For a time I did nothing at all.
I lay on a thin mat at the edge of the Tahl's camp, in the striped shade of a woven awning, and the days went over me as water goes over a stone in a riverbed. I ate when they brought food. I drank when they brought water. I slept when the sun grew too hot for anything else, and I slept when it didn't, and the difference between sleeping and waking wore thin enough to read through.
I will not pretend to you that I was healing. The body was healing. The body is a tradesman, it takes the work in front of it. Skin closed. Bruises went through their colors and faded. The stumps of my fingers stopped weeping and began learning to be ends instead of beginnings. But I was not in the body doing any of that. I was somewhere behind it, a few steps back, as you stand back from a workshop where something of yours is being mended that you no longer remember wanting.
When I closed my eyes, I saw faces.
Wil came first, always. Wil with the blood dried across him to the color of old wine, his hand still closed on the axe haft, keeping his last account. Then Sim, looking at me with those soft eyes that in all the years I knew him had never once held anything harder than worry for a friend. Looking at me, and his lips moving, and the wind arriving.
Denna came differently.
She walked through my dreams with her back always turned. That was the whole cruelty of it, and it needed no more. She was forever just leaving. Through doors I could not reach, down streets that lengthened as I ran them, along the rail of a riverboat pulling from a dock my feet were nailed to. I would call her name and she would pause. She always paused. She never turned. I would reach for her shoulder and my hand would find the place where she had been, and she was smoke, she was wind, she was gone. I would wake with my arms full of nothing on a thin mat at the edge of the world.
Understand. Dreams of her walking away were nothing new. I had had them for years. The difference was in the waking. For years the waking had been the kind part.
And through it all, under it all, Auri's voice followed me. Live, she had said, close against my ear, under all the wind of a breaking tower. One word. She had never in her life spent words carelessly, and she had chosen that one, and paid for it out of the middle of her own worst hour. So it held. I want to be honest about how little held me, that season, to the waking world. It was one word, in one small voice, and it was enough. It was nearly not. It was enough.
One morning Taeylia came to my mat.
I had learned to know her step, dragging slightly on the left since the night of the singing. Her weathered face was as kind as it had been over Denna's body, but it carried something new laid over the kindness, and I recognized the something, because I have worn it myself. It was the face of a person who has decided that the merciful thing and the hard thing are the same thing today.
"You must go," she said. Final as a door closing.
I looked up at her and said nothing, which was as close to arguing as I had strength for.
"We have done much." She lowered herself down beside my mat, joints negotiating the whole way. "It was well spent. Do not hear me wrongly. But the desert has little to spare, and we are the desert's." She paused, choosing her next words as you choose footholds on loose stone. "Grief is hungry, child. It is patient and it is hungry, and it has learned where you sleep. It will eat you here, one quiet day at a time, and you will let it, because here nothing asks you to stand."
She was right, and I told her so. It is one of the very few times in my life I have said those words without a clever half-turn hidden in them somewhere.
Her hand came to rest on my shoulder, light as a leaf.
"Your woman is at peace," she said. "We sang her to the stars. It is done well." And then, more gently still, in that rusted careful Aturan, "But you are not done. The living must walk."
Another of the Tahl stepped forward then, the young woman with the scarred eyebrow, the one whose hands the sun had only begun to darken, the one whose too-large gestures had saved us. She pressed warm flatbread into my palm, and held out a waterskin with the leather still cool and damp from the filling, and signed, small and correct this time, Walk well. Adem would have been proud of her economy. I could not sign my thanks back properly, and she watched me try with my wrong hand, and bowed her head slightly as though I had.
Taeylia knelt in the sand and drew me a map with one weathered finger. The dunes, and where they dipped. A dry riverbed that remembered being a road. The first true well. The pass through the western mountains, and the landmarks in their order, each one named in her careful Aturan, each one, she made sure I understood this, a place her own feet had been. It was a good map. It was the kind of map you could trust your life to, drawn in the kind of surface that keeps nothing. That is the Tahl entire, I think. Everything they know is written in sand, and so they make sure to know it very well.
But beneath all the kindness lay iron, and we both knew it. I was to go. Today.
I gathered what little I owned, which took no time at all, and that was its own small lesson. The Tahl let me keep to the shade through the worst of the heat, one last measured mercy. When evening came on and the air began to forgive, I stood, and my body went through the motions of leaving while my mind stayed where it had been for days. It sat a little apart, beside a grave the sand would someday cover, under trees that had sung and could not save her.
The Tahl gathered at the camp's edge to see me off. There was no ceremony in it. They stood as people stand to watch weather leave. Taeylia was at their head, and as I passed her, I heard her voice one last time, pitched so soft I might have imagined it, and have spent years deciding I didn't.
