Chapter Thirteen: With Muffled Drum

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

- W.H. Auden

Someone had been killed.

There was a funeral being held for a rebel in the Wastelands. Opal knew this to be so, only because Enyakatho had arrived at the compound in the early hours of the morning with arms full of clothes that he had thrown at the girls in the room - Liz, Opal, Sol - and Wren had put a small bag of make-up on the empty bed at the end of the room that had been intended for Ekaitza and Farid had shuffled notecards in his hands and distributed them to the Selected saying, quite softly, "learn them by heart, we need this smooth". Opal had taken them, and glanced at them, and had barely the chance to ask what was happening before Enyakatho and his entourage had swept back out of the room in search of their rebel chaperones and Liz was pulling at the clothes and saying, "I swear, they never get my colour right".

Sol laughed. Privacy had become rather a thing of the past in the Selection, so as Opal sank onto Ekaitza's abandoned bed to scan through the notes they had been issued, Sol and Liz began to change, shaking out the clothes that had been selected for them and voicing quiet sounds of approval and disapproval at the colour and cut - black and scarlet, conservative and lacy. The notes had similarly been set on blood red paper, written with rich black ink. It was poetry, she thought - no, elegy. She wondered who had chosen them. She wondered why.

One line caught her eye - "But since it fell into my lot, that I should rise and you should not..." In her mind, it was her father's soft Scottish accent whispering the words. It was an emigration song of loss, when people could still emigrate. People didn't emigrate anymore. It had once been very common indeed in the rebel enclave of Hansport, hemmed in by Crown provinces on all sides, and some years ago, before the province had fallen to the Kingdom, it had been a most common sight to spot boatfuls of refugees strike out from the shore in desperate hope of reaching some kinder land. Nowadays the seas were still and empty, and no one sang the Parting Glass for emigrants anymore.

So Opal knew it was to be a funeral.

They dressed quickly. There was a sense of urgency to the whole situation - Enyakatho banged the wall of their dorm as he passed, making Sol jump, to underline the rush of it all. Opal's dress fit her perfectly, but was, as Liz had earlier noted, not entirely to her taste: the bodice was a little too tight, the skirt a little too flowing, but on the whole she had to concede that it was far from the worst garment she had ever worn. Looking at Liz and Sol, she noted they were wearing nearly identical clothes - long lacy sleeves, a sweetheart neckline and a skirt that looked somewhat like a dirndl. Enyakatho had not left them any shoes, so Opal slipped on her own pair of combat boots - the skirt was not long enough to cover them - and waved away Sol's offer of the paltry bag of makeup that had been left behind for them. Hansport had been under rationing for several years now. Hansport girls had grown unaccustomed to cosmetics.

The door to the dorm swung open and Liz in turn swung on whoever entered, ready to tell them to get out again, but it was Nina, in a similar dress to the girls, her hands up as though to defend herself. Nina was one of those girls who was at risk of looking plain if you caught them in the wrong light, but this was certainly not the wrong light - she had emphasised her iron jaw, her high cheekbones, and the time in the Selection had granted her enough rest that her eyes no longer looked so deeply sunken. She looked, Opal thought dourly, entirely too glamorous to be attending a funeral.

And it was to be a funeral. Nina said, "it's a funeral," and Opal looked back down at her red cards, and wondered who had died.

Who had died that the Selected were being drafted out to attend? That was what worried her. Demetri? It couldn't be the king. Opal was quite certain it couldn't be the king. They would have heard. They would have been told. Wouldn't they? The other Selected girls would be here. The inner circle would be here. They would have been briefed more, given more guidance, put in more appropriate dresses. Their speeches would have been more carefully penned, more personal or at least pretending to be so, rather than merely stolen from old emigration songs. Surely that would be the case?

Surely it wasn't Demetri?

A small voice in the back of her mind said, Theo?

Liz was squinting down at her cards, her lips moving slightly as she read them, and she said, quite darkly, "he didn't actually mean for us to memorize these right now, did he?"

"He certainly did." Enyakatho had appeared at the door again. "Not too far to go from here, girls, so let's get going." He quickly ushered them out of the dorm, saying softly, "now, remember, we're going for somber. Sorrowful about the loss of life, but not the loss of a life, does that make sense? In mourning, but not grieving. No laughs. No speaking. And just remember, whatever you do, don't stare at the cameras."

"Cameras?" Sol asked, a little disbelievingly.

