Chapter 18:Common Bird or Petal

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains all that man is,

All mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins.

- W.B. Yeats

Rather than go back to the usual places and face the wrath of Givre or Wick or someone else with their heads on their shoulders rather than their heart in their hands, Demetri left Thiago to deal with Marjorie and with the girl trapped under the ground and went south again, just a few miles this time, to the little apartment building in what had once been Sumner, where Uzohola had been staying for a day or two. The rebels rarely got a break, the Inner Circles even more rarely, and if Uzohola hadn't come down with something that the camp doctors alternately diagnosed as malaria or dengue fever or maybe just some sort of stress-induced fever, Demetri knew that she would not have rested until he was on the throne in Angeles with the crown on his brow. But rest had been ordered, and on his way back south towards the Wasteland, he stopped to make sure that she was listening to her orders.

He brought her favourite Nigerian soups, and they ate together in companionable silence, switched on the television and piled together on the couch like they had when they were children. The heater was broken, so Uzohola pulled a blanket over them and Demetri's arm around her. They had watched the movie a few dozen times before; it was some black-and-white film about a princess' wild night on some European town, and Demetri found himself paying little attention to it, so concerned was he with the matters that had consumed his days and weeks.

Uzohola nuzzled closer to him, and Demetri pressed his cheek to her wild curls, finding some small degree of comfort in the familiarity of it all. Thiago was his spymaster, Wick one of his closest friends, and Vardi Tayna a persistent thorn. Even Täj was his blood brother, someone without whom he would be dead and nameless and lost a thousand times over. But Uzohola was his oldest comrade, his most loyal companion, his udade, and being around her was as natural as breathing. She said, "if it was me, what would you do?"

Demetri frowned. "You mean..."

"If Cor or Artur or Ysabel or any of them did to me what you did to that girl. That Khione. What would you do?"

He pressed his lips together. "That's irrelevant."

"How so?"

Because, he thought, Ysabel had done worse to him, worse to all that he had cared about, and would do worse a thousand times again. Because, he thought, he had seen what Artur had done to Täj, when the pale man was a pale boy and still had all of his soft edges. Because, he thought, he had seen the world that people like Cor created for people like Yenifer, how it had made its survivors few and cruel. And because, he thought, he would never let any such thing happen to Uzohola. The idea was anathema. Uzohola was strong, but the others protected her nonetheless.

He was silent for so long that Uzohola spoke again. "You could have made some sort of deal with them."

"No." His voice was firm. "Täj would never forgive me."

"Täj isn't the king."

He peered at Uzohola suspiciously. "Playing Lady Macbeth, are we?"

"You know what I mean."

"I don't intend to become king of the ashes, Uzo. What's the point of winning more land if we can't defend it? The People in Exile should be able to live free of exploitation by cheap gangsters like Corvina Rouen."

"You know," Uzohola said sleepily. "Sometimes I think you'll make a great king. And other times I remember that you're the most stubborn fucking man that I've ever met."

"Vala umlomo uye kulala," he said, very softly – shut up and go to sleep.

Uzohola just laughed under her breath, pressed her lips into his sleeve and said, "you know I'm right."

"Can we change the subject now? I've spent my entire day talking about smoke and daggers and bloodshed. Maybe you can tell me about yours for a change." His voice was laced thick with innuendo.

She punched him lightly in the arm. "Stop."

"What did I say?" Demetri smiled. "Come on. It's been six years, Uzo. If I get married before you do, it'll be seriously embarrassing… for you."

"I've already told Xïta that I want to get married in the cathedral in Angeles. No use proposing until that's an option."

"And how does Xïta feel about this?"

Uzohola was amused. "He doesn't get an opinion."

"Seems like a functional relationship, alright."

"Men dragging their feet in their Selection don't get to judge other people's relationships. That's, like, a rule or something."

"If you say so, comrade."

"I do say so."

He knew better than to try arguing with her by now.

