Chapter 105: Beside Us

Dinraal woke to someone speaking a language he did not know.

For a moment, he was back aboard the reconnaissance ship.

The red sky waited behind his closed eyes. He could hear the low, overlapping signals from the Ashen vessels, urgent in a way he had never heard before.

Then Isolde moved against him.

Her hand rested on his chest.

The room smelled of blankets, cold tea, and the food Rhiannon had left beneath a cloth.

Hearth.

He opened his eyes.

Beyond the doorway, someone laughed.

A different voice answered.

He turned his head toward the sound.

The arch was still there.

Isolde opened one eye.

“You’re checking.”

“Yes.”

“So did I.”

“When?”

“A little while ago.”

“Did it behave?”

“Remarkably well.”

He smiled faintly.

She lifted her head from his shoulder.

For several seconds, she studied his face.

“How much did you sleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“Enough to stop looking as though you were holding yourself together by argument.”

“That sounds like improvement.”

“It is.”

He brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek.

She looked tired too.

He had been so relieved to reach her that he had scarcely thought about the days she had spent waiting, or the night she had spent making his fear comprehensible to people on another world.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Making you sit through all of it.”

Her expression changed.

“You didn’t make me.”

“I know, but—”

“Dinraal.”

He stopped.

She placed her hand over his.

“I’m glad you told me.”

Outside, a cup struck stone with a small, clear sound.

They both looked toward the door.

The noise was almost absurdly ordinary.

Isolde smiled.

“We should get up.”

He nodded.

Then he drew her close again.

“Just a moment.”

She settled against him.

For a little while longer, they listened to another world getting ready for morning.

Hesk had not moved far.

She stood on Avalon’s side of the arch with her hammer close at hand. Her cup remained beside her boot, untouched.

Opposite her stood the young woman who had taken Hearth’s watch during the night.

Another cup sat at her feet.

Dinraal noticed both before he noticed anything else.

He stopped beside the doorway.

The young woman straightened.

“Nothing to report.”

“That sounds like an excellent report.”

She smiled.

Through the arch, the courtyard lay in early light.

It was larger than he had thought in the darkness. Stone beneath the open sky. Doors leading into a house whose shapes he recognized from years of partial images.

The house on the rise.

He had heard about its kitchen so often that he felt he ought to know where the cups were kept.

Now he could smell something cooking there.

Isolde came beside him.

She held her notebook against her chest.

“It’s real,” she said.

He looked at her.

She shook her head, laughing softly at herself.

“I know how that sounds.”

“No. I understand.”

Enna emerged from the laboratory’s adjoining room, fastening her coat.

She stopped in front of the arch and examined its base.

Then the sides.

Then the top.

Asha waited behind her with visible difficulty.

“Well?” she asked.

Enna looked at her.

“Well what?”

“It joins two worlds.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“It changed the floor.”

“Yes.”

“The clocks agree.”

Enna folded her arms.

“Then I suggest we arrive on time.”

Dinraal laughed.

It hurt a little in his chest.

He was glad of it.

Aurelius brought his clean coat and said nothing about the one he had worn during the voyage. The old one lay folded in the small room, still carrying the stale smell of the ship.

Rhiannon had found Isolde a fresh scarf.

Tiamat had sent word that the fleet remained in position and that she expected a complete account of the meeting.

Arcturus’s message was shorter.

We have the watch. Go.

Dinraal read it twice.

Then he put the communicator away.

The arch changed before the hour.

Dinraal saw the courtyard through it.

Then, as he moved a step to the side, another room appeared.

He stopped.

A long table.

Windows.

A wall covered in words.

People.

He moved back.

The courtyard returned.

Asha made a noise behind him that he suspected she would later deny.

Eve caught her sleeve.

“Slowly.”

“I am moving slowly.”

“You are breathing quickly.”

“Those are different things.”

Dinraal looked from one view to the other.

Kyria stood beyond the opening, watching the same transformation with an expression that contained more concern than triumph.

Dot translated her explanation.

The arch had been asked to show the meeting room.

It had answered.

But it had kept the courtyard too.

Two faces.

Kyria had never seen one do that.

Dinraal looked toward the children.

Corin was no longer beside the relay. He had been carried away to sleep.

Somewhere, that small boy had asked a question which had altered the shape of their morning.

Isolde opened her notebook.

Then closed it.

“What?”