"Walk well, broken one. Walk until you are whole."
It is one of the great shames of my life that I had nothing to leave them. They had given me water, and shelter, and time, and songs. Songs, plural. They had spent five of their singers to the edge of breaking for a stranger's woman, and the world does not hold many older kindnesses than that. Everything they gave had cost them dearly, and was given without a word about the cost. It is a debt I have never been able to pay. I keep it with my other debts, in the place where I keep the things that made me. If this story ever travels, and stories travel, let it carry this much east past the Stormwal. The Tahl are good people, and strange, and the strangeness is the smaller part.
The stars began their slow opening above the desert, and I walked west.
Each step took effort. Not because I was tired, though I was tired as stones are worn. Not because I was weak, though the wind could have argued me off my feet. It took effort because some part of me, a large part, a part with excellent arguments, wanted to stop. To sit down in the clean empty dark. To stay, and be still, and let the desert do what it does to everything that stays. Wear it smooth, wear it round, wear it away, until nothing remained that could remember or be remembered.
But Auri had told me to live.
So I lived. I walked. One foot, and then the other, and then again, and again after that. It was not much of a life. It was what I had.
I spoke the names of stars under my breath as I went. The common names, and the Eld Vintic names, and the ones the Adem use, that are numbers and jokes at the same time. It was something to do with my mouth besides scream. It was something to do with my mind besides remember. If you ever wonder why men of my profession learn so many things, I will tell you the secret. It is so that on the worst nights there is always something in the head besides the worst thing. The stars did not care that I named them. That was the best part of the naming.
I came to Renere's gates with my clothes in tatters, spans later, leaner than I have ever been before or since, and the guards looked through me as you look through weather. I had braced for questions. There were none. A scarecrow of a man walking in from the east was beneath the notice of that city now, and I passed under the gate-arch of the capital of the world unremarked, which would once have offended me to the bone. It is strange, the hours in which you notice you have changed. I felt only relief, and the relief felt like putting down a pack.
It was a city that had learned silence. You could hear the learning everywhere. Merchants whispered their prices as though prices were treason. Children still played in the alleys, children always play. It is the last thing to stop, but they played with their eyes on the street, as I had played in Tarbean. Everyone else moved with their heads down and their errands held close to the chest, in the particular hurry of people who have mouths to feed and have decided, sensibly, that they cannot afford to see anything.
Then I saw the first sign.
FEYDA.
The name was painted in red across a warehouse wall, the letters tall as a man, the paint run down from the strokes like the wall had bled. I stood and looked at it longer than was safe. I knew that name. It had sat at the head of a lawyer's document I have told you about, the one that reached into my life with clean gloved fingers and took what was mine. It belonged to the first king of this land, three thousand years dead and crowned after his dying. The king the careful histories lay quiet, and the fireside ones say wore his crown in the dark under the hills. And it had hung, folded and altered past proving, on the gold of Trenati's ring. I had taken it for a cult's password. It had become a city's.
It was on the next street too, scrawled across a banker's fine lacquered door. Then on a tavern's shutters. Then small, in charcoal, at knee height, where a child had practiced it. Everywhere I looked, the dead king's name bloomed across the living city like a rash, like a fever making its map of a body.
As I watched from a doorway's shadow, two figures slipped out of an alley across the way. One masked, riding the shoulders of the other, reaching up with a dripping brush to lay the name in red across a chandler's sign, quick, practiced, four strokes and a flourish. Boots sounded two streets over. By the time the patrol rounded the corner there was nothing to arrest but wet paint and a question, and the question stayed on the wall, and the patrol did not look up at it. I understood that too. In cities like that, looking has a price.
For all of it, the Blind Beggar stood where I had left it, wearing its shabbiness like comfortable old clothes, its painted beggar still smiling under the two coins on his eyes. The windows were still boarded. The door had taken the same red name as half the city, and under the paint it was still our door.
I slipped around the side, where memory served me well, and found the window whose latch had an understanding with me. It yielded to my good hand. I climbed through into darkness that smelled of dust and cold tallow, and stood still in it, and let my eyes arrive.
Our room waited like a stopped clock.
Nothing had been touched. That was the terrible part. I had been braced for ransacking, and instead there was the gentler violence of everything exactly where it had been left. The table with its ring-stains. Wil's ledger-neat stack of papers, squared to the table's corner. Sim's cloak on its peg, holding his shape loosely, as cloaks do. Two narrow beds, still unmade, unmade as beds are left by men who mean to be back by dark, and I stood between them in the dust and the tallow-smell and did not touch anything at all, because the room was perfect, and it was a lie, and it was the only place left in the world where they were still alive an hour ago.