Over the past weeks in Raphael's house, Yue had found herself slipping into a routine with a frightening ease, so facilely and fluidly that some small part of her whispered that, Selection or no Selection, it would be so easy to stay here forever and live this simple provincial life of errands in the market and helping Agares prepare dinner for the whole little family and walking Feste by the river. Demetri was such a small presence in their life that it would have been forgivable for Yue to forget, to smile back at the boy in the market who sold her two pounds of salmon every Friday, to look at the little colourful houses for sale in the street with more than mere whimsical wonder. She and Atiena and Liara had prised the boards off the door of one such house once, a few days ago, and ducked in amongst the flowering bouquets of exquisite pink and purple bougainvillea. While the others had explored, Yue had wandered through the lower floors, one hand on the mantelpiece sending little flurries of dust into the air, and admired how the light had splayed onto the floorboards like honey, and thought of how, with books piled here and there and a fire in the hearth and a couch against the wall, this could so easily feel like the kind of home she only dared to dream of when she didn't think anyone was around to catch the longing in her eyes. There had been a little balcony as well, the struts twined with wild honeysuckle and climbing hydrangea, which looked out onto the busy street, an emulation of a Parisian terrace. The cobbles below had been quiet, so early the hour, and Yue thought that this might be where she would drink her tea in the morning, or read her books in the evening, and how quiet such a life might be.

She almost didn't dare to hope. It seemed too lovely.

The mornings all began uniformly, and early, for that was the rhythm of Raphael's routine. Feste, the many-named dog, would have curled up on Yue's bed at some point in the night, so light and small as to have lain unnoticed until she woke. He would lead her downstairs, for it had been agreed rather silently between the lot that Yue and Atiena were somehow now responsible for the well-being of the little hound, and Atiena often said it was the only thing preventing her from contracting cabin fever. Vardi Tayna would be in the bed next to Yue only sometimes – if she was there, she would just mutter something about the harshness of the sun and roll over to sleep until noon. If she was not there, Yue would rarely see her until the late evening. She was not there today. Yue did not bother to wonder about that anymore.

Atiena would have risen about an hour before the rest of them, and would be doing exercise in the courtyard – silent and purposeful and strong. No amount of placid provincial living could change her instinct to remain ready for anything, Yue thought, and wondered if she was being accorded a tiny glimpse in miniature of the fate of the rest of the rebels whenever this war was done, if they would be trapped like the clockwork figurines in Agare's grandfather clocks, doomed to tread the same track again and again, without respite from the demons and threats that lurked only in their own minds. But Raphael seemed to have managed it. The tall blonde woman was peaceable, though she still had the sort of muscles that Yue had only ever seen before on Olympic weightlifters or seasoned blacksmiths, the kind of strong arms that belied how many of Agares' kanafeh she could wolf down in a single sitting. Yue sometimes found herself wondering if maybe, when she saw Atiena and Raphael side-by-side, if maybe she was glimpsing the same soul ten or fifteen years apart. If anyone deserved to rest, and to fight no more, it was Atiena Morris.

Feste could be relied upon to go out and fetch Atiena, and tell her that breakfast had been prepared; Liara would have already begun in the kitchen, allowing Agares a few precious minutes to finish up on whatever small cogs she had been tinkering with in her workshop in the bowels of the house. Yue saw in the Lee girl the same instinct that she felt, to make herself useful in whatever small way she could, but she thought that maybe it had different stems. Yue hated the idea of being useless; Liara actively wanted to be useful. Yue supposed she was used to being waited on, in the Lee household, nestled at the heart of the Angeles' court, but to look at Liara now, you would never be able to guess that fact – she fended for herself, and fared for the others, as well as Atiena or Agares did. In fact, Yue thought ruefully, she had very nearly mastered Agares' recipe for ghozi. This morning, though, she was laying out the usual Layeni fare: strips of cold salmon and quarters of hard-boiled eggs, an array of breads, some soft cheese, a bowl of yogurt and another bowl of mixed seeds and spices. Liara had got up early enough to make baozi, and a small bowl of them stood steaming near Vardi Tayna's usual chair. Though Yue and Liara and Vardi Tayna all clearly shared New Asian heritage, any attempts by the two more northern girls to speak to the rebel in a New Asian language had been met by a blank stare. She had spoken enough Wutun to tell Liara to go back to English; Raphael had laughed, and later told Yue that Vardi Tayna was a child not of New Asia, but of the wastes. "I think she learned English from the wolves," the older woman had added ruefully. And yet the little wasteland rebel devoured baozi like she was starving. So clearly Liara expected her back for breakfast.