“I can write later.”

She reached for his hand.

He took it.

At the hour, Dinraal stepped through.

Nothing seized him.

There was no tearing sensation, no drop, no struggle to remain himself.

One foot stood on Hearth.

The next stood on Avalon.

The air changed.

That was what he noticed first.

A faint sweetness he could not identify. Warmer light. The distant smell of growing things.

Then the room became fully real around him.

Faces turned.

Conversations stopped.

Dinraal stood before a table occupied by people from worlds he had only known as names in reports.

His silver rested at his wrists.

His father’s silver.

Theirs.

Shared with children, queens, strangers, enemies, and people who had become friends without ever touching his hand.

Behind him came a heavy breath.

The First Weapon pushed through the arch, lowered his great head, and proceeded into the doorway beyond as though he had spent years being inconvenienced by the room’s arrangement.

Dinraal closed his eyes briefly.

“Of course.”

A dog stood beside the tall grey figure at the entrance.

It looked at the First Weapon.

The First Weapon looked back.

For a moment, Dinraal considered whether their first diplomatic difficulty would require him to separate animals.

Then the dog approached.

It sniffed the ancient creature’s nose.

The First Weapon allowed it.

He lowered himself onto the floor.

The dog settled against his side.

The tall grey figure bowed its head.

Dinraal looked at Isolde.

She was smiling.

“One negotiation completed,” she murmured.

Okafor stood at the head of the table.

There was an empty chair beside her.

Dinraal saw it and understood the deliberate courtesy of it.

Not a place at the rear.

Not a stool brought in after everyone else had settled.

A place kept.

Dot gave him the greeting.

He answered, then found himself looking past Okafor toward the man beside the window.

Lucas.

Without the relay between them.

Without broken lines or delayed translation hiding the smallest movements of his face.

He looked younger than some of his reports had sounded.

Older than others.

Tired in a way Dinraal recognized.

They approached each other without quite agreeing who had begun.

Dinraal held out his hand.

Lucas took it.

For a moment, neither spoke.

The contact was warm.

Ordinary.

Dinraal had expected the silver to do something.

To answer.

To recognize.

Perhaps it did, somewhere below his awareness.

What he felt most clearly was another man’s hand.

“Thank you,” Dinraal said.

Dot carried the words.

Lucas glanced toward the arch.

Then back at him.

His reply came gently.

It had been more than one person.

Dinraal smiled faintly.

“I’m beginning to notice that.”

Lucas laughed.

The room relaxed by a degree.

Behind them, Enna had already found Keir.

She looked at the drawings in front of him and began speaking before she sat down.

Keir reddened as Dot translated her observation about the load path on his second aircraft.

He had fixed it.

Years ago.

He said so with the alarm of a man who had hoped a conversation might remain safely behind a great distance forever.

Enna listened.

Then answered.

Dot paused before translating.

“She says she knows.”

Keir stared.

“She says she has wanted to tell you in person that she knows.”

Enna almost smiled.

Then she took the chair beside him and pulled the drawings closer.

Dinraal looked at Isolde.

She had not followed him toward the waiting chair.

She stood near the doorway, her notebook against her chest, staring through the long window behind Okafor.

He went back to her.

“What is it?”

“The field.”

He followed her gaze.

The north field lay green in the distance.

Beyond it stood houses.

Roads.

A world made visible by all the things people had told them about it.

“There,” she said softly.

Small rows of growth marked a patch of ground.

The beans planted after the wedding.

She looked toward Dot.

Then asked whether the garden was far.

The woman who rose from the chair at the end of the table looked familiar before Isolde understood why.

It was not her face.

It was the way people made space for her without being asked.

The way she crossed the room as though a stranger’s question deserved an answer immediately, even with forty-one worlds waiting around a table.

Dorothy Dask stopped in front of Isolde.

She held out her hand.

Dot translated.

“Not far, love. Come and see.”

Isolde looked toward Dinraal.

The meeting was about to begin.

He saw the hesitation.

Then he looked at the window, at the garden she had wanted to see for so long.

“Go.”

“We came for—”

“I know why we came.”

He touched the edge of her notebook.

“Bring back something that isn’t a map.”

She smiled.

Then she took Dorothy’s hand.

They left through the ordinary door.

That mattered to Isolde afterward.

The first steps she took farther into Avalon were not through another impossible opening. They were down a path beside someone who kept pace with her and pointed out places as they went.

