erlebnisse (n.) the experiences, positive or negative, that we feel most deeply, and through which we truly live.

"You don't need to fuss, Ina..."

"I'm not fussing," Ina said, slightly wounded. "I'm helping."

The string between them pulled taut; it was a darker blue these days, fretted with a pale yellow, like individual threads had been interwoven to form a whole. It was a pretty enough colour; it was warm. It always reminded her of a sky, fretted with the yellow of a morning sun. Ina hoped it reflected, to some small degree, the way that Azula felt about their dynamic. It was the least that she could hope.

Azula was worrying at her lower lip, smoothing her skirt and clearly thinking carefully. Ina wondered what she was thinking about. "Sorry. I'm just..."

"Don't apologise." Ina gave the younger Warrior's blouse a gentle tug, to ensure it was lying flat along her shoulders; she critically assessed her hair. Fine, she thought, it would do – Ilja had warned her not to do anything too elaborate. They were interviewing for maids, not for models; it would serve them better to present a girl who was respectable, but clearly accustomed to hard work. Ina knew that the position would be almost as highly coveted as a slot as a Selected – what chance did a so-called refugee have? They would just have to hope that Ilja's contacts were as good as he portrayed them; Ina didn't think of Ilja as a liar, but arrogant? Maybe. "I totally understand. But you have nothing to worry about. You'll do great."

"You have to say that," Azula said, but she was smiling. "Besides – if the worst comes to worst..."

Ina's voice was wryly affectionate. "Don't abuse it, Zula."

"I would never." Azula brushed off one sleeve, and raised her eyebrow. "I'm wounded, Ina."

Ina rolled her eyes. "Sure." She leaned back against the counter, and folded her arms. The kitchen was hazy with flour and early afternoon light; rays of sunshine seemed to float through the narrow window set high into the stone wall of the eastern wall, so that the majority of the space was doused in grey shade. After the chaos of the morning's rush, it was nice to enjoy the longer undern hours which stretched through the day like one of Ina's ribbons. After the tight schedules of training with the Commandant in Opona, Ina was still finding it difficult to find hobbies and activities to fill her quieter times; more difficult again when she realised that thoughts of Pekka were waiting for moments of silence to pounce. In long-past days, she would have simply whiled away such hours in his company, in his arms; now, she usually tended to just turn to matters which would occupy her hands and distract her from thoughts of his. It was always harder when she was left alone – it was nice to have Azula's company, it was mildly disturbing to see how much tea she and Zoran could get through in a single lunch-time. "But..."

She sighed.

"If you have to," she told the Devil of Kur. "If you think that you must – don't hesitate."

"You don't have to tell me twice." Azula was pulling on her coat. "They're devils, Ina. I'm not afraid to do what I have to."

Ina curled her fingers around the edge of the counter and nodded, hesitantly, brittlely. "Devils," she echoed in reluctant agreement. Why did that word feel so jagged in her mouth? Devils bound together as they were – devils wreathed in string. "Devils." She shook her head. "Just… stay safe, okay? And get home soon."

"Home?" Azula arched her eyebrow. "I'll come back to the bakery, Ina. Don't worry about that."

Ina smiled. "You've hit the awkward years, I see."

"It had to happen sometime, Ina." Azula smiled and set a fond hand on the older Warrior's forearm. "You're stressing. Stop stressing. I'll take it as an insult. Stress about yourself."

"Is there another problem I should be stressing about?"

"Try to find one," Azula said, "while I'm gone."

Ina's smile brightened slightly. It was nice, these moments of normality – and yet still, it rankled slightly. They were moving into position, chess pieces to their squares, and yet she was still here, working the bakery. The people making the plans – Ilja, if they were being honest; Ghjuvan, if they were being smart; Kinga, if they were aiming to be home before their ten years were up – those people had told her little about the role that she was meant to play for them, as a Warrior, as their equal. Was she to just stay here, dodging gazes, dodging comments, watching the threads? Were they going to send little Azula into the lion's den alone, in the garb of an indentured servant? Were they to put all of their trust into the so-called-Belle, and the idea that she could somehow – curse or no – get close to the royals?

