retrouvailles (n.) the happiness of meeting or finding someone again after a long separation.
His mother had always told him not to step on the cracks in the pavement. He wasn't sure why; she'd never given him a reason, and by the time he had thought to ask for one, it had already been engrained in his mind, his memories worn in his muscles rather than his mind.
The last time he had seen Milena, she'd done the same over the paving stones which snaked between their father's workshop and the kitchen door: skipping and hopping and jumping to avoid the spider-web constellation of cracked stone. Such a strange link between them – between an only child and his only sister. Tenuous and frayed and nothing compared to the links he had glimpsed between Jaga and Kinga, between Ina and Sherida, between Eero and Pekka... but something, some small hint about why they both might lay claim to the name Czarnecki.
Zoran found himself thinking about this habit, staring at the disruption in the street where a druj had landed particularly heavily in some attack many years past, as beside him, Khalore turned to squint at the sun as though it had personally insulted her and murmured something darkly under her breath. It was the first time, for a long time, that he had seen her in the light of day – she had grown pale, her eyes underscored by grey shadows, in the past six months. She rarely left the property these days; though she seemed to have grown slowly adjusted to the use of a single arm, there seemed to be little adjustment she could make to the simple reality of living among the devils. Even now she shrank back against Ghjuvan as a neighbour passed them in the street, murmuring an apology. It was not a fearful motion; it was a movement of barely repressed rage. Zoran could see it etched upon the Hanged Man's face: she had still not forgiven the Illéans the simple sin of their birth. He was starting to understand that she never would.
Wasn't that the point?
Wasn't that why they were here?
Wasn't this what Oxana had always called the burden of their blood?
Zoran shook his head, trying to physically dismiss the thought as it struck him, and offered Khalore a small smile when she caught his eye. There was a twitch to her mouth that might have been a frown as she pulled her cloak a little tighter over her right side in an attempt to better conceal her stump – from whom, Zoran wasn't sure. He wasn't going to ask; six months in Illéa had done little to make Khalore more palatable to spend time with. He didn't think she would appreciate the curiosity either. All of this time had taught him that much.
Ghjuvan was carefully locking the gate to Ina's courtyard, for once dressed in the duller browns and greys of an Aizsaule civilian rather than the green in which Zoran had become accustomed to seeing him garbed. It was strange to realise how quickly your mental image of someone else shifted: it was strange to see Ghjuvan without his hooks, without his swords, without his excubitor's coat. When had Zoran started to see him as an Illéan? He wasn't – they were Kur, always had been and always would be. Warriors, Zoran thought, but the word was not spoken with his voice. Not carpenters, bakers, soldiers – warriors.
Xrafstars.
Ghjuvan had cut himself shaving; there was a slight red wound shining like fresh paint, marking his jawline precisely, as he turned to give Zoran a nod. "Shall we?"
Zoran smiled thinly, and stepped carefully over the crack in the road. "Nice of you to arrange a field trip."
"We needed to get you two out of the house somehow."
We – was that him and Inanna? That was sweet, but not unexpected: Ina worried. It was in her nature; she had always done so. It was a tendency that had only intensified since Pekka. She would need to start prioritising herself at some point – wouldn't she?
Since Pekka. Was that how he was thinking of it now?
They walked past the bakery; it was as busy as ever, with a narrow line of people snaking out the doorway despite the crisp bite to the chill morning air. It had rained lightly for much of the night, but the day had resolved into a dewy kind of dryness, a humidity that promised a storm upon the horizon barely restrained by some invisible grip in the sky. Beyond the thin shadow cast upon the window of the shop, he could discern the almost shapeless shape of Ina moving behind the counter – just the suggestion of the colours which composed her, warm brown and inky black and shining gold. She was wearing a blue dress today, the colour of myrtle. It was nice. Zoran knew without seeing it that it would be nice.
Just in case she could see them walking past, he raised a hand in a slight wave, and Ghjuvan smiled, and Khalore turned her head aside, and then they were walking down the hill with the wind at the back and the wan sunlight of dawn straining their eyes. He had seen light like this rippling off the surface of his tea that morning, with the silhouette of a falling girl captured at its heart; he had poured it away, lest he glimpse more.
