One name I supplied him myself. Kerry. The last Molly and I had known of this street boy, he had gone off as a puppeteer’s apprentice. He’d ended his days as little more than a puppet. His laughing mouth was stilled forever. As boys, we’d run errands together, to earn a penny or two. He’d been beside me the first time I got puking drunk, and laughed until his own stomach betrayed him. He’d wedged the rotten fish in the trestles of the tavern keeper’s table, the one who had accused us of stealing. The days we had shared I alone would remember now. I suddenly felt less real. Part of my past, Forged away from me.
When we were done, and stood silently looking at the tables of bodies, Verity stepped forward, to read his tally aloud in the silence. The names were few, but he did not neglect those unknown. “A young man, newly bearded, dark hair, the scars of fishing on his hands …” he said of one, and of another, “A woman, curly-haired and comely, tattooed with the puppeteers’ guild sign.” We listened to the litany of those we had lost, and if any did not weep, they had hearts of stone. As a people, we lifted our dead and carried them to the funeral pyre, to set them carefully atop this last bed. Verity himself brought the torch for the kindling, but he handed it off to the Queen, who waited beside the pyre. As she set flame to the pitch-laden boughs, she cried out to the dark skies, “You shall not be forgotten!” All echoed her with a shout. Blade, the old sergeant, stood beside the pyre with shears, to take from every soldier a finger’s-length lock of hair, a symbol of the mourning for a fallen comrade. Verity joined the queue, and Kettricken stood behind him, to offer up a pale lock of her own hair.