THE COST
The victory had a price.
I had known it would. The prophecy had said so, not in those exact words but in the specific language of old texts that understand cost as structural. Something given for something held. The territory anchored at the expense of something else.
What it cost was Della.
Not her life. I want to be precise about that, because when I say cost I need to say what the cost actually was. She did not die. But the ceremony, the long hours of translation and guidance and the specific energy she had poured into facilitating a convergence that hadn't been performed in three hundred years, had taken something from her that Silverwood's healer could not simply rest back into herself.
She told me on the Saturday after the battle, in the medical station, with the brisk
