Title: Requiem
Series: All That We Are
Author: Nina/technicolornina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX
Pairing/Characters: Yubel/Jyuudai
Word Count: 8 234
Spoilers: It's past-life. So, um, kind of?
Story Rating: PG-13
Story Summary: Yubel goes home, only to discover she has no home anymore.
Notes: Character death (gee, I wonder where THAT title came from).
Feedback: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: There was once a man who took an eleven-year-old girl by the heartstrings, and across the barriers of time, language, and an entire ocean, asked her a very important question: "Shall we pity him? Shall we fear him?" The message in every one of those translated words still rings true in my heart today, and so, M. Gaston Leroux, this story is for you, wherever you may be.
"And, whatever you do, don't try to enter my house: I'm not always there...daroga! And I should be sorry to have to dedicate my Requiem Mass to you!" - Erik, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
In memoria æterna erit iustus,
ab auditione mala non timebit.
- traditional requiem mass
She looks like something out of one of the fantastic tales of Kashimin or Tyraba, everyone agrees when the Dailish caravan appears at the outskirts of town one chill morning of Fool's-moon. Her hair is brushed back, held with gold and jewels, and under a dark red traveling cloak she wears a rich blue dress of a kind nobody in Delain has ever seen—a kind of silken wrap fringed with gold, and beneath that, what might be a blouse and some kind of trousers that bear only the most passing resemblance to the short-pants worn by boys of the Dailish working class. She is speaking to the prince, and as they come through on horseback both the news and the question spread: a new girl has come from elsewhere on the Arc, that much seems clear, but who is she?
By the time the caravan reaches its destination in the town square, all of Amneth with time and eyes to see has come out to look over the dark-skinned girl in the strange clothes, the one sitting so easily the horse beneath her seems almost part of her. On one hand she wears a strange kind of bracelet, a ring and wristlet attached by a jeweled chain, and when she raises her hand to brush a stray hair off her face it glints in the winter sunlight.
The town has reached its verdict before so much as a single person dismounts: Changes have been made, and the prince has taken a Kashmini bride. Certainly this girl, whom it would be easy to describe even at a clearly young age as a woman, is of an appearance and poise befitting—
"Papa!" she calls, and dismounts in an untidy half-leap that pulls her wrap up high enough to reveal part of her waist. A rippling murmur goes through the crowd as she tears across the town square and flings herself into the arms of Yssaq, the trader-merchant: it's only Yubel after all, so well made-up and dressed as to fool the entire town. Once the façade has been broken, though, it's easy to see past the jewels and silk. The grace is still there—mostly—and so is the sense that this is not the same helter-skelter girl who left Delain twomonth ago, but she's just a sun-darkened Yaroni Dail after all. Yssaq smiles down at her, but his smile is grave.
"You do a dishonour to your fiancé," he tells her, and she lets go of his waist, clearly distressed, just in time for the prince to appear next to her. He smiles, and then does something that can only be the influence of the girl he has raised to noble status with a simple kohai, the formal marriage proposal that found her a place in the castle: he traces his right foot in front of his left and bows low, arm resting across his knee.
"Nothing of the kind, aryta-Yssaq," he says, and as he stands, he puts a hand on Yubel's waist. "A poor prince will make for a poor king, and it would be a poor prince indeed who'd deny his promised her family and his own."
By sunset the word will have spread to the farthest back alley that Prince Jyuudai of Amneth stood in the town square and called a common man "father," but at this moment there is only a murmur from the assembled crowd. Yssaq bows in return, although his own bow is not so deep; he is far past the sixteen years the prince can lay claim to, and his mark of fealty is cut short when his forward leg trembles beneath him. Jyuudai puts a hand beneath the merchant's shoulder before he can fall.
"Peace," he says, and presses gently on Yssaq's shoulder to raise him. "I know you come in good heart."
Yubel reaches for her father's hand. "Papa, I must tell you—"
"Your journey's not yet done, I think," Yssaq breaks in, and before Yubel can do more than begin to look disappointed Jyuudai shakes his head.
"There's naught but things to take to the palace, and for that they don't need us," he answers. "We'd stay and pass the time, if it suits."
Yssaq glances back and forth for only a moment between his daughter and her fiancé. Then he offers a single nod. "If ye'd be so kind to follow, my prince," he says. "Cold such as this isn't made to talk in."
Jyuudai reaches for Yubel's hand, and they walk past the crowd, all of them curious and silent, and finally make their way to the small gray house Yubel still refers to as "home." Inside it is less cold, if not outright warm. Yssaq offers them both stools before moving into the kitchen to start the fire. Yubel follows him, and Jyuudai in his turn follows her, the pair of them plunking down companionably on the hearthstone and Yubel reaching for the tinderbox while her father retrieves his flint and steel.
