III. The Golden Afternoons

There were, mercifully, whole stretches of her existence that had nothing at all to do with the ledger, or the dream, or the exhausting private arithmetic of a woman trying to calculate the exact weight of a debt she had never meant to create. Most of her actual days — the ordinary, unremarkable, gold-lit stretches of afternoon that made up the overwhelming majority of her existence in this castle — were simply spent being loved, badly and enthusiastically, by the household she had built her whole strange, glass-walled sanctuary to shelter.

It was on one such afternoon, seated in the smaller and warmer of her two studies, papers concerning the household's endless, cheerfully chaotic logistics spread across her desk, that Eremos found her the way he always eventually found her — without knocking, without announcing himself, simply appearing in the doorway with the loose, unhurried posture of someone who had never once in his life needed to ask permission to exist in a room she was already occupying.

"You're doing the arithmetic face," he said, leaning against the doorframe, both mismatched eyes narrowed at her with the particular fond suspicion he reserved for the moments he caught her thinking too hard about something she had not yet decided to share with him.

"I have several faces that could reasonably be described as arithmetic faces. You'll have to be more specific."

"The one where your eyebrows do the thing." He crossed the room without further invitation and folded himself down onto the floor at her feet, the exact same undignified posture Vesalia so reliably objected to, resting the side of his head against her knee with the easy, unselfconscious weight of someone who had never once considered that this might be an imposition. "You get it when you're trying to solve a problem that hasn't happened yet."

She let one hand fall, without quite deciding to, into the dark green tangle of his hair, the small unglamorous gesture that had become, across the centuries, its own private and wordless language between them — not a reward for good behavior, not a bribe for patience, simply the plainest available proof that she was here, and he was here, and for the length of this particular gold-lit afternoon, that was allowed to be the whole of the agenda.

"I am doing the arithmetic," she admitted, because there was very little point lying to him; he had an unnerving gift for hearing the true shape of a thing underneath whatever careful phrasing you tried to dress it in. "I keep trying to calculate how far in advance a person would have to start, to keep someone they love from becoming a martyr."

He was quiet a moment, his eyes half-closed under the slow, absent motion of her fingers through his hair. "Is this about the dream again?"

She did not ask how he knew about the dream. She had never told him about it directly — some private, protective instinct had kept her from ever describing it aloud, the same instinct that had kept her from telling him what she suspected about his own origin — but she was long past being surprised by how much he simply knew, the way plants know which direction holds the sun without ever being told.

"It's about a future I keep seeing when I'm not paying close enough attention," she said instead, choosing the truth at an angle rather than head-on, the way she had learned, over the centuries, was often the kindest way to hand him something heavy. "A future where you decide — the way you always eventually decide, about everything, about everyone in this house — that the correct and only acceptable response to danger is to put your entire self between it and the people you love, without once asking whether there was a version of the solution that didn't require you to disappear into the cost of it."

"You mean the Mountain," he said, quietly, and she felt something in her chest tighten at how plainly he said it, without flinching, as though the possibility of becoming an enormous, unmoving, corrupted thing standing eternally between his family and every danger the universe could invent was simply one more shape his devotion might someday be asked to take, and he had already, in some private accounting of his own, made peace with the asking.

"I mean the Mountain," she confirmed. "I mean a version of you so large and so devoted that there is nothing left in it that is still, recognizably, the boy who cried the first time a bird landed on his shoulder and didn't fly away. I have seen glimpses of that future, Eremos. I do not know yet whether they are memory of something that already happened somewhere I cannot reach, or warning of something still deciding whether to happen at all. I only know that every version of it I have seen begins the exact same way — with you deciding, quietly, without consulting anyone who might have talked you out of it, that your own continued existence as yourself was simply a smaller price than the alternative."

He was silent for a long moment, his cheek still resting against her knee, and when he finally spoke his voice had lost its usual light, teasing register entirely.

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"Would it be so terrible?" he asked. "If it came to that. If there really was no other way."

"Yes," Ilyrisse said, with a fierceness that startled even her, her hand going suddenly still in his hair. "It would be the single most terrible thing I could imagine, and I have imagined a great many terrible things across a very long existence. Do you understand why?"

