Movement Five — What Ilyrisse Said, Afterward

Vesalia was waiting when we arrived at the crystal castle — I am not certain, even now, how she always seems to know. Perhaps it is simply that she has spent enough centuries as someone else's weapon that she has learned to feel it in the air when violence has recently passed through a place, even violence done on her behalf, even violence she will never be told the full shape of.

She had been standing near the western hall's tall windows when the air first changed, though she would not have been able to tell you, if pressed, exactly what alerted her — only that some old, well-worn instinct in her chest had gone tight and watchful, the same instinct that used to warn her, in her old life, of a shift in Kaelen's mood before he'd said a single word to confirm it. She had learned, across that life and the long silence after it, never to ignore that particular tightening. It had kept her alive more than once, back when staying alive had still been a thing she could lose.

She looked at Ilyrisse, who had come to the doorway at the sound of us arriving, and said only, "He did it again."

There was no accusation in it. I want to be careful about that, because it would be easy to hear those four words and imagine some harder edge underneath them than the one that was actually there. Vesalia has never once, in all the years I've watched her stand near this family, begrudged Eremos the shape his love for her takes, however dark that shape sometimes turns. If anything, I think some old, unhealed part of her finds a strange, complicated comfort in it — proof, however violent, that someone in this vast gray world was finally willing to answer for what had been done to her, when no one in her old life ever had.

Ilyrisse looked at Eremos, asleep against me, his face finally, entirely still, and there was no surprise in her at all. There rarely is, when it comes to him. She has loved him longer than any of the rest of us, longer than the Between itself has existed for most souls in it, and I think she stopped being surprised by what he is capable of somewhere around the second or third century of knowing him, and simply started loving the whole of it instead, the soft parts and the parts that are not soft at all. I have watched her, across all our years together, learn to hold both truths about him in the same open hand without ever once letting one crowd out the other — the boy she raised who was afraid of his own footsteps for the first several decades of learning to walk, and the man who had just done whatever he'd done to a god who deserved every second of it. She does not flinch from either version of him. I don't think she knows how to, anymore, even if some quieter part of her occasionally wishes she still did.

She did not scold either of us. She looked instead at the blood that was still, faintly, marking Vesalia's own face — not her blood, never her blood, but the residue of standing too near something that had bled on her behalf — and she did not flinch from it, and she did not ask her to explain it, and she said, in that low voice she keeps for when a thing needs to be settled rather than discussed, "Then we leave it there. The sinners have to pay, and more than that — the soul who gives us all a home has to sleep somewhere warm, after what the world did to him."

Vesalia reached out, then, and wiped the last of it from her own cheek with the back of one hand, an old, unhurried gesture, the particular practicality of a woman who has cleaned worse from herself before and did not require anyone's help to do it now. "I keep thinking," she said, quiet enough that I nearly missed it, "that I should feel guilty. That whatever he did tonight, he did because of me, and I should be the one carrying that weight instead of handing it to him so easily."

Ilyrisse reached out and took Vesalia's hand, the particular unhurried gesture she offers whenever words alone don't seem like enough to hold what's being said. "You didn't hand him anything," she said. "He picked it up on his own, the same way he picks up everything else in this house that he thinks no one else can carry. You are allowed to grieve what was done to you without also grieving what he chose to do about it. They are not the same debt. I've felt the weight of that same confusion myself, more than once, watching him carry what he carries on behalf of the people in this house. I don't think either of us needs to apologize for finding some comfort in it, once the guilt has had its say. I think we're allowed to hold both — grief that it happened, and gratitude that someone finally answered for it. The two don't cancel each other out, however much easier it might be if they did."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Vesalia nodded slowly, though I do not think she fully believed it yet, not in the way that settles into a person rather than simply passing through them. Old wounds rarely accept comfort on the first offering. I have watched this particular one resist comfort for longer than most, across all the years I've known her.

I left the two of them there together, in the doorway of the castle Ilyrisse built out of centuries of solitude and now shares with more people than she ever imagined she would be allowed to love. I made my way, instead, toward Ilyrise's own chamber — I wanted to be the one who told her, rather than let her hear it secondhand, though I do not think, if I am honest, that there was very much left to tell her that she did not already carry with her, quietly, as a fear she never says out loud.

I did not know, until I was already halfway there, that Iris was standing where she so often stands — near enough to a doorway to hear what passes through it, far enough back that neither Vesalia nor Ilyrisse had noticed her at all. She looked at the two women who did not know she was there, and she did not say anything, and she let out a breath that had nothing behind it but old, tired worry.

"Let us hope we avoid it," she said, to no one, or perhaps to me, since I was the only one close enough to hear her say it. "If it were not for her, none of this would have happened."

I did not ask her what she meant. There are things Iris says that I have learned, over the years, not to ask her to explain — not because I am afraid of the answer, though I sometimes am, but because I understand, in the same instinctive way the rest of you are only beginning to understand about her, that some knowledge sits too large in her to be handed to the rest of us in pieces small enough to carry. I have my suspicions about what she meant that night. I am not going to share them with you yet. Some things, even I am willing to let sit a while longer before they are told.

She had been watching Eremos for longer than any of us realized, I think — longer than the household understood, back before any of this, back before any of us had names for half of what he was. I have wondered, more than once since that night, whether whatever future she is guarding him against, in whatever visions have shown themselves to her, wears the shape of this exact fire finding no hand strong enough to close its own fist around it in time. I have wondered, and I have not asked, and I have decided, for tonight, that not asking is its own kind of mercy too.

I stayed with her a while, in that quiet corridor, neither of us speaking. Iris rarely needs company the way the rest of us need it — she has existed long enough, and seen enough, that ordinary loneliness has stopped applying to her the way it applies to everyone else in this house. But she let me stand there anyway, and after a while, without quite looking at me, she said one more thing before she finally walked away.

"He doesn't know what he actually is," she said. "Not the smallest piece of it. I think some nights that's the kindest thing about this whole strange, borrowed existence of ours — that the people who carry the most are so rarely shown the true weight of what they're carrying, until they're already strong enough to bear it." She paused, and something in her face, for just a moment, looked older than anything I had ever seen wear a face before. "I intend to keep it that way for as long as I possibly can."

I did not ask her what she meant by that either. I have learned, across all my years beside her, that Iris's silences are rarely empty. They are simply full of things none of the rest of us are ready yet to hold.