Yue brewed the tea. Usually she was up before Liara; she still slept lightly in the house, so alive did it always seem with creaking floorboards and shifting foundations and people in every room, be it Vardi Tayna in the bed next to her or Wick asleep on the couch downstairs. But last night she had stayed up so late finishing the book that Demetri had last given her that she had fallen asleep only a few hours before dawn. It had been worth it, she thought, though the heroine's sad fate still occupied a central part of her mind even as she went through her usual morning rituals.

"Don't forget Täj's oolong," Liara said lightly as she finished putting plates on the table, and Yue smiled into the teapot at the older girl's concern.

"I won't."

Atiena still exclusively drank coffee, much like Raphael, so the split usually came to Liara and Täj drinking oolong and Yue and Agares drinking chamomile. Yue set down the teapots, and Liara did not have to ring any bell or call out, because everyone had become used to the routine by now, which meant that Atiena came in the backdoor and Raphael was arriving in the front, and Agares was coming up from her workshop.

"It's getting colder out there," Raphael said, as she took her seat beside Agares near the head of the table. A little frost still clung to the shoulders of her old green sweater, which brought out the deep mossy colour of her eyes. "Old Deacon thinks the river is going to freeze over before the festival."

"You were an ice skater, weren't you, Yue?" Agares looked at the northern girl with a smile. The watchmaker was wearing a dark purple headscarf today; it brought out the flecks of hazel in her dark brown eyes. "Maybe if the river freezes, you can show us your moves."

Atiena laughed as she reached past Liara to heap her plate with little bread rolls. "If I could put a single foot on ice without falling on my ass, I would consider it a miracle. I have no idea how people like you pull it off."

Yue smiled at her plate. "Just lots of practise." She sighed. "I started very young." And, she added silently, she had grown to hate the ice. Skating meant screaming and slipping and never being good enough. In Raphael's house, she rarely looked at herself in the mirror and saw only disappointment – in fact, she rarely looked at herself in the mirror here. What was the point? All the girls had abandoned their beauty regimens, if they had even practised one before the Selection; the rebels rarely had enough food for everyone, let alone the wherewithal to obtain cosmetics or skincare. Though Yue knew that Saran still found it a little stressful, particularly when a particular propagandist was around, she personally found it a little freeing – hair braided back, face washed, and ready for the day, pretty or ugly or whatever.

And anyway, it wasn't like the king had ever seen her like this.

"Sahtein!" said Agares, which was her version of Yue's mother's usual itadakimasu. The others echoed it, and began to eat. Yue had not even raised her fork to her mouth before Feste leapt to his feet, and barked, and raced for the backdoor, which was swinging open.

"Just us!" That was Vardi Tayna's familiar, husky voice. Us? Did that mean Demetri was here too?

Yue shook herself. It was probably Täj.

And it was.

Vardi Tayna held up her hands as she came round the corner into the kitchen, as though pleading mercy. She had her sleeves rolled up to her elbow. Not for the first time, Yue glimpsed the brand on her roommate's arm, a blackened remnant of what had once been a scar, or a burn: Ꮬ. "Sorry we're late for breakfast, auntie." She came around the table to kiss Agares on the cheek, and was quickly waved off with a shchtu, your food will go cold. Atiena scowled into her bread as the rebel dropped into the chair beside Yue, and Täj moved silently around the table to sit at the other end of the table. Yue caught Atiena's eye quite carefully, and the girl from Tammins cocked her head in that way that Yue knew meant can you believe her?

The freedom accorded to Vardi Tayna in Layeni was a source of some discord amongst the girls, Yue knew. She seemed to entirely disregard her curfew in favour of disappearing into the town and returning at her leisure. If she was anyone else, Yue wondered, would she have been eliminated by now? Was there a reason Demetri was keeping her?

