She turned toward him to share a smile, only to find a flash of discomfort passing across his face. He clutched at the crenellations with one hand, raised the other to his chest. She stepped closer and held his hand tightly. Ever since she’d brought him back, he’d suffered from small fits of weakness and pain.

“Are you all right?” she said as the attack passed, his features relaxing.

“I’m fine. But I’ll be glad to leave this place. After all this death, I feel like I need to learn to live again.”

He was right. The past week had been dedicated to the dead: the bones of innocents executed under the Justice’s orders, the Ancestors who had moved, restless, from their graves—and of course the newly dead: the hundreds who had died in the battle for the castle, nobles and commoners, servants and guards of every livery. The bodies had been scattered in all corners of the castle. Even Constance’s apartments in the south tower had not been spared. A man in a physician’s brown coat, one of his hands covered by the twin of the Justice’s gauntlet device, had been found dead at the foot of a bed. His body had lain twisted on the floor, blood pooling under his nose and strange burn marks streaking down his face. Lena had known instinctively that the lightning with which she had fought and defeated the Justice had been the death of him too. Another man, a nobleman dressed in silks, had been found stone-cold on the bed, a victim of internal injuries.

“Do you think you will get better?” Lena asked.

He squeezed her hand tenderly. “It’s thanks to you that I am alive,” he said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “What’s a little pain every now and then!”

The sun was sinking farther, and the deeper chill of the night was curling around them. She turned toward the west tower, one final body laid out on its summit, surrounded by sputtering torches sending bright sparks into the evening.

“Are you sure about this?” Emris asked, noticing where she was looking.

“I’m sure.”

In the dusk light, from the distance of the east tower, Constance looked serene—a sleeping woman with long fair hair spilling over the wooden platform on which she had been raised, hands folded on her stomach. But Lena had found her body at the top of the steps to the great hall, covered in old corpses and ravaged by cuts, bruises, and vicious gashes—as if the Ancestors really had tried to wreak their revenge on the woman who had broken their eternal sleep. Lena had cleaned Constance herself, dabbing her wounds, helping the other cryptlings dress the Lady Protector in fresh silks from her chest. We don’t judge the dead, Vigo had always told her. We simply serve them.