"How is what happened to them any worse than death?

And that's how all lives end. Their works live on at Heffiji's house-it's more immortality than most people get. And these old men live. No matter what you might think of it right now, life is good and sweet, even with the memory of great loss and terrible grief."

"I have lost both my fathers," Patience whispered, "and I killed them both with my own hands."

"You were Unwyrm's hands when Angel died."

Patience shook her head, then walked toward the other hearth.

Will lay on a pallet stretched before the fire. Kristiano knelt by the giant man, wiping his naked, sweating torso with a wet cloth. Patience knelt beside the boy ok.

"He likes this," said Kristiano. "But he's afraid."

Patience took the gauntling's hand in hers. "May I?"

Kristiano relinquished the cloth with a sweet but enigmatic smile. Patience saw herself, for a moment, as the gauntling saw her-this human woman would come and serve Will for a moment, but the gaunt would serve him hour after hour, unfailing. If love was giving the gift most desired, then only gaunts in all the world truly loved. But Patience shrugged off the silent criticism of the beautiful child. You are what you are; I have other work to do, and I can only give a few gifts to anyone.

Maybe none at all.

Will's eyes were open, but he said nothing. Patience had no smile for him, nor he for her. They were alive, weren't they? And Unwyrm was dead. That was victory.

But it had been Patience's hand that threw the loop that nearly cut off Will's. And it had been Patience also who killed Unwyrm and held Unwyrm's only child as it died.

There was much murder and pain in Patience's memory, and she had not yet discovered whether any love remained.

Ruin sat nearby, his broken leg heavily splinted, his face glum as he stared into the fire. Reck soon came with a carafe of water and gave Ruin a draught of it. He drank long and deep, then touched her arm in silent thanks.

Reck gave the carafe to Patience, who took it, lifted Will's head, and let water into his mouth. Will lapped it gratefully. Gently she lowered him to the pallet again.

Finally, now, Will spoke. "How did you find strength to do it?" he whispered.

"It wasn't my strength," said Patience. "It was lent to me. The geblings called me. Together, with one voice. It gave me just enough freedom within myself to find myself.

So I did what I was born for."

"Saved the world."

"Murdered an enemy who trusted me. I remained the consummate assassin to the end."

"You did what God wanted," whispered Will. Then he closed his eyes.

Ruin spoke. "He's right, you know. About what God wanted. The kind of god I believe in, anyway. Humans and geblings and gaunts and dwelfs, we all wanted to live more than Unwyrm wanted us to die. It all worked together. You couldn't kill Angel, and he lived to bring into the birthing place the knives you killed Unwyrm with, after he thought he had left you weaponless. Reek's arrow saved you; Will broke my leg to save me; Sken, useless and stupid and foul, kept Reck from killing herself under Unwyrm's control. Every bit and piece of it, an intricate and impossible network, a web that could have failed at any point." Ruin nodded, almost angry in his insistence. "We are god, if there is a god, and Unwyrm fell before us."

Patience remembered again the unbearable joy she had felt under Unwyrm's body. And felt again the way his ichor spilled over her, the way her knife tore through his tender organs. It was not what she had felt with her body that most affected her now. It was what she had felt with her mind. For as the death agony came, he cried out to her with his silent voice, the one that had ruled her for so long; he cried out: I live. I want to live. I must live. It was the desperate cry of her own heart, too. He had wanted nothing more than any human wanted. To live, to pass on his genes to his children, to keep death at bay for as long as he could. His people-for such the wyrms were, to each other-his people had lived for centuries, but he had lived longest of all, waiting to be the salvation of all his race. And his death was the death of ten thousand generations of wyrms.

His death was the death of the miraculous child she had held in her arms, the new shape a dying species had tried to adopt in order to save themselves. They saw us coming, and they knew we would be the disease for which there was no cure. They did all that they could do.

The last breath of their struggle grew in my womb, shaped like a human in tribute to the human gods who had come to destroy them. But we did not accept the offering, no; I killed Unwyrm before the child's yolk was complete, and when the child was born I let it die in my arms.

What is so much better about my kind of life, that we should survive, and they should die? She could think of no standard of judgment that made sense, except this one: I am human, and so humans must live. It was not a struggle for justice. It was a battle of savages. The cruelest won. I was the perfect savior for mankind.

"Unwyrm held in his mindstone the memory of this planet," said Reck. It was as if she had read Patience's thoughts. "His root was back to the first wyrm that had a thought. And in his mindstone, the stories of his kind, forever. Of our kind. We have as much wyrm ancestry as he had."

"You favor the human side," murmured Will.

"See how beautiful it makes us," said Ruin.

"You are beautiful," said Patience, looking at Reck.

"I remember being a gebling myself. I remember the way it felt, inside my body; I remember the voice of my siblings in the othermind. And something else, too. The loneliness of never knowing my father, and then, when the scepter came to me, finally remembering his life as he knew it."

"It nearly drove you to insanity," Ruin reminded her.

"I wish that every human could have such madness.

Or a taste of it, just for a moment, to know their mother or father. It would be a great gift."

"To know them, but not to be them," said Will.

"You are very strong. Lady Patience. Few can endure having other people's memories live in their minds. I couldn't."

"You?" said Patience. "You're the strongest of all."

His eyes went distant, rejecting the praise. "Will I keep my hand?" he asked.

"It will dangle as beautifully as ever at the end of your arm," said Ruin. "As for using it-I've done all I can to encourage the nerves to grow."

"I won't be much use to anyone without my right arm," he said.

Patience touched his forehead, drew her finger along his cheek, and finally let her fingertips rest on his lips.

"We're all looking for new careers," said Patience.

"There aren't any prophecies about what I'll do after Unwyrm is dead. I'm not seventeen yet, and everything I was born to do is done. Does this mean that I'll have to learn a trade?"

Reck laughed softly, and Will smiled.

"You're Heptarch," said Ruin.

"There's a man in King's Hill who would disagree," said Patience. "And he's not a bad man, and not a bad Heptarch."

"He's a caretaker," said Will. "Ruling only until your work here is done."

"When an army of a million geblings stands at his border, he might give thought to abdication," said Ruin.

"No," said Patience.

"What, do you think we'd do it for you out of altruism?

The geblings are best served by having a Heptarch who remembers being a gebling. We aren't subhumans to you, now."

"Not a drop of my people's blood will be shed in my name," said Patience.

"There you are," said Ruin. "You're right. Your life work is over."

"Shut up, Ruin," said Reck.

Sken walked up to them, buttoning a clean gown that fit her like the draping of a warhorse. Her ruddy face gleamed in the firelight. "Heptarch, the geblings have brought the body of your former slave out of the birthing place. They want to know what you want done with it."