Inanna Nirari was frustrated, but you could never have told so from her smile as she watched Azula take a last glance down at her outfit, set her jaw with determination, and slip out through the backdoor to the courtyard; she always preferred using the gate in the pink wall, Ina thought, and rarely used the main entrance to the business. It was such a small act of familiarity that it could not but warm Ina's heart slightly to see it; Azula had so rarely seemed at ease anywhere when they were kids. On their family days in training, Ina could remember departing for the docks with Pekka and watching Azula sloping into the main body of the city to visit the orphanage in which she had been raised, looking lonely among the enormous facades which lined the avenue.

They were here to destroy this city, Ina thought; she could not afford to forget that much.

She hoped that Azula did well at her interview; she hoped that she got the job. She hoped, most importantly, that Azula got the job without any need for employing her curse.

It was the apparent absence of foibles – the lack of a drawback – which scared Ina the most about her generation of xrafstars. Ilja was the only Warrior so far who seemed to be buckling under the weight of his curse, but even then Ina could not have said what, precisely, was going wrong. With the last generation, their curses had been irreparably etched upon them, on their face and skin: Decebal had literally crumbled to ash in front of everyone. Maybe someone else would have seen this as some sign of fortitude on the part of this generation; for Ina, however, this simple fact only conjured the spectre of something awful lurking beneath their skin, ready to snap when the moment was most inopportune.

Or maybe she was just being paranoid. She thought either was possible – or indeed, likely. Illéa seemed to do that to you; it crept under your skin. It crept into your dreams. When she had come here, she had expected to dream of Pekka – you would, wouldn't you, you'd expect that much, she had earned that much, was this some tacit acknowledgment that she couldn't remember what he looked like? – but instead she found that her dreams were abstract, abstract and utterly chained to Illéa. Sometimes she found herself back on that strange beach onto which she and Zoran had first washed up, staring out at the flat grey sea and feeling hollow. Her heart was not such a heavy burden in these dreams, and somehow that scared her more. Sometimes she was standing in an empty bakery, and watching the dust motes swirl. She was always aware of the strings weighing down her fingers and of a presence, silent, protective, behind her. She never named it Pekka. It was usually Zoran – almost always. Sometimes it was Kinga, or Ghjuvan, or even poor grey Ilja. Once, without looking, she had known that it was Khalore. Once, without looking, she had known that it was Avrova. But never Pekka.

Ina found herself testing her own memory, in the hours where business were slow. She could remember him, couldn't she? And certainly, she could miss him – the ache behind her ribs was evidence enough of that. Then why didn't she dream of him? The ghost of Avrova, too, was absent more often than not… and that was all it was, a ghost. Sometimes, the way Zoran spoke about it, it seemed as though Matthias was still chatting busily to him, like Matthias was alive in some way, like he lived on in the Hierophant's head. But for Ina, it was more like wearing a dead girl's coat: the uncomfortable sensation that something more than thread had been stitched into its sleeves and hem. It was an echo of Avrova – no more. No less, but certainly no more. Was it the same for the others? Did Celuiz whisper to Azula at night? Would Khalore list Arsen among the people she blamed for their circumstances? Was it Decebal's ghost that carved those shadows beneath Ilja's eyes and drained his colour?

Ina didn't like to think about being lonelier than the others.

