That night, the Low Risers saw stars for the first time.
Amber sucked in a soft gasp as she discerned them, between the swaying and spindly branches of the trees. Her fingertips found Leo’s wrist, begging for understanding. It was beautiful, the way they twinkled, even more beautiful than the blue sky, and scrolling clouds ... and she had come so close to never seeing this at all. How could the world contain such unornamented beauty? How much more was there yet to discover? Tears rolled down her temples and melted into her burnished bronze hair.
Clem was by himself, as usual. His bedroll was far away from the rest of them, nearest the outside of the trees. He had announced that he would stand watch, and that appeared to be what he was doing, sitting there in silence, back to them all, staring out into the darkness. As the hours rolled by, and everyone fell quiet, save for their deep breathing and Brom’s thunderous snores, Clem felt chills wash over him. Sweat coursed down his body, and he shivered, and closed his eyes upon sweet hallucinations of times he had never had with Cass, without the relief of sleep.
Some time later, he had no idea when, he rose to his feet and slipped from the camp, and their lives, with the stealth of a wraith.
In the morning, when they woke to find him gone, Amber panicked. That feeling of dreadful certainty closed around her heart, with all of its horror, and with all of its peace. She refused it, trying to buck it off like an unbroken horse does a saddle. In the end it was Flint, with his tracking skills, whom she’d had to follow in order to find Clemence. He lay in a gulley, his body just barely cold. Besides his sweat, nothing seemed wrong with him, until they lifted his black sweater to find the infected knife wound in his gut.
There had been ample time for Clem to get this treated; he had chosen not to. He had not committed suicide by traditional means, instead letting the nature of violence take its natural course, but it was difficult to view the situation as anything other than a wasteful choice.
Brom had known what they would find, he could see it in the terror on Amber’s face. When it was confirmed, however, all he said was: “He’ll be with Cass now. He’d have wanted that.”
Flower burst into blubbering tears against Flint’s side. Joe suggested they bury him, that’s what the Unbroken did, he had heard, and they were in Unbroken territory, now. To Amber it felt wrong, to put his body into the earth to decompose slowly and painfully. It was not a final enough ending. It was not swift, and shouldn’t he be, if he was to catch Cassandra? He had been Amber’s trainer, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t even harden over. She merely felt the pain, like a meat grinder to her internal organs, and did nothing about it, as Leo would have done.
It was a waste of a half day, scooping out ground and laying Clem in it, as the pallor increased in his bronze skin. Leo was now the only High Riser left on their expedition. Once the dirt was over him, Flower placed something pretty she had woven from blades of grass on top of it, with a feather stuck through the center of it. It was the blue-black feather of a raven she had found on the ground.
Amber began to speak awkwardly, her words long and drawn out, until it became apparent that she was singing, or trying to, for the first time. Her voice was rough and off-tune, not at all lovely, but it grated with emotion, very Amber-like:
“Gut them, for freedom an’ for feather
Cut their Unseen throats…”
Here Flower joined in, her voice a whispery warble, high-pitched and sweet, and Brom soon followed her, his voice deep and pleasant. Joe contributed a word here or there, but he didn’t seem to really grasp the concept of singing.
“...an’ spit their blood ‘cross both tiers
Meet us in the middle and we’ll strike together
Lay their corpses out and scream redemption in their ears.”
They all ended the song at different times, so it seemed that “scream redemption in their ears” echoed many times. It was sung far more quietly and sadly that it had been sung in the arena and elsewhere afterwards, as a victory song.
“Let’s move on, we’ve lost enough time,” Amber said, quietly and brusquely. Clem the peacemaker would not have wanted to delay them on their way to war.
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