Chapter 78: What They Were Holding

Lexander had begun to make a list of things he wanted to finish.

It was a short list, which surprised him. For most of his life, completing one obligation had exposed three more beneath it. Ruling Concordia had not improved that tendency. There was always another wall to strengthen, another village to supply, another argument that became urgent because someone had postponed it until winter.

This list was different.

He wanted the people sheltered in his kingdom to know whether they could remain there. He wanted the council able to settle an ordinary dispute without waiting for him to return from another battlefield. He wanted his children to grow accustomed to seeing him at breakfast.

And he wanted to stop measuring every peaceful day by how much useful preparation could be squeezed into it before the next disaster.

Io read the page over his shoulder.

“You’ve left something out.”

He handed her the pen.

She wrote sleep beneath the final line.

“That is an aspiration,” he said. “Not an administrative matter.”

“So is your third item, judging by this week.”

He glanced toward the nursery. Ignatius was trying to wrap a birthday present without allowing anyone, including himself, to see it. Seraphina had been placed in charge of the ribbon and was exercising her authority with considerable force.

“They know why we’re here.”

“Yes,” Io said. “They do. I would still like them to know us when nobody needs rescuing.”

Lexander looked at her.

For a moment, the room became quiet enough that he heard paper tearing in the nursery.

“We should keep this,” he said.

“The list?”

“Yes.”

She set down the pen.

“Then keep it somewhere you’ll find it.”

He folded it into the small book beside his chair, not among the official papers that traveled between Greykeep and Concordia. He had no wish to discover later that his intention to be present for his family had been filed beneath a report on roof repairs.

From the nursery came a sharp accusation concerning the ribbon.

Io turned toward the door.

“Your third item needs attention.”

Lexander rose.

The alarm sounded before he reached the passage.

Once.

Then the Castellan spoke.

No attack. A messenger.

Injured.

Io was already moving.

Lexander looked into the nursery, made certain another adult was there, and followed.

Thor found the feathers first.

They lay scattered across the eastern battlements, black against pale stone. Smoke thinned above the wall where nothing had been burning moments earlier.

Two guards stood over a man in a torn black coat.

Thor passed between them and dropped to one knee.

“Saelis.”

He lay on his side with one arm drawn against his chest. Scorch marks crossed his back. Feathers clung to his hair and collar, the last untidy remnants of a transformation completed under more strain than his body could bear.

His eyes opened.

“Thor.”

She had not heard that voice in a long time. Memory supplied it whole and uninjured, carrying some dry observation across a camp where nobody had slept enough.

The voice before her could barely manage the breath required for her name.

“I was aiming for you,” he said. “Wasn’t certain I would manage it.”

“You hit the battlements.”

“The castle. Close enough.”

He attempted a smile.

Then he lost consciousness.

Thor caught his head before it struck the stone.

“Room,” she told the guards.

They stepped back at once.

She did not try to straighten his arm. She kept him from rolling onto the ruined skin of his back and listened to his breathing until Evelyn reached them.

Lexander came with Io shortly afterward.

He stopped beside Thor, looked at the man, then at the remaining smoke.

“Someone you know?”

“Yes.”

That was all she trusted herself to say before Evelyn began working.

Caldris recognized the marks across Saelis’s back. Silver wire. A capture net thrown over him in flight.

Thor looked at the torn coat.

“He broke through.”

“Most of it.” Caldris indicated the raw line beside a shoulder blade. “Not quickly enough to escape this.”

Gold and blue light gathered around Evelyn’s hands.

Saelis woke beneath it.

He looked at the healer, then searched until he found Thor.

“Carrow Tor.”

She went still.

“How many?”

“Nine. Six fighters. Three others.” He drew a breath and winced. “We were twelve.”

Thor felt Lexander watching her.

“Who holds the gate?” she asked.

“Brannoc.”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

Of course.

Of all the answers Saelis could have given, that one left the least room for comfort.

Brannoc would still be standing if there remained any way for his body to stand.

And if he had fallen, he would have done it in the gateway.

Saelis lasted in the infirmary only until Evelyn turned away to speak with Liora.

He made it halfway down the passage before being found with his good hand against the wall, pale and determined and entirely without a convincing explanation.

Evelyn looked at him for a long time.

Then she found the wheeled chair Perrin had built for Vaust.

Saelis accepted it with immediate gratitude.

“Already more sensible than Vaust,” Thor observed as she walked beside him toward the map room.

“I reserve the right to disappoint you later.”