"Is your leg paining you, Papa?" she asks, taking note of both his slowness and the unsteadiness of his gait. Yssaq shakes his head.
"No more than the usual in a cold month," he answers. "T'ought to limber now we're out of the chill." He strikes a spark, and Jyuudai holds out his hands to shelter it until a small flame has caught. Yssaq hobbles toward the pantry, and Yubel gets up to stop him, putting her hands on his shoulders and shaking her head.
"Sit and get warm," she tells him. "I can get us a drink."
Yubel is kind if not proper, and her father doesn't wait to accept the offer—he simply sits by the stove, waiting for his daughter to bring a pot of loveberry cider to put over the fire to heat. She pulls off her cloak now that the room is warming, then reaches for the strings on Jyuudai's.
"Shall I put them downstairs?" she asks, and Yssaq nods, stretching his legs.
When Yubel comes back from the simple little whitewashed room in the earth that she once called her own Jyuudai and her father are still sitting on the hearth, discussing horses. Yubel finds the stool she once used to reach high cupboards and puts it down by the fireplace so she can join them. Her father smiles at her, then glances at her clothes.
"Do you always carry a change with you, chanti-tam?" he asks her, and she blushes a little. The rich fabric of her wrap is sitting on her bed below, carefully folded with her cloak, and the tunic she has pulled on from the small pile of clothes she still has in a trunk downstairs looks common and incongruous next to the fine silky cotton of the under-wrap pants she has brought back from Kashimin.
"I didn't want to ruin it if I raked out," she murmurs, and Jyuudai reaches for her hand to squeeze. She squeezes his in return as her father reaches for the kettle to pour out cider.
"I see a royal appointment hasn't changed your habit of trying to shake out the rug the folk stand on," he tells her, and she can't help joining in when Jyuudai starts laughing.
"I think it might be the most beautiful place in the world, Papa," she says, although she doesn't allow her wonder to go so far as to not drink her cider. Loveberries and passion-peaches are in Kashimin what star-fruits and dragon-fruits are in Delain, and her favourite drink was in short supply. "Their mountains look so different from ours—and the bazaar, Papa—"
"They have a hall that sells nothing but diamonds," Jyuudai cuts in. "All different kinds. Even black ones. I didn't know there were diamonds that aren't white."
Yubel absorbs the interruption into her disorganised and breathless recitation of the wonders of Kashimin, complete with occasional interjections from her fiancé: great dunes of sand, entire cities populated by people living not in buildings but tents of finest silk, the grand indoor bazaar in the capital city full of everything from rice and grain to hand-loomed carpets and jewels set in rare metals. Even the sky—the same sky that arcs above Terchath and Tyraba and Delain and even the southward countries that are not part of the Arc, if Kanti is to be believed—seemed a different colour, not the deep blue of the sea but a bright and unnamed colour almost completely unblemished by clouds and streaked and spotted by night with wild pinks and oranges and reds and purples as it faded toward a black liberally sprinkled with stars as bright and sparkling as the diamonds in the Kashmini bazaar.
"We even went into the mountains," she tells her father. "On kuruks, with a dragon-whisperer."
"And you nearly got eaten," Jyuudai interrupts again. Yubel shoots him a dirty look.
"If I'd been about to be eaten, I'd hope you'd have been doing quite a lot more shouting and coming after me," she says. "And mountain-dragons can't eat humans, Serif said so." She is suddenly aware that her father has grown very still. "Papa?"
"You wandered, unprotected, into a dragon colony?" her father asks. Yubel can see the line between his brows darkening.
"Not unprotected," she protests, trying hastily to keep him from a lecture. "We wouldn't have even got there without someone guiding us. It's hidden. And I didn't nearly get eaten, I tripped over something and fell into one. It just—looked at me," she adds, seeing the groan of despair imminent on her father's face. "I think it knew I didn't do it on purpose."
"What in Gamaru's name were you doing chasing after dragons to begin with?" he queries, and Yubel and Jyuudai both touch their left shoulders with their right hands in perfect unison.
"I don't know. Xaquirah wanted blood and venom to study. I haven't got the slightest idea what for." She thinks of Serif, the wildly talented village boy who led her and Jyuudai not only to the flight's colony but straight to the nest of its elder female, and the strange, wordless communication of eyes that ended in the dragon snorting and rubbing her claw on the ground to pull off old scales and reveal just enough of the dark underflesh for a knife to pierce and take the blood sample Xaquirah so dearly desired.
"He shouldn't have been allowed," Jyuudai breaks in. "Things like that are against the law."
"Only if it's fatal or taken by force," Yubel corrects. "I asked Kanti. It didn't sound right to me, either. But the Kashmini laws are different."
"That shouldn't matter," Jyuudai argues, and Yubel shrugs—it shouldn't, but it does.
