Chapter 37: What the Glass Remembers

I. The Walking Hours (Ilyrisse)

The Castle of Crystal did not have mornings. It had only the hour Ilyrisse chose to walk, and today she chose the hour when the false moon still hung low enough to spill its borrowed light across the eastern halls, painting the floor in long blue rectangles that looked, if she let her eyes go soft, almost like water.

She had built this castle to stop her own thinking. That had been the whole of the design — glass so that nothing could hide inside it, halls so long that a thought had to travel the length of them before it could catch her, ceilings so high that grief, when it came, would have somewhere to go besides her chest. It had worked, more or less, for longer than she cared to count. It worked less well on mornings like this one, when the walk itself became an excuse to remember.

She walked anyway. She had learned, over the centuries, that there was no version of herself who did not walk this castle remembering someone. Better to choose which someone.

She chose him first, because she always did, because eighty years of raising a mute plant into a boy who could hold a cup without shattering it had rearranged something permanent in the architecture of her. She thought of the first time he understood that water could be held rather than simply endured — the way his whole small body had gone still with the concentration of it, both mismatched eyes fixed on the cup as though it might vanish if he blinked, his fingers curled around the clay so carefully that his knuckles had gone pale with the effort of not crushing it and not dropping it, holding that narrow, trembling line between the two.

He had looked up at her afterward with an expression she had never had a name for until she raised him long enough to learn it: pride, offered to her like a gift, because he did not yet understand that pride was supposed to belong to the person who felt it and not be handed away entire to whoever had taught you to feel it at all.

You did well, she had told him, and he had beamed — an actual beam, sun-bright and unguarded, the kind of expression that made her chest ache in a way eighty years of solitary rule over the Dominion of Eternity had never once required of her — and then he had promptly poured the water directly onto himself, delighted by the sensation of it running down his own bare arm, and she had laughed. Really laughed. Not the practiced sound she gave her court, but something that came up from underneath the Empress and startled even her with how young it made her feel.

He still smelled, she thought now, walking the blue-washed hall, of wet new growth and the color that had no name — the color of that colorless hill in Something where she had first found him rooted and mute and endlessly patient, waiting for centuries for someone, anyone, to notice that a plant could want. She had noticed. She had knelt in front of him in the dirt of a world that was not yet ready to hold him and said, quite simply, I see you, and something in the plant that would become Eremos had cracked open like a seed does — violently, permanently, unable to go back to being merely seed once it happens.

With her, he was still that. The plant that only wanted to be near her, that only wanted her weight beside him and her voice above him and did not yet know that wanting things was supposed to be embarrassing. Around everyone else in this house he had become the pillar, the one who held the turns and carried the weight of a thousand souls' worth of grief without complaint, and she loved him fiercely for how well he had learned to be that. But when it was only the two of them, in her glass halls, at her low false-moon hour, he did not have to hold anything. He could be spoiled. He could be spoiled, petulant and clinging and young in the specific way that only a creature who spent eons being nothing gets to be young, decades late and twice as hungry for it.

She indulged it without apology. She had earned the right, she thought, to be the one place in his existence where he did not have to be good for anyone else's sake.

There had been a version of this castle, in its very earliest years, where she had worried that indulging him would ruin something in him — that a creature raised on nothing but hunger, suddenly handed the run of an empress's affection, might grow bloated and careless with it, the way starved things sometimes do when finally fed too much too fast. She remembered saying as much, once, to the empty halls, in the years before he had learned to speak in more than gestures and single borrowed words. I am making a mistake, she had told the glass. I am teaching him that love arrives without limit, and the world outside this castle has no intention of confirming that lesson.

But the world outside this castle had never once been the point of him. That was the thing she had needed decades to understand, watching him grow from a mute green shadow into a boy who wept the first time a bird landed on his shoulder and did not fly away. He was not being raised to survive the world's stinginess. He was being raised to know, in his very bones, that stinginess was not the natural law of things — that somewhere, at least once, in at least one glass castle built by one exhausted, grieving empress, generosity had been the rule rather than the exception. Whatever cruelty he would later meet elsewhere — and he would meet a great deal of it, she had known that even then, had known it the way you know weather is coming from the particular color of a distant sky — he would meet it already knowing it was not universal. That, she had decided eventually, was worth every risk of spoiling him rotten. A god who had never once been indulged made for a very frightening god indeed. She had seen enough of those to last several eternities.