“You’ve begun.”

He looked at her, and for a heartbeat she saw the man she remembered beneath the pain.

“Then we’re properly acquainted again.”

In the map room, his splinted arm rested on a cushion. His coat lay around his shoulders because he had refused to leave it behind, although the cloth was scorched and offered little warmth.

Thor sat where she could see his face.

Lexander remained long enough to hear the account. Io returned to Evelyn’s work. There would be preparations to make if the injured messenger had brought people behind him in need of the same care.

They called themselves the Unbound.

Saelis explained the name without pride. Othellos had attempted to take some of them and failed. Others had seen what happened to gods who waited and left before the officers reached them.

Saelis had found them.

Messages were his domain. He knew when someone was trying to send word and could not.

There had been many such voices during that first year.

Most had stopped.

Thor kept her gaze on him.

He named the people who remained.

Brannoc, whose strength lay in shields and the lines of people holding them. Kaedra, a hunter with a bow accurate enough to strike a binding rod at three hundred paces. Tavros, who knew the mountain paths and could confuse an army’s sense of where it stood. Nyxa, who belonged to night and was difficult to look at directly. Ishkar, whose power lived in the charge, the spear, the instant before lines met. Oruun, once a god of forges, now occupied with breaking the things their enemies made.

“And the others?” Thor asked.

“Mireth mends us.”

Wounds, bone, armor. Whatever could be held together long enough to survive another day.

“She’s tired,” Saelis added.

The plainness of the words troubled Thor more than a dramatic account of exhaustion would have.

Wenhild kept hearths and provision. Their camps had fire without smoke and food when there should have been none left.

Saelis carried the messages.

Nine.

He counted himself among them even while sitting injured at Greykeep, and nobody corrected him.

Lexander listened to the account of the raids with a growing awareness of how much had happened beyond the edges of his maps.

Timber wagons bound for Surtr’s crossings. Supply columns. Prisoner convoys stopped in mountain passes, cages broken, people sent south along routes the captors did not know.

Sixty-three freed over the year.

Not all had survived.

Most had.

They had followed the old shrine roads because those roads felt safer. The Unbound had not known whose work they were relying upon.

Thor recalled refugees who had reached Westmere from the east. They spoke of people who freed them and pointed them south without offering names.

Saelis said Kaedra probably did the pointing.

Brannoc did the shouting.

A brief smile crossed Thor’s face and vanished.

When Uriah asked why they had not come sooner, Saelis did not accuse him of ignorance. He merely explained what rumors looked like from a mountainside where friendly invitations had already become traps.

A king with a storm in his hand. A city that accepted gods.

Othellos could invent such a place as easily as anyone else could describe a real one.

Then Saelis had flown above the lamps on the longest night.

Thousands of them.

He had returned to his companions with the conviction that wherever that light came from, it was not Othellos’s work.

The following morning, Surtr found them.

Lexander looked at the drawing Saelis began with his good hand.

An old monastery on a spur of rock. One approach. Cliffs around the other sides. A wall and a gate.

Carrow Tor.

They had lived there for a year.

Someone had given away the location. Saelis did not know who or whether the person had been willing. Caldris confirmed that a binding officer could compel a captured speaker.

Lexander was grateful no one began searching for a traitor among people whose freedom might have lasted only long enough for them to be taken again.

Twenty giants had come with Surtr’s force.

At least forty binding officers followed with rods and nets.

At the bridge below the tor, three gods had been taken.

Faelan, of rivers. Corra, of autumn. Dun, who kept their horses.

Thor’s fingers closed slowly on the edge of the table.

Taken alive.

For their enemies, that was the useful way to take them.

Now Brannoc held the monastery gate. Kaedra kept the officers back from the wall. Mireth kept Brannoc standing, and Wenhild spent what strength remained on their fire.

Saelis had left through smoke. Two nets had caught him. He had torn through both.

He did not know whether the gate still held.

Thor stood.

“How far?”

Four days by road.

Two by dragon.

Too long.

She turned toward the Castellan’s lights.

“There must be something closer.”

There was no gate at Carrow Tor.

There was one at Ashfell, sixty miles south, restored the previous summer.

Eliza calculated the remaining flight in minutes rather than days.

Lexander watched Thor look at Uriah.

Both were already leaving the table.

Lexander caught his sister at the armory door.

He did not block her path. She would have taken that badly, and he had no intention of stopping her.

“What do you need?”

Thor checked the fastening at her wrist.

“Bruni. Giants should see one of their own who isn’t afraid of them.”