Nina said from behind Opal, her voice very dark, "the Crown should see what they've done."

"The Crown knows what they've done," Liz snapped. "They don't care."

Opal kept her mouth shut, unable to shake that single word from her mind.

Theo?

The quiet speculation of the other girls did little to help her dislodge this unpleasant thought as they repeated their now-familiar ritual of piling into one of the low, open-topped trucks that had first ferried them into the compound. The girls were accorded the cab; Wren and Farid climbed into the back with their rifles, and what had first struck Opal as a mere space-saving measure now struck her as a strange security feature, as she turned in her seat to see Farid rapidly loading his gun, a strange and quick ritual that still fascinated Opal just a little bit, so different was it from the loading of the revolver her old boss had kept in the laundromat in case of trouble from rebel or Crown forces alike. Farid made it look so easy - bolt handle up and back, almost violently, magazine in, bolt handle forward and down, and then he threw a magazine to Wren and set his gun across his knees and watched the horizon behind them for any sign of trouble.

Opal couldn't help but feel that Demetri was putting a lot of faith in the shooting skills of two skinny teenagers with outdated bolt-actions, to put into their hands the lives of four young Selected women when the sky could, at any moment, blacken with the buzz and movement of Crown planes, when another air-strike could be imminent at any moment, when the black widow queen had clearly succeeded in killing someone important enough for a funeral and would succeed again, eventually. Wren's rifle was almost larger than she was. Opal thought the diminutive rebel seemed perpetually at risk of breaking her shoulder with the recoil if she tried firing it.

They were out of the Wastelands now, but the land was still mostly arid scrub, filled with tufts of desert grass and flowering bouquets of the flowers her father had called elephant tusks and sparse thickets of very slender gum trees. There was a road here, unlike in the Wastelands, though it was a roughly hewn path of dirt and Opal found it just as uncomfortable as the alternative had been. Enyakatho was driving; the passenger seat had been given over to his camera, while the four girls sat in the back. Sol had to sit on Liz's lap, and nearly hit her head off the roof with every treacherous crevice in the road. Liz, her arms wrapped lazily around Sol's waist, said, "will this be on the Report, then?"

"That's the plan." Enyakatho spun the steering wheel to skirt around a pile of abandoned rebar in the middle of the road. "Mainly updates about recent successes in St George, exam results in Yukon, fisheries in Hansport." Opal looked up from her notes at the mention of her hometown, but found that the director seemed to be speaking about little of interest. "Lady Eden scripted and filmed a piece about war widows in the east, then there's this funeral, and then, well..." Enyakatho shrugged. "I don't know how much has been mentioned to you guys about the plan for the next few weeks."

"Well," Nina murmured. "Nice to hear there is a plan."

She said it softly enough that Opal thought Enyakatho probably hadn't even heard her, but Opal shot her fellow former Seven a look nonetheless. Nina didn't seem to have looked at her notes at all, but was moving the cards in her hands, not quite nervous but somehow impatient, brusque. Opal thought she could understand. The day had been oddly claustrophobic, since Theo had dropped her off at the compound. Sol had gone on a short date with Demetri the day before, and had returned from it ever-so-slightly despondent. "I may have scolded the king," Opal had heard Sol confide in Liz over their paltry lunch earlier that day, and Liz had responded, "well, did you or didn't you?"

"I think I did."

Liz had laughed under her breath. "At least you made an impression."

Sol looked like that date was probably on her mind right now. If the Selected girls were being brought to this funeral, then surely the king would be there also?

Unless he was in the ground.

Opal shook her head. "Ró-dorcha," she murmured to herself softly. "Fiú uaim." Too dark, even for her. There came a point that cynicism became fatalism, and considering she wasn't sure whose funeral it was going to be, she thought it best to reserve some depth of despair to which she could plunge should the funeral be for Demetri.

Or Theo.

Or Demetri.

No, she thought, it couldn't be Demetri's funeral, because the scene before them was far too motley and disorganised for the funeral of a king, even a king as paltry as the king of ashes, lord of dust, whatever other insulting terms the Crown used to denigrate the Kingdom in Exile. She half-expected to see vultures circling in the sky above as the truck pulled up and the girls filed out into the dusty shared space that divided the assembled rebel mourners from the narrow hole they had hewn into the ground - not even six foot deep, Opal thought. As the truck approached, the buzz from the rebel group seemed to have, for the first time that Opal could remember, died down. There was another truck parked beside Enyakatho's, with a shape lying on its open bed, wrapped neatly in old sheets and tarpaulin, secured with baling twine at the shoulders and ankles.

