modéré et chantant

When no one was looking for them, though, they could head down and start the war anew. They pulled the lightbulb strings to make searchlights, crawled under the car and around the patchwork tile floor. Green pretended the dust that made his eyes simmer was poison gas, and to survive they had to pinch their noses until they spoke like Gramps with a really bad cold. Other times they hopped in the jeep and Leaf would drive them around landmines and Voltorbs and he shot at the Unovans and other people.

One time were they caught, when the lab assistant went to get whatever weird thing Gramps needed. Leaf got smacked on the head and Green had his ears pulled until they were probably stretched out the door, and they were told, do you know how foolish that is? You could get hurt, or worse! The nurse and the assistant told Gramps that to just get rid of everything. Green thought that might have been good because then he could just drive the jeep out and they could fill it with gas and then they could go anywhere.

Gramps just told the adults to leave everything down there. Gramps just told him to leave it all alone.

It wasn’t like he enforced it, though. The door was never locked. All they did was hang up a curtain that blocked everything off. Even when they tore down the curtain and draped it over some old machine to make a tent or a ghost, the next time they came back, it would just be hung back up like the most useless wall.

Her uncle had looked at her, his square chin lifted just enough to obscure his cavernous eyes. He told her, as dry as ever, “Come on. People disappear all the time.”

No shit. She’d been to the mansions at the edge of the kingdom, where ten-year-olds worked orchards cultivated on the bomb-blistered wasteland. Even New Meridian had its own household of the disappeared, where children served wine and played piano for a man in a wifebeater and patent leather shoes. And when they weren’t useful anymore, their bones were wrapped in chains and plunged in manmade lakes, left them nameless and useless and harmless.

(“Did you know,” that man in his wifebeater once told her over clementines and glasses of strawberry liqueur and cream, “each of these piano strings holds ten tons of force?” He had also slaughtered a twelve-year-old maid to teach the others a lesson. All he needed were his fingers and piano wire.)

Filia knew these things. She would never say. Not even on those nights she ended up stinking from drinking too much, when, no matter where she started, she ended up following the path to Carol’s house. Not even when she ended up sprawled on the couch, with just enough room for Carol so Filia could prop her head on her lap and let Carol fuss over her with water and tea and, in summer, lavender placed on the coffee table.

“I’m not a good person,” she said sometimes.

Whatever it was that ran through Carol’s mind, whatever way she felt, she only sorted out Filia’s hair with her fingers. “At least you’re not practicing opera out there,” she joked. Or maybe, “At least you’re not doing something stupid out there. Or silly. You’re more inclined to silly.”

The last time she went, Filia thought of Carol’s body all cut open. Cavity scraped clean into just bone. Floating in murky water. She said nothing about that, but Carol reached over and drew her hand up anyway. Squeezed it hard enough to feel her pulse through her fingers.

“I would like it if you read to me a little. Just a single verse.” She gestured to a small, leather-bound book on her table. “I marked the page. Please. My eyes… It’s late, and I can’t seem to make out the words.”

“That’s worrying to hear,” she said, absently turning the book in her hands. “Have you been resting properly?” It would be just like her to lie in her bed without sleeping for an instant.

“I can’t remember. Perhaps that’s the trouble.” She looked away, and that was enough to confirm her suspicions. “A physician said I might be going blind. When I was a girl, my nursemaid told me that everyone is born with only so many tears. If you use them all on trifles, your eyes will dry up and you’ll go blind.”

“That’s…” A horrible thing to say? But Elena didn't have the right to say that. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“She only wanted to quiet me, nothing more. Still, I swore to myself I would never shed another tear. I must have been…perhaps seven?”

Yggdra seemed to have kept her promise; Elena had never once seen her cry. Perhaps it would have been to her benefit to shed a few tears; such displays were shameful in a monarch but expected of a woman. Playing that to her advantage could win sympathy from the aristocrats, or at least, they would find themselves without the tools to play at revolt.

She jolts away and turns and it is Durant there, his hand pulled against his shoulder and hangs there. His arm drops. His eyes are on her chin. “Excuse me for my asking, but why are you here? Is there something that disturbs you?”

“Durant,” she says, once the pounding of her heart ebbs from her throat. “You frightened me. Isn’t it silly, to be so scared? I’m sorry. I came here to clear my head.”

“They’ve been asking after you. The queen, Alanjame – they don’t know where you’ve gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrinks quieter each time he breathes. She smells the damp wool of his coat and something else indefinable. “You shouldn’t be out in this weather by yourself. I will take you back inside.”

Inside, the air is balmy and transparent. The servants bring bright flowers to decorate her room. When those flowers die – as the brightest flowers die the fastest – they are replaced within hours. The soldiers spend their hours protecting her home and ensuring her future. That man by the water, too, protected her, and even if he was not here, he had made his vow. This is all certain.

Still: there was something gruesome about the freshness of those flowers. Like an insult. Like peering into darkness. And Durant, who had sworn to protect her before she could even walk, who wants nothing more than for her to go inside but only looks at her with watery brown eyes – for whom, exactly, does he train out here for nights on end? Why does he make the wood splinter and crash and cut through the night?

The brightness that tears through the dark clouds seems like the glint of a blade about to strike.

“Durant,” she says again, “do you ever get the feeling that something isn’t quite right?”

—Yes, they both have broken a promise.

The voices of the village will say – if you were strong, you would have broken these gods once and for all. Baretreenu will look at him, and he will wither, and she will say – How could you listen to him? Have you not heard the weeping of the world?

But he had promised to the world and the Nessiah had promised to him that they would destroy the World Eaters. And the first of these awful shadows is gone. The earth is still dark and cold like the ashes of a fire, but the stars seem to have grown more vibrant, the moon shines more like ivory.

Out there, Zilva perches on a rock and looks indifferent and will probably disappear at least once before the night is over, and Nessiah will hate her for it. So long as Siskier is glancing over him and frowning and testing his fever, there’s no question she’ll come back, and Nessiah will hate her for it even more. Baldus, too, he sits and watches them all. And Emilia, for fun, takes her wicked club and approaches what’s left of the dead mountain and beats it into dust – that’s her promise.

His entire body brims with whatever energy that comes from gods and survival. But everything goes by slowly, slowly, as if he were still dreaming.

(It comes back to him even if he should just rest his eyes for a moment. Someone who is not him is screaming, needles lining his throat, body enclosed in a vault of thorns and he cannot see a thing and his eyes seep fire and they throw him and the waves crash around him and he—

Nessiah only ever says, “That’s the ocean.” And he says, “Don’t tell me about your dreams. I find them rather tiresome.”)

The emerald in the strange hilt stares at him. His blood burns. His hands burn. Another unbound monster sleeps and yet it pulls at his heart like the tide (but he has never felt the tide. He has never seen the ocean—)

“Promise me,” Gulcasa says.

“I don’t have to promise you anything. You won’t survive the next time.”

“That’s the fucking point, asshole.”

Siskier glances at him and he regrets it, but she just nods and says, “I dunno what he’s whining about, but you tell him!”

He folds his hands over his eyes and rolls over until there is only black. He thinks, now, “I don’t care. Just swear it.”

He can put together this image of Nessiah – lion-gold hair, easing his shoulders, and he imagines him simpering and putting his head back. It is the wrong image.

He says, quietly, “You are quite a stupid man. But brave. It’s a shame we had to kill him. He was my favorite.”

There was something wrong with his tone. As though he regretted something. As if this were an apology.