Jade War

Juen gave her a long, calculating look, but there was sympathy in it. He was not yet officially the Horn and it would be overstepping his authority to act on something so personal to the Kaul family without consulting the Pillar, but that was not the case for Shae, and Juen had no desire or reason to oppose the Weather Man. “No, Kaul-jen. That’s all true.”

Shae returned to Maro and knelt back down in front of him. She had a nauseating sensation she might sink into the ground. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say.

Maro nodded gratefully. He took one of Shae’s hands and enfolded it in his own large ones, then brought it up to his face and laid it against his cheek as if it might offer a vestige of comfort. “Maybe I’m a coward after all,” he said, “but you’re not.” He leaned into her touch, his beard tickling the center of her palm, and closed his eyes. Shae reached up and cupped both hands around the back of Maro’s head and neck. His life pulsed beneath her touch, the wrinkled texture of his jade aura warped with anguish and regret but no longer burdened by the tension of anger or fear.

Shae felt as if she couldn’t breathe; she squeezed her eyes shut and imagined herself as a column of ice, a creature like Ayt Madashi, made of unwavering resolve and unflinching steel. With a stifled, incoherent cry, she gathered all the jade energy she could muster and Channeled into the base of Maro’s skull. He put up no defense at all, did not raise even the flimsiest Steel. His energy yielded beneath hers; his aura tore and fled. The vessels in his brain burst and he died in seconds.

She caught Maro as he fell into her arms. She lowered him to the asphalt gently, then toppled over his body in a shudder as the blowback of his escaping life rushed into and through her. She clung to the wave for a second, wanting to hang on to it, to follow it into whatever oblivion it was headed toward, but it slipped past her and she was still on the asphalt with Maro’s body in her lap. Slowly, Shae lowered him to the ground onto his back. His eyes were still closed, and his face was inexpressibly sad, but relaxed. Shae kissed his forehead, then both of his closed eyelids. She stood up. Juen and his men were gathered around, but they did not speak or move toward her.

She turned and walked toward the Weather Man’s house. Halfway there, the memories came—slowly at first, a trickle from behind a wall of spreading cracks, growing into a torrent, then sweeping her away like the deluge from a bursting dam. Long conversations and tender moments, the fire in Maro’s eyes when he was energized by an idea, the softness of his smile, the aching warmth of their bodies pressed together. Miraculously, she didn’t break her stride, didn’t stumble or collapse or burst into a run, but her vision swam and she could barely see her own front door when she reached it. When she was inside her own house and alone at last, Shae closed the door behind her, took three steps into the foyer, and crumpled to the ground with a long, silent, wordless howl, arms clutched to her sides, forehead pressed to the hardwood floor as if in eternal penitence.

CHAPTER 47 Back to Work

Shae barely left her house for a week. She dressed and emerged to attend Kehn’s funeral, but the entire event passed in a blur of walking, chanting, and resentful silence. Hilo was devastated by his Horn’s death; he kept Wen’s hand tightly clasped in his own and their children within his sight at all times. Tar broke down at the side of his brother’s grave and wept like a child. Afterward, his eyes were vacant and lost, as if he was no longer present, except for one moment when Shae passed near him and she felt his gaze settle on her for a moment, his aura flickering with bitterness that she had executed Maro painlessly.

Shae couldn’t bring herself to speak to Tar and tell him that she, too, grieved for Kehn. She hadn’t known the Maik brothers well at first, for a long time thinking of them only as her brother’s lackeys, but the past few years had altered that impression. She’d seen Kehn grow into the role of Horn, had shared meals with him around the family dinner table, had come to know him as a loyal and dangerous but quietly dogged man who was at least half the reason for the productive cooperation between the two sides of the clan. Hilo had insisted that Kehn be laid to rest next to the grand Kaul family memorial instead of the small, disused patch where his ignominious father was buried, but from what Shae overheard, the explosion had not left much in the way of remains. Kehn’s ashes did not take up even a fraction of the steel casket. The Horn was a dangerous role, one in which a Green Bone might expect to lose his life for the clan—on his feet with a blade in his hand. Not like this.