IX. Sleep, and the Pulse Against It

Late that night, long after Vaelira had drifted off to wherever Vaelira drifted off to when she finally tired even of being underfoot, Ilyrisse found herself once more in the cold gallery, the ledger open in the silent language of her own private accounting, the false moon climbing high enough to tell the truth about the shape of things.

I wanted to sleep, she wrote. I have wanted it for so long that I have nearly stopped noticing the wanting as a distinct sensation; it has simply become the water I swim in, the ordinary temperature of my own existence. I built a castle of glass so that my thinking would have somewhere to go, and some deep, tired, honest part of me built it also, I think, as a very slow and very patient way of trying to stop thinking altogether — to let the accumulated weight of everything I have survived finally, finally set me down.

And he will not let me.

Not through argument. He has never once argued with me about this, has perhaps never even fully understood that this is the shape of what he does. He simply exists, stubbornly, uneven-footed, water-spilling, endlessly devoted, and every single time some part of me tips toward that long, quiet exhale I have wanted for so long, some other part of me — smaller, more treacherous, entirely unwilling to be reasoned with — remembers the exact weight of his head resting against my knee, and finds, against every wish I have ever recorded in this ledger, that it still wants to stay awake to feel it.

He is not the reason I no longer die. But he is, I think, the reason I keep choosing not to disappear. There is a difference, and I am not certain I have ever fully explained it to him, and I am not certain, tonight, that I have the courage to try. It is enough, perhaps, simply to write it here, in the one room where honesty costs me nothing, so that some version of the truth exists somewhere, even if it never once reaches the ears of the boy who is, without ever knowing it, the reason my own tired heart keeps insisting on its next beat.

She closed the ledger, at last, in the way she always eventually closed it — not resolved, not balanced, simply set down for the night, to be reopened tomorrow or the night after, in the same cold gallery, under the same patient false moon, for as many centuries as it took her to finally, finally, arrive at a total she trusted.

Somewhere down the long glass corridor, she knew, a boy who had once been mute and rooted for eons was sleeping, or pretending to, indigo hair very likely tangled somewhere improbably close to his shoulder, and somewhere beneath his sleep, she suspected, some quiet unspoken part of him was already digging, patiently, devotedly, a hole he believed, in his infinite and terrible tenderness, he might someday have to disappear into for the sake of everyone he loved.

She would not stop him from digging. She had learned, across the long slow accumulation of this particular argument, that she did not have the power to stop him, and that trying too hard to stop him risked teaching him the wrong lesson entirely — that his devotion itself was the danger, rather than simply the shape it might someday be asked to take.

But she would keep filling in beside him. Every hole he dug, for as long as he kept digging them, she would be there with her own hands in the same dirt, refusing, over and over, across however many centuries it took, to let the space between them ever grow wide enough that he could disappear into it alone.

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Sleep, if you must, she thought, one final time, before finally letting her own long tired eyes close. I will not resent you for wanting it, the way I have never once fully forgiven myself for wanting it too. But I promise you now, the way I have promised you in every dream you have ever given me: if you go down into the dark, I am going down with you, and I will not let either of us wake up there alone.

She thought, before finally letting sleep take her, of the poem's oldest and simplest line, the one that had started all of this private accounting so many centuries ago and had never once, across all that time, stopped being true: one thing we know by now, that each of them can read the other's mind. She had read it once, long ago, as a simple observation about intimacy — the ordinary, comfortable fluency of two people who had loved each other long enough to finish each other's sentences.

She understood it differently now, in the cold gallery, under the patient false moon, with the ledger closed and the dream waiting somewhere ahead of her in whatever sleep she finally allowed herself. It was not comfort, that fluency. It was vigilance, dressed up gently enough that it could be lived inside without exhausting the people living inside it. She read his mind because she had spent eighty years and several centuries beyond them learning every possible shape his silence could take, learning it the way you learn a language you intend to still be fluent in centuries from now, when the stakes of misunderstanding him might no longer be merely emotional. He read hers, she suspected, for the same reason, though he would never once describe it in such clinical terms — because some devoted, uneven-footed part of him had appointed himself, without her ever asking, the permanent keeper of her exact weight, ready to step in the instant the scales tipped past what she could carry alone.

This is what the poem meant, she thought, finally closing her eyes. Not that love makes two people transparent to each other for the simple pleasure of it. That love, carried far enough and long enough, becomes its own kind of watchfulness — two ledgers, kept in two different rooms, in two different hands, both open to the exact same account, both refusing, across however many centuries it takes, to let the other close their book alone.

Somewhere down the long glass corridor, she knew, he was sleeping, or pretending to, and somewhere nearby, indigo hair spilled improbably across a shoulder that did not belong to her, a witch who had once chosen to die twice was keeping her own version of the same vigil. And somewhere beneath all three of their sleeping, waking, endlessly accounting hearts, the same quiet promise kept turning, patient and unbroken as the false moon itself: that whatever hole any of them eventually found themselves standing in, whatever dark finally arrived to collect on however many centuries of devotion, none of them — not the Empress who built a castle to stop her own thinking, not the witch who died to stop hers, not the boy who had once been mute and rooted and had grown, against every reasonable expectation of the universe that made him, into someone worth loving this completely — would ever have to stand there entirely alone.

Sleep, if you must, she thought again, one last time, feeling her own long tired eyes finally close. I will keep the ledger open for both of us. I always have. I always will.

End of Chapter 38.