APEX SOVEREIGN

I do not remember crossing the floor.

I remember the sound he made when he hit the stones. It was a small sound, a dull wet thud, no louder than a sack of grain. I remember that the white spike had gone out of him as he fell, and that the hole it left in his chest was the size of my two fists, and that it did not bleed. It glowed. The edges were charred, and through the char I could see a bright pale light, moving, like a thing alive.

I remember kneeling.

I remember that his eyes were open, gray, calm, a little puzzled. They looked at the ceiling. Then they found my face, and the puzzlement went out of them, and something else came in.

"Ah," said Declan. It was hardly a voice. "There you are."

"Don't talk."

"I am not... in much pain." A breath. "That is a poor sign, I think."

"Be quiet."

"Tamsin." His hand moved on the stone. I took it. It was cold. "The star. It took the worst of it. Another... half an inch..." He tried to smile. "It was a good shield. I am sorry to have used it up."

"Declan, stop."

"I wanted to say—"

"No." My voice broke. I heard it. "No. You said after. You said after the battle. You don't get to say it now. You don't get to say it here, on the floor, like a man in a ballad. I won't have it. Do you understand me? I won't."

His fingers tightened on mine, very faintly.

"Stubborn," he whispered.

"Yes."

"I rather like that."

His eyes closed.

…

I do not know what to call what happened next.

I have heard it named a great many things. The broadsheets said the Awakening of the Apex. The priests said the Reaping of the Last Founder. Mabel, who had a gift for the plain word, called it Tuesday. I think she was nearest the mark. It did not feel like a miracle. It felt like the moment, when you have been standing at a closed door for a very long time, that you stop pulling at the handle and notice it opens inward.

I put my hand flat on the hole in his chest.

The Cinder was there before I asked it. It went down my arm like a river over a weir. It poured into the wound, and I felt the white fire in it, the Chancellor's stolen light, the hard clean structure of the spike. It was a lattice. It was a thing built of wards. And what burns structure, I thought, with a terrible clarity, is me.

I burned it.

I took it apart from the inside, thread by thread, each strand of white going red and then black and then to dust. It hurt him. I felt him arch, and gasp, and I held him down with my other hand, and I said, over and over, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, hold still. The pale light went out of the wound. The charred edges flaked away. Beneath them, slowly, I saw the red of living flesh.

But it was not enough.

The wound was too deep. The spike had gone through the star. The silver mark on his breast, which had held him together since the ninth chain fell, was cracked from side to side, and the Mana that should have flowed through it was leaking away like water from a split cask. He was dying. I could feel it. His heart was going slower and slower under my palm.

I need more, I thought.

I need more than I have.

…

"Then take it."

I looked up.

My mother was awake. She hung in the heart of the tree with her arms outstretched and the silver wires streaming from her skin, and the light in her had changed. It had gone from pearl to gold. Her eyes were bright and very clear. She was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on any face, and knew at once, because I had seen it in a mirror: the fierce, wry, absolute tenderness of a woman who has made up her mind.

"Take it, Tam," said Elinor. "All of it. It's yours. Everything in the tree. I held it for twenty-one years. I held it for you."

"I can't."

"You can."

"It's them. It's the children. It's their—"

"It is not theirs now." Her smile was crooked. "Look."

I looked.

The sparks had not all gone. When I had broken Crane and sent the golden flood roaring up the shaft, I had thought that every one of them was gone, home, scattered over the city like seed. But some of them had stayed. Not many. A few hundred, perhaps. They hung in the dark above the Engine, in a loose bright cloud, drifting slowly down. They hesitated. They came near me, and circled my head, and I heard them: a whisper, a thin sweet many-voiced murmur, like wind in dry wheat.

Is it her, they said. Is it the one.

She said our names.

She said it on the stage.

She said it to the whole world.

I put my free hand over my mouth.

I understood. I had read page forty to the Senate, and the Glass had carried it to nine million homes. And the children, the ten thousand, bound to the tree and listening in the dark, had heard it. They had heard a girl say their number. They had heard someone say that it had been wrong.

