Author's note: A year and a half. I fail. This chapter's been finished for nearly a year, I'm sorry to say. I held it, hoping to have the next chapter in the can and ready to post. In that time, I've moved halfway across the country, picked up a World of Warcraft addiction (it eats your soul! Stay away!) and I started grad school. There will be another chapter or two. I'm working on the next one, and it won't be a year and a half this time.

Chapter Twenty

Later, over my cup of tea and his of coffee, Edgar tried to explain about both the population and the economy. "Under Kefka, strangely enough, it wasn't so bad. In Jidoor and Nikeah those who could afford it were spending money like drunken sailors. Now, everyone's saving because they know they might live long enough to spend it later."

"That's bad?"

"We want them to spend money," he said. "By 'we' I mean government, in this case."

"Edgar, you're on a whole different level from Mobliz. We're volunteers. We don't really have taxes, even."

He stared at me for a moment, then abruptly started talking about the population. "I hope I'm wrong. I hope Jidoor and Albrook will have better news for us, but it looks like half to two-thirds of the world's population is gone now."

"At least ours don't sound so bad," I said. "Maybe a lot of people ended up with us. I'll get you the results for the official report once I'm back home."

"But what size was Mobliz before?" he asked. "And what about the population of the Veldt proper, not just around the city? Some may still be living there, but it shifted, what, forty degrees of latitude, sixty?"

"Two-thirds of the world's population?" I asked, still stuck on the math. It was too unfathomably huge to be more than numbers. Numbers, and the memory of dust motes in the sunlight slanting into Doma's empty halls, the nearly-deserted streets and locked doors of Narshe and the way people darted inside when they saw us, and all the graves I'd helped dig in Mobliz. Duane and I worked for days, and by the end of it we were burying whole families together because we didn't have enough room or time for individual graves.

"Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "But the numbers are devastating, whatever the specific figures are."

"What are you doing to her?" Setzer asked from the doorway - I was facing it, and him, and Edgar, who had his back to the door - and flicked a card at the back of Edgar's head. "Stop depressing her. She's on her way to a tryst."

"She's been buried in the wilderness!" Edgar protested, hand to the back of his head. "I'm bringing her up to date."

"She's right here," I pointed out, though my face still felt hot. "It's not a tryst, it's a visit, and anyway, I want to hear what's going on. Of course I knew things were bad, but I hadn't realized... and this just brings back what it was like when we were traveling."

"It's been coming out gradually," Setzer said. "That's why I meant he shouldn't inflict the whole flood of bad news on you at once."

"When else will we have the chance?" Edgar asked.

"You could write me letters," I pointed out, and he made a face at me. "I know you don't have time," I added. "I wish we had a telegraph line."

"You may be hearing from investors soon on that front, actually," Setzer said. "Just a rumor I've heard, but I'm looking into it for my own reasons."

"That's... good? Oh!" I said, suddenly remembering. "Setzer, we need airship plans. Sell us some."

"Us? Who else? Are you using the royal 'we'?"

"I never use that!" Edgar said, but he was grinning. "Unless I'm including my brother in it. Or Parliament. She's a terror, Setzer. It's your turn."

"I am not a terror. Though I can work on it if it gets us the plans."

I tried terrorizing Setzer for a bit after that, but I wasn't really sure what to do. I decided on following him around, first through the living areas and down into the guts of the ship, to tell him, at length and in somewhat rambling fashion, about all the wonderful things the airship plans would bring us - factories, higher employment, money for our rudimentary government through taxing the ship builders and the trade that a fleet of ships would bring, something to do with all that dead land no one could farm, money for all kinds of people, nice things from far away for people to buy, and so on - until finally Edgar took pity on him and led me away. "You'll have the return trip to harass him further," he said. "You've done enough damage for now."

