen men. Fourteen bundles for the years I didn’t know any better. Fourteen mistakes. Fourteen ignorances. Fourteen things I’ve done and can’t undo.

Life. Life as equally important as death.

And a Heartless, who took far too long to figure out that particular detail.

Someday, someone will see the fourteen bundles of white wood wrapped with red ribbon, adorned with iron bells, set deep and well into the snow on the top of a distant ridge, accessible only by teleportation magic or flight, and they will wonder. They won’t see the girl setting them, one by one, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll hear her tears, echoing beyond the stone and out over the world.

…

“What took you two so long?” Malachite looks up when Lucien and I enter the sage’s tower. My steps feel the smallest bit lighter as I half skip over to a chair beside Fione and settle in.

“Icicles,” I chirp. “All over our noses. You should’ve seen it—one sneeze and we were practically wielding swords on our upper lip.”

Fione makes a catlike smile beside me, sipping her licorice tea. “Inventive as always.”