"I suppose it makes a difference when it's someone they trust," she says at last. "There must be a reason only people from the mountain villages can do it. If they'd been asked to do something harmful I think we'd have been chased out instead of helped. Or at least asked if we were out of our minds."
Jyuudai looks discontented with Yubel's answer, but sips his cider and shifts to be more comfortable on the hearthstone. Yubel's father sighs. Then he smiles at her. There is something tired in his face, and Yubel reaches out to squeeze one of his hands between hers. The smile widens a little before dropping back to the expression that is slightly more tired than she is used to seeing on his face.
"I was part of several caravans to Kashimin when I was still young," he tells them both. "It seems to have not changed overmuch."
Yubel tries and fails to hide her disappointment. To her, it seems almost inconceivable that Kashimin is even in the same world, much less the same alliance of kingdoms, as Delain, and there is something disheartening about hearing that the wild fantasy world she saw is of little note to the person she spent her entire day waiting to share it with. Then her father squeezes the hand she's placed below his. "I'd have given a great deal to see it alongside you, chanti-tam. The marvels of Kashimin are unequalled all through the Arc—even outside it, perhaps, and I've seen many places outside it."
Yubel smiles at him. Then she gasps. "I forgot—"
"I see you haven't changed overmuch, either," he teases. Jyuudai stifles a laugh into his hand, and Yubel elbows him hard in the ribs. Jyuudai lets out a muffled noise of pain and rubs his side—Yubel is well-known among the boys she once scuffled with for having a certain amount of viciousness where attacks from elbows and knees are concerned.
"I brought you something and it's still in the caravan," she laments. "I wanted to give it to you when we came back."
"You didn't need to bring me anything, chanti-tam," her father says, and Yubel shakes her head.
"I wanted to," she protests. "I knew you could use it." She all but bites her tongue to keep still, and he smiles that tired smile again.
"Well, tell me, then," he says. "Your face is a book in clear print."
Yubel exchanges a gleeful grin with Jyuudai. "We found it in the bazaar," Jyuudai answers. "There's a craftsman there who can make anything you like out of tamirl."
Yubel sees her father open his mouth to protest—tamirl, the mountain-metal that looks like pure silver but is both harder and stronger than silver, is expensive—and speaks quickly to stop him. "He said you'll never need another and they almost never dull," she tells him. "And if you want a larger one to go with it we've only to send for it with the next caravan out and he'll make one to match."
"And what is it so necessary for me to have that you took money meant for you to spend on me?" he asks, glancing into her cup and refilling it. Yubel pauses for a sip before she answers.
"A dagger, Papa," she says. "The most beautiful dagger you've ever seen." She pauses and glances out the corner of her eye at Jyuudai to see which of them is supposed to deliver the crowning verdict on the gift, but Jyuudai is only looking back at her in the same manner, and so she finishes. "There's real copper in the handle."
Her father squeezes her hand. It occurs to her that his grip is not as strong as she remembers, and she wonders for a moment if it's because he's tired or because, as Kanti is fond of saying, all things grow in memory.
"I'll accept because I know you mean well by it, but there's no need to bring me something so fine, chanti-tam," he tells her. "To see you safely here again is enough."
Yubel laughs and leans forward to embrace him, her cheek pressed against his wind-roughened one. As soon as she sits back Jyuudai takes her place.
"It's good to see you well," he says, and as he pulls back he holds out a hand, palm up, as though completing a bow. Then he gives Yubel another of those sidelong glances. She answers with her own eyes, and Jyuudai turns his more fully back toward her father. "We should go before dark falls," he continues. "But there's naught for us to do tomorrow unless someone's declared war while we were away, so if it suits . . . "
"It suits," Yubel's father answers, and this time there's a low chuckle to go with the smile. "Unless the crown's begun to outfit its soldiers for battle with grain-flour and ladies' shoes."
It's Jyuudai's turn to laugh, and Yubel follows his suit as he stands, reaching for his cup to put in the basin before leaving him with her father so she can change back into the clothes she returned from Kashimin with.
She takes off the tunic and drapes the outer wrap of her new sarabi over her shoulder, then reaches for her cloak and for Jyuudai's. There is something wrong with Jyuudai's, and the sight is one so unexpected it takes her almost half a minute to identify it properly.
The back of his cloak is covered, not in the grit of the road, but in the kind of dust from a room that has lain untouched for days or even weeks.
Yubel brushes it off, then reaches out and puts a hand on her old counterpane. It comes away feeling gritty. Strange . . .
She comes upstairs and waits for a break in the new conversation—trade prices, this time—before handing Jyuudai his cloak. He shrugs it on and ties it, then reaches for hers to drape over her shoulders. As soon as she's into it Yubel throws her arms around her father's neck and kisses his cheek.