"No, I haven't," I said, but I let myself be led. I'd been talking for a while to no obvious effect and I was thirsty, and besides, I had a goal on the diary again. It was still going to be around a day and a half before we got to Locke's dig, so I had more free time than I was used to; more than I really knew what to do with. I threw myself into the diary work so I wouldn't have to think about the long strip of sand and dust below, about graves or empty cities or the tents outside South Figaro and Nikeah, or about this opera thing that everyone but me knew all about.

Sometime in the late afternoon, Setzer, unwisely, made a comment about ruining my eyes - even long practice couldn't make the handwriting easy to decipher, and I was leaning close over the page in lamplight - so I turned on him, my mind full again of relationships, to ask about tension after "that opera thing."

"What?" he asked, looking mystified.

"Edgar said– Locke and Celes– Didn't you–" I gave up for a moment, but he clearly wasn't about to take up any of my false starts. "Wasn't that when you proposed to her?" I finally asked.

"Well, yes, and Locke objected– why in heaven's name was he telling you about that? I thought he was supposed to be the gifted politician." I looked at my hands. I was probably pouting like a child; I certainly felt like I could. "Terra, think of it this way. If someone... say, if Sabin were about to sacrifice himself by marrying an utter stranger for the good of the mission, how would you feel?"

"What mission?"

"It's hypothetical."

"Is she hypothetically pretty? I mean, does he like her? I guess if she's awful I'd try to stop him."

"...that's not the point... If anything seemed tense, it was because none of them had flown before and Sabin had just learned Edgar had cheated him of the throne. But that's just my guess."

"Wait, what?" So I made him tell me everything, and when poor Edgar blundered into the kitchen I turned to him to say "You stole the throne from Sabin?"

"It was the last thing he wanted!" Edgar said, then took to his heels, but I grabbed a fistful of cape and hauled him back into the kitchen for the full story.

"I missed so much!" I said a bit mournfully when he was done. "Why did everything happen while I was unconscious?"

"I never knew all of this either," Setzer said. "Just the bones of it. We need some sort of chronicle or some such. Terra, you're showing a literary bent."

"No I'm not," I said. "I'm transcribing. Not writing a history."

"It's personal," Edgar said. "It doesn't need to be in a chronicle."

"It's the throne of Figaro," Setzer retorted. "I think a few other people might be interested."

I spent a lot of time working on the Queen's diary over the next two days. I reworked my early notes, I reread my fair copy and compared it against the original, and I pored over a map Setzer had found for me in a copy of some epic set around that time, to try to determine where they might have been. I'd check with some of Locke's colleagues later to find out more about that.

The queen's language, once so strange, made sense to me now, most of the time. I paged through my notes for the oddities I'd marked, wanting to see if I could make sense of them from context now. A few, I could, but then I found myself getting distracted by reading the entries as I landed on them. I found one where she was speaking of several Espers and knights, early in the volume, and noticed a mention of a couple of Espers among the knights. "The best is like unto a man but he goes horned," she said, and how had I managed to miss the reference to Odin? Actually, I knew why – I hadn't been reading the first parts as closely, and hadn't really organized my approach to it until later. She went on about him for a bit – "he says for this reason he coulde never take to him a wyf, and his men make merrye of it, but he cares not" – which Locke had told me was a reference to men whose wives cheated having horns, though he couldn't explain it beyond that. But that made me think of something else.

I knew exactly where this was, close to the end of the book. It still took some searching, but finally I found it – an illustration of his antlers and hair, though the face was stiff and a bit awkward. She wasn't a very good artist. "I had thought to illumine this record of my dayes but there is too little," she said – she'd gotten tag ends of colored ink or paint from the scribes, if I remembered her earlier entry about it right. So she'd tried to draw Odin instead because apparently the antlers fascinated her, or because they were "straunge," and she mentioned he'd told her he shed them yearly "like the yonge hart in sprynge." She'd drawn his hair as curly; when I'd seen him frozen in the castle, he'd been wearing a helmet. I did wonder what antlers would look like up close on an Esper, so no wonder she'd made the attempt.