"Girls," Enyakatho said. "Over here, over here, just form a nice neat line on this side of the grave... There you have it. Learned your lines, have you?" He turned towards the man on the other side - Opal couldn't remember his name. "Where's himself?"

"Inbound."

"Alright. We'll get the camera set up."

Another ripple of talk amongst the rebels. Opal couldn't escape the fact that many of the men and women in the mourning pack were casting dark, somewhat dirty looks in the direction of the Selected. There was ugly chat circulating, she thought, something unfriendly in the way that they watched the four girls, a harsh look in their eyes. Opal knew that some of the girls - Lissa, Atiena, Marjorie - had made the acquaintance of a few of their guards, but they had been kept thoroughly insulated from the ordinary rank-and-file forces of the rebellion, first in the safehouse and then at the compound. Uzokuwa and Arzu and the others had always had something gregarious about them; these men and women still had dirt on their hands and blood on their faces, loaded guns on their backs and knives in their boots. They all looked so much hungrier than the others. Some of them had daubed black coal dust under their eyes, two small dots, in a small sign of mourning and grief - though Opal privately thought it looked a little bit more like war-paint. In her clean, tailored mourning dress, with her hair neatly put back off her face, Opal abruptly felt unpleasantly, ostentatiously out-of-place. Like there was a target on her back. These people clearly knew the person who had died. Had maybe loved them. And now these glossy strangers were being marched out in front of cameras to legitimise and validate their mourning, to make a spectacle out of it. Opal had no reason to cry for the body in the truck.

Unless it was Demetri.

Unless it was Theo.

It wasn't.

She came to that realisation almost dazedly, as a final car pulled up between the two trucks and Demetri appeared at the passenger side, dressed not in the black of mourning but as he had dressed on the last Report - a dark green fisherman's jumper, the same colour as his eyes, and worn jeans that would have looked more in place on one of the rebels in the motley group than on the king of their new nation. There was a tear over one of his knees, Opal saw, its frayed edges stained with a little bit of blood, and she could not say why, on today of all days, she found that to be such a strange and note-worthy detail.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Demetri called, and went straight past the Selected girls to embrace one of the men nearest to the grave, a short blond rebel with a scar on his face. "Absolutely no words for it. Condolences don't cut it." It was strangely gratifying, Opal thought, to see how the king was welcome at once within the group - not like the Selected girls, subject to uncertain looks and whispers behind their backs, but all of a sudden totally and undeniably one of their own. "He would have wanted it like this. He went down fighting."

He, Opal thought, and then saw Theo slide out of the car that had chauffeured Demetri to the funeral. Opal saw him, and he saw her, and Opal looked away and focused on Demetri as the king withdrew, hugged another, withdrew. There were pats on the shoulder, commiserations, a few sprinkles of laughter, and Enyakatho nodded and the cameras started rolling even as Demetri shook hands, inspected war wounds, wiped away tears and, eventually, called for the body to be brought to the grave.

Rebel burial traditions weren't stringent. There weren't even all that many traditions. The body was pulled from the back of the truck, and thrown into the roughly hewn grave, none too gently. Sol and Opal seemed the only two of the Selections to be perturbed at this harsh handling of the corpse - Opal supposed that the miner and the farmer both had some experience with death, and how tangible and close and imminent it seemed when there was a dead body in front of you. Even still veiled, Opal could not shake how viscerally uncomfortable a sight it was to see a husk without any consciousness or soul left within, something so heavy and so human in appearance and yet utterly, entirely dead.

There was some conversation on the rebel side of the grave - "had he belief?""belief? tons." "religion? ehhhh" "we should say a few prayers just in case he was wrong, ha?" - and Demetri said, looking down into the grave, "our Selected ladies have prepared a small tribute for our lost friend. They never knew him, but they wanted to offer some small piece of comfort."