"I missed you, Papa," she tells him, and rests her head on his shoulder as his arms come to rest around her waist.
"And I you, Yubel," he answers. "You gave me the turn of my life coming back into town like that." She laughs a little against his shoulder, and he pulls her back away from him enough to look into her face. "You looked like your mother when I first met her."
Yubel can't help blushing just a little as the three of them head for the door. Then she hugs her father one last time—twomonth and more, she thinks, is too long.
"I love you, Papa," she says. He smiles that tired smile again.
"And I love you," he replies. Then he kisses her forehead. "I'm proud of you, chanti-tam."
She stops only once as they leave, at the gate to the street. There she turns to wave back at him, seeing his own work-darkened palm raised in answer. Jyuudai joins her before putting an arm around her waist to guide her away.
"He was tired," Jyuudai says at last, as they turn the corner away from the home of Yssaq, the trader-merchant late of Angon. "More so than I've ever seen."
"I think he's been busy," Yubel answers. "Jyuudai . . . "
He looks over at her, gazing not off to one side but full into her face, and she thinks for only a fleeting moment how very much she's come to love those eyes before she finishes. "My room was full of dust. When have you seen anything in Papa's house covered in dust?"
Jyuudai frowns. "Never." He pauses. "And that wasn't the limp of a man with bone-pains, either."
Yubel shakes her head and glances back. From where they stand at that moment, the house is just visible. "He's too old to take care of everything himself."
Jyuudai kisses her temple. "Talk to him tomorrow," he suggests. "If he needs help, we'll find it for him." He looks directly into her eyes—see my promise and hold me to it, that gold-flecked gaze says. "I meant what I said. He won't want without you."
Yubel nods. "As soon as we've given him his gift," she tells him. "It might be better if I talk to him alone."
"We can bring a horse I could check on," Jyuudai answers. Yubel smiles up at him—it's not the most creative excuse for tact, but it's a kinder suggestion than any she could come up with on short notice, and she's thankful for it. She rests her head against his shoulder and they walk in silence, Yubel planning in her head what she will say to her father tomorrow.
She assumes, of course, that there will be a tomorrow.
The house is silent when Jyuudai ties up just inside the fence and helps Yubel off with a single sure hand. Yubel has to find the key to turn the latch, and when she does she discovers the fire is out and the curtains still drawn. She calls out once, her "Papa?" seeming to echo off the walls. Jyuudai puts a hand in the small of her back.
"Is he not home?"
Yubel shakes her head. "I don't know. He's only been working half-days since I came to the castle, so he should be here, but—" She trips and nearly falls onto the bench her father sits on to dress for the weather before he leaves to work. A glance down puts a small sliver of ice into her heart.
Her father's boots are still sitting next to the bench, one of them tipped over where her foot has struck it.
"Papa?" The word rings back flat again. She feels something small and cylindrical in her hand and recognises it as the handle of Jyuudai's dagger.
"I'll check the barn," he tells her. "Don't go downstairs alone."
Yubel knows the thought in his head without having to ask: the lock into the house is old and simple, and a thief jealous of her father's good fortune would have only to push it back with a thin knife-blade to gain entry. She also knows that the house is empty; there is nobody in any of the three rooms below, and he knows it as well as she does, or he would insist she go with him. The vacancy of the place is in the silence, which clangs in her ears as loudly as the town bell, and the only concession she makes toward the unlikely possibility of a lurking burglar is to adjust Jyuudai's dagger until it feels right in her hand before she takes the stairs.
The door to her room is still standing partly open, exactly as she left it; the room on the end where her father keeps his important documents is still tightly locked. Her father's room is in the middle, and its door is closed instead of open. Another of those small ice slivers makes itself known to her, this one not in her heart but in her belly. She reaches out and pushes the catch with a single finger, her other hand flat on the door to push it open.
Yubel doesn't need the lamp sitting on the floor at her feet to know her father is still in the room; the blankets are mounded in a way that cannot be mimicked by anything but a human body. She picks up the lamp, fear fluttering around her chest like a small trapped bird—is he sick? Is that why his smile was so tired, his gait so slow?—and sees his eyes closed, hand resting on his chest. "Papa?" she whispers, and when she does the hand on his chest shifts just enough to slither off the side of the bed.
The dark colour of his skin has faded and been replaced with a tinge of blue. The pads of the fingers are black.
There is a word in the shriek that brings Jyuudai running from the barn just in time to put out the fire from the lamp Yubel drops heedlessly on the floor, but nobody who heard it would recognise it—except, perhaps, for the man whose too-cold, too-still hand she is clutching to her cheek, begging him to wake from a sleep that is final.
Yubel sits quietly on the hearthstone.
