Together they walked back across the bridge toward the upper city. The crowd between us swallowed whatever was said next, and hard as it was to wend through the throng to Aven, I got there in time to hear the information I most desperately wanted.
“Your brave little messenger,” Aven was saying to Tain as they walked, shoulder to shoulder, heads bent close together. “How she made it through when no one else could, I just don’t know.”
“Lini,” Tain said, his voice quaking. He saw me and gripped my forearm, pulling me in. I barely felt the slash of pain from my hastily wrapped wound. I stared at the Warrior-Guilder, waiting, hoping.
Aven directed her gaze to me. “I’m afraid I didn’t get her name,” she said. “But she bore your Oromani tattoos, Credo Jovan.…” The hard lines of her face softened as she placed a hand on each of our shoulders. The feel of her rough squeeze sent a frisson of shock through my body.
“Kalina,” Tain said. “It was Kalina. Jovan’s sister.”
I turned my head, unable to look at her, unable to face the words I already knew were coming. “I’m sorry,” Aven said gently. “We think she must have swum in the river to avoid the patrols.”
“What happened?” Tain asked, though he must have known the answer, just as I did.
“The deep cold,” Aven said, shaking her head. “She made it to us, and told us enough to send us back here, but she was barely conscious and coherent then, and she … Well, she collapsed and never woke again.” I sensed her gaze on me. “I’m sorry, Credo Jovan. But your family should be proud. Your sister was a hero. We all owe the city’s safety to her.”
I couldn’t handle the sympathy in her face, or my own grief reflected on Tain’s, so I just stared at the ground. Though it had been barely more than a hope, I had secretly relied on the idea that my sister would come home with the army, and that I would retain some semblance of the family that had been my whole world at the start of summer. Now, after everything, it was just me.
They must have continued speaking, but I heard nothing as we made our way through the applauding crowd and toward the Manor, nothing but a high ringing in my ears and the distant babble of what might as well have been a foreign language. There wasn’t enough air to breathe properly. All I could do was count steps and alternate squeezes of my hands, hoping the calming rhythm of the repetition would get me through this day. And the next, and the next? Deal with them as they come. The voice in my head sounded more like Etan’s than my own.
Though the Council came together briefly, it was agreed that we would spend the day treating victims and cleaning up, with the Council and the representatives from the estates to meet to begin formal discussions first thing tomorrow. Perhaps it was relief, or perhaps a mark of how Tain’s power and honor had grown, that none of the Councilors criticized the early ideas Tain put forward: financial and other reparations, immediate representation on the Council, new Guilds, mass schooling opportunities; even Caslav had been unable to voice such things. Now they offered no argument. Bradomir looked a different man, twenty years older, like someone had stolen the life force from him. Varina agreed forcefully with everything the Chancellor said. She nodded, eyes bright with focus, through Tain’s heartfelt apology to the Darfri and other assembled community leaders. She, too, looked a different person, though perhaps that was through a lack of drugs more than anything else. I said nothing. Following even the vague direction of the conversation was like clutching at smoke. I wondered if the others could see what I truly was—an empty man.
Tain sent everyone off to their allocated tasks. Tomorrow the real work would begin. Rebuilding the city, repairing the damage we had done over centuries, reimagining the way people interacted, wouldn’t be arranged in a single meeting. But it was a start, at least.
I looked up at last, thinking Tain and I were alone, and realized Aven, too, had hung back. She sat in the most relaxed pose I’d ever seen her, perched on the edge of the Council table, leaning back on one hand and shaking out her thick braid with the other.
“Honor-down, I’m so tired.” She scratched her head vigorously and shook her hair out with her fingers.
Tain sat beside her, dropping his head forward. “Me, too,” he said. “It’s over, but it’s not. There’s so much work to be done, it’s hard to even know how to start.”
Aven nodded. With her hair down and lacking her usual rigidity, she looked younger. Almost vulnerable. Her voice even sounded softer as she put a hand on Tain’s shoulder. “You’ll do it because you must,” she said. “And because you’re the most honorable man we could ask to lead this country. No one else could have done what you did today, and stopped the fighting.”
“I feel like I’ve failed,” Tain admitted. The two of them seemed not to register that I was still there.
“Failed? You?” She laughed. “You succeeded where none could have expected you to. You survived, and in the end you saved a lot of lives. You’ll be a Chancellor they’ll write about, Tain.”
Aven leaned closer, hand fluttering hesitantly and then, with more confidence, threading gently into his hair. And like a drowning man lunging for air, Tain kissed her, with all the hunger of months of watching and wanting her from a distance, and all the pent-up emotion of the day.
I stood and left the chamber.
* * *
I walked to the hospital, keeping to my most familiar routes, where I knew how to step to keep in perfect balance, and could walk over cracks in the stone with alternating feet, one of my favorite calming exercises. I didn’t begrudge Tain finding something to hold on to in this maelstrom. But the sight of him finding it made me feel even lonelier and more lost than before.
So I sought my own anchor.
Hadrea was at the hospital, just where I thought she would be. Savior of us all, and yet there she was, her head bent over a patient, elegant long hands cleaning blood and dirt from around a wound. She looked up from over the table and her smile cut across the room, a crack of light in the darkness.
I threaded through the throng of physics, assistants, and patients, until I reached her side.
“Kalina?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Her response flashed across her eyes, but she said nothing, merely squeezed my hand. Grateful for the silence, I looked around to see how to help. I needed a distraction, something to make me feel useful.
“Here, give me a hand,” a physic barked in my ear, and I followed her to the next bench, where a man lay groaning, his hands clutched around an arrow protruding from his shoulder. “Get some pressure around this, get the bleeding stopped. Don’t try to move the arrow.” She thrust a wad of bandages at me and moved on.
“Hi,” I said to the man. “I’m going to try to stop that bleeding, all right?”
He stared at me with teary eyes and nodded. I had to pry his hands away from the arrow to press the wadding down on the oozing blood in a fat little loop around the arrow. “Help me hold this here,” I told him, putting his bloody hands back in position. “Nice and hard. I’m just going to put a bandage around this arm and shoulder now.”
Mindful of the physic’s instructions, I worked carefully around the arrow shaft. The fletching tickled me in the face as I leaned over and worked the bandage around to hold the wadding in place. Then, stupidly, I found myself battling tears. Kalina had been helping with the fletching one of the last times I’d ever seen her. I realized then what lay ahead of me: I’d never be free of things that reminded me of my sister. We had grown up here, spent our lives together. Would there ever be a day where I wouldn’t be surrounded by memories?