Shrapnel

Cuinn was having trouble sleeping.

She was exhausted; was in fact beyond exhausted and still running on the dregs of battle-rage and desperation and terror. Still, this was hardly an unusual event. Even before Reynhild Andersdottir and her ill-gotten gift of gods-touched hyper-alertness, Cuinn rarely slept more than a consecutive few hours. It was likely a result, she figured, of growing up in a world where your companions would like as not slip a knife between your ribs for your boots or the handful of jerky in your purse.

She'd even taken the precaution of pitching her tent well away from Mara's and Aerona's. They certainly didn't help. Mara was apt to shout phrases in ancient mystic languages in her sleep, some of which would make the room shake, glowing sigils half-appear in the air before winking out, or summon a stink of brimstone. Aerona either snored, particularly if she'd been drinking, or kept all and sundry awake with ecstatic cries from her tent's other occupant, or occupants. Or both.

Only next to Corrac had she ever slept the untroubled six or more hours' span of sleep that everyone else in the world seemed to relish.

For a brief moment she pictured him sitting next to her at the open flap of her battlefield tent, clad in his field plate, stropping a dent from the edge of his sword. What would you think of all this? she wondered. Would you grin at me wryly? Remark "Reyn, my star, don't you think this has all gotten a little out of hand?"

Because at some point, she realized, she had ceased doing this to honour Corrac's memory, or Cullan's. Nay, at some point, the burning ambition that kept her rushing headlong down this foolhardy path stopped flowing from any other source but inside her.

And with a twinge of guilt, she realized it had been a long time since she had thought of Corrac. His shade seemed a firefly burning a bright trail through the darkness of her memory, something precious but evanescent, where it used to feel like an anchor dragging her to the bottom of an abyss of loss.

Cuinn winced; she was more bandaged and poulticed wounds than hale flesh at the moment. She had nearly died; she had not gazed death so squarely in its vacant eye sockets since the battle with the Bladesingers. Her face smarted. Thaliere's greatsword--a handsome, monstrously large thing with an onyx dragon head for a pommel-- had taken the tip off her right earlobe, slashed along her lower right jaw and chin, cleaved clean through her cuirass and into the flesh beneath her left shoulder. If she'd been a fraction of a second slower, the erstwhile Countess would have taken her head clean off. As it was, she would carry the scar from their fight. Aerona had offered to try and heal it, but Cuinn declined. Thousands of men and women have died, for the ambitions of dukes and emperors, for our lofty notions of independence, for my desire to see the lost glory of House Fulcairn restored. Thousands of men and women have given up far more than a gobbet of flesh. Let me see them, let me remember them every time I look in the mirror. 

She rose and walked into the night. An eerie stillness had descended on the valley. The dying had been put out of their misery, and the wounded had, through Aerona's spells and more mundane medicines, at least found some rest. The carrion crows had been driven off. The only sound was the wind, and the last crackling embers of the pyres where bodies burned.

Tomorrow, she would ask Aerona to use her skill at magically shaping stone to erect a monument for the fallen, here on the valley floor. A griffon taking flight, perhaps, to commemorate their bravery in the fight for Taeghas' freedom. A touch of irony; a flying creature it might be, but she knew she would carry its monolithic weight always.

''Tis a great victory we have won today, but I feel the weight on my heart and the scar on my face more than the victory. And perhaps this is as it should be. The day I throw away lives on a whim is the day I am no longer  fit to lead.

Something glittering caught her eye as she walked. There, in a pile of iron shrapnel, was a handful of chips and splinters from the ensorceled rubies that had powered the arcanist Xander's iron construct. She bent to pick them up; they gleamed like spilt blood in her palm.

Maybe I'll have one set into the Crown of the Taeghan Kings, she mused.

So many deaths, all for my desire to see the lost glory of House Fulcairn restored. 

My desire. 

I am no one's grieving widow anymore. No one's wife. No one's paramour. I am no longer an impostor, a bandit, a grifter playing at respectability. I am Cuinn Fulcairn. 

As she walked away,  two teenage squires from Seasdeep, who'd sneaked from their encampment hoping to scavenge bits from the golem's remains, timidly crept closer. One pointed at her retreating silhouette and whispered "The Titanslayer" to the other, but she didn't hear him.