“And from me?”

That made her look up.

For a moment, the old habits moved between them: the expectation that he would reach for a weapon, that she would assume his presence wherever danger demanded a name large enough to answer it.

Then she glanced toward the passage leading back into the castle.

“Make certain we have somewhere to put them.”

“We do.”

“Then make certain the people doing it have help.”

He nodded.

She returned to the strap, pulled it tight, and tested the movement of her hand.

“Brannoc won’t leave while he thinks the gate depends on him.”

“You know him that well?”

“I know him that badly.”

Lexander almost smiled.

Thor did not.

“He’s a good man,” she said. “Sometimes that makes it harder to get him to stop.”

“Then let someone else stand there long enough for him to understand.”

She looked at him again.

“That is the idea.”

He put his hand briefly against the back of her neck and drew her forehead against his, the kind of gesture neither would have tolerated from anyone wishing to make a ceremony of farewell.

“Bring them back,” he said.

She closed her eyes once.

Then she stepped away.

Preparations consumed the next hour.

Caldris and Thesra brought instruments made for binding wire and rods, devices prepared because they had learned that breaking the wrong thing could release what it held. Eliza assembled twelve scouts. Melody appeared without asking whether anyone thought her necessary. Avarn came ready and quiet.

Two dragons waited.

Serevan showed gold beneath his wings and copper along his tail. Thor had heard him explain that his continued presence near Greykeep owed something to the bakery’s honey buns. She suspected that explanation concealed more than it revealed, but she respected anyone who selected a good bakery as part of an allegiance.

Aelune regarded them with pale eyes beneath a mane that showed silver in the shade.

“Get on. We’re late.”

Bruni looked at the sling of chain prepared for him.

Thor wisely said nothing.

Saelis came in the wheeled chair.

Evelyn had refused him once already. He answered her second refusal by explaining that he intended to ride rather than fly.

That distinction did not improve her expression.

“They won’t trust you,” he said at last. “He’s sent people with friendly faces before. Brannoc knows me.”

Thor watched Evelyn weigh the risk against the truth of it.

Liora would go with him, she decided.

If his injuries opened, he was to return.

Saelis thanked her with immaculate courtesy.

The look she gave him made him straighten in his chair.

Thor helped him rise without allowing the movement to pull at his damaged arm.

Across the receiving space, Lexander stood beside Io. She had already begun asking what should be ready for the return. Not because she doubted Evelyn’s arrangements, but because the work would be done more quickly if no one had to carry it alone.

Thor saw her brother listen, take a short list, and go toward the people who could make it happen.

Then the gate opened.

Ashfell waited on the other side.

The river country fell away beneath Serevan’s wings.

Thor sat with Uriah and Saelis, keeping enough attention on the messenger to notice when his breathing changed. Liora had her bag and the determined expression of someone who had accepted that keeping a patient alive might require following him somewhere thoroughly unsuitable for healing.

Aelune flew nearby.

Bruni hung beneath her in the chain sling with an expression Thor carefully declined to examine. Above him rode the others who would reach the tor first. The riders following overland would come as quickly as horses and terrain allowed.

Smoke rose ahead.

Saelis leaned forward.

Thor saw the monastery emerge around the column: old stone buildings, the enclosing wall, the narrow approach crowded with enemies.

Twenty giants.

More officers than they had expected. Nearer sixty, moving among wooden frames edged in pale metal.

Silver wire caught the light.

Thor let the count settle into practical places in her mind. Where the frames stood. Which could be reached without driving the officers toward the gate. How the giants might turn if something larger passed overhead.

Then she saw the shield.

It filled the gateway.

A single armored figure stood behind it.

A giant’s club struck.

Brannoc staggered.

The shield remained upright.

Another blow.

Another stagger.

Thor’s grip closed.

“Still standing,” she said.

Saelis raised two fingers to his mouth and called down the valley with the harsh cry of a raven.

On the wall, a woman turned with her bow already rising.

She saw Saelis.

The bow lowered.

She shouted toward the gate.

Brannoc did not turn, but his shield tilted enough for him to see the sky.

Thor rose.

Serevan had not landed.

She stepped from his back a hundred feet above the approach, Mjölnir in her hand.

For a breath there was only air.

Then stone rose to meet her.

The impact threw lightning across the ground.

Thor landed between the gate and the nearest giant. Broken stone jumped beneath her boots. The giant fell backward, its club striking the slope hard enough to send fragments rattling downhill.

The officers scattered.

