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Chapter 40: Ash on the Breeze

  This was by far the creepiest thing Rowan had ever done. He crept into Claire’s ward, the place silent and dark but for Kess, sound asleep in one of the beds. He felt a little bad disturbing her, but with Claire’s odd sleeping schedule, there was no other choice.

  He crept over to Kess’s bed and gently shook her awake. She jumped at him in the dark, then blinked blearily when she recognized him.

  “Rowan,” she whispered, but Rowan just shook his head and jerked it towards the door. Kess sat up, but when she went to put weight on her legs, she leaned heavily on the side of the bed, a wince on her face. Even in the dark, Rowan could see the color on her cheeks. Kess hated help, but she would have to endure it for a little longer—Claire had warned Rowan that it might be weeks before she was back to normal again.

  Rowan scooped her up and carried her from the ward without a word. When they were out in the dim hallway, Kess spoke, her voice hushed.

  “When you said you had a surprise for me tonight, I didn’t think it meant being kidnapped from a sound sleep,” she groused. She put one of her arms around his shoulder, and though Rowan’s only intent was to make her more comfortable, he found himself enjoying the experience all the same.

  “Are you complaining?” he asked. “I can bring you back.”

  “No,” she said immediately. “But unless you’re planning on camping outside my room, Claire’s not going to let you get away with this.”

  Rowan began climbing the stairs, enjoying the closeness of Kess next to him. I thought she was gone. To think she was this close to—He shook his head. There was no point in worrying about what could have been.

  “I’ll work out something with Claire,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with her for quite some time. The trick is to make her think she’s gotten what she wants. You just have to convince her that what you want and what she wants are the same thing.” Kess frowned from his arms.

  “That sounds confusing.”

  “Claire and confusing go together like clouds and storms.”

  “Or like me and a real meal,” Kess muttered as he turned another corner, headed to her rooms. “She ate an entire pile of Eamon’s stuffed buns in front of me. She’s a sadist.” He shook his head, smiling.

  “Do you ever stop thinking about food?”

  “Rowan, the woman won’t let me eat anything real. How am I supposed to recover on a steady diet of broth?”

  “You’ll never eat broth again, on my honor as a man,” he said, smiling again. Clouds, she was alive.

  “Fanas bless you, Rowan,” Kess said, and kissed him on the cheek. Rowan tried to hide the look of shock from his face, though he had a hard time pretending he didn’t enjoy it. Still—

  “Kess, Fanas is the Seat of chaos—the Ashfall itself.”

  “Exactly,” she said matter-of-factly. “Who better to ask to watch over someone? The other Seats are too straight-laced for that kind of thing. Normal folk need someone a bit twisted to watch over them. Though...” She trailed off, studying his face as he approached the door to her rooms. “You’re a good sort. Maybe Mariel or Faleas would be better to invoke.”

  Rowan laughed and opened the door to Kess’s room. A hearth crackled merrily there, and Rowan had taken the liberty of having a few tables moved closer to her bedside. He’d even left a stack of books there—including the silly one he’d caught her reading once before Draven’s death. He deposited Kess gently on the bed, where he’d left extra pillows and blankets, and stepped back, looking around the room. It felt homey enough.

  Kess’s eyes tracked around the dim room to all the little changes, and she began shaking her head, tears forming in her eyes.

  “It’s not much,” Rowan said, looking around. “But I wanted it to feel a little more accommodating.” He ruffled the hair on the back of his head, a little embarrassed. Was it too much? “I’m behind on a lot of supply paperwork for Arlette. I can work on it here tomorrow if you’d like company,” he said, though he had a hard time looking at Kess as he said it.

  A log snapped in the fire, and he glanced at Kess finally. Tears tracked down her face as she met his eyes, her own full of grief and sorrow, but also of something else—gratitude.

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  “I’d like that very much,” she said, nearly choking on the words. Then she pushed herself to her feet and wrapped her arms around Rowan in a fierce hug, most of her weight resting on him as he awkwardly held her up.

  “I’m so sorry, Kess,” Rowan finally said.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for,” she said into his shoulder. “I can’t be sorry anymore, either. I have to be better." He felt her grip tighten on the back of his shirt. “I will be better.”

  And as Rowan held Kess, broken and sobbing against him, clouds, he really believed that she would.

  Days later, Kess made the trip through the tunnels to bury Draven, leaning heavily on Rowan with Claire nearby. Claire had, despite Rowan’s rescue attempt, continued to be a constant companion for Kess throughout the healing process, though at least Kess was allowed to remain in her own rooms. Claire said it was due to the severity of the burnout, but an increasingly grumpy Kess wondered if it was just something the other woman made up to keep Kess around.