She was startled from her reverie by the bell beside the oven as it began to ring gently. Zoran had set up the system for her, one augustly warm evening when Azula had been in the courtyard tending to her flowers and Ina had dared to start to complain. It was simple enough – when the bell over the front door rang, it triggered the bell in the kitchen as well. It had taken Zoran an hour and a half to assemble to his liking, and Ina had repaid him with two dishes of szarlotka the very next day. She liked it; it meant she could spend her evenings in the backroom or the kitchen, rather than listlessly manning the counter without customers. Kinga had found her some books – salvaged from the wreckage of a Tiamat schoolhouse, where a druj had left naught but tattered pages in its wake – but struggling her way through the old Illéan script was frustrating and unfulfilling; they were not novels, but strange false hagiographies of a history that had not, could not have, been. They spoke about more kings than Illéa had ever had or could ever have had; they made no mention of the war, of the xrafstars, of Irij; they spoke of a doom befalling all outside the walls, past-tense, not future-tense.

She still picked them up some evenings, when Zoran was away in Kass or Azula was taking one of her walks, but she preferred the nights when Zoran would come over for dinner and they would spend the last waning hours of dusk watching from the rooftop as the city around them slowly, gradually, fell asleep.

The bell rang again, and Ina brushed down her apron, her myrtle-blue dress. Sometimes she still dressed like she was going to see Pekka that day, with some idle thought at the back of her mind about whether he would like the colours that she had chosen. Not that it mattered if she looked presentable – she had found that the customers would have treated her the same, whether she had matted hair or a gown. Maybe that should have been a relief – some element of her life where she needed to exert absolutely no effort – but, in truth, it was a new kind of exhaustion. She could only hope that it was one of the older men with strange tastes in bread, the elderly gentlemen who came in the early afternoon to request that she bake something specifically to order. They were a more polite lot, though they still watched her with a certain kind of fascination; she couldn't quite name what it was, that fascination, for it wasn't simply one thing or another – not lust, not admiration, not suspicion. Fascination, really, was the only word that worked: it had infected Pepijn but slightly, and laid greater roots in the hearts of his usual accomplices: Vīksna, Txori, Krievs and Rudzītis. Their pink and orange strings were distinctive, and rather harmless in that distinction; they were a vacuous colour that spoke of no great bond, no emotional ties, no burden. A petty bond, Ina had called them before, and Zoran had understood what she meant without need for elaboration; not a bond in which she would ever vest much concern or care. Not like her silver, her navy, her yellows.

Earlier in the day she had seen them depart for the apothecary, her narrow little band of Warriors: Ghjuvan, his shoulders set square as though he were walking directly into the wind; Khalore, sheltered a little behind him, her eyes fixed on the hem of his coat as though afraid of what she would see if she glanced upwards; Zoran, his hand raised in greeting for an Ina that he could not see but whom he knew was there. And snaking from each Warrior, as though the glass window between them meant nothing, one of those strings: Ghju's forest green; Khal's pale blue; Zoran's rapidly rusting silver. They were light where they connected to Ina – at her temple, at her chest, wrapped around her hand – and yet, glimpsing them had caused something heavy to settle in her chest. It felt like an anchor, she thought, like something tenable weighting her to the rest of the world. She was starting to think that she would never get used to a world filtered thus, strung up like marionettes, but then there were moments like these where she found a simple, deliberate, delightful joy in the certainty of it all.

She was loved – loved by one person, at the very least. More, if she was being honest with herself. It wasn't enough – it could never be enough – not anymore – not after Pekka – but she was loved. There was a certainty in that. It felt like finally hitting the ground very hard, after so long falling.

She stepped out behind the counter, ready to smile, but that expression died on her face as she realised the person standing before her. Here, there were two levels of recognition, and they each hit her like a wave – she had barely staggered back up from the first when the second was washing over her and leaving her with the air knocked from her lungs.

The first thing she noticed was the dearth of strings. It was him – the man from the night before, who had escorted her past the guardsmen. He was still wearing the same jacket, the military coat with pink and blue squares; dimly, she wondered if he had slept in it. He was eyeing the baskets of bread which lined the western wall of the shop. He was, now as then, utterly stringless; it gave him the strangest kind of silhouette, at least to Ina's eye. It was too clean, too uncluttered; she had the strangest sensation of unease to see it, and to focus upon it. It was like seeing a puppet standing of its own accord, its strings cut.