More rumbles. Did Demetri know how unpopular his Selection seemed to be amongst the ordinary rebels? Opal knew it wasn't personally directed at her, or hoped it wasn't, but it was still far from fun to be the focus of so much negative attention at an honest-to-god funeral. Nonetheless, Demetri caught her eye, and nodded, and offered an encouraging smile, and Opal realised that her position at the end of the line of the Selected probably meant that she was due to go first in whatever small speech Enyakatho had prepared for them on red cards. She could not hold back from looking down at her red notes, and heard Wren chuckle softly behind the camera, and realised with some relief that she had indeed been accorded only pieces from the Parting Glass for her speech. No self-respecting Scot, part or entire, would struggle to recite it. Opal could remember her father singing it at her grandfather's funeral, his voice rough and imperfect and faltering, but low and emotional and honest.

"Oh all the time that e'er I spent, I spent it in good company. And all the harm that e'er I've done, alas, it was to none but me. And all I've done for want of wit, to memory now, I can't recall, and all the comrades that e'er I've had are sorry for my going away..."

She could feel Theo's eyes on her, but refused to let it unsteady her. Instead, she focused on the grave in front of her, the dead stranger within, the king standing beyond with calm eyes and an encouraging smile.

The poem should have been sung. That was really all that Opal could think. She took a deep breath, and concluded, her voice soft."So fill to me the parting glass. Good night and joy be with you all."

Murmurs amongst the rebels. Enyakatho nodded, swivelled the camera to Nina, and Opal could not help but realise that Demetri had still not looked away, though Nina had begun to speak, and as Opal lowered her head, she realised that Theo was still looking at her as well.

Each of the Selected girls spoke. They had nice words, nice sentiments, but it was all, Opal thought, so generic. It could have been a funeral for anyone. For no one. There was nothing personal here. Just poetry taken from others, songs spoken rather than sung. But maybe that was how the rebels did things. She doubted they had any ability, time or inclination to prepare eulogies while they were on the run in the Wastelands. Maybe they would usually just dump the body under the soil and keep running. Maybe they were only holding a funeral for the sake of the Selection and its cameras.

Liz was the last to speak, and when she concluded there was a long silence across the group during which all eyes turned to their king - even Theo's. Demetri looked away from Opal, and gazed into the grave, and pulled from his pocket a chain with a pair of dog-tags on its end and a small, gold coin. His voice was very soft, but he spoke with sincerity and confidence. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today," he began, and a ripple of laughter wavered out across the group. "No, no." Demetri shook his head. "Wrong occasion."

He paused.

"Funerals are a time for sadness," Demetri said. "Grief. Mourning. But I'm not sad. Are any of you sad?" He paused. "I'm angry."

Some cheers.

"We are accused of terrorism," he said. "if we dare to speak about the remains of a homeland that is scattered in pieces and in decay. In decadence and disarray. About a homeland that is searching for purchase among the wastes, a nation that no longer has a face."

He cast his gaze about the assembly, almost in challenge.

"We are accused of sedition," the king said - and for the first time, Opal did see him as the king, a calm and perfectly composed young man with some sort of invisible power in his veins that had driven young men and women to throw themselves under the wheels of war and into early graves. "If we are to speak about a homeland that has nothing left of its great ancient verse, but that of wailing and eulogy. About a homeland that has nothing in its horizons. About a homeland where all birds are not allowed to sing. About a homeland whose writers use invisible ink."

There were murmurings. Opal still wasn't entirely accustomed to the rebel style of audience - it was a most active form of listening, one where people in the crowd would holler in response to things their king had said, would boo at any mention of the Crown, would call out contributions both satirical and serious.

"We are accused of barbarity," Demetri said. "If we refuse to negotiate with the wolf. Lady Liz."

Liz jumped to be called out in such a fashion. Her eyes wide.

"Lady ELizabeth. Your people ran a farm, did they not?"

"They did, your Highness."

"So you can tell me. When the wolves come for your land and for your stock and for your children in the fields, do you ask it nicely to stop?"

"No."

"Do you negotiate terms of surrender?"

"No."

"Do you kneel, and allow it to slaughter as it will?"

"No."

"Then tell me, Lady Elizabeth. What do you do?"

Liz said, softly, "you kill it."

"You kill it. You cut off its head and tear out its teeth." Demetri stood over the grave. He flicked the coin in his hand and allowed it to drop into the grave. "There is no time for grief. The Crown has killed my father twice over. It has taken from me now one of my most beloved childhood friends. After so much loss, we cannot be sad. He would not wish that we did. We cannot mourn. He would not allow us. We must be angry. That is his legacy. Revolution."

Someone in the assembled band of mourners shouted, "M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid!"

Opal translated for the girls next to her, her voice very soft, as she scanned the crowd for whatever Celt had shouted the slogan. "If you bury us, we will merely grow."