She thought, too, of the smaller rituals that had grown up between them over the centuries, the ones no one else in the household had ever witnessed and that she suspected he did not even discuss with Vaelira, who otherwise seemed to know the contents of his heart before he'd finished forming them himself. The way he still, after everything, after becoming the load-bearing wall of an entire family's grief, sometimes simply appeared at the door of her private study without a word of preamble and lay down on the cold floor at her feet like something half his considerable age, waiting to see whether she would set aside whatever she was reading and simply put a hand in his hair. She always did. She had never once, in all the centuries of this small unglamorous ritual, refused him.

Let him be a child here, she thought, walking on through the blue-washed hall. Let this be the one room in all of existence where he is allowed to still be small.

She found Vesalia in the long gallery that overlooked the inner garden, standing the way Vesalia always stood — angled three-quarters toward the nearest door, weight balanced on the balls of her feet, eyes doing slow, methodical sweeps of every surface that might conceal a blade or a person who wished to become one. Survivor's geometry. Ilyrisse had seen it in soldiers and in queens and in children who had grown up too fast in palaces that pretended to be safe, and she recognized it now in the woman who had once ascended to godhood on the strength of a betrayal that should have ended her.

"You're doing the thing with your shoulders again," Ilyrisse said, coming to stand beside her, not too close. Vesalia did not like closeness that arrived without warning.

"I don't have a thing with my shoulders."

"You have several things with your shoulders. I've catalogued them. That one means you slept badly."

Vesalia's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but its distant cousin, the kind of expression that had to travel a long way through old scar tissue before it reached the surface. "I don't sleep. I rest my eyes and remain vigilant."

"Of course." Ilyrisse let the silence sit comfortably between them for a while, watching the false dawn move across the garden below, where dew that did not need to exist clung to flowers that did not need to bloom, because Eremos had decided, once, that his family deserved beauty that made no practical argument for itself. "He came to you last night."

It was not a question, but Vesalia answered it as though it had been one. "He came to sit. He didn't say anything useful. He never says anything useful." A pause, the kind that Ilyrisse had learned meant Vesalia was deciding how much truth to let out of the vault. "He just sat on the floor next to my chair like an overgrown dog and put his head near my knee and waited to see if I'd let him stay."

"Did you let him stay?"

"I told him to get off the floor, it's undignified."

"Vesalia."

"I let him stay." The admission came out clipped, almost angry, the way confessions of tenderness always came out of Vesalia, as though softness were a wound she had to press through gritted teeth. "I hate it. I want you to know that I hate it. I was built to need nothing. Kaelen made very sure of that — a weapon doesn't get to want a warm knee to lean its head against, a weapon gets to want the mission complete and the enemy dead and that is the entire permitted inventory of wanting. And then this — this child — sits down next to me like he has all the time that exists, because he does, and puts his head there like it's the most natural thing in the world to want to be near someone, and I —" She stopped. Recalibrated. Her jaw set into the old severe line. "I hate it," she said again, more quietly, which from Vesalia was the linguistic equivalent of weeping.

Ilyrisse did not reach out to touch her. She had learned, across the centuries of knowing women like Vesalia — women assembled by other people's hunger into shapes that could survive anything except gentleness — that the worst thing you could do to that particular kind of grief was to acknowledge it directly. So instead she said, mildly, watching the dew: "Doran would have hated it too, I imagine. Being needed."

It was a risk, naming him. Vesalia's whole body went rigid for exactly one second, and then, slowly, unwound. "Doran hated being needed. He didn't mind being wanted. He used to say there was a difference — needing was a debt, wanting was a gift, and he only ever wanted to be given gifts." Her jaw tightened again, differently this time. "He was very good at leaving before the debt came due."

"And Eremos?"

Vesalia was quiet for a long moment. Below them, in the garden, something with wings that were not quite wings and not quite light moved between the flowers, and neither woman watched it, because both of them were watching something much further away.

"Eremos doesn't leave," Vesalia said finally. "That's the whole insufferable problem with him. He sits down on the floor and puts his fool head against your knee and he does not have anywhere else to be, ever, because you are where he has decided to be. There's no debt to come due because he never intends to collect. He just—" she made a short, frustrated gesture, as though trying to physically shape the concept in the air between them, "—stays. And I don't know what to do with a person who stays. I was never issued instructions for that."

"None of us were," Ilyrisse said. "I think he's teaching all of us at once, badly, out of order, and none of us gets to graduate."

That, finally, won a real sound out of Vesalia — not quite a laugh, but close enough that Ilyrisse counted it as a victory and did not push her luck any further.