She rose from the crouch of her landing and looked for the first person attempting to reach a rod.

Overhead, Aelune came low.

The wind of her passage tore three frames from their settings and sent them tumbling away. Silver snapped with sharp flashes. She used no fire. Thor was grateful for the precision; they needed an opening, not a burning hillside around people too exhausted to run.

Bruni dropped onto the valley floor.

He stood between the giants and the gate, metal fingers flexing.

The enemy giants stopped.

One spoke.

Bruni answered in their language.

Thor did not know the words, but she knew the posture. He had planted himself where they must either pass him or reconsider what they were doing.

She moved to cover the space beside him.

Serevan lowered Uriah and Saelis onto the wall. Thor saw Kaedra turn with an arrow drawn close to Uriah’s throat. Saelis spoke. The arrow lowered.

Then the work separated into parts she could see and parts she had to trust.

Inside, people would have to be convinced to leave.

Outside, she could make certain they had the time.

A giant shifted its club.

Thor lifted Mjölnir.

“Think about it,” she said.

He looked at the fallen giant, now struggling to regain its feet, then at Bruni.

For the moment, he thought.

The officers regrouped beyond the damaged frames. Thor watched their hands. She knew too well how little movement a rod required before someone else paid for it.

Behind her, through the gate, voices rose and fell.

Brannoc’s among them.

Still arguing.

Thor felt an old, exasperated affection cut through the strain.

He had lived long enough to become impossible in a familiar way.

She intended to keep him alive long enough to continue it.

At Greykeep, Lexander carried a stack of folded linen because someone had put it into his arms and he had asked where it belonged.

He delivered it to the room Io indicated.

“Here?”

“On the chair. Not that one. Someone needs to sit in that one.”

He changed direction.

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Eat something.”

He looked at her.

“I have several other skills.”

“I know. They work better when you’ve eaten.”

Evelyn passed them in the doorway, occupied with preparations of her own. Io waited until she had gone before lowering her voice.

“She’s doing very well.”

“Waiting?”

Io nodded.

Lexander looked down at the last folded cloth in his hand.

“So are you.”

“I haven’t decided yet whether I am.”

He placed the cloth with the others.

They had received wounded people often enough to know what could be prepared and what could not. Warm rooms mattered. Clean water mattered. A bed placed with room on either side could spare a healer several awkward movements when time was short.

None of those things would bring the party back sooner.

They did them anyway.

Later, Lexander went to the nursery.

The birthday present had been wrapped again. More successfully this time, although a small section of the object remained visible at one corner.

“Is that deliberate?” he asked.

Ignatius looked at the gap.

“Yes.”

Seraphina looked at him.

“It is now,” she said.

Lexander laughed before he could stop himself.

Lirien sat nearby with her blanket, watching the children without joining the disagreement. When Lexander sat down, she glanced at the open door and then back at him.

“Are they coming here?” she asked.

“The people Thor went to help?”

She nodded.

“That’s what we’re preparing for.”

“Do they know?”

He thought of Saelis in the chair and the lamps he had seen from the sky.

“Someone went to tell them.”

Lirien considered that.

Then she returned her attention to the badly wrapped present.

Lexander stayed until the children needed help with the ribbon. He was useful at that too, though Seraphina supervised him closely.

The shield struck the gatepost with a crack.

Thor turned her head just enough to see.

Brannoc had lowered it.

For an instant she saw his face beneath the battered helm, blood dried into his beard, exhaustion making him look both older and less familiar than she had expected.

Then Avarn stepped into the opening.

His sword remained sheathed.

Thor understood only part of what had passed between them. She had heard enough to recognize the bridge in Avarn’s words, the failure he had carried long after the fighting ended.

Now Brannoc turned toward the people behind him.

The giant nearest the gate looked at Avarn.

Its club moved slightly.

Thor smiled without warmth.

“That one’s mine. You’ll go through me first.”

The giant looked from her to Bruni, then toward the dragons above.

Its club lowered.

Inside the courtyard, Brannoc crossed to a pallet.

Thor could not see the woman lying there clearly. She saw Liora kneel, saw the healer already beside the pallet lift her face, saw the stillness that followed a question too important to be answered carelessly.

Alive.

The word reached the gate.

Barely.

Thor tightened her hold on the hammer and turned back toward the officers.

They were watching the same opening.

They would not have it.

A little later Brannoc came into view carrying a dark-haired woman against his chest. He held her with a care wholly unlike the violence required to keep the shield upright.