Nina smiled. "I like that."

Demetri gave the signal for the grave to be filled. Even as this was done, the crowd dissipated almost immediately, rebels splitting off into small groups and walking to the edge of the grave to pay their respects before leaving in clumps, pausing only to grasp Demetri's hand and speak of retribution and cast suspicious looks in the direction of the Selected girls. Enyakatho and his team were packing up their cameras; Farid called to Theo to drive them home, saying that Demetri intended to drive himself home, and Theo was close enough that Opal could hear him asking if that was really all that wise a decision. The Selected girls were permitted to break rank, only for Liz to immediately pull hers on others: "we should pay respects," she said firmly, and marched up to the edge of the grave, her gaze a challenge in Enyakatho's direction to try to tell her to otherwise as she bent her head over the body. Nina copied her, and Sol copied her, and Opal drifted behind them and mimicked their movements, feeling abruptly exhausted beyond words. A weariness had settled in her bones. She thought of how tired and jaded all of the other rebels had looked. She wondered how many of these funerals they had attended. She wondered how many lay ahead.

If something happened to one of the Selected, would this be how they were buried? A dozen people beside a hole in the ground, some empty platitudes, and down thrown the soil. Would there be cameras? Or would they just be burned, like most? Nina was saying something now about how she had heard that burials were too much effort, and accorded only to those who were very important - but was this really all they could muster for one who was very important?

If you bury us, we will merely grow.

She wondered how often they had shouted that as they committed a friend to the earth.

She wondered if any of them actually bought into that nonsense.

She wondered how many bones had been buried to produce this narrow, faltering revolution.

The other girls were moving back towards the truck, but as Opal backed away from the lip of the nearly-filled grave, Demetri extended his hand to indicate that she should wait with him, so she did so, aware that Theo and Liz were casting her watchful looks, one more curious than the other. Demetri still had those dog-tags clenched in his hands, but he seemed quite relaxed, calm, composed. Kingly, she supposed was the word.

"Lady Opal," he said. "Of Hansport."

"That's me." She paused. "Your Majesty."

"Thank you for attending." The trucks were filling up, soil spinning from under the wheels of one as it took off. "It means a great deal to the others that they do not have to mourn alone." He paused. "I had hoped we might have the chance to introduce ourselves, and I will accompany you back to the safehouse. Please let me know if that is not to your liking."

Opal could not deny that she was curious about their odd, aloof king, and she shook her head and said, "I would be honoured." She paused. "I'm very sorry about your friend. You have my most sincere condolences."

He smiled, very briefly. "We knew each other as boys. We lost touch. But I will miss him."

"As boys?"Opal's voice was slightly uncertain. Had this been some defector from the court, some commander's son who had deserted in search of his childhood friend, a Liara before Liara?

"When I first joined the rebellion. We were often put together, he and I. The General thought we might keep one another out of trouble - well, I tended to get him into scrapes more often than the other way around." When he smiled, Opal had the sudden, overwhelming impression that he was just a young man, the same age as herself, and human despite the responsibility on his shoulders. He looked almost kind. Demetri pressed the dog tags into Opal's hands, and withdrew, and started to walk, almost absent-mindedly, away from the grave so that she had to hurry to catch up with him. There was a single word on the engraved metal: HERRY. "I enjoyed your recitation," Demetri added.

"Would have sounded better sung."

"Do you sing, Lady Opal?"

"God, no. No." She shook her head. "Funerals are painful enough without all that, sir."

"Sir," Demetri said exasperatedly.

"Is there something else I should call you, sir?" Opal could not help herself.

"I'll put some thought into it and get back to you."

"Do."

"I overheard you translating what Leith said earlier. You speak Gaidhlig?"

"Just enough to order a coffee."

"Don't talk to me about coffee. I thought getting out of the Wastelands might mean I could get a decent cup someplace, but I've been disappointed."

Opal laughed. "My dad used to say that I had caffeine in my veins rather than blood."

"Life of a student?"

"I had three jobs." She paused. "And a college course."

He squinted at her almost suspiciously. "You know, my friends say I'm a workaholic. I think I need to bring you along as my counter-argument."

