We buried a hundred and seventy-four on the third day after the retreat, in the long field west of the castle where the ground still remembered how to be soft even after everything the siege had done to it elsewhere. Vesha read the names. She read them the way she read everything, without inflection, without pause for the weight any given name might carry to whoever stood closest to that particular grave — and I understood, watching her, that the flatness wasn't indifference. It was the only way to get through a hundred and seventy-four names without breaking somewhere in the middle of them.
I stood at the head of the field for all of it. A Demon King owed his dead that much, at minimum, whatever else he failed to give them.