They had been waiting.

"They will not give it to just anyone," said my mother softly. "It has to be offered. It has to be earned. It has to be a gift." Her eyes were shining. "They are offering. Tamsin. Please. Don't make them ask twice."

I bent my head.

"Thank you," I said, aloud, to the drifting lights. My voice shook. "I don't know what I've done to deserve it."

You remembered, they said.

And they came down.

…

It was not like the Storm.

The Storm had been a battering, a forging, a violent shaping of a thing against its will. This was the opposite. It was quiet. The sparks settled on my skin like snowflakes, on my hands, my hair, my face, and where each one touched, it melted, and went in. Warmth spread through me. It was a slow deep homely warmth, the warmth of a kitchen on a winter night, of a lamp in a window, of a hand in the dark.

I felt them all.

I felt the ones who had been small and shy, and the ones who had been fierce. A boy who had wanted to be a pilot. A girl who had wanted to heal. A child of nine who had dreamed in colors, and had been told that dreaming was no use. A hundred, two hundred, five hundred little wants, bright and various and entirely their own, folding into me one by one like leaves into a river.

The Emberheart opened.

I had thought it was a thing in my chest. I had thought it was a coal, a seed, a small bright stone. It was not. It was a door. It opened outward and outward, and beyond it was a field, and the field was full of light, and the light went on and on, past the walls of the chamber, past the Senate and the city, to the edge of the world.

So this is what it's for, I thought.

It was never a weapon.

It was a home. It was a place that anyone who had been told they were not enough might come to, and be told otherwise.

I heard a voice say, from very far away, in the dry, tired, ironic accents of a woman in a gray cloak with ash in her hair: There. You see? You were never slow.

And the black tree on my arm caught fire.

…

I will try to say what it was like. I am not sure I can.

The nine limbs of cinder, which had lain across my skin since Skyfall like a branched scar, burst into flame. They did not burn me. They grew. They lengthened. They put out buds, and the buds put out leaves, and the leaves were gold, and green, and red, and silver, and every color I had ever seen. Blossoms opened. A wind blew through them. The tree on my arm became a tree, a real one, tall and living, its roots in my breastbone and its crown in my hair, and its shadow fell across the silver floor of the chamber.

I rose.

I did not mean to. I was lifted. I rose off my knees and my feet left the ground, and I hung in the air above the Engine in a nimbus of light, with my arms spread, and the children's voices singing in my blood.

And I looked down at the man who had made them sing.

…

Everett Crane was on his knees.

I had broken him. I had not known how completely. The pearl radiance had gone out of him, and the youth, and the gold. What knelt on the marble was an old man, small, withered, trembling, in a coat too large for him. His white hair had thinned to a few wisps. His hands were claws. The cane lay across his knees, split in two, and he was staring at it with the blank incredulous fixity of a man who has been robbed in his own house.

He raised his face.

It was an old face, and a tired one. There was no malice in it any longer. There was only a vast, hollow bewilderment. The pale eyes had faded almost to white.

"What have you done?" he whispered.

I came down slowly, until my feet touched the floor.

"I gave it back."

"It was mine."

"No." I walked toward him. The tree rustled at my back. "It was never yours, Chancellor. You borrowed it. And you borrowed it from the people who couldn't say no." I stopped in front of him. "I have not killed you. I want you to understand that."

His mouth worked.

"You will go up that shaft. You will go before the Senate of Houses, and the Glass will go with you, and every word you say will be heard. You will answer for ten thousand, four hundred and six. You will answer for my mother. You will answer for every one of them, one by one, in the light." I looked down at him. "That is all I want. I want you to be seen."

"You could end it now."

"I know."

"It would be quicker."

"It would." I held his gaze. "That is why I won't."

I thought of a road, and a boy in a nightshirt, and a gray cloud of ash blowing east. I had unmade Alden in a breath. It had cost me nothing, and gave me nothing, and I had known it at the time. There are some things that can be put right by an ending. There are others that must be lived through.