There was the house.

There was the turn toward the long ward.

There was a patch of ground where children had been digging for reasons apparently understood only by the children.

The words came through Dot when needed.

Other things required none.

Dorothy noticed Isolde looking at the slope and slowed slightly.

Isolde almost said she was fine.

Then decided she could be fine at a slower pace.

The town opened below them.

People carried baskets between houses. A child ran past with one shoe in his hand. Somewhere, metal rang against metal in a rhythm that made Isolde think of the workshop at Hearth.

She had read about this place under attack.

She had read about people arriving here with nothing.

Now she saw a woman arguing cheerfully with a neighbor over a length of washing line.

She saw bread cooling in a window.

She saw a young person sitting on a step, repairing a strap while someone else held the loose end.

Each ordinary thing made the reports both more real and less complete.

“You’ve brought something,” Dorothy said when Isolde touched her coat pocket.

Isolde looked down.

Then laughed.

She had almost forgotten.

Wrapped in damp cloth lay a small grey-green cutting from their garden.

Its scent reached them as she unfolded it.

Dorothy bent closer.

The leaves were narrow and soft.

A plant that had survived their first careless season because Adela had told them, very firmly, where it should go.

Isolde explained as well as she could.

“From home.”

Dorothy smiled.

Then pointed toward the garden.

They found it a place together.

At the long table, Dinraal began with the reconnaissance ship.

He did not begin with Bahamut.

He did not begin with the histories of the Ashen or the battles that had shaped his own life.

He began with what they had seen.

A distress marker.

A red sky.

A defensive line.

Four days.

Asha placed the images before them.

Garnet moved nearer with her board.

Dinraal recognized the concentration in her face. He had seen it in Isolde when she worked through a record whose owner might still be alive.

The pictures appeared.

The Ashen formations.

The pods opening.

The pale creatures descending.

Nobody interrupted the first sequence.

Then Okafor asked him to stop.

She pointed at a ship withdrawing from the ridge.

Dot translated her question.

How many had left?

Dinraal looked at Alexander’s figures.

“We confirmed some departures early in the engagement. After the second day, the images become less reliable.”

“How many could have escaped without you seeing?”

“More than I can responsibly guess.”

Okafor nodded.

She preferred that answer to a useful lie.

He liked her better for it.

Questions followed.

Did the Ashen attempt to destroy the feeding mass?

Yes.

Did they change tactics after it formed?

Yes.

Did the creatures avoid any particular weapon?

Not consistently enough to establish a pattern.

Did the Ashen ever attempt communication?

Not with his ship.

With the attackers?

He did not know.

The Overseer listened from beside the doorway.

When it spoke, the room quieted.

Dinraal watched Dot translate.

The Ashen had understood the enemy before the first probe reached them.

The formation confirmed preparation.

The world might have been chosen as a place to fight, or merely become one.

There was not enough evidence to say.

Dinraal looked toward the grey figure.

He had spent much of his life judging how quickly something might kill him.

He could not entirely stop.

But he could listen.

“The warning,” he said. “The emergency marker. Could it have been meant to draw us?”

The Overseer considered for a long time.

It might have been.

It might also have been a surviving machine doing what it had been built to do.

Those possibilities could exist together.

Dinraal looked at the frozen image of the relay’s ruined structures.

He thought of the good cups inside the tender.

Of systems whose labels had outlived the people responsible for them.

“All right,” he said.

Then he continued.

Aramaeis arrived while they were discussing the feeding mass.

Asha went to meet him, with Eve on his other side.

He came slowly, leaning on his stick.

Dinraal rose.

His uncle waved him back down.

The journey through the arch had tired him less than the effort of pretending it had not unsettled him.

Dinraal knew the expression.

Aramaeis stopped just inside the room.

He looked at the wall.

HEDGE.

THEY ARE FIGHTING TOO.

ORRIN.

NOT AGAIN.

TIRAN. ALL.

And beyond the map, a small circle with a question mark.

The thing heard beyond the edge.

He studied that last mark for several seconds.

Then his gaze moved to Crane.

The man sat with a tool near his writing hand.

There was a pale mark around his throat.

Dinraal watched recognition travel across his uncle’s face.

Not recognition of the man.

Of something the man carried.

Aramaeis crossed the room and took the empty chair beside him.

Neither spoke.

The meeting continued.