The fire is not out; Jyuudai has struck flint and steel to the kindling in the fireplace, the kindling laid by Yubel's father in the minutes before he retired to his room for the last time. It doesn't matter—Yubel would no sooner notice if the fire went out than if the entire town went up in flames. Diyashid, the healer Yubel has known all her life, is speaking with Jyuudai downstairs, just outside the room where Yssaq the trader-merchant spent his final minutes. Eventually, she knows, Jyuudai will come to tell her what Diyashid has to say and to lead her to her father's workroom, where they will find out how his body is to be disposed of and who has been designated to break what small property he has. How long it will take is of no consequence to her, not right now; right now she is simply sitting, looking at the place where her father once traced a Castle board in char and then guided her hand, much smaller than it is now, to move a piece as he taught her the rules of the game.
Iereine, the woman from the small house next door, brings a cup of something hot and hands it to her. Yubel does not thank her—is not even entirely aware of who has handed it to her. She is in chiya, the first grieving. Tonight someone will bring her something to eat as she sits awake with her father's body, and at least some of the town will join her in keeping spirit-watch in their own homes to ensure her father's spirit travels to Tym, the realm of the gods, instead of remaining tied to the earth to become one of the knocker-men.
Yubel is vaguely aware of Jyuudai's voice murmuring something to someone who is not her. Then he sits across from her and takes her hand. She knows he tells her something—the final pronouncement on her father's condition, most likely—but it doesn't settle in her head. What does it matter if her father was carried off by his heart or a stoppage of breath or a guide-spirit? His hands are still cold and ashen and Yubel is still sitting in the place where she will never sit and play Castle with him again.
At last Jyuudai reaches out to pull her into his arms, and she wails before collapsing against his shoulder, sobbing. Jyuudai rocks her and strokes her hair as though she is still the small child who ate and played on this stone every day for fifteen years, the child who slept in the room below and flew on wings into her father's room when thunder rolled across the sky. A time later she feels a hand that is not Jyuudai's on her shoulder.
"He is gone, Yubel," she hears the King's voice say, and she is too stupefied with grief to wonder why he should be there. "But thee's not."
She calms slowly against Jyuudai's chest, enough to take a sip from the cup of water that has been offered to her. She looks up in the general direction of the hand that has given it to her and sees Diyashid looking back at her before he touches her forehead and feels for her heartbeat.
"When you're ready," he tells her. Yubel starts laughing, a choked sound not so different from the tears it trails off into. Ready? Ready to face the room where her father died, the room where he lies waiting for her to send him on and the room where instructions to that effect wait for her to read them? Who would be ready after so few minutes, could be ready? Diyashid only waits. She hears Jyuudai say something to him and doesn't understand it. Eventually she nearly dozes off in his arms, exhausted and heartsick, and then she forces herself to sit back and brush her hair from her face. Jyuudai squeezes her hand so gently she almost doesn't feel it, and that gesture is enough to remind her of her father putting his hands on her shoulders less than a day before: I'm proud of you, chanti-tam. She reaches up to brush more tears away—stupid, useless things, how many are there?—and Jyuudai takes her hand before she can let it fall back into her lap. It occurs to her in a vague, not-actually-happening sort of way that Jyuudai's father is here, away from his throne, and she looks up in his direction, meaning to tell him that there's no need for him to wait the day away with her. His hand rests on her shoulder again.
"Thy grief is our grief," he says, and Yubel nods. Then she squeezes Jyuudai's hand as hard as she can, and stands. She has never known her father to shirk a duty or ignore a task, and it is time for her to live his example and give pride to the name of Yssaq of Angon.
Her father's name.
There is one chair with a back in her father's household, and Yubel has not sat in it since before her mother's death. At the time it seemed much too large, the cushion for her father's back behind her head as her feet dangled well off the floor. Now her feet do not dangle and the cushion sits against her own back, but the chair still seems much too large when she sits in it to unlock the simple wooden box that contains the details of her father's ownings. It occurs to her—again in that far-off, not fully there way—that she is sitting and the Prince and King of the country are standing behind her, she, a bastard-girl whose mother was one of the wandering folk, and the thought strikes her funny enough, in a very morbid kind of way, that she almost laughs.
She turns the small silver key that holds the box closed and lays her hands upon the lid, not quite ready to open it. Doing so will be her first admission to the world that her father has been given from Mim—the earth-plane—to the care of Tym, and she does not want to say that just yet. At last she takes the sides of the lid and turns it back.
Sitting on top of the small stack of papers within is not the letter of writ, as she expected, but a folded letter with a simple seal of string and candle wax. It is addressed to her in her father's handwriting, and after touching it with her fingers she pulls her hand back. She should read it—must read it—but the idea of seeing words her father set down to be read by her only when she could no longer discuss them with him by the fire is an idea she cannot bring herself to have. Jyuudai squeezes her shoulder as he squeezed her hand, gentle, almost a caress.