Then I knelt, and reached under the near bed, and drew out my lute.
Sim had minded it for me, all those spans of court and masks. The case had been dusted. That was Sim entire, dusting an absent man's lute in the middle of a conspiracy. I sat back on my heels with it across my knees, and my right hand found the clasps, and my left hand lay on the leather and was the wrong shape, and I did not open the case. I want to be plain about that. I did not open it, and I could not have told you that night which of us I was sparing.
I took it with me. Some things the hands decide.
No sign of Bast.
I climbed back out through the window, handing the lute down ahead of me, and dropped into the alley with my feet finding the stones at barely a whisper. Broken as I was, the old training held. I have been quiet in alleys since I was ten. I will be quiet in alleys in my grave.
"You're losing your touch, Reshi."
The voice came out of the dark to my left, warm and pleased with itself, and my heart did something complicated, leapt and cracked in the same motion, because I knew it before my eyes found its source, and it was the first voice in a very long time that belonged to someone still mine.
"Bast."
He stepped from the shadows wearing that grin of his, the one that promises trouble on your behalf and has already made the arrangements. He looked well. He looked exactly the same, which the Fae always do, right up until they don't. He opened his mouth for the next jab. And his gaze caught on my left hand, on the bandaging where fingers should have been, and the grin died on his face as a fire dies when the door opens on winter.
"Reshi." He barely got the word out the second time.
"Gone." I tucked the hand against my side, out of his sight, an animal reflex I have never fully unlearned. "How did you find me so fast?"
He allowed me the turn. Bast has always known which of my doors to leave shut. "I paid runners to watch this place and the Willow Blossom both." A tip of his head toward the alley mouth behind him. "The boy who watches nights nearly broke his neck getting to me. Someone climbed through the window at the Beggar, quiet as a cat. I told him quiet as a cat wasn't much of a description in this city, and he said, quiet like a trained cat, and I came at a run."
"Runners cost money."
"Only half the coin we had left."
"Half."
"The other half," he said, with dignity, "bought me a room and no rest at the Brewer's Rest."
I gave him a look I had been saving for some spans.
Something entirely unrepentant flickered behind his eyes, ancient and cheerful, the fae-bright thing that grief slides off of like rain off oilcloth. And then it went out, all at once, and the lightness left his face as it leaves a room when the candle is carried out.
"Twelve days, Reshi." His voice was low now. "I stepped out that morning to get our things from the Beggar. Gone an hour. Less. When I came back the room stood empty, and there was blood on the floorboards, yours. I know the smell of yours by now, and there's a sentence I'd unlearn if I could, and your sword in pieces by the wall. Pieces, Reshi. I didn't know a thing in this world that could do that." He stopped, mastered it. "I searched everywhere I could think and some places thinking doesn't reach. I even went looking for that girl of yours." His mouth made the shape of a wry thing without any wryness in it. "I thought—maybe you'd finally run off together. I was going to be so angry with you."
Bast didn't know.
Of course he didn't. The knowledge belonged to a mountaintop past the edge of every map, and to a circle of firelight in the Tahl's oasis, and to me. And now, in an alley smelling of old rain and new paint, it had to belong to him too, and there was no gentle road into it, and I did not have the strength to build one.
"Denna's dead."
The words came out flat and final, two stones set down. My good hand had begun its trembling where it hung at my side, the damnable shaking that finds the crack in me whenever the crack is there to find, which is always, now.
Bast shrank. There is no other word. His shoulders dropped and his whole frame settled inward, as though something had been drawn out of the middle of him, and I remembered, of course, only then, that he had known her. Not a name in my story. A woman he had bickered with across one entire terrible day, matched blade-tongue to blade-tongue, shared the weight of me with, mile after mile, neither of them once letting the other carry me alone.
"Reshi." Soft. Almost bruised. He began to reach toward me, hand rising. And then he let it fall, because he is wiser about me than I deserve, and he knew that one kind touch in that alley would have brought the whole of me down like a wall.
Somewhere down the street a woman was calling her children in to supper, the same three notes, twice, a fourth time. Ordinary as breathing. The world does that. It keeps setting its small tables right at the edge of your ruin, and it means nothing by it, and it never once stops.
The story of the desert, of the doors, of the mountain, of Denna's last breath under trees that sang, would have to wait. Words would come later, or they wouldn't. Bast asked for none of it.
I turned from all of that and looked out at the red name drying on the walls, until I could trust my voice with weight again. "The city looks ready to tear itself apart."
