“It was . . .” Ritva thought. “She was hurting a lot and she said good-bye to us all and told Alleyne to teach the children she’d loved them and hadn’t wanted to leave while they were still so young, and then . . . I thought she was gone and she opened her eyes and said: Like silver glass . . . green shores . . . the gulls . . . a white tower . . . home, home, at last . . .

“And then she died,” Ritva whispered after a moment. “One by one they go, the heroes, the legends.”

The surviving crew folk of the dirigible were grouped at a little distance, the ones not too badly injured to stand. Major Hanks spoke a command and they came to attention, their hands following his to a salute. Behind them the burnt wreckage of the Curtis LeMay was smeared across a scrubby hillside, parts of the brush it had set afire still smoldering though the tall plume had dispersed over the course of the day. The Thurstons stood nearer, but Cecile and her daughters were a little apart from Juliet; and they stood on the side of her that put her son between them. The boy was sobbing from the swirl of emotions around them, but he was too tired to be loud about it.

The Dúnedain were closer still, and Ritva was near the leaders; she was Astrid’s niece, after all. Alleyne had invited Juliet into the party, since it was to save her or perhaps her son that his wife had lunged forward, but there had been an icy politeness to it, and she had declined in a half-heard murmur.

“Farewell, beloved,” Alleyne said, his eyes locked on the body. “Wait for me, until my work here is finished.”

Farewell, anamchara, sister of my soul, Eilir’s fingers said. The threads of our lives are spun together forever.

Together they stepped forward, their hands on the torch. The pine logs were stacked crisscross in six layers, and the gaps between them had been stuffed with branches and needles and bone-white fallen timber. The wind from the north was still brisk, even though the storm had blown itself out. The kindling caught with an eager rick-rick-rick sound, and then the whole pyre seemed to explode into a pillar of flame and smoke that rose and bent away from them towards the southwest. The summer-dry sap-rich wood burned with a dragon’s hissing roar, almost instantly hot enough to turn bone to dust. Ritva felt her eyes water and brushed at them again.