He tilted his head slightly, waiting, and she made herself say the rest of it plainly, the way she rarely allowed herself to say anything, because some truths only worked if you handed them over without armor.

"Because I did not raise a mute, patient, endlessly starving plant across eighty years, teaching him one careful lesson at a time how to hold a cup and speak a word and want something simply because he wanted it and not because wanting had finally been permitted, in order to watch him decide, at the end of it, that the correct use of everything I taught him was to erase himself in service of everyone else's safety. I did not do all of that so you could become a wall. I did it so you could become a person. And a wall, Eremos, however protective, however necessary it might someday genuinely be, is not a person. I would rather lose to the danger honestly, all of us together, than win by losing you into something that no longer gets to be soft."

He did not answer for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone thick in a way that told her, without needing to look, that his eyes had gone bright and wet against her knee.

"Do you remember," he said instead of answering directly, his voice muffled slightly against the fabric of her sleeve, "the first time you let me carry something heavy? Not water. Something actually heavy. I think it was one of the old glass panels, before this wing was finished, and you'd told the household staff to handle it because it was too much weight for anyone to manage alone, and I picked it up anyway before anyone could stop me, because I wanted so badly to prove I could be useful to you."

"I remember," Ilyrisse said. "You nearly dropped it directly onto your own foot. I have never in my long existence seen a soul look so simultaneously proud and terrified in the same instant."

"You didn't take it away from me," he said. "That's the part I keep coming back to. Everyone else in that hallway was already reaching to pull it out of my hands, certain I was about to hurt myself, and you just stood there and watched, and let me figure out how to hold it, and only stepped in at the very last moment, right before it actually would have crushed something, to help me set it down safely. You didn't take the weight away. You just made sure I didn't get destroyed carrying it."

"I remember that too," she said, softer now.

"I think that's the only kind of help I actually know how to trust," he said. "The kind that doesn't take the weight away from me entirely, because taking it away always feels like being told I'm not allowed to be useful, not allowed to matter to the people I love in any way that costs me something. I don't know how to promise you I won't become the wall, Mother. But I think — I think if you're the one standing there making sure I don't get destroyed carrying it, the way you did with the glass, then maybe it doesn't have to become the whole of what I am. Maybe it can just be one more heavy thing I'm allowed to carry, instead of the only thing left of me."

"I don't know how to promise you that," he said again, more quietly this time, circling back to where he'd started. "I don't know how to promise anyone that, if it actually came down to it — if there really was no other way — I wouldn't just. Do the thing anyway. Become the wall. I think some part of me has always known that's who I might eventually have to be, and I've just been trying very hard not to look directly at it."

"I know," Ilyrisse said, and resumed the slow motion of her hand through his hair, because there was nothing else honest left to say. "That is precisely why I keep doing the arithmetic. Not because I believe I can talk you out of a devotion that large — I have lived long enough to know that devotion of that size does not respond well to argument. I do the arithmetic because I refuse to let the future arrive and find me unprepared for it. If there is a version of events where danger comes for this house and there is genuinely no way to meet it except at the cost of the boy I love disappearing into something enormous and eternal and lonely, then I intend to have already found every other possible door before that one, and closed it only after I am completely certain no other door existed at all."

"And if there really isn't another door?"

She was quiet for a long moment, looking down at the crown of his dark green head resting so trustingly against her knee, thinking of the child in her dream who would not move, who stood between her and the devouring dark with his small arms spread and said, with a certainty too large for his small body, I will protect you.

"Then I will not let you stand there alone," she said finally. "Whatever door is left, whatever hole you decide you have to dig yourself into to keep the rest of us safe — I will not let you dig it by yourself, and I will not let you disappear into it without me beside you. If that is the only door left, Eremos, then we will walk through it together, and I promise you now, in this room, on this afternoon, that I will spend whatever remains of my own existence making absolutely certain no version of that future ever gets to leave you standing there entirely alone."

He turned his face up toward her then, his mismatched eyes wet and enormous, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all, the gold afternoon light falling quiet and unhurried across the two of them — an empress who had spent centuries doing exhausting private arithmetic to keep her son from disappearing, and the son himself, who had already, in some silent unspoken corner of his own devoted heart, begun quietly digging the hole anyway, just in case.