"Take him up," I said.

The twelve Gold Guards, who had been standing in a ragged line along the wall since the fight began, with their swords at their feet and their faces gray, hesitated. Then the nearest, a man of forty with a gray mustache, bent, and took the Chancellor under the arm.

He did not look at me. But as he lifted the old man to his feet, I heard him say, very low:

"My daughter has the Tithe-scar."

I nodded.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Tell her it's gone."

…

I turned back.

My mother's light had begun to fade.

She hung in the tree with her head tilted a little to one side. The silver wires that had held her for twenty-one years were loosening, one by one, and falling away like hair. Her face, in the gold, was peaceful. The black lashes lay on her cheek. She looked very young.

I went to her. I reached through the cage, and the cage let me, and I touched her hand.

It was warm. It was real.

"Mother," I said.

"Tam." Her eyes opened a crack. "Is it done?"

"It's done."

"And Declan?"

I looked back. He lay where I had left him, on the silver floor. His chest rose and fell. It was slow, but it was steady, and the red of living skin had closed over the wound.

"Alive."

"Good." The faint smile came back. "He is rather splendid. I always thought so. I sent him a message once, through the wires, in the early days. I told him to wait for you." She sighed. "He's very stubborn."

"I noticed."

"Don't let him say it too soon."

"Say what?"

"You'll know." A soft breath of laughter. "Oh, Tamsin. I wish I had had you for a day. Just one day. I would have taught you to braid your hair."

"I cut it off."

"I saw. It suits you."

I could not see for tears. I laid my forehead against the wire.

"I remember your name," I said. "I never forgot it. Even before I knew. I used to say it in the dark, when I was little. Elinor. I didn't know why."

"I know."

"Elinor Ashgrove."

"Yes." Her voice was growing faint. "Oh, my darling. That is all I wanted."

The gold went out of her.

It went gently. It faded from her hair, her face, her hands, until the light was only a shimmer, and then a memory of a shimmer, and then a very soft and ordinary gray. The wires fell from her wrists. The cage opened. And my mother's body, lighter than a child's, slid out of the dying tree and into my arms.

I held her.

She weighed almost nothing. She smelled of dust and cold metal and something very faint and sweet, like old lavender. I sat down on the floor of the Tithe Engine with a dead woman in my lap, and I rocked her, and I did not say anything for a long time.

Behind me, the great silver tree went dark.

…

When I looked up, the chamber was empty of light.

The crystals had gone out. The chains were dust. The wires fell from the walls in a silent glittering rain, and settled on the floor in drifts, like snow. The only light left in the cavern came from the shaft overhead, a pale clean circle of day, and from the tree on my arm, which glowed softly, green and gold, as though a lamp had been lit inside it.

Nimbus came out of the shadows.

I had forgotten him. He stalked across the silver drifts with his tail high and his coat standing in spikes, his silver eyes enormous, and he stopped a yard from me. He looked at my mother's face. He looked at Declan, on the floor. Then he looked at me.

"You have a tree," he said.

"I do."

"It is very large."

"So I'm told."

"I do not wish to be rude." He sat down. "But I believe that you have become the most powerful creature in the Republic."

I laughed. It came out as a sob.

"Apex," said Nimbus. "That is the word. I looked it up. In your head. Apex Sovereign." He cleaned a paw with great dignity. "I thought you ought to be told, in case no one else had the manners."

I put my hand over my eyes.

"Thank you, Nimbus."

"Also," said the cat, in a different voice, "he is waking up."

I looked.

Declan had turned his head. His gray eyes were open, and clear, and looking straight at me. He did not say a word. He only looked, with the plain, quiet, steady attention I had come to need like air. And then, very slowly, he smiled.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

"I seem," he said hoarsely, "to have been unavoidably detained."

I put my mother down on the silver, as gently as I could, and crossed the floor on my knees, and kissed him.