Aftermath

Synopsis

Nothing the three of them had done looked like magic, so three hundred people took the killing for the last scene of the reenactment. Koa pulled his sword out of Beltran and found months of build-up amounting to less than he had expected. Then a bolt went through his arm from one of Beltran’s crew on high ground, and the crowd swamped the shooter before anybody quite registered that a real bolt had been fired.

Aldo took the body by the collar and dragged it back toward the burning Color Stay. The door opened ahead of him and Alyphe stood in it, soaked to the sleeves in blood that was not her own, looking down at a sword coming out of her son. Mikhail’s sleep would not take on her, and she blinked at the empty flagstones while they hauled him past her.

Then Aldo and Koa stepped back onto the steps and told Haudh-Gwenn the truth. This was not a performance, the lieutenants were gone, and it was time to take the city back. Koa put the weight on the other side: people out there still meant them harm, so take the city back without burning it down or killing each other over coin, and the Valiant Few would help restore order. Three quarters of the crowd went.

Inside, a fresh pool of blood was dripping off the bartop. Mikhail came around and found Katalia lying very still in it. The potion he forced past her lips did nothing, so he went to the kit and worked an hour, spending the party’s last blood block, and got her stable at one short of dead.

Alyphe was on the floor by then with her son’s head in her lap. Do not touch my son. Aldo, who blamed her for allowing all of it and made himself gentle anyway, mentioned the girl behind the bar, and her head came around. The blood on her was Katalia’s: she had spent her last minutes on a stranger and had never tried for Beltran. Told the girl might live because of it, she let herself be moved off the body and put to fighting the fire, the one thing still left to do for her son.

Two people were never going to put out flames that burned like real ones. They bought Mikhail his hour and no more, which was all Aldo wanted, since he meant the inn to go. With Alyphe out of the room, his care of the body was a fraud: bandages laid out, the healing potion drunk himself, the empty flask set beside the corpse. Then he stripped the armor and boots, stacked three rings and the pendant that had been turning shots aside where they could be found, and pocketed the folded documents out of the belt pouch privately, in case they named something the party did not know about.

Bria was not in the building. Mikhail opened the Oubliette to bag the effects and the Wraithblade reached for him through it, an icy pull that had him staring before he noticed. He raised a fist over the corpse for the punch he had never gotten to throw, thought better of it, and drew Beltran’s own cloak back over him.

The smoke won and they carried Alyphe and Katalia out. She wanted her son in the family ground, and carrying a Grayeras corpse through those streets would have gotten all three of them killed, so Aldo and Mikhail talked her into commending him to Krelene instead. He had died in the middle of one of her fire-festivals, and passionate was the only word anyone could find that fit him. It is against Grayeras custom, and she yielded.

Lady Grayeras was their pass into the Chantry hospital, where the staff turning the Valiant Few away stopped when they saw her. Müde took Mikhail into the critical ward, made him confirm the death as a witness rather than as one of the Few, then set his terms: aid to anyone who asked, only the critically injured inside, no blood shed under his roof. A small wound is how a murderer gets through a hospital door in a rising. Whatever you thought of them before this day, they are now your rabble.

They split the night, because they had to be seen and that meant three places. Mikhail took the hospital door. Koa went for Johanka Materai at the clinic and then the councilors’ quarter. Aldo went to find Lady Talia: fight beside the people if the guard fought, let the guard barracks burn if the crowd wanted the symbol, keep them off each other. The army might be a day out or two, with Leon somewhere on the road behind it. Aldo asked after Talia through the evening, and a city with nothing left in charge of it gave him nothing back.