"After the tower? How could it not." He shifted his weight, boots whispering on the stone, glad as I was to be handed work for his voice. "When the King died, when Fascino fell, the Maer gathered what was left of Renere's great and good at the Citadel gates, before the blood was dry. And he told them a story."
"Let me guess. The grieving ally, come too late."
"Oh, better. Much better. You'll want to sit down for the craft of it." His voice took on the kind of admiration one reserves for particularly clever predators. "He told them you came to him first. That you sought him out and tried to recruit him into your plot against the crown. You'd served him once, after all, half his court had seen your face. He refused you, naturally, being loyal to his marrow. Raised his army the moment he understood the danger and marched day and night to save good King Roderic." A pause, precise as Cinder's swordwork. "And arrived, to his everlasting grief, one hour too late. The bloodthirsty Ruh had already done what the Ruh do."
I almost laughed. It was that or the other thing. "How tidy. I appear from nowhere, kill everyone standing between him and the throne, and vanish into the air."
"He had answers ready for every question before anyone thought to ask it. That's the trick of it, Reshi. He'd had the answers ready for years, I'd wager, waiting for the questions to be born. And for flavor"—Bast's lip curled—"he reminded them all how Lord Vatis died in the courtyard. How you cut him so he'd bleed slow instead of die quick. Proof, he called it, of the Ruh's true nature. The savagery under the paint. They wept, some of them. For Vatis."
"And for those still unconvinced?"
"Priests." The word came off his tongue like something spoiled. "He brought out Tehlin priests in their grey, and knelt before them in front of the whole city. Proclaimed his repentance. That he'd had you in his court once and failed to see you for what you were, that Tehlu had weighed his blindness and found it wanting. He took the iron chains, Reshi. Wore them through a whole day of penance on the Citadel steps, where everyone could watch him be humble. Justice in his heart, service to the divine, tears on cue." Bast's expression twisted with the particular disgust the Fae keep for human religion, which is the disgust of a craftsman watching his tools used to pry open coffins. "Your kind eat that meal every time it's cooked. They can watch the cook spit in the pot and eat it anyway."
"So they crowned him."
"Full ceremony. Blessed oils. The white cloak and the old words." He showed his teeth. It was not a smile. "And his first decree as king concerned you, and any soul who had helped you. All to face the same justice that had already found the traitors Wilem and Simmon."
Wil. Sim. Even the names, even secondhand in an alley, felt like losing them over again. And worse than the loss was the use. That he would take dead men, my dead, and hang his story on them like a butcher hanging weights on a scale. They had names now in the city's records. Traitors, executed in absence, guilty of a king they had died defending. I pressed my fists against my thighs, the whole one and the ruin, and said nothing, because everything I had to say was a curse, and I had learned what my curses weigh.
"There's a thing I should tell you," Bast said, and his voice had gone gentle in that careful way he has, the one he gentles around the inn some nights even now. "After the coup, I took work carting bodies. There was a great deal of that work, those days, and nobody looks at the man doing it. The new king meant to put what was left of your friends up on spikes above the east gate. For the education of the public."
My stomach turned over. "Bast—"
"I got to them first." Simple. Flat. He might have been telling me he'd bought bread. "Traded shifts, forged the papers, drove the cart myself. They went out the south road under a load of fever-dead no guard wanted to inspect."
"Did you see to them?" I couldn't look at him while I asked it. I looked at the red name on the wall across the way.
"I did what I could. They're buried together, south of the city, up off the road where the land starts to roll. There's a tree." He paused. "I don't know all your manling customs, Reshi. I know you put your dead where the living can find them, and I know you mark it, and I marked it, but I didn't know the words, so I said some of ours. They're old, and they don't translate, but they're the ones we use for—" He stopped himself. "They're the ones we use."
"Thank you, Bast."
I put my good hand on his shoulder, and felt the solid warmth of him, real as the rain barrel, real as bread, and for a moment the alley was the whole world and the world had exactly one thing still standing in it, and the thing was enough.
"That's not all I learned." And his grin came back. It came back different, bright as a blade tilted to catch light and aimed, for once in his ancient trouble-making life, entirely at the dark. "You'll want to be holding onto something, Reshi."
"Bast."
"Auri lives."
The city went away. The soldiers, the whispering merchants, the red paint drying on cold stone. All of it, gone between one heartbeat and the next, and there was only that word and what it meant. Lives.
"Hidden," Bast said. "Guarded. It won't be simple, and I don't like the shape of what I've heard, and I'll tell you all of it. But she's breathing, Reshi. She's breathing."
My good hand began to shake where it rested on his shoulder.
I let it.