"There's something else," Vesalia said, after a moment, in the low, careful voice she used only when she had decided a thing was worth the risk of saying it out loud. "He asked me, last night, sitting there on the undignified floor. He asked whether I thought my daughter would have liked him. Not — not whether she'd have loved him, or trusted him, just. Liked him. As a person, if she'd met him somewhere ordinary, before any of this."

Ilyrisse went very still. She had not expected the name to surface this morning, of all mornings, in this hall of all halls; grief in this household had a way of arriving sideways, uninvited, precisely when a person believed they had steered well clear of it.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him the truth. That my daughter liked almost no one on sight, that she made people earn it, slowly, over months, the way I did." Vesalia's jaw worked once, twice, before she continued. "And that she would have earned him slowly too, and hated every second of enjoying it, and loved him completely by the end, the way the rest of us apparently have no say in the matter. I told him that. I don't know if it was kind or cruel to say. He stayed with me, very quietly, the way he does when he doesn't want you to notice he's heart broken, and then he thanked me, and then he asked if I'd tell him a story about her that had nothing to do with how she died."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

They stood together a while longer in the blue light, two women built by different centuries into different kinds of armor, both of them, in their own private and unspeakable ways, grateful for the boy-shaped plant who kept insisting, with the enormous patient stupidity of something that had once waited eons just to be noticed, that they were allowed to be soft.

Ilyrisse did not say what she was thinking, which was: I recognize you. Not celebrity to celebrity, not empress to soldier, but something older and plainer than either title — the recognition of one woman who had been shaped by other people's hunger for another. She had been carved into an empress by a title she never asked for. Vesalia had been carved into a weapon by a man who called it devotion. Neither of them had ever fully forgiven the hands that made them. But they had, at least, found their way into the same glass house, standing in the same borrowed dawn, loving the same absurd, endless, water-spilling boy. It would have to be enough. It was, Ilyrisse thought, already more than either of them had once believed they'd get.

The prison did not announce itself the way prisons in the living world did — no rusted bars, no reek of rot, no torchlight guttering against wet stone. Ilyrisse had built it, like everything else, out of glass, because she believed that punishment should never be allowed the mercy of shadows. If you were going to cage someone, you owed them the honesty of being seen doing it. It was, she privately admitted, the closest thing to a moral position she had ever built into architecture.

Selwyn was awake when Ilyrisse arrived, which did not surprise her; Selwyn was almost always awake, curled in the corner of her glass cell with her knees drawn to her chest and her dark hair falling loose and unbrushed around a face that had once, Ilyrisse remembered, been full of a mischief so bright it had gotten her family's entire estate exiled twice over before she turned twenty. That brightness was banked low now, nearly extinguished, the way a coal goes when no one thinks to feed it, but Ilyrisse had watched enough fires in her long life to know that banked was not the same as dead.

"You're staring again," Selwyn said, without lifting her head from her knees. Her voice had the particular flatness of someone who had run out of energy for outrage a long time ago and settled instead into a weary, watchful patience. "I'd ask if I have something on my face, but I imagine it's just more prisoner. I understand it's not a flattering look."

"You have excellent bone structure for incarceration," Ilyrisse said, because there was no point pretending gentleness with Selwyn; the girl had a nose for false comfort and would only trust the version of Ilyrisse that told the truth plainly, even when the truth was unkind.

That won her the ghost of a real smile — small, crooked, defiant in the particular way of someone determined not to let her circumstances take the last of her humor even as they took everything else. "High praise from the Empress of Eternity. I'll treasure it. Perhaps I'll have it carved on whatever they eventually build to mark the spot where I finally, mercifully, expire of boredom."

Ilyrisse did not laugh, though something in her chest wanted to. She had known, from the very first accounting of the plot against her — Selwyn own cousin's greed, a poisoned cup, a girl of no political consequence caught holding the wrong goblet at the wrong hour and made to answer for a crime that had never once been hers — that there was no version of justice waiting at the end of this particular corridor. The world did not owe Selwyn a reckoning. Worlds rarely owed anyone anything; they simply continued, indifferent, dragging their small tragedies along in their wake like debris behind a ship that never looked back to see what it had struck.

The world will keep to its course, Ilyrisse had told herself, over and over, in the years since the sentence had been passed. My intervention changes nothing. My light is not a light for everyone; it never has been, and pretending otherwise has cost better women than me their thrones.

It was, she still believed, mostly true.

