Page 93 of Of Songs and Silence

The sun is just creeping over the horizon when my sisters and I stand outside of the place we spent more than half of our lives imprisoned.

It seems impossible that everything has happened in one night. That Einar survived.

He sits behind me, resting against Khijhana, who arrived with the boat, still angry with me that she had been left behind.

Melodi has just returned from telling her mate that she was all right. Or at least, physically unharmed. It doesn’t feel like any of us are all right. I’m not sure we ever will be.

He waits in the water nearby, watching Mel with the same intensity I have come to expect from Einar.

Not that Remy is much better with Aika. He just hides it in a way the other two don’t bother to. He stands behind Aika, suffering stoically through the curious attentions of a large purple octopus.

All of our eyes are trained on the house, though.

I already walked the halls, feeling Rose’s ghost alongside me as I plucked the vials I needed from Madame’s storeroom. As Melodi prepared her body in a way I’m not sure she deserved. As Aika meticulously created a trail of turpentine along the floor, and another around the perimeter.

We’ll never have the answers we so desperately need. They died right alongside her, but at least it’s over. There’s only one thing left to do now, to drive the final nail in her coffin.

“Whenever you’re ready,” I say to my sisters.

“We’ve been ready,” Aika mutters. “Just waiting on you to have your whole dramatic moment.”

She says it casually, but her words are edged with a bittersweet tone that I feel inside my soul.

This house was a prison, but it was also the only real home we knew—the place where Madame took one family from me and gave me another.

“Says the woman who had this idea to begin with,” I shoot back.

Mel shakes her head softly, fondly, but she makes a gesture for us to move on.

“All right then,” I say, my voice wavering slightly with disbelief.

Aika holds out a vial and hands out three small matches. One by one, we dip our matches into the vial and smoke and sparks burst to life.

We drop them to the ground.

Then we stand back and watch the life Madame forced on us go up in flames.

EPILOGUE

Melodi

Ihaven’t returned to Delphine in the year since my sisters and I burned the chateau to the ground. I probably never will, but my people bring back reports that the villagers on the isle are doing well, trying to rebuild after Mother’s reign of terror.

Aren’t we all?

Most days, this newfound freedom still doesn’t quite feel real. The nights are even worse. I wake up in a cold sweat, remembering Damian’s hands on me, the way I had accepted a fate that would have slowly destroyed me.

Then I see my mother die all over again, feel the life she wasted on hatred draining away in my hands.

All we can do is move forward, Kala, Ari says to me in those precarious in-between hours.

He’s right. We can only do better, create better for our own people, just as my sisters are doing for theirs.

Like I’ve summoned them with my thoughts, Aika and Zaina walk through the double doors at the back of the cabin, joining the rest of us outside. Shortly after Delphine, we came here and built a place of our own on the beach at the intersection between our three kingdoms.

It runs right into the surf at the edge so Ari and I can stay as well, though I’m not sure it’s a gesture he appreciates when Aika spends our time together mocking him.

“How’s our favorite grumptopus today?” she asks, looking pointedly at my husband rather than the actual grumpy octopus winding around a stool next to her.

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