Make ready. Prepare the way.
The owl had been a lie to protect the tender psyche of his host body. After he awakened, another lie took its place: his life. His humanity was a lie, a mask, like the dream of owls in the dark.
Now he was dying. And the lie was dying with him.
There was no pain. He did not feel the bitter cold. His body seemed to float on a warm, boundless sea. The alarm signals from his nerves to the pain centers of his brain had been shut down. This gentle, painless easing of his human body into oblivion would be the final gift.
And then, after the last human being was dead: rebirth.
A new human body unburdened by the memory of being human. He would not remember the past eighteen years. Those memories and the emotions attached to them would be forever lost—and there was nothing that could be done about the agony attending that knowledge.
Lost. Everything lost.
The memory of her face. Lost. The time with her. Lost. The war declared between what he was and what he pretended to be. Lost.
In the quiet of the winter-draped woods, floating on a boundless sea, he reached for her, and she slipped away.
He knew what would come of it. He had always known. Once he found her imprisoned in snow and carried her back and made her whole, his death would be the price. Virtues are vices now, and death is the cost of love. Not the death of his body. His body was the lie. True death. The death of his humanity. The death of his soul.
In the woods, in the bitter cold, on the surface of a boundless sea, whispering her name, entrusting her memory to the wind, to the embrace of the silent sentinel trees and to the care of the faithful stars, her namesake, pure and everlasting, the uncontained universe contained in her:
Cassiopeia.
16
HE WOKE TO PAIN.
Blinding pain in his head, his chest, his hands, his ankle. His skin was on fire. He felt as if he’d been dipped in boiling water.
A bird perched on a tree branch above him, a crow, regarding him with regal indifference. The world belonged to the crows now, he thought. The rest were interlopers, short-timers.
Smoke curled in the bare branches overhead: a campfire. And the smell of meat sizzling in a pan.
He was propped up against a tree, covered by a heavy wool blanket, with a rolled-up winter parka for a pillow. Slowly, he lifted his head an inch and realized immediately that any movement at all was a very bad idea.
A tall woman came into view carrying an armload of wood, then vanished from sight for a moment while she fed the fire.
“Good morning.” Her voice was low-pitched, lilting, and vaguely familiar.
She sat beside him, pulled her knees to her chest, and wrapped her long arms around her legs. Her face was familiar, too. Fair-skinned, blond, Nordic features, like a Viking princess.
“I know you,” he whispered. His throat burned. She pressed the mouth of her canteen against his raw lips, and he drank for a long time.
“That’s good,” she said. “You were talking nonsense last night. I was worried you’d suffered something a little more serious than a concussion.”
She stood up and disappeared from view again. When she came back, she was holding a frying pan. She sat next to him, placing the pan on the ground between them. She was studying him with the same haughty indifference as the crow.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You have to eat.” Not pleading. Stating a fact. “Fresh rabbit. I made a stew.”
“How bad is it?”
“Not bad. I’m a good cook.”
He shook his head and forced a smile. She knew what he meant.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “Sixteen broken bones, skull fracture, second-degree burns over most of your body. Not your hair, though. You still have your hair. That’s the good news.”