  Kess supposed she should be grateful for the company as the small group of them—including a few guards towing Draven’s body—picked their way through the rocky, dark path along the side of the mountain, but it also seemed too personal to bury the man with a crowd of onlookers.

  Still, Kess was determined that he receive a proper burial, and with no family of his own left, Kess was the only one who could be there for him. So she would do that, audience or no.

  The cliffside clearing Rowan led them to was tucked away in an alcove overlooking the lake to the Northwest of Hillcrest. Kess had left the city maybe twice in her life, and never very far from home. Like most citizens of Hillcrest, her family found the trek too dangerous to make very often. Money, at least, could buy you a guide who would lead you along the safer routes. Once had been for a day with her family at this very lake, although far from the shallow pit where the guards set down Draven’s body.

  Most people buried their dead in this way—set in a shallow hole with rocks adorning the top of the body until the remains could no longer be seen. Rocks were plentiful in the hills, and the dry weather meant that the remains were mostly left in peace.

  With Draven in place, the guards and Claire all went to gather rocks, but she cleared her throat and shook her head, still leaning heavily against Rowan. “I’ll do it,” she said quietly.

  Claire and Rowan exchanged a glance, but eventually Claire let out a deep sigh and walked past Kess to a nearby boulder, silent argument lost. She broke free from Rowan and began to gather.

  The work was arduous for Kess, as close as she’d come to joining Draven in the ground, but she pushed through the pain, the breathlessness, and the shakiness in her limbs, covering her friend slowly from head to toe. With every rock she thought of some joke Drav made, or a bowl of stew he gave her when times got too hard. She remembered nights when even Oliver had been no comfort to her—just one more responsibility for a woman who already had too much to bear. Draven had shouldered some of that for her, and made it okay to just be herself. With him gone, that responsibility settled on her shoulders alongside the weight of his death, a hulking giant that made it hard to breathe or think.

  She didn’t tell Rowan or Claire that her own actions had caused this—that coming Downhill, sheltering here, and befriending Drav were just as much a cause of his death as anything he might have done to attract attention. So the gathering was penance too, for a mistake she would never forgive herself for as long as she lived.

  As she caught Rowan and even Claire watching her as she passed, she wondered if she wasn’t making the same mistake again.

  Last rock placed, Kess fell to her knees in the rocky soil, staring at the mound that had once been her friend and father.

  Draven’s ring sat in her left hand alongside Oliver’s Stormclap pin, the metal cool against her feverish skin. A storm brewed overhead—one of the last of Lightstorm season—and she heard Drav’s words again, as clear as the day he had spoken them to her.

  When that storm washes away everything, don’t let it take away who you are.

  Kess bowed her head, picking up another rock in her other hand. Who was she? Fulminant? Not? A child of the upper city, the lower city, or both? If the Fulminant did this to Draven, how could she call herself one of their own?

  As for the storm, had Draven known of his impending death? Had he made peace with whatever he was doing for Forgebrand, knowing that it might ultimately lead to his capture and death? Regardless, she would never know now.

  The Stormclap pin glittered in her other hand. She’d hidden Downhill to avoid bringing her problems to anyone else, but somehow she’d gotten people involved in them, anyway. Kess looked up from the grave and found the Uphill looming over the city, visible easily from the similar hill they sat on. Shrouded in clouds that glowed a violent blue against the horizon, Kess felt that it was a specter she couldn’t escape. Her past would follow her until she dealt with it—of that, she was increasingly certain. She gripped the ring and pin in her hand so tightly that her bones groaned from the stress.

  She had failed Oliver.

  She had failed Draven.

  She had failed herself, and maybe more than that; her promise to herself—born out of a desperate desire to survive—had left her with no weapons to protect those she loved. Nothing had changed since that night so many years ago. Perhaps she’d been foolish in toying with her powers recently, but the other option—to leave them languishing and useless—no longer seemed right either.

  Kess placed the last rock on the center of the pile and felt the wind cool the tears that she hadn’t realized decorated her cheeks. Tonight, she would make a new promise. Tonight, exhausted, heartbroken, she would learn not to fear her powers, and become what she had to.

  There was only one path for Kess to take now—the only one with answers, and perhaps vengeance for those lost. She would go Uphill, to where it all began.

  It was all she had left.

  As if in reply, thunder rumbled overhead, and the first rain of the Floodstorm began.

  Also I promise I'm posting this week like I usually do, but I have to schedule out the posts today and I'm behind lol. Then on to the Writathon!

  Thanks, as always, for reading! Now for my regular spiel below:

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