Crane helped place the Ashen battle beside the movements known from the Sorn’s side of the war. He did not try to force the maps to agree where they did not.

Sometimes he corrected himself.

Sometimes the Overseer corrected him.

Neither enjoyed it.

Both did it anyway.

Dinraal could work with that.

When the discussion reached Merrow, Crane wrote three words on his slate and angled it toward Aramaeis.

Dinraal could not read them from where he sat.

He saw his uncle look.

Saw his hand become still on the head of the stick.

Then Aramaeis took the pen.

He wrote beneath Crane’s words.

Three of his own.

Dinraal knew the script.

He knew those words.

He had seen them on records that had turned the dead into transferred workers and the abandoned into administrative details.

Transferred.

Reassigned.

Lost.

Crane studied the writing.

No translation passed between them.

But he moved his slate closer to Aramaeis and left it there.

Dinraal looked away.

The room contained too much history to understand in a morning.

Still, people were finding places to begin.

The garden soil was warmer than Isolde expected.

She knelt beside Dorothy and pressed it gently around the cutting.

Above them, leaves moved in an air that smelled unfamiliar and alive.

For a moment, the laboratory, the maps, and the red sky receded.

Not gone.

Simply elsewhere.

Dorothy watched her work.

Then she asked about Hearth.

Isolde told her about the coast.

The mountains.

The first garden wall.

The beans.

At that, Dorothy smiled and turned toward the nearby rows.

Isolde followed her.

She had seen Marian’s beans emerge from soil at home. She had watched the first uncertain shoots and wondered whether the experiment had given them a living thing or only the appearance of one.

Now she touched a leaf growing on the world where the pattern had begun.

The same plant.

Another place.

She laughed quietly.

Dorothy looked at her.

“Sorry.”

The older woman shook her head.

No apology needed.

Isolde explained.

The first attempt.

The second.

Dinraal trying not to look disappointed when the first seeds remained still.

Asha pretending she had expected the failure.

Eve knowing perfectly well she had not.

Dorothy laughed.

Then she told Isolde something about beans, kitchens, and the people who insisted they had eaten enough.

The exact wording mattered less than the expression.

Isolde knew those people too.

A pod rested in Dorothy’s palm.

She offered it.

Isolde accepted it carefully.

She opened her notebook and placed it between two blank pages.

Dorothy watched.

Then pointed at the book.

Isolde turned back a few pages.

She had not intended to show anyone.

But here, kneeling beside someone whose life she had come to know through messages, it seemed natural.

The wedding.

The first view of their planet.

The shelter night.

The lines on their kitchen door frame.

And the sentence she had written after Johanna told her.

There are three of us now.

Dot helped with the words.

Dorothy read the translated line.

Then looked at Isolde.

The warmth in her expression was almost too much.

She put her hand over Isolde’s.

For a little while, neither spoke.

Then she asked how she was feeling.

Isolde told her honestly.

Happy.

Tired sooner than she expected.

Occasionally frightened by how much there was still to learn.

Dorothy listened without attempting to fill every uncertainty.

When she answered, she spoke about being allowed to ask for help before exhaustion made the decision for her.

Isolde smiled.

“I suspect Dinraal would like you.”

Dorothy’s answering look suggested that liking her had not always been necessary for people to hear the same advice.

They both laughed.

Before they left, Isolde took one small fragrant sprig from the cutting’s wrapping and offered it.

Dorothy tucked it into her hair beside the dark blue ribbon.

Something of Hearth.

Alive on Avalon.

Isolde looked back at the little plant as they walked away.

She had brought it because she wanted a gift.

Only now did she understand that she had also wanted evidence.

Something that would keep growing here if the clocks ever disagreed again.

By the time they returned, Dinraal had stopped trying to fit everything on one page.

The table held drawings of station coverage, arch approaches, shelters, supply paths, and worlds awaiting evacuation.

He had asked for a map.

They had given him a living arrangement of people and responsibilities that no single drawing could contain.

He looked up when Isolde entered.

There was soil on her knees.

A strand of hair had escaped her scarf.

Dorothy wore something grey-green beside her ribbon.

Dinraal smiled before he could help it.

“You found the garden.”

“Yes.”

“Was it far?”

“Not very.”

“Was it worth missing two hours of me speaking?”

“Immensely.”

He laughed.

She sat beside him.