Here he was, a Hierophant, shrinking from his purpose. He had always known that he would not live up to the greatness expected of a xrafstar, but now he was disappointing even himself. What had Commandant Sauer been thinking? Making him a Warrior? Placing him third? When Pekka was gone and Kinga was…
There was something wrong with Kinga. He could see it, even if no one else could. And there was something wrong with Ilja. Everyone could see that much. And –
Sometimes he dreamed of Hyacinth as well. Had she blamed them, while the water filled her lungs? Had she cursed their names? Had she thought of the ten years that she had been promised, the oath gone unfulfilled? Sometimes he dreamed of Mielikki as well. She had always been so quiet around Zoran – had she screamed, when the time came?
Arkadiusz Wyrocznia had been the Hierophant of the seventeenth generation, ranked second among his comrades, and Zoran found himself thinking of him often. Like Matthias, he had left a bundle of notes behind him to warn their successors of their fates, leaving their deaths embedded in paper for anyone brave enough to look. Immediately legible – he had outshone his successor in that sense, at the very least. If Matthias had handed them such prophecies, would Zoran have dared to look? Maybe he was giving himself too much credit by pretending there was any chance in any world that he would have refrained. Could he say the same if he held in his hands the secret of Azula's death, Ilja's death, Ina's? If he knew that they were embedded in stone, as certain as the tides?
The notes papered over his workshop purported an answer he had no interest in accepting.
Ahead of him, Ghjuvan and Khalore were in lock-step, silent; she was studying the pavement, he the shops they passed, and Zoran found himself staring at their backs and wondering whether they knew what they were hoping to find. If it was Belle – what would that mean? Maybe she would hold the Wheel; maybe she would hold the Tower; maybe Mielikki's curse, Hyacinth's curse, had somehow found its way back to Irij for re-assignation. Surely they would have issued one of the stagnant curses. Surely they would give the xrafstars every resource that they had at their disposal.
If it was not Belle – surely, he thought desperately, surely that could only be a good thing.
And he found himself thinking, as he often thought, of Xye, the Illéan soldier, and the fate that he had found at the foot of Wall Alliette. At night, he no longer dreamed of nothing; instead, he dreamed of Xye in the uniform of New Asia, in the suit of a Swendway bureaucrat, in the peasant garb of an Kur restorationist, and wondered over what portions of the past he was imposing his own understandings of the world. In his dreams was he open to such interferences, though they were poorly drawn, like watercolours in greyscale; in daylight, at least, he could cover his mirrors and avert his eyes from meeting someone's gaze, and by so doing avoid seeing the death and destruction which his curse compelled him to see in their depths. It was not simply a fear of the future, not any fear so clearly drawn: it was an invasion, or at least that was how it always felt to him, to look into a mirror and find himself looking at a weeping red-eyed Azula, Kinga with blood around her mouth and something visceral clutched in her hand, the delicate form of the sleeping Ina.
Ina had not been alone in the bed either – invasion upon invasion, then. He was seeing the past as well as the future, if that was the case; if he could confine it thus, he would not be doing too badly.
But should he? This was selfishness and foible. This was prioritising his own comfort over the duty he owed to his comrades. Matthias had warned him as much, the last time Zoran had glimpsed him, stitched into the dull reflection of his butter knife while making toast: who knows what you're not seeing.
But even now, as Zoran passed by an older woman in a shawl, he made the mistake of catching for a moment her eye and saw, reflected in the tiny black of her pupil, the canker which lay in her lungs. It would kill her within the year, he thought, but she had already passed him, and she was laughing at something her son had murmured softly to her, and how could he turn and say to her treasure these months, treasure this laughter, treasure this sunlight (pale though it is)?
He just let her advance up the hill, her laughter following them down the street as Ghjuvan and Khalore turned onto Ne Street and, for the first time, began to speak as they usually had on hikes in the mountains – arguing in a mild tone about whether the singular of sheep should be shoop, which had always been one of Myghal's favourite ways of breaking any tension he sensed in the air. "Foot and feet," he would always start by saying, "or goose and geese, or louse and..."
"Leese?" The last time he had tried this tactic, Kinga had taken a brief break from heaping ire on Uriasz and had regarded her fellow cadet with a faintly bemused air accentuated by the way their campfire had painted strange red shadows on her face. "Louse and leese?"
Myghal had frowned. "Isn't that right?"
"I don't think it's wrong," Ilja had said thoughtfully, sprawled out next to Kinga with one elbow resting on his knee; he was shredding a leaf into small fragments and casting them carefully into the flames, a process that the Szymańska girl was watching with a distracted kind of fascination. Despite the cold, he had stripped down to his under-shirt, his shoulder cushioned by freshly-fallen snow. He was lying directly in the path of the campfire smoke to keep warm, a sly tactic which had stained his sclerae a sickly blood-red. "But I don't claim to be an expert."