Was that reason love?

Liara was looking at Täj. "You're bleeding."

He looked at her in that quick way of his, pale green eyes flicking up and away almost in the same motion. "It's nothing." His voice was very soft. Yue always forgot how deep it was, almost rusty from disuse.

Liara clearly had to bite her tongue to hold back from saying more. Vardi Tayna glanced between them, and then shrugged and reached for the teapot. Her hair was wet, Yue saw, despite the chill outside, lying in thin cold strands around her face. She was wearing a shirt that was too big for her; she had to keep pushing the sleeves back. Where her hair dripped on the fabric, it became translucent and showed her sharp collarbones, her body still vaguely gaunt despite the weeks of relative comfort and safety with Raphael.

"You were saying," Atiena was saying to Agares, clearly trying to move on from the whole interruption.

"Oh, yes. The Layeni town festival will be taking place next week. I think you'll all love it. It's the highlight of the calendar in these parts – dancing and contests and shows and such. Raphael talked Wick into advancing us a little more of her war pension this week, so we can go out and get some material to make you new dresses, if you like – or a nice new jacket," Agares added, looking at Atiena with a smile. "It's traditionally thought of as a lover's festival, so there's always such a wonderful atmosphere. A lot of people get engaged – like Raphael and I."

"The most cliché thing we've ever done," Raphael said ruefully.

"Oh, we knew we were going to get married long before then. We just had to get some nice rings and actually say the words." Agares smiled. "A little like actual marriage, then."

Yue could not deny she was oddly fascinated by the retired soldier and the watchmaker. They seemed to have the kind of relationship she had always dreamed of having – not like her parents, antagonistic and competitive and proud, but comfortable and sweet and thoughtful without needing to think. They seemed to understand one another without speaking; she had often seen Raphael hand her wife the tool she needed without being asked, or Agares know exactly when Raphael would need another cup of coffee and some time to herself. It was such a symbiotic, and yet oddly independent dynamic. Yue wondered if all rebellion relationships were like this by sheer necessity. Surely this was the kind of marriage that Demetri was setting out to accomplish.

"That sounds lovely," she said. "But please, don't go to any expense on our part."

Atiena nodded in agreement, and Raphael waved off this concern. "Nonsense. We love having you here, and you deserve to enjoy yourselves. Anyway, gifts are traditional. We won't have our girls looking drab next to the rest of eligible Layeni."

Liara looked away from Täj, at Atiena. "I need to send a letter to my mother. Can you come with me to Field Marshal Uzokuwa's? He seems to like you, and I want to see if I can get away with him censoring as little as possible."

In any other room in the rebellion, Yue knew, the idea of Liara, scion of Angeles, the dread king Mordred's childhood friend, the traitor-in-the-making, trying to send a letter and avoid censorships would have produced blades and venomous words. Instead, Raphael laughed and just said, "make sure he strikes out any mention of my cooking", and Agares playfully swatted at her wife, and Vardi Tayna pushed away from the table and said, "you'll have to excuse me" and no one did bother to excuse her as she disappeared back up the stairs and Täj, seeming rather heedless of the dirty look that Agares was shooting him, produced a cigarette and was about to light it when Atiena said "smoking outside, Täj, how many times do we have to say" and he shrugged and turned up his collar and called for the dog as he left and Liara watched him go, turning her letter over and over in her hands.

"Yue," Agares said, producing a scrawled list from her pocket. "Would you mind…? I'm a bit behind on a repair for the Zhangs."

Yue nodded. "Of course!" Truth be told, she loved to be left to her own devices in the little town of Layeni, especially in the mornings, when it still seemed half-slumbering. She could move at her own pace, and look all around her, and wonder at each little life at play behind each brightly painted door and shutter. How strange to think that every single person in this village had heartsickness of their own, had lived through a rebellion and claimed their lives back, and yet still had to rise in the mornings, still had to brew the tea and bake the bread. She was still totally, irrevocably fascinated by it all.

She ran upstairs only to put a ribbon in her hair and hold it back, and pull on the jacket borrowed from Agares, with the Arabic letters