"Do you want me to read it?" he asks. Yubel swallows and feels something catch in the back of her throat. Then she nods. Jyuudai reaches over her shoulder to take the letter, then pulls his hand back.
"You should probably break the seal," he tells her, and she knows why: if anyone says there is suspicion of tampering, Yubel can aver that she opened the letter with her own two hands.
She lays her fingers on it again, seeing her father in her mind writing and sealing the letter, laying it on top of the other documents in this box. She starts to slide her finger under the seal and stops. Then she hears her father's voice in her head, not a ghost or wandering spirit but a kind of intuition: It's for reading, not holding, chanti-tam.
Yubel breaks the wax almost savagely, startled by that voice—still so clear in her head as to nearly delude her into believing the words were spoken directly into her ear—and then sits with one hand resting on the still-folded bark-paper, as though the effort of breaking a few drops of candle-wax has exhausted her. Jyuudai takes the letter, and behind her she hears the crackle of the bark-paper as he opens it.
"It's addressed to 'my dear Yubel'," Jyuudai says, and Yubel hears something catch in his throat, too. She reaches up to the hand still resting on her shoulder and squeezes it. "The letter says—"
There is a long pause, and when someone breaks it by speaking it is not Jyuudai's voice but the deeper, rolling voice of the King. "You know, if you are reading these words," he says, "that a final limit has been put on my time by the gods, may they bless you and your fiancé."
"He just wrote it," Yubel breathes through another ineffectual shower of tears. "If Jyuudai is in it then—"
"I came to know there was naught to be done five weeks ago, kai-Yubel," Diyashid says, and Yubel turns away from the box to look at him.
"You knew—" She stops again.
"The growth in him did not respond to any herb, and was too deep-trenched for a charm," Diyashid tells her, and she can hear regret in his voice. Yubel imagines this is what Jyuudai told her when he first came back to her place on the hearthstone—that her father was killed by one of the strange, bulging tumours that baffle even the best of healers. "I did all in my power to ease his pain and prayed daily to the gods you would see him again. He forbade me utterly to send a caller for you."
Yubel does not so much look away from him as beyond him, feeling very much far out of herself. That tired look, the look of a man carrying a weight not his own and yet, somehow, his own; the dust on the bed, the disused room he was forced to abandon as pain and lack of energy left him barely able to care for himself. She should have known, she thinks—should have seen what those signs really meant. The King clears his throat quietly from behind her.
"He writes that this is for thy eyes only, at such time as thee's ready to read what he would tell thee," Jyuudai's father says. "I'd not read further than this if'st a private matter."
Yubel nods. There is another crackle of bark-paper, most likely as the King refolds the letter. Yubel hears Jyuudai murmur a quiet affirmative, and when the letter is not handed to her again—stowed safely in Jyuudai's cloak, perhaps—she reaches into the box for a second time.
This time she finds a parchment envelope labeled with her father's name—Yssaq of Angon, son of Myakhel—and the words "letter of writ." The seal is a far more elaborate one than that on the letter he left for her—a thin strip of wax melted the length of the envelope and scribed with his contract-mark, marked at one end with a braided cord. Jyuudai hands her the dagger he retrieved from her father's bedroom floor where she dropped it next to the oil-lamp, and she uses its slightly blackened blade to break the cord and open the envelope before sliding out several sheets of parchment. The writing in front of her eyes wavers, then doubles, then blurs, and Yubel swipes the back of one hand across her eyes to clear them.
"It's dated to the last week in Tower-moon," she says, trying to force her voice to stay clear. The task of reading most of this document will not be completed until after the mourning-rites are done, and will almost certainly fall to one of the three men in this room. Knowing she has to read only a few lines—far enough to identify the person who will carry out her father's last wishes—does not make the task any easier. She flicks to the last page to check the marks. "It's signed by Sibiyatin. I don't know who this is." She puts a finger on the second mark and holds it up to Diyashid.
"Tsiyram," he answers, after a moment's study. "The fellow off the Square who does leatherwork."
Yubel nods and goes back to the writ. "It says 'having voided all prior documents to that effect by me, the most recent prior being retained for reference'." She stops long enough to be sure she can speak again. "I don't know what that means."
"It means any writ with a date older than the one on that parchment isn't any good," Jyuudai answers. "He must have written one before and then changed his mind. You'll probably find another one in there to compare it to—the one he wrote before this one."
Yubel takes a deep breath before she continues reading. Her voice wavers, but none of the men assembled tell her to speak up or suggest reading it for themselves—it is her duty as Yssaq's next of kin to turn the writ over to the person intended to fulfil it, and to nobody else. "There's a summary here of how he set it out and—" She stops again, and this time she shakes her head in an endless gesture of negation. Jyuudai's free hand comes to rest on her other shoulder.
