Page 220 of A Vow of Embers

Of course Maia would have died this way. Protecting an innocent.

I put my hands over my eyes. I wasn’t sure that I had enough tears left in me to cry. I felt drained, destroyed.

Shattered.

There were no words for how terrible this was. I wanted to sink into the ground and disappear. I was already numb and wrung out from the slaughter we’d seen in Lycia, and this was so much more personal. It almost felt unreal, like it was happening to someone else.

How could Maia be lying here on the ground in front of me, dead?

How had any of this happened? And how were we supposed to keep going when there was this kind of evil and devastation in the world?

I remembered Maia telling me about how similar weddings and funerals were, with the only difference being the time of day. She deserved a proper funeral, but we wouldn’t be able to give her that. I had to make sure that she was buried in the earth. We had to give that respect to all of them.

“Over here!” Io called out. I got up and ran to her, as did the others.

Antiope lay on the ground, stabbed and bruised and broken and bleeding.

“Still breathing,” Io pronounced, her voice catching.

A sharp pang of relief pierced my heart. I should have known that our battle master was too stubborn to die.

She opened her eyes and tried to speak.

“Don’t talk,” Io said as she rummaged through her bag.

“Ham . . . ham . . . hammer,” Antiope mumbled.

“Hammer,” I repeated, to show her that we had heard.

She nodded slightly. “Of . . . Arion . . .”

“Hammer of Arion?”

She nodded again and then her eyes shut. Io poured a mixture down her throat and directed Zalira and Ahyana to carry her out. “I’ll have my brothers take her back to the palace so that the healers can work on her. We should keep looking.”

What had Antiope been trying to tell us? What or who was the hammer of Arion? Something or someone important enough that she’d kept herself alive long enough to tell us about it.

Finding Antiope had given us hope, but we didn’t discover any other survivors. I was the one who found Artemisia’s adelphia. The three members who had survived the previous attack on the temple hadn’t survived this one.

It suddenly occurred to me that we were wasting time. We should do this the easy way. I went over to Suri.

“Is there anyone else alive?”

She held up one finger.

“Is it Artemisia?”

No.

“Is she here?”

No.

Somehow, I’d already known the answer to that question. Because my gut told me that Artemisia was involved in what had happened.

“Where is the one person still alive?”

I didn’t hold out hope that it was one of our fellow priestesses or acolytes. Suri closed her eyes, opened them again, and pointed toward the gymnasium. I knew who we would find there.

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