"It's definitely wrong," Ina had said with a chuckle, from where she was reclined, her head in Pekka's lap and her hair spilling around her like a crown of spilled ink. "It obviously must be lousi…."
"Whatever it is," Zoran had murmured, "I think Eifion has them in his hair..."
Eifion had reached for bread to throw, checked only by a sharp word from Pekka about wasting food, and Ina had not been able to hold in her laughter. Like a little golden prize, that giggle; even in that moment, young as they were, stupid as they were, she had been perfect. He should have thought to treasure it, in that moment. He should have paused, and savoured it – savoured how easily they spoke to one another, with what candour Decebal had spoken, the warmth in Dagmara's voice, how light-hearted Ina had seemed. Even the bitter feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty that had risen within his chest every time he had mentally compared himself to the man who would become the broken Tower – yes, he should have thought to savour that as well.
It hadn't been much. They hadn't been much. But they had been whole.
He thought again, since Pekka.
They were turning onto Piecdesmitā Street, in the shadow of the great wall which guarded them from Vanth. The houses here were more tightly crowded together, the streets narrower together, as though in lieu of sunlight they had to lean on one another for survival. Aizsaule was one of the gate districts, little bubbles of land providing a dual-lock system for admission beyond Wall Szymanski; Vanth contained vast swathes of farmland, green and verdant, with little villages spotted here and there. It seemed a particular kind of bucolic idyllic, and one from which Eunbyeol Seo had claimed on her Selection form to stem, travelling into the comparative metropolis of Aizsaule every morning to work as a so-called 'lung' at an apothecary near the gates.
They found it easily enough; it was a cramped storefront, with a grey sign lettered in thick brown script: ᚨᛚᚲᛇᛗᛁᛊᛏ. Alkimist. On either side it was crowded by a fishmonger and a cobbler; the streets were gloomy despite how high and bright the sun had risen, lines laden with clothes traversing rooftops to provide a thick umbrella which sheltered Piecdesmitā Street from the sky. Like his dreams, it all seemed like so much greyscale – like all of the colours of the world hadn't quite woken up for the day.
The windows of the shop in question were lined with repurposed and papered-over jam jars, each containing some soft powder or shredded flowers or tea leaves heaped high. It was a clutter of cures and contraband; Zoran was quite sure that if the paqūdus had bothered to patrol stringently then the proprietor of this particular apothecary was likely to find himself in some difficulty. The doorway was tall and thin, with two long thin ovals of frosted glass offering a blurred impression of more shelves and counters heaped with an assortment that closely resembled the array in the window display. Dark figures moved within. Zoran found himself gazing closely within the window.
"Let's stay subtle here," Ghjuvan murmured. "Lore?"
Khalore rolled her eyes, and set her jaw. "Yeah, yeah."
She reached into her dress pocket and produced a scrap of paper, onto which Ilja had scrawled a recommendation for some blend of herbs which would stem any sensation of phantom limb. Zoran wasn't even sure if Khalore suffered from that particular malady; he only knew that it was a perfectly plausible explanation for this particular set of people to be hanging around an apothecary in the first hours of the morning, even if Ghjuvan's idea of spycraft was ditching Khalore at the door of the shop and wandering down towards a greengrocer's on the corner.
Maybe it was easier to leave when you knew how easy it was to return.
Zoran met Khalore's gaze, very briefly, offering her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. She just nodded, eyes sliding past his, as she set her lone hand on the door and shoved it open, slipping into the faintly stale air of the alchemist's beyond. The windows were dark enough that Zoran could not see within; he could only see himself, pale and shaggy-haired and tired.
He didn't think he would miss working on the wall in Kass, but here he was. There was something awful about this – no step closer to the radiance, just chasing their own tail in circles. If it was Belle… if it wasn't… and why wouldn't it be?
No. Eunbyeol Seo – Belle or not – had been Selected. This was still productive. This would help them. This would guide them towards the radiance. Zoran was not a praying man, but, god, he hoped.
Hope against hope, that's all this was any more.
After a few minutes, Zoran took the handle of the door and eased himself across the threshold. He had been right – the interior was dark and the air was slightly stale-tasting. Nothing like the sweet lightness of the Kivi Bakery; there was something faintly grimy about this place. Ahead of him, Khalore was at the counter, reciting the prescription listlessly; the apothecary was feigning great attention as he eyed the shelves behind him, clearly trying to decide what he could pawn off on the glowering amputee.
Zoran circled the shelves. There was only a half-wall of shelves behind the counter; a little further over, and one could peer directly into the workshop and the enormous fire that closely resembled the open forge of a blacksmith or – and now he was reminded, painfully, of home – the uncovered firebox of a steam locomotive. There was a bellows, and a long workbench over which there hung two coats: the heavy brown coat of a working man and a thinner garment, pale blue in colour, a woman's jacket. The furnace before the bellows was alive with an enormous inferno that raged precariously close to the lip of the hearth; Zoran could not believe that Belle was the lung charged with keeping the fire fed and large. Belle Seo was petrified of fire – always had been, always would be.
Her home had been razed to the ground when she was a child – because she was Kur or because she was Asian? Zoran wasn't sure if they had ever got an answer, but he could distinctly remember Pekka carrying her out of their fire trials over his shoulder, and earning another two demerits for his trouble. Belle's lungs had been scarred; her fear of fire had only intensified.
This was making so little sense.
Zoran hovered inconspicuously by the teas, and waited for Khalore to create her diversion. He could only hope that she had a more keenly atuned version of what was an appropriate distraction than Kinga had ever displayed – but there didn't seem to be any druj lying around for the one-armed Warrior to set on Aizsaule, so they were safe from that much.
"Oh," he heard Khalore say, flatly, "how clumsy I am."
She dropped the jar she had been handed; it smashed right between her shoes, fragments of glass exploding in every direction. The apothecary swore loudly, and rushed to check that she was unharmed; Zoran, keeping his head down, slipped past the wall into the workshop. He didn't realise until he circled the workcounter that there was the faintest indent in the wooden floor that suggested something lying beneath; he knew that many of the wealthier merchants in Kass had rudimentary safes hidden beneath the floor of their shops, in case of robbery. Was this apothecary really doing well enough to so concern itself with theft?
The whole space was deserted, but there was an open door leading into a small, cluttered yard fenced off between the apothecary and the bonebreaker that had the shop on the street behind. Here, also, there was no-one; Zoran found himself standing in the fresh air, staring at a grey wall, and thinking of how many Eunbyeols there might be in the world.
So many. Too many.
The yard's pavement was utterly broken and shattered; seven year's bad luck worth, he thought, and so many opportunities to step on a crack and wreak unknown misfortunes. Between each crack a tiny flower grew: ox-eye daisies and clovenlip toadflax, delicate and pale. Their edges were slowly curling inwards as though burned; when he turned back to look at the shop, he found that purple and blue flowers were growing from the ceiling of the workshop, blotting out any sight of Khalore or the apothecary – just hyacinths, everywhere hyacinths.
He was shocked from his reverie by the deep voice of his comrade.
"Let's stay subtle here," Ghjuvan murmured. "Lore?"
Khalore rolled her eyes, and set her jaw. "Yeah, yeah."
Zoran looked away from the shop's window; he shook his head and set his hand gently on Khalore's shoulder, as though to physically restrain her. "No," he said, softly. "She's not there."
"Are you sure?"
"Trust me."
Ghjuvan and Khalore exchanged a look and a raised eyebrow. They weren't quite as good at silent communication as Zoran and Ina, Zoran mused, but they weren't too bad either. In any case, Ghjuvan just said, quite mildly, "you could have told us sooner," and gestured to the greengrocer's on the corner. "Anyone for breakfast while we're here? I'm not meant to report for another hour or so..."
Khalore slipped her hand into her pocket and nodded, her eyes dark. She drifted along behind Ghjuvan, seeming deep in thought, and Zoran fell into step beside her, still thinking about flowers.
He did not have long to think; Ghjuvan had just turned to murmur something softly to Khalore, the ghost of a smile clinging to his lips, and over his shoulder Zoran glimpsed the dark-haired girl stepping out of the greengrocer's with a brown bag in her arms and dark bags under her eyes. He saw her at the same moment that she saw him; her arms opened. The paper bag fell to the ground, and all the herbs it had contained – little bundles of stalks, little piles of flowers – were caught by the breeze and dragged into the curb of the cobbles, tugged this way and that way by the gentle morning air.
She stared at them. They stared back.
"It's you," she said softly, "it's you."
Unlike the last time the Warriors had found themselves reunited on that bridge in Nav, there were no hugs, no tears. Zoran could remember Ilja hugging him so tightly that he thought his ribs would break, and he could remember thinking that he wouldn't quite mind; he could remember Zula sobbing, softly, and Ina laughing, and then crying, and then laughing again.
And now – they just looked at one another.
Khalore had moved to stand at Ghjuvan's shoulder, ever his lieutenant; Ghjuvan had eased his hand down to his jacket in what looked like a casual motion, but which Zoran recognised as the movement of a man who had sharpened his knife the night before. And they just looked at each other.
Zoran said, quietly, "it's us, Belle."
She nodded, almost curtly, and knelt; she began to gather up her greenery, turning her eyes to her task quite silently. And the others – just stared at her
When she straightened again, Ghjuvan had lowered his hand, and gestured that they should move a little further down the street. That made sense, Zoran thought; they shouldn't draw attention or suspicion, not now, not when the hostility was pouring off Khalore like something visceral. They advanced a little further down the street; their reflections in the windows of the houses that they passed were almost comical: little Belle, marshalled on either side by the serious Ghjuvan and the glowering Khalore, trailed by Zoran, who was in turn trailed by a wavering shape without definition.
Finally, Khalore said, rather sharply, "is that it?"
"I don't know what you want me to say." Her voice was quiet.
"An explanation," Ghjuvan said, "would be a start."
He was keeping his voice low, but he was obviously tense, watchful – Ilja might have said paranoid.
Zoran found himself thinking about Ina and Azula. If something went wrong here… something, anything… or with Kinga and Ilja…
Would they be okay? Of course they would be, he thought, eventually – if Ina had survived what had happened to Pekka, then maybe his death wouldn't even phase her. That was a cruel thought, callous to the depth of feeling he knew Ina possessed, careless for the friendship he had so treasured, and yet it occurred to him anyway. Maybe it would be better, he thought. He stepped over a crack in the pavement. They could eke out a happy nine years here – an ordinary life, a good life, a life furnished by simplicity and happiness, simple happiness, as though there were any other. Czarnecki the carpenter could be soon forgotten; Khalore and Ilja rarely showed their faces to be missed; Ghjuvan and Kinga would be dead soldiers, two of an infinite number. If anyone was able to adapt, Zoran thought, it was Ina.
Or would she and Zula insist on finishing the mission themselves? That thought scared him almost more than the spectre of danger which had just abruptly loomed.
"Tofana sent us," Belle was saying. Her voice was quiet as it ever was; Zoran had almost forgotten how soft it could be. "Tofana told us you were all dead…."
The wavering shape in the window was slowly resolving itself into a discernable silhouette: Jaga, her hair loosely braided and lying over one shoulder, her eyes tired and yet warm, as they always were immediately upon waking. She wasn't smiling, but there was a certain softness to her mouth that suggested she was just about to do so, or that it faded away only a moment ago. He couldn't remember the last time that he had seen her look so relaxed; he couldn't remember the last time that he had seen her human. She was beautiful, but there was a brittleness to it, a shivering uncertainty. He could almost see the monster lying under her skin. In some strange way, that only made her more beautiful to him. Jaga tilted her head toward him, and started to say something he couldn't quite hear –
And then Zoran glanced over his shoulder, reclaiming the threads of his thoughts, and Kinga said, bluntly, "you're not going to like this."
Ghjuvan squinted at his comrade, as though trying to read her face. "Be more specific."
"Fine." She had set her jaw; it was an expression she usually reserved for a few specific people. "You're going to hate this."
"This?"
She shook her head, and held out her hand, showing them a silver coin in the palm of her hand. An Irij coin, Zoran realised, stamped with the familiar shape of the Opona clocktower with the chancellor's sigil embedded into the edge. Kinga began to flip the coin between her knuckles; it flashed like a star in seizure. She had stained her knuckles with blood; so much for a peaceful intervention, wherever she had been. Zoran wondered if she had won the fight, and then chastised himself for wondering. Was there any doubt? "Ms Seo here brought a friend."
Khal's husky voice was amused. "And?"
"And her friend brought a friend." Kinga curled her fingers over the coin. Was that a burn running up her forearm, black and red and black again? Zoran thought he could see bone. "Like I said. You're not going to like this. I certainly don't."