The second thing she noticed was the colour of his eyes. At night, shrouded in gloom, their precise shade had been impossible to discern; here and now, in the paler light of the day, she could clearly see that they were blue. Zoran's eyes were blue as well, but a much paler shade; these were as close as Ina had ever seen to true electric blue, like they had been lit up by some mystical light within. They were totally blue, without even those slight flecks of green around the pupil that had made Pekka's eyes so fascinating to watch in high light. And she had been right about his hair – in this warmer light, it did look gold. It was longer than the Illéan standard; it reminded her of the sailors on the docks of Opona, who had been too long adrift at sea to care much about the pettier matters of personal grooming.

"I did say," he said. Once again – that voice, that accent. It was like an itch she couldn't reach. It was on the tip of her tongue. It was there. "That I would see you soon."

"There's soon," Ina replied wryly, maintaining her politest smile as she moved over to the counter and watched as he took a step back as though they were moving in a silent dance. "And there's soon."

"I've been hearing good things about the Kivipaberkäärid bakery for a half-year." He pronounced it flawlessly on his first attempt; he was the first person that Ina could remember ever doing so. "This seemed as good a time as ever."

"Well. I'm very grateful for your assistance last night – but I do I hope you're not expecting anything on the house?"

His voice was stained with the echo of a smile. "Cruel lady."

"Heartless," Ina said, "that's what they call me."

He rapped the counter very gently. Her eyes caught on that scar again – the line between knuckle and finger. He had a knot-maker's hands: long fingers, calloused palms, thick wrists. "Slander."

She shrugged. It was strange – the sudden and total comfort that she felt, just as she had felt the night before. There was no question, in her veins or in her nerves, that here-and-now she was safe. That unnerved her more than any instinctual aversion would have; she was not the uncautious sort. "I never said they were wrong."

"I'm sure you have a heart, Ina."

"I'd say the same for you," she said, "but you never did get around to telling me your name."

"Perhaps I was hoping that you would guess, Mrs. Hämäläinen." Why did he say it like that? Like it was funny. Like it was a joke. That was almost enough to rile Ina – but she tamped down on her emotions before any such reaction could register on her face or in her body language.

She shrugged. "I don't usually play games with customers."

"Oh?"

"Usually," Ina said, quite simply, her voice steeped in good humour, "I sell bread."

"Of course." He smiled. His teeth were very white against his tan skin; she could not help but observe his features closely. He had a face as lean as his build; it was all sharp, all cheekbones and jaw. "What do you recommend?"

"Do you have any preferences?"

"Something Swendish."

"Some reikäleipä, then," Ina said, automatically, even as her mind clicked and turned and she thought Swendway doesn't exist here. That was true; that was inevitable. Nothing here was Swendish; the Illéans didn't have a Swendway; the Illéans didn't have anything other than Illéa. Pekka's father had been Kaapo, and Kaapo's father had been a seafarer from Swendway; Ina remembered Pekka telling her that he had made his way, slowly, gradually, to Irij, guided by constellations. That was one reason – one among many – that Ina did always keep some Swendish bread in the bakery. Kaapo had taught her how to make the rye bread which was so typical of the region; reikäleipä always had a hole in the centre, like a doughnut.

The man said, "that suits me fine."

Ina reached for the basket and said, casually, "do I know you from Mønt? Your accent is..." She wasn't sure how to finish that sentence. There was an accent. She wasn't sure what else she could say. His voice was very deep, and very soothing, and very familiar – and yet there was that accent.

"No," he said, "not Mønt."

Ina frowned, and opened her mouth to say something, but then there was a loud sound from the courtyard that made her jump – not quite a crash, but something close enough to make her glance over her shoulder reflexively, like she thought a druj would have crept into the kitchen in the few minutes that she had spent out front.