But belief, she was discovering — belatedly, at an age when she should have long since stopped discovering anything about herself — was not the same as obedience. She looked, without meaning to, at the quiet figure who had walked with her this morning as she always did: a soul from the household staff, one of the many who took turns accompanying the Empress on her rounds, standing a respectful distance behind her with the patient stillness of someone accustomed to waiting on decisions that were not theirs to make. Ilyrisse caught her own reflection in the glass of the cell — tired, ancient, still beautiful in the ruthless way that power preserves a face — and beside it, faint and half-formed, she caught something else: an expression she had not given herself permission to feel.

She did not decide to move her chin. It simply moved, the smallest fraction, toward the lock.

Her companion understood the gesture before Ilyrisse herself had fully understood giving it. There was no hesitation, no question asked aloud — only the soft, decisive click of a key that had always, Ilyrisse realized now, been carried for exactly this possibility, as though some part of her retinue had long ago decided this day was inevitable and had simply been waiting, patiently, for the Empress to catch up to her own mercy.

The cell door opened without ceremony. Selwyn, who had fallen into an exhausted half-sleep sometime in the last hour, did not wake at the sound. It was Ilyrisse's companion who lifted her — carefully, the way you lift something you are afraid might shatter from disuse rather than force — and carried her out through the glass corridor, down toward the warm wing of the castle, toward a room with a real bed and real blankets and windows that showed, at Ilyrisse's private instruction, the color of actual sky rather than the manufactured moon.

Ilyrisse watched them go and did not follow immediately. She stood alone in the empty cell for a long moment, feeling the strange, unfamiliar lightness of having done a thing without first calculating every consequence of it.

This is not forgiveness, she told the glass, and the glass, being glass, said nothing back. I have not decided the world owes her anything, and I have not decided I owe her anything either. This is only warmth, borrowed forward against a debt I haven't finished deciding how to name.

It was, she thought, the most honest gift she knew how to give. Not absolution — she had none of that in her, had spent it all centuries ago on people less deserving of it — but simply the sideways mercy of a warm room and clean sheets and the chance, however faint, that a boy who loved too easily and too completely might find, in his own slow and terrible time, a way to make right what circumstance and cowardice had left wrong. Whether he would take that chance was his to decide. She had only opened the door. The rest of the garden, as always, belonged to the one who chose to tend it.

She lingered a moment longer at the mouth of the empty cell, remembering — because the glass would not let her not remember, that had been the whole design of the place, after all — the day the sentence had first been passed. Selwyn cousin's face across the council table, smug with the particular confidence of a man who had never once believed his empress capable of choosing justice over convenience. The goblet itself, produced as evidence, its rim still faintly discolored by whatever slow poison had been meant for Ilyrisse's own lips and had found Selwyn's instead, an accident of proximity and bad timing that had cost a girl of no political weight the whole of her freedom while the man actually responsible walked free for another three decades before his own ambitions finally undid him elsewhere, in some other court, against some other unlucky woman who had not had the good fortune of an empress's belated conscience.

I let it stand, Ilyrisse thought, walking now, slow and deliberate, back toward the warm wing. I let it stand because unwinding it would have meant admitting, publicly, that my own council could be so easily turned against an innocent, and I was not, in those years, prepared to spend that particular currency. I chose the appearance of an unbroken court over the freedom of one unimportant girl, and I have told myself every possible version of the story that makes that choice sound wiser than it was.

She did not forgive herself for it, walking now. She had learned, across the ruthless architecture of her own long life, that self-forgiveness offered too cheaply was its own kind of theft — theft from whoever had actually been harmed, who had never asked to have their suffering absolved on someone else's convenient schedule. She simply carried the fact of it, the way she carried most of her failures, folded neatly into the enormous ledger of things an empress does and does not get to undo, and let the small, late mercy of a warm room stand as the only apology she currently knew how to offer without pretending it was larger than it actually was.

Flora found her on the return walk, the way Flora found everyone eventually, drifting into the corridor with the unhurried, faintly luminous patience of something that had once spent an entire existence rooted in one spot and had never quite lost the habit of trusting that the world would come to her in its own time.

"Cuántas temporadas," Flora said without preamble, tilting her pale green head, her hazel-gold eyes wide and entirely without guile. "How many seasons? While you were away. On the long mission."

Ilyrisse looked at the false sky through the nearest window — she could have told Flora the count in exact days if she'd wished, down to the hour, because empresses were trained never to lose track of time even when time no longer had any power to punish them for losing it — and found, instead, that she wanted to laugh.

Who, in a castle of eternal glass, in a realm where clocks were sentiment rather than necessity, still counted days? Who, surrounded on every side by souls who had long since stopped marking the turning of anything, clung so sweetly and so absurdly to the old mortal rhythm of seasons, as though winter and spring still had the power to mean something here, in a place built entirely out of the refusal to let time matter?

