Act II, Chapter 7: Elara Drakon and the Three Fires of Exile

The pyre had been burning since before dawn, and by the time full light came the smoke had gone from black to grey to something almost white, which Thessaly had once told her meant the wood was spent and the flesh was nearly done, and that the soul, if it existed, had already left for wherever souls elected to go when released from the obligation of a body.

Elara had not moved from her position six feet from the pyre's edge in four hours. Her boots were scorched at the toe. She had not moved back.

Behind her, on the slope of the black-sanded beach that the exile community called the Ashen Shore — named for the volcanic dust that gave the sand its color, not for any metaphor, though the metaphor was available — thirty-one people arranged themselves in the loose geometry of a funeral gathering. Mercenaries who had sold their swords to her cause. Exiles who had sold their grudges. True believers who had sold their disbelief years ago and could not now repurchase it. Councillor Taveth, the oldest of them, whose joints had given him a decade of advance notice about impending weather, stood slightly apart from the rest in the way of a man who had attended enough funerals to have developed a preferred posture for them.