Wenhild.

Behind him came the others.

Ishkar limped with his spear. Oruun needed help to rise. Nyxa stayed close to Mireth. Kaedra kept her bow ready.

Tavros appeared at the edge of the gate and looked down the valley.

“They’ll follow.”

“Let them,” Thor answered.

“There’s one road out. They’ll reach it before we do.”

She looked up at the weathered mountain god.

“How many roads are there for someone who knows these hills?”

He went quiet.

Then his face changed.

“Seventeen.”

“Pick one dragons can follow.”

He looked back toward the monastery, beyond the buildings to the rock above them.

Thor saw him stop thinking about the road the enemy could see.

Then he went to lead the others out.

Thor and Bruni remained at the gate.

The monastery behind them grew quieter as Tavros led the escape through a narrow cleft in the rock. It was not the sort of route Thor would have chosen for wounded people. It was the route available, and the people using it knew more about its safety than she did.

She listened for progress without turning her back on the valley.

Stone scraped.

A low voice asked someone to wait.

Brannoc had to turn sideways in places to carry Wenhild through.

The officers began moving a frame.

Thor saw the silver first, a thin bright line above the hands guiding the timber. A rod rose toward the gateway.

She shifted her weight.

An arrow struck from the high cleft.

The rod broke.

Kaedra.

Thor looked up briefly. The archer was already moving again.

The officers abandoned the attempt.

Beside her, Bruni flexed his metal hand.

“What did you tell them?” Thor asked, keeping her eyes on the giants.

“When?”

“When you landed.”

“That I hold bridges.”

She waited.

“And that I would learn gates.”

Despite everything, she laughed.

One of the giants frowned at the sound.

Thor let him wonder.

When the last of the others had passed through the cleft, she and Bruni withdrew slowly. No triumphant challenge. No final strike offered merely because their enemies remained within reach.

They had come for people.

The people were leaving.

Thor backed beyond the gateway, then turned where the rock gave cover and followed Bruni upward.

Nobody pursued them.

At the high saddle, the dragons waited.

Below lay Carrow Tor, still smoking, still surrounded by an army watching a gate that no longer protected anyone.

Tavros stood at the edge and looked back.

A year of shelter had occupied those buildings. Meals. Arguments. Work. The repeated relief of returning alive to people who knew his name.

Thor understood why he did not immediately turn away.

Saelis stood beside him.

For once, the messenger offered no cleverness.

Eventually Tavros faced the dragons.

Thor helped make room for the wounded.

They reached Ashfell by nightfall.

Greykeep received them later, after the arrangements required to move exhausted people through a gate without turning exhaustion into another injury.

Thor came through with dust in her clothes and the lingering sensation of the mountain beneath her feet.

Lexander stood beyond the arch.

This time she did not wait for him to ask.

“Nine.”

He looked past her.

Brannoc carried Wenhild into the hall.

Evelyn crossed to them immediately. Her face became calm in the way Thor had learned meant there was little room for delay.

She placed a hand against Wenhild’s forehead.

Light rose.

Wenhild opened her eyes.

“Who are you?”

“Evelyn. You’re in Greykeep.”

She told her she could rest.

Wenhild looked beyond the healer at the lamps still burning in the receiving hall, at people waiting with blankets and water, at a place whose warmth did not depend upon her keeping a fire alive.

“Oh,” she whispered. “It’s warm.”

Her eyes closed again.

This time, she slept.

Thor found she had nothing to say.

Lexander stepped beside her and took the bag she had forgotten she was carrying.

“Come on,” he said quietly. “Let them work.”

Io helped settle Mireth near Wenhild’s bed.

The healer resisted rest without ever quite refusing it. She watched Evelyn’s hands. She asked after the others. When someone brought water, she held the cup but forgot to drink.

Nyxa remained close.

Io did not attempt to look directly at the shadows that seemed to gather around her. The woman’s attention was plain enough. She had decided Mireth would not be left alone, and she meant to keep that decision.

Aurelia arrived within the hour.

She sat beside Wenhild and laid a hand against her forehead.

When Mireth began to rise, offering to take over, Aurelia looked at her.

“You’ve kept everyone alive for a year. Who has been keeping you?”

Mireth stared.

Then she sat down abruptly on the neighboring bed and covered her face.

Nyxa put an arm around her.

Io set the water within easier reach and moved away enough to give them privacy.

Across the room, Lexander waited with another stack of folded linen.

“Where?” he whispered.

She showed him.

He placed it down without making a joke this time.