Flora does, Ilyrisse thought, and the laugh she'd been holding back came out of her clean and unguarded and real, the same laugh that had escaped her the day Eremos poured water down his own arm and beamed at her as if he'd invented joy. It was, she reflected, becoming something of a habit — being surprised into genuine laughter by the two members of this household who understood the least about pretending.

"We've passed through winter," she said, when she'd recovered enough breath to answer properly, crouching a little so she could look Flora more level in the eye, the way you would for a child, though Flora was no child — simply a soul who measured her years in root-depth rather than birthdays. "And now we are on the very first day of spring."

Flora's whole face opened at that, the particular unguarded brightness that only bloomed on her, on no one else in this entire glass and grief-soaked castle, because no one else had been born, however strangely, out of an actual flower's simple and undivided wanting.

"Are you ready to bloom?" Ilyrisse asked her, and meant it as more than a season's greeting; meant it, she realized only as the words left her mouth, as something closer to a blessing.

"I think so," Flora said, seriously, the way she said everything, without a trace of performance in it. "I've been practicing. Eremos says I don't have to practice, that flowering isn't something you get wrong, but I like practicing anyway. It makes the waiting feel like it's doing something."

"That," Ilyrisse said, straightening, feeling something in her old and calcified chest loosen by another careful degree, "is possibly the wisest thing anyone in this castle has said to me in several centuries."

Flora beamed — actually beamed, sun-bright, the family expression, Ilyrisse thought, the one Eremos must have learned from being near her — and drifted off toward the warm wing of the castle with the unhurried certainty of a season that knows it is coming regardless of whether anyone is ready for it.

It was from the high balcony above the eastern garden, on her way back toward her own chambers, that Ilyrisse saw Vaelira.

She was exactly where Ilyrisse had known she would be — draped along the balcony rail in that particular boneless, felinely careless posture that made her look, at any given moment, one breath away from either falling asleep or falling entirely off the ledge, and somehow managed to look, despite the physical impossibility of the pose, utterly unbothered by either outcome. Her indigo hair, fading to silver at its ends the way frost fades from a windowpane toward morning, caught the false moonlight and gave it back changed, softer, as though even borrowed light improved itself by passing through her.

She was watching the manufactured moon with an expression Ilyrisse had seen a thousand times and never once grown tired of — that particular half-lidded contentment, the look of someone who knew perfectly well the moon overhead was a lie built by loving hands rather than a true celestial body, and had decided, with characteristic laziness, that the distinction simply wasn't worth the energy of caring about.

It's pretty, Ilyrisse thought, watching her watch it. Does it matter if it's real?

She thought, unbidden, of the last time she had nearly kissed Eremos on this same balcony — how she had leaned in, slow and deliberate, savoring the anticipation the way she savored very few things anymore after so many centuries of having already tasted most of what existence had to offer, and how, in the exact half-breath before their lips would have met, a third weight had simply arrived on the stone beside them, uninvited and utterly unrepentant, indigo hair spilling across Eremos's shoulder as though gravity itself had decided Vaelira belonged there more than physics belonged anywhere.

You're doing the thing again, Ilyrisse had said, exasperated, and Vaelira had cracked one golden, clock-ringed eye open and said, without a shred of guilt, What thing? — as if she had not, in fact, been lounging in the exact geometric center of a kiss that had not been hers to interrupt.

She had done it enough times, over enough centuries, that the household had stopped remarking on it entirely. It had become, instead, a kind of unspoken barometer: if you saw Eremos somewhere and did not also see, within a reasonable radius, a length of indigo-and-silver hair draped somewhere improbable nearby, you were meant to wonder — quietly, without panic, but with genuine curiosity — whether the Eremos you were looking at was really him at all, or some trick of the castle's strange light. Vaelira's presence beside him had become, in its own absurd and entirely characteristic way, a kind of proof of life.

Ilyrisse did not join her on the balcony. Some mornings called for solitude even from women who loved each other; some walks were meant to end alone, folded quietly back into your own chambers with your memories tucked in around you like blankets. She lingered only a moment longer in the doorway, watching Vaelira watch her false and lovely moon, feeling something settle in her chest that she did not entirely have language for — pride, maybe, or its stranger cousin, the particular ache of loving a whole household of broken, difficult, luminous people and knowing that every single one of them, in their own private and unglamorous way, was slowly, slowly, learning how to bloom.