"Yubel?"
She does not answer—cannot answer, doubts she will ever be able to answer. She hears Jyuudai's voice and picks out only a single word-aryta, Father. There is an answering murmur, and she feels Jyuudai move from behind her. There is a crackle of parchment; perhaps he has moved because he cannot reach over her shoulder with any degree of ease when she has buried her face in her hands.
"Kai-Diyashid, will you tell any who question that I read in place of my fiancée by the King's permission?" she hears Jyuudai's voice say. There is a reply Yubel does not quite catch, and then Jyuudai speaks again. "From the summary onward Yssaq has written, 'charging—'" Jyuudai's voice also pauses, but only for a moment; when it picks up again it is quieter but still sure of itself. "'Charging that the status granted my daughter, Yubel, is sufficient that she will execute the actions herein, with what aid she may require from her fiancé the prince of Delain kai-Jyuudai and the benefit of counsel from Iandiru of Amneth, through whom I have conducted every legal matter of substance'." There is a slight pause, and then Jyuudai finds his place again. "It says his body's to be taken care of 'according to the usual custom'." He pauses again, and there is the sound of parchment being moved back and forth. "I don't know which 'usual custom' he's talking about. It doesn't say."
Yubel thinks of her father's words the day before: I'd have given a great deal to see it alongside you . . . I've seen many places outside it. She thinks of her mother, Braundii of the Yaron-folk, and of something she remembers hearing her mother say to Yubel's father when Yubel was still very young: sometimes I think ye've one of our own hid in your blood somewhere. She scrubs again at her eyes, and the men behind her fall silent, anticipating what she will say.
"The custom that lets him travel farthest—and free," she says, and feels more tears on her face. There is no need to keep them at bay with that most important sentence read, and so she lets them fall. "He's waited this long."
Night again.
Yubel sits next to the pyre cradling her father's body, looking out tearless and silent at the Square. She suspects her tears are not done—suspects there is, in fact, a river of them ahead, and that when she thinks she has reached the river's end she will find an ocean of more of the same—but now she is drained, exhausted, her ability to cry at least temporarily exhausted. Earlier in the night some of the women of the town brought her drink, something strong and almost bitter to warm her as she sits in Fool's-moon frost with no cloak and wearing a sarabi as red as the mourning-cord tied around her left arm. Another brought her some kind of soup, but in spite of her hunger she managed only half a dozen spoonfuls. She has neither enough energy nor enough focus to eat.
Something warm drapes over her shoulders, and she rolls them almost automatically to shrug it off. Her father will never be warm again; any warmth brought to his body by the final fire that will turn him to free and wandering ash will be nothing but a temporary illusion, and Yubel sees no reason she should have what he cannot. The warm thing drapes over her shoulders again, and this time someone's hands hold it there.
"You can't stay out here dressed in that," Jyuudai's voice scolds her. Yubel considers whether or not she has enough energy to answer.
"I have a duty."
"Your duty doesn't include making yourself sick." He ties the cords of the cloak around her neck and sits beside her. "I brought food."
"I'm not hungry."
"And I'm not that fond of making girls do things they don't want to, but if you don't eat something now I guess we'll both be doing something we don't want to, won't we?"
He holds out part of a bread loaf, and after giving him the dirtiest look she can muster just to make sure he knows what an inconvenience he is putting her to, Yubel takes it and nibbles on it. Someone has made bread with cheese and herbs, and when Jyuudai provides a small dish of the oil and sweet vinegar such breads are usually served with, Yubel manages to call up just enough of an appetite to spare herself the embarrassment of being ill on fresh bread.
She gets part of the way through the bread and then shakes her head: any more of it will sicken her. Jyuudai examines her face in the flat yellow glare of the oil-lamp by her side and then takes the remnant of bread to wrap up.
"You don't have to be here," she says at last. Jyuudai shakes his head.
"You shouldn't have to sit alone just because we haven't been through a ceremony yet." He takes her hands and holds them between his. Yubel looks up at the wrapped cloth on the pyre.
"Xaquirah said tamirl won't burn," she tells him at last. It's something to say. Jyuudai shakes his head.
"Not hot enough with no forge." He pauses. "Father wanted to know if you'll be staying with us or in his house."
Yubel knows why he is asking—there is the nine-day custom of chiya for her to heed, and now that she is in the thick of death she understands that custom and embraces the numb comfort of it—but the question very nearly makes her angry, all the same. She does not know which to choose, how to choose, and finally she shakes her head. Jyuudai strokes the back of her hand with one thumb.
"I already talked to him. If you stay in town, I'll stay with you."
Yubel knows her decision as soon as the words are out of his mouth—as though they are some kind of spell that cleared her mind just long enough to decide. "I need to stay alone."