Opal couldn't say why she was so glad to hear that he had friends. So much of what she had seen of the young king had seemed strangely, awfully lonely - a single figure on the Report, a lone silhouette in the office of the military compound, speaking to crowds by himself. She had known the inner circle served as his informal court, but she had never connected that thought with the idea of friends. Like if there wasn't a war, would they go to the movies together, play pool, go drinking? She couldn't picture it. She said, "what's your personal best?"

He understood almost instantly. "Eighty."

"Eighty five." Opal had once gone three and a half days without sleep, a fact that her mother had always said she took far too much cynical pride in. She shook her head. "I was hallucinating by the end of it."

Demetri, she was glad to see, seemed to find this impressive and slightly concerning rather than absolutely bizarre."Might have been too much caffeine?"

"I was thinking it wasn't enough."

"Priority one," Demetri said, "once I get to the city. Decent coffee."

"Have mercy on the rest of us and bring some back, but?"

"The kinder thing might be to let you get your own." Demetri paused and leaned on the car. He had rolled up his sleeves, as he frequently seemed to. He looked more comfortable like that. Up close, Opal could see precisely how closely his dark green eyes matched his jumper. "I know you guys probably have cabin fever."

You guys, Opal thought, not you girls. Not you ladies. A small detail, but a sign that, if he wasn't comfortable, he was certainly feigning comfort masterfully.

"So thanks for your patience," he added. "I know it isn't easy to just be... trapped doing nothing in the middle of a rebellion. Especially when you're so used to being busy."

Opal shrugged. "It's been a paid vacation."

"You must have a very odd family," Demetri mused. "To have air strikes on your vacations."

That startled a laugh out of her. "Ah, no, we're ordinary enough for people who live in a lighthouse."

Demetri looked surprisingly delighted with this fact. "A lighthouse?"

"When I was younger. Pa used to have the night shift, so we'd spend one week up there with him and one week down in the house with my a-me."

"Who's we?"

"Me. My sister, Ruby."

"Ruby and Opal?"

She waved away this most common of questions. "They're good names."

"I didn't say they weren't." Demetri was smiling faintly. "You must miss her. Your sister, I mean."

Opal decided to be honest. "I do."

"What is she like?"

"She's... the most cheerful person on the planet. I don't think she ever stops smiling, or dreaming." Opal hadn't allowed herself to think about her family in weeks, but talking about her sister was surprisingly sorrowful. She hadn't even been able to get a letter to them. She hadn't spoken to them since the day she had left Hansport.

Demetri must have noticed. "I understand how you feel. To be estranged from one's sibling is a very strange bereavement."

Of course. Opal almost laughed. Demetri's brother was trying to kill him.

She indicated the grave. "You seem familiar with bereavement, sir."

A shadow flitted across his face. "Unfortunately. I've buried many friends. I've been deprived the opportunity to bury many, many others."

Opal wound the chain of the dog tags around her fingers, and was for a moment unsure of what to say.

She was saved by Demetri continuing, "such is revolution."

"M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid."

"That's the idea." Demetri smiled. "It's from a much longer chant, but that's the line that stuck with us. Seemed suitably underdog."

"It's a good line." Opal twisted the chain of the tags, and decided to risk one more question. After all, it had taken her this long to get to speak to the man - she knew this was likely to be her first, and last chance. "The others didn't seem too happy to have us there."

"They were in mourning. They tend to close ranks when they grieve."

"Are we unpopular? The Selected, I mean?"

She could see that Demetri was also trying to decide whether or not to be honest with her. "Unpopular isn't the word."

"What is the word?"

Demetri looked slightly pained; the words were torn from him almost reluctantly. "Obviously everyone has their own favourites. Everyone roots for a different girl. Such is the nature of the Selection."Opal knew this already. Saran and Yue were favourites in the north; the south seemed to favour Atiena and Nina so far. Liara and Eden were popular amongst Kingdom loyalists in Illéa.

Opal didn't think she was popular anywhere except Hansport.

He moved around to the door of the car and opened it. "Many in the Kingdom would like to see a queen who understands the struggle they went through to win their nation. Who participated in the struggle. A queen who has blood on her hands. A queen who has cried at these funerals and hunted wolves all her life."

Opal said, "is that what you want, Demetri?"

Demetri said, "I don't tend to want anymore, Lady Opal."

Opal paused, and nodded, and slid into the car as Demetri did the same. They were still filling the grave, she saw, and she saw also that they were not bothering to mark it any way. Just another set of bones in the ground, she thought, another seed for the growing rebellion. M'adhlactar sinn, fásaimid.