Then, beneath the table, she put her hand into his.

He held it while Okafor resumed.

The Hedge.

Ears first.

Watchers who could hear what the ordinary instruments missed.

Dinraal thought of Tiamat, still above Hearth, listening to every report from the outer boundary.

Doors.

A means of opening them.

A means of closing them.

Someone who stayed beside each one.

He looked toward Hesk beyond the arch’s far face.

Sky defenses.

The young learning.

Materials whose usefulness had to be tested rather than assumed.

Shelters.

Water.

Air.

Warmth.

People who knew where to go and someone ready when they arrived.

Dinraal thought of Eline sleeping at last in the second shelter.

Of Teren inspecting the handrail.

Of Mira’s wooden ship beneath a blanket.

Then Okafor reached the fifth part.

She looked directly at him.

Everyone else.

No single person at the center of every necessary act.

Dinraal’s hand tightened around Isolde’s.

Not because he objected.

Because he could see exactly how much of his life had been arranged otherwise.

How often he had mistaken being indispensable for being enough.

He looked down the table.

Forty-one worlds.

People who had brought their own losses.

People who had reason to distrust one another and had come anyway.

Kyria sat with her blade across her knees.

Lucas watched him without expectation.

Dorothy settled back into the chair someone had brought for her.

Aramaeis sat beside a man he could not speak to.

Dinraal drew a breath.

Isolde opened her notebook.

He began.

“Hearth has fought alone for as long as there has been a Hearth.”

Dot carried the words.

Dinraal watched them reach the table.

He knew they were not literally true of every hour.

Hearth had been built by a fleet, by survivors, by people who gave what they could.

But beyond their own small circle, the fighting had always felt like something they must bear without expecting anyone to come.

“My father fought before me.”

He looked at his hands.

“Under banners most of you have never seen. For people who learned to forget the names of those who kept them alive.”

Aramaeis lowered his gaze.

Isolde wrote.

Dinraal continued.

“I thought if we found a place far enough away, I could give the people with me a different life.”

He looked toward the window.

“That is still what I want.”

No one interrupted.

“But I stood above that world and watched the Ashen lose. I watched them understand they were going to lose.”

The red sky came back for a moment.

He let it.

Then he looked at Lucas.

“I have been standing at the edge of things for a long time.”

His voice roughened.

“Facing out.”

Isolde stopped writing long enough to touch his wrist.

He turned his hand and caught hers.

“I would like someone to stand beside me.”

The translation ended.

The room remained quiet.

Then Okafor rose.

She took the chalk.

Dinraal watched her walk to the wall.

Beneath the work already recorded there, she wrote another name.

HEARTH.

Then a smaller line beside it.

Dot read it for him.

“Two fronts. One hedge.”

Dinraal looked at the words.

He had expected relief to feel larger.

A physical force.

Something that might break through the tightness he had carried since the red sky.

Instead, it arrived quietly.

The knowledge that the next warning would not have to be translated into solitude before anyone could answer it.

Isolde slid her notebook closer.

She had written what he said in their own language.

Then again in the dictionary they shared.

Now she added the words from the wall.

He looked at her.

She was not smiling.

Her eyes were wet.

Neither of them tried to hide it.

At the break, Risa found Isolde beside the window.

Isolde recognized her from pictures.

The real woman seemed both smaller and more forceful.

She stood with the ease of someone accustomed to occupying dangerous places without asking permission.

Above her head hung a cloud.

Beside it, a much smaller one.

Isolde stared before she could stop herself.

Risa noticed.

One corner of her mouth moved.

Dot translated something dry about the weather being difficult to ignore.

Isolde laughed.

“I’m sorry.”

Risa waved that away.

Then she took something from her pocket.

A small piece of paper.

Folded many times.

She opened it carefully.

A bird.

A nest.

Lines that Isolde recognized before memory caught up.

She had sent it long ago.

A little image, offered across a connection that had so often been occupied by frightening news.

She had not known whether anyone kept it.

Now the paper was worn at its creases.

Risa held it with the care of someone handling a familiar object rather than a diplomatic gift.

Isolde looked from the picture to the two clouds.

Then she laughed again, one hand over her mouth.

“I’ll need to send another.”

Dot translated.

Risa smiled.

For a moment, they stood together looking at the small cloud.

It flickered faintly.

Isolde resisted the temptation to turn that movement into a greeting meant for her.