Jyuudai does not question her choice—he mourns the passing of the man who will be his father-in-law only in death enough that he, too, is wearing a mourning-cord, but he also knows that his grief is far less than hers, and he will not try to talk her out of what will comfort her. "I'll check on you, then."
Yubel nods, not so much because she needs him to watch over her as because she recognises through the haze of her own sorrow that this is his answer to her grief: for nine days the town will band together to ensure she has food and firewood, providing the material things she needs so she will have the time, uninterrupted, to make peace enough with her father's death that she can care for herself. Jyuudai cannot provide those things, but he still feels the need to help her, and he will do so however he can.
At dawn Yubel raises her voice as loud as it will go—not an inconsiderable volume, even now—and hails the slowly waking town as she stands with the lamp between her hands.
"See Yssaq of Angon, who made his home in this town and lived here honest and well!" she calls. It is the last thing she must do before she retreats to her father's home, and that knowledge is enough to keep her on her feet with her voice filling the square and echoing into most of the surrounding streets. "Send him on to find peace and walk again with his wife and ancestors in Tym—petition Rydia and Kilyo in his name!"
Jyuudai slides the glass cover off the lamp, and Yubel swings it into the dry kindling at the bottom of the pyre. Oil spills over the tinder and kindling and starts to blaze. Larger wood catches, some of it splitting open and spilling sap. Presently the fire reaches the cloth wound around her father's body, and flames lick across it to taste the flesh and bone beneath. Yubel feels more tears start to flow as fire obscures the shape of one work-roughened hand.
There are others appearing in the Square now—those who have waited out the night with her, flames lit in their homes to send his spirit on. She watches the fire grow larger with them, sees her father's body hidden, and then comes the scent of it as it is consumed. She sees the first swirl of ash and sparks dance up from the pyre on an eddy of hot air, and she turns away into Jyuudai's waiting arm to be led to her father's house.
Someone has already been there—Iereine or Dyanah or perhaps Xiarah, the old widow-woman who took her father's washing after Yubel's betrothal—and there is food waiting for her, covered with a cloth on the table. Yubel moves it absently to the hearthstone and pulls off the wrapped fabric top of her sarabi. Someone has lit a fire, and Yubel is automatically careful to keep the fabric away from it when she lets it fall on the hearthstone.
She sits by the fire and looks into it, thinking of her father in the Square, thinking of the fire that has consumed him and sent him on to wander where he will—to Terchath, perhaps, or northward to Nyarva or even maybe to the places far along the Arc where she stood not so long ago with Jyuudai and stared in simple wonder. The thought of her father's ashes swirling through the Kashmini mountains sets her crying again, and though Jyuudai puts his hands on her shoulders, he does not try to comfort her. Comfort will come later, when she is able to recognise it; just now she has no energy to spend on recognition.
At some point as she stares into the fire she hears someone behind her talking to Jyuudai, but she takes no notice. Instead it occurs to her that with her duties completed she may go, if she wishes, and sleep. There is no delaying the duty that will soon fall to her, but she can escape the knowledge of it for yet a little while, and so she stands and makes her way to the stairs. Someone has come this way, too—the door at the end of the short corridor is closed again, and there is a small looking-glass hanging in her father's doorway.
Her own door is open, and the quilt on the bed is both clean and unfamiliar. The sheets beneath are not the faded cream ones Yubel dickered for only two years ago, and she supposes—again in that numb, far-off way—that someone has taken the dusty counterpane and linens to wash and dry. She remembers Jyuudai's promise that they would find her father help, and feels the first emotion she has felt since finding his body that is not related to her grief: embarrassment that even if the town understands, now, the length and breadth of the illness she didn't even know her father had, someone saw this room with its layer of dust and unlived-in air.
She sits on the blanket that is not actually hers and reaches for the buckle that will loosen her shoe. It snags, and she stares down at it, deciding she does not have the energy to fight with it and rolling over to face the wall. After some period of time someone touches her foot, and her shoe slips off. Jyuudai's cloak—undeniably Jyuudai's, smelling of wood-smoke and grasses and with the faintest dusty hint of the air of Kashimin still buried in its folds—drapes over her shoulders and down her legs as her other shoe is loosened. She hears the voice that is not Jyuudai's again and does not bother trying to make sense of the syllables it speaks. A gnarled hand—old, with swollen knuckles and protruding blue veins under pale, translucent skin—appears next to her face, pulling up the cloak and tucking it around her. Yubel thinks of her father's hands, dark and square with hard calluses, and closes her eyes.
The end of the bed sinks—Jyuudai sitting down to watch over her. Yubel pays him no mind, but somehow finds herself a little comforted to know he is still there.
He puts a hand on her ankle and sits, quiet and still; and it is in that way that she sleeps.