They worked together until there was no further task that would be improved by having more people in the room. Then Io handed the remaining work to people who were ready to do it and went out with him.

In the passage, she stopped.

He waited.

“Nine,” she said.

“Yes.”

“All here.”

“Yes.”

She leaned against him, and he held her until her breathing eased.

Thor found Brannoc before the night was over.

He had removed his helm. Without it, she could see old scars she remembered and new ones she did not. He sat as though his body still expected to brace against another blow.

For a moment neither spoke.

Then he looked at her.

“You took your time.”

She sat beside him.

“You’ve become difficult to find.”

“So I’d hoped.”

The attempt at humor failed between them. He looked down at his hands.

“Faelan. Corra. Dun.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know where.”

“No.”

He accepted the answer because she had not tried to make it more comfortable than the truth.

Thor told him about the courtyard.

Not as a promise that the same thing could be done again whenever they wished. She explained the workers, the lamps, the girl who had taken a baker’s hand, the rule that had been there longer than Othellos’s prison.

He listened with the concentration of someone learning that an enemy’s strength might contain a weakness he had never thought to search for.

“The floor?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“You’re serious.”

“Painfully.”

He rubbed a hand over his face.

“I’ve been holding a shield for so long I may have forgotten how to hear anything else.”

“Then start with this. We don’t go through his doors because he invites us to.”

He nodded slowly.

“And the others?”

“We keep looking for a way to reach them.”

Brannoc sat with that.

Thor did not ask him to be grateful for being alive while three friends remained captive. She knew better. Rescue did not divide memory neatly into the saved and the absent.

After a while, he rose to find somewhere quieter. Fenrir was in the garden. Thor saw Brannoc notice the great wolf and turn toward the bench nearby.

She let him go.

By the time Lexander returned to the nursery passage, the sky beyond the windows was beginning to pale.

He had lost count of how many times he had walked that stretch during the night. This time his hands were empty.

Io came beside him, moving with the careful weariness of someone who had done enough and was resisting the temptation to find one more task.

From within the nursery came Uriah’s voice.

Low at first.

Then Carol’s, suddenly awake.

“Today?”

“Today.”

Garrick sat up across the room.

“Today.”

Lexander stopped at the open doorway.

He had been thinking in arrivals and beds and the condition of a healer’s hands. He had forgotten, for several hours, what the children had been waiting for all week.

Their birthday.

Lirien stirred between Carol and Seraphina.

“What’s today?”

“We’re three,” Carol told her.

Lirien looked at Carol’s height, her long legs, the face that had grown so quickly beyond the age it belonged to.

“You don’t look three.”

“I know. But I am.”

Lirien considered this.

“I’m four.”

Carol looked at her in turn, at the little girl with the roughly cut hair and the flour-sack blanket.

“You don’t look four.”

There was a pause.

Then Lirien laughed.

The sound was small and rough, uncertain at its beginning. Lexander had not heard it before. He knew that at once, with a clarity that made every other sound in the room briefly recede.

Carol laughed too.

Seraphina woke into it, blinking, then smiling before she understood the reason. Garrick joined them. Ignatius lifted his head and looked around, offended for only an instant that joy had begun without him.

Down the passage, Roderic announced his own awakening with considerably less restraint.

Io put a hand over her mouth.

Lexander looked at her and found that she was laughing too.

Uriah sat on the floor beside Carol’s bed. He looked tired beyond any reasonable description and entirely willing to remain where he was.

Thor appeared behind Lexander.

“Is it morning already?”

“It’s the birthday,” Seraphina informed her, with the authority of someone newly acquainted with the fact.

“So I hear.”

“Did you bring presents?” Garrick asked.

Thor looked toward Uriah, then at Lexander.

“Nine very tired guests.”

Garrick considered that.

“Will they have cake?”

“When they’re ready,” Io said.

That satisfied him.

Lexander entered the room and sat beside Ignatius, who immediately began explaining that the present was wrapped and that the visible corner was deliberate.

Across the room, Lirien still smiled.

There were people to find. An old road beyond the eastern mountains. Three gods behind doors they could not safely enter. Enemies who would answer their failures with new cruelty if allowed the chance.

None of those things had vanished overnight.

But his sister was home. His wife sat within reach. His children were arguing about whether breakfast ought to include cake, and a little girl who had spent years speaking to a floor was laughing with them.

Lexander remembered the folded list in his book.

He would keep it.

For the moment, he stayed where he was and let Ignatius show him the present.