She did not need it to be.

There was already enough wonder in simply seeing it.

Risa asked about her pregnancy.

The question was practical and direct.

Isolde answered.

Early.

Being watched.

No clear timetable yet.

Risa listened.

Then glanced toward Dinraal at the table.

He was speaking with Lucas, but his eyes found Isolde almost immediately.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

He looked caught.

Risa saw.

The two women laughed.

Isolde felt something settle.

Not because another person could tell her what her own pregnancy would be.

Because she no longer had to explain what it was like to love someone whose first response to fear was to place himself between it and everyone else.

Across the room, Dinraal watched them and wondered what had been said about him.

Lucas followed his gaze.

Whatever his reply meant, the tone was unmistakably sympathetic.

Dinraal laughed.

He suspected they had found common ground.

The meeting continued into the afternoon.

There were no sweeping promises of safety.

Dinraal appreciated that more as the hours passed.

Hearth’s fleet could observe approaches beyond the immediate world.

Avalon’s arches could move people in ways no ship could match.

Neither meant much if one side could not understand what the other was reporting.

Eve and Dot began arranging the first shared terms.

Asha joined them and had to be reminded twice that more detail was not always more clarity.

Enna and Keir covered the table between them with drawings.

Their conversation remained incomprehensible to most of the room even after translation.

Aramaeis asked for copies of certain administrative records.

Crane agreed.

Dinraal could see the cost of that agreement in the man’s face.

His uncle could too.

He did not pretend it made the past disappear.

He simply took the offered work.

Isolde asked about the people who had arrived alone.

Who kept their names.

How children were matched with relatives.

What happened when someone could describe a home but not a world.

Wren’s records entered the conversation.

So did the work being done in Thera.

Isolde filled pages.

Then stopped and tore one out.

Dinraal looked over.

She was drawing a simpler version of Hearth’s household form.

A name.

People to find.

A place to return to with more information.

She passed it across the table.

Someone examined it, then added a space she had not thought of.

She leaned forward to ask why.

Dinraal watched her.

This was what she had brought.

Not merely her notebook.

The ability to look at a system built in desperation and ask where a frightened person would stand inside it.

Later, he found himself beside Lucas near the window.

For the first time all day, neither had a report in his hands.

Dinraal looked at the town.

“At home, we have a room where my father stays.”

Lucas listened.

“Aurelius,” Dinraal clarified. “Bahamut died.”

Dot helped with the distinction.

Lucas nodded.

He understood more quickly than Dinraal expected.

“I keep thinking about the things I still want to ask Bahamut,” Dinraal said.

He looked at his wrists.

“About this. About what he knew. What he was told.”

The answer came after a pause.

Lucas had questions for his father too.

Some would remain questions.

Dinraal looked at him.

It was not consolation exactly.

It was company.

He found he could accept that.

After a while, Lucas asked about the reconnaissance ship’s crew.

Everyone had returned.

Dinraal said it aloud.

Everyone.

The word still mattered.

Lucas nodded.

Then looked toward Isolde, who was arguing gently over the placement of a line on a form.

Dinraal followed his gaze.

“Yes,” he said softly.

He was not answering a question.

He thought Lucas understood anyway.

They returned to Hearth before evening.

Not because anyone hurried them.

Because a day could only hold so much, and there were people waiting on their own side.

Isolde carried the notebook with the bean pod pressed between its pages.

Dinraal carried copies of maps and a list of things that could now be asked in person.

Asha continued speaking as she crossed.

Eve listened until they reached the laboratory, then gently took the tablet from her hands.

“Eat.”

“I’m not—”

“Eat while talking, if you must.”

Enna remained behind with Keir for another half hour.

No one attempted to retrieve her.

Aramaeis crossed last, tired enough that he accepted Dinraal’s arm without protest.

At the threshold, he stopped.

He looked back.

Crane stood beside the long table.

Neither raised a hand.

Neither smiled.

But Crane inclined his head.

Aramaeis returned it.

Then they came home.

Aurelius waited near the laboratory window.

He looked first at Dinraal’s face.

Whatever he found there eased something in his own.

“How was it?”

Dinraal set the papers down.

For a moment, he could think of no answer large enough.

Then he said, “They made us a place.”

Aurelius looked toward the arch.

Beyond it, another room remained visible.

Another world.

“Yes,” he said.

Isolde went to him and embraced him.

