Mammoths at the Gates (The Singing Hills Cycle, #4)

by Nghi Vo

up and down, all summer. And you remember. Grandma couldn’t go with us. She died two months ago. She was a good lady. She raised us after our parents got divorced, loved us a lot. She was great.

No, they couldn’t have. Of course they couldn’t have. Of course they could have. “Well,” Ru said thinly. “Thank you for your story, Corporal—” “No.” Tui In Hao rose from her place, the storm come at last, and her face was twisted with fury.

“Our grandmother loved her husband. She cried for him for a week before she died. What my sister spoke of is certainly not true.”

“This is history, not litigation. That is to say, advocate, this is our world, and not yours.”

I don’t know what to do if that happens.

“I must speak,” she said without turning to look at Chih. “Oh, Cleric Chih, grand-niece, I must speak, but I do not know how.”

You must warn yours, Almost Brilliant, about how terrible the world might be.

When we let her out, she sat on the ground for a moment as if stunned or perhaps afraid. I did not want to get too close to her, and we watched her until finally she gathered her wits together to fly away.

Chih sat in the silence afterwards, and then, when they were certain that Myriad Virtues was done, they carefully snuffed out her candle.

“I am glad you are glad,” Almost Brilliant said. “Now try to remember that when next I tell you you need to be nicer to the local magistrates or that you do not need to spend all our money on sesame brittle.”

“Are you going to go to bed?” Chih asked. “You can’t make the gate stronger by staring at it.” “But what if I could?” Ru joked weakly, but they shrugged. “I’m staying.”

The humans had figured out the trick pretty quickly, pulling scarves over their faces, but the mammoths looked incensed.

There was absolutely no precision about it, nothing more than a storm of black and white wings flying straight for the mammoths’ faces and the faces of their riders.

all she wanted to do was to forget her grief, but of course that is something no neixin can do. So she stopped being a neixin.” “If you can’t grieve, can’t fly, can’t remember, why, you might as well be a man,”

“For grief, she said. For sorrow. When the world has changed so completely, why should I remain the same? I cannot remain. I cannot stay.”

“I am a thousand stories of Northern Bell Pass, and an illustrious career in the capital, of a northern tribunal tricked. I am a father and a grandfather as well as a cleric, because no single thing takes away from the rest.”

Every moment, Chih couldn’t help but think. When they taught us to read, when they saw me introduced to Almost Brilliant, when we left home for the first time.

“Come tend her grave, come sing her the songs she liked best, and drink to her final long night. If you will do this, then I will consider all matters settled with Singing Hills.”