I remembered what Locke's eyes looked like up close, and his eyelashes, dark but sparse. I remembered his hands, the long callused fingers and the nails he kept short, the way he looked tilting his chair back from a table, but I had a hard time calling up an image of him at any distance, not in detail. Was it normal to only remember someone in pieces like that?

"What do you have there?" Setzer asked me.

"Setzer, what's illumined? Illumination? She said she didn't have enough paint for it."

"You have an illuminated manuscript?" Edgar asked, surprising me - I hadn't known he was in the room.

"Well, no, she didn't have much paint. Is it like illustrating?"

"More or less. Ask Edgar to get you a pass to the Royal Archives in South Figaro. Or have Locke take you there next time he attends one of those gatherings," Setzer said. "Maybe you can present your work on that diary. Or was that for your own satisfaction?"

"No, I... I think I'm going to get it presentable and try to publish it, or... whatever people do," I said, surprised to realize I meant it. But I didn't like the incomplete notes from the early parts of the diary, and I wanted, if nothing else, to have a clear version I could read without having to guess from context if the tall loopy thing was an h or an l.

"There you go, then," he said. "If you're a member they'll give you the run of the place."

"Not the old manuscripts!" Edgar protested. "They don't guard the crown jewels that carefully!"

"I used to read it while I was cooking," I said.

"Please tell some archivist that," Edgar said. "While I'm in the room."

It was amazing how little work I got done considering the way the time dragged. I stared out the portholes and fiddled with my notes and worked on a letter to Katarin, and made very little headway on any of them. I also tried a letter to Celes, but I made even less progress there. What could I possibly say to her?

But eventually we started descending, and I threw clothes and belongings into my trunk and began, with rather more care, wrapping up the diary and my notes. "Excited?" Edgar asked, when I emerged from my room with my gloves on and the bundle of the diary under my arm.

"I... well..." I floundered, embarrassed. "I'll be glad to get off the ship."

He smiled a little. "It was nice seeing you again, though."

"Oh, Edgar, that's not what I meant!" I hugged him, one-armed, and he held on for a moment.

"I do miss all of you," he said. "I know you don't like leaving the family, but if work brings you to Figaro, you're always welcome."

"I know," I said. "I miss everyone, too. It's tough being so out of the way."

"Untrue," he said. "I've seen how many children you have. You don't have time to miss anyone, except possibly Locke."

"A couple of seconds a day!" I protested, and we bickered our way up to the deck, where the wind whipped the words from our mouths. I found myself wishing I'd pulled my hair back, as it immediately covered my face and half-blinded me, but at this point the damage was done, so I tucked the diary into my valise and ran over to join Edgar at the railing, holding my hair back from my eyes and looking over at the camp, the dun-colored tents almost blending into the sandy stone of the slopes, several sturdy, drab mountain chocobos nibbling on scrubby grass at some distance away. And then, not far from the edge of the ship's enlarging shadow, I spotted Locke, almost at the same time he seemed to see me.

He yanked off the blue bandanna he was wearing and waved it, and I waved back, moving my whole arm from the shoulder so he wouldn't miss it. I was beaming; the word fit, because I felt like my face might actually be alight. The ship was settling down, gasping and creaking and quieting. I turned to Edgar, still smiling, and he grinned back. "Happy?" he asked then.

"Yes," I said, surprised to realize my voice was thick with tears even though I hadn't stopped smiling. My heart was beating fast. A couple of Setzer's deckhands were securing the ramp, and I hastily raked my fingers through my hair.

Edgar caught my hand, and squeezed it. "You look beautiful," he said. "Don't worry. Just go." I smiled at him, nervous - I'm sure I was trembling - and then half-ran, as fast as I dared, down the ramp. Locke caught my shoulder to steady me when I stepped down onto the ground, and then I threw my arms around him and held on tightly. So did he.