He held her, then looked over her shoulder at Dinraal.

There would be time for the details.

For the names.

For the plans that would bring more work than any of them yet understood.

For now, he drew Dinraal close with his free arm.

The three of them stood together while Asha attempted to explain to Rhiannon why a cold sandwich was perfectly adequate after the most important day of her scientific life.

Rhiannon disagreed.

Loudly.

The sound carried through the arch.

Someone on the other side laughed.

Hesk collected her cup that evening.

Isolde saw it happen as she and Dinraal prepared to leave.

The smith bent, picked up the cold tea, and looked at the young woman across from her.

The woman picked up her own cup.

For a while, they regarded one another.

They had spent the night guarding a doorway neither had expected to exist.

They shared no language.

Hesk looked down at the cups.

Then she crossed one arm through the opening and set hers on Hearth’s floor.

The young woman watched.

After a moment, she placed her own cup on Avalon’s side.

Dinraal stopped fastening his coat.

Isolde touched his sleeve.

Neither spoke.

A girl came down the courtyard steps.

Dory.

Isolde knew her immediately.

Not because she matched the earliest pictures.

She did not.

Because everyone nearby seemed aware of her in the quiet way people were aware of a steady light.

She carried two fresh cups.

One for Hesk.

One for the woman from Hearth.

Then she sat in the arch itself.

A small creature settled at her feet, occupying space on both worlds without apparent concern.

Dinraal looked down at the threshold.

For most of his life, a border had been somewhere to prepare for an attack.

Now there was a girl sitting on one, sharing tea.

He knew that did not make it harmless.

He could see Hesk’s hammer.

He could see the prepared keystone.

But the precautions had made room for this.

They had not replaced it.

Isolde smiled.

“Come on.”

He looked at her.

“Home?”

“Yes.”

He nodded.

They walked out together.

The house seemed smaller when they returned.

Not diminished.

Simply familiar in a new way.

Dinraal could now stand in the kitchen and know that beyond the laboratory, beyond a short stretch of Hearth’s road, another world lay open.

He set the maps on the desk.

Isolde put down her notebook more carefully.

Then she opened it.

The bean pod lay flattened between the pages.

Dinraal came beside her.

“You brought something that wasn’t a map.”

“I did.”

He touched the edge of the page.

“Did you plant the cutting?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Near the garden path. Dorothy helped.”

He smiled.

“Will it like it there?”

“I think so.”

She looked up.

“If it doesn’t, they’ll move it.”

The certainty of that answer pleased him.

Not that everything would succeed immediately.

That someone would notice and try again.

They ate a late supper from the food Rhiannon had left.

For a while, they spoke of small things.

The smell of Avalon’s air.

The dog leaning against the First Weapon.

Keir’s expression when Enna sat down beside him.

The way Dorothy had made time for a garden in the middle of a war council.

Then Dinraal grew quiet.

Isolde waited.

He looked toward the wrapped book on the cupboard shelf.

“We can take that now.”

“Yes.”

“And the seeds.”

“Yes.”

He nodded.

Then he looked at her.

“I meant what I said.”

“At the meeting?”

He nodded.

“I know.”

“I didn’t know how much I needed to say it until I had.”

She reached across the table.

He took her hand.

For a moment, he saw the Ashen line again.

The fear.

The collapse.

The awful labor behind the ridge.

It was still there.

He suspected it would remain for a long time.

But it no longer occupied every direction.

There were other things now.

A name on a wall.

A chair beside a commander.

A boy saying hello.

Isolde’s hand in his.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

Dinraal looked around the kitchen.

The marks on the door frame.

The loaf cooling beneath a cloth.

The notebook waiting on the desk.

“Our child will grow up knowing that road exists.”

She followed his gaze toward the window.

“Yes.”

“Another world.”

“Several, apparently.”

He laughed softly.

She came around the table and sat beside him.

For a while, they did nothing more ambitious than lean against each other.

Later, when Dinraal checked his communicator, the message from Arcturus was waiting.

No new contacts.

Outer watch steady.

He sent back the same report to the laboratory.

Then, after a moment, added a second message for Eve to pass through when convenient.

We are home.

The acknowledgment came quickly.

No long delay.

No broken line.

Just an answer from people who could now come looking if the next message failed to arrive.

Dinraal put the communicator down.

Isolde held out her hand.

He took it, and went with her to bed.