The man smiled at her, and set a dozen gold coins onto the polished wooden counter – far too many for the paltry offering of reikäleipä that Ina had managed to pack into the paper bag in her hand. "You should probably go check on that," he said gently. "Are you free tonight?"

"Free?"

"Reikäleipä shouldn't be eaten alone, Ms. Nirari."

Ina nodded, slightly dazedly; there had been another dull sound in the courtyard, like something falling onto the cobbles, and another dull sound like a muffled swear in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Ilja's. "Are you –"

"I'll swing by this way this evening. If you're still busy then… well, it's no concern." He smiled. He had a nice smile. It was sharp; he had pointed cuspids.

Ina tried to say again, "are you –"

And then, behind her, Khalore speaking bitterly: "can I steal you for a second, Nanna?"

Ina had only the time to swing her gaze at her fellow Warrior, and then straight back towards the counter – and the un-stringed fellow was gone, slipping out the door as the bell sang sweetly and meandering back in the direction he had gone the night before. Ina's instinct was to chase him – to demand answers – but, she counselled herself, she would have time to do so later. He would be back.

Her Warriors needed her now.

Khalore's string was pale blue, and somewhat agitated; it seemed to flex between them as the other Kur girl said, her voice dour, "we have Nez tied up in the attic."

"Tied up?" Ina blinked. "Nez?"

"And Ilja knocked out Hyacinth..."

"Hyacinth…." Ina just needed to lie down. Just for a moment, that was all – she just wanted to take a break, take a single moment away from everything, give herself a single moment to breathe before the world kept pummelling at her. Nez is here. Hyacinth is alive. And this man is… "Is she in the attic as well?"

"Yeah," Khalore said. There was no pity in her voice, no sympathy. "She's in the attic."

Ina followed her out. This new information suggested two origins of those loud sounds earlier: firstly, that the lads had dropped one or both of their captives on their way up to Khalore's little annex apartment in what had once been a shed adjoined to the bakery – or, secondly, and Ina thought more likely, that one hostage in particular had staged an escape attempt and had been arrested in their tracks by a Warrior not in the mood for trifling.

The sight of Kinga, sitting on the stone steps which led to Khalore's flat and nursing bloodied knuckles, seemed to suggest one was a more likely explanation than another. She had strips of brown cloth bound around her arm; she glanced up at Ina, and made a grimace that didn't seem to equate to any emotion in particular. The bronze chain that bound them together, and that bound Kinga to Khalore, barely shifted as she did. "Sorry to crash, Na."

Ina could hear it in her own voice: she was clearly aghast. "What happened?"

"Well," Kinga began, and was cut off by Khalore.

"She didn't bring her sword."

"I didn't need my sword," the Moon of Kur said stiffly. "Who needs a sword when Ilja brings a plate?"

Looking closer, Ina realised that it was actually grey cloth twisted tightly around her forearm. "God, Kinga, that looks horrific. Do you want me to…?"

"Blame Estlebourgh." Kinga sighed, and glanced up the stairs. Ghjuvan and Ilja's voices were wafting down softly. "Blame Astaroth."

So it was true. Not that Ina had disbelieved Khalore but… so it was true. Here. Alive. And, apparently, wounding Ina's Warriors. Were they enemies, then? And that man… an enemy also?

"Azula's not here," Khalore had begun to say, her voice soft. "So..."

Kinga glanced at her. Her eyes had darkened with anger; they looked closer to black in moments like these, when she was in low light, when she was pissed off. "Ghju wants you to interrogate them."

Ina met her gaze levelly.

Ina met her gaze levelly, and remembered that Pekka had always compared Kinga's eyes to Eero's. The same dark brown, he had said, the same gold dapples, the same way of flashing with sudden emotion that they otherwise kept concealed. Dark brown – dark brown – dark brown. Eero's eyes had been dark brown.

Not blue. Never blue. Pekka's eyes had been blue.

Ina met her gaze levelly and said softly, meaning it fervently, "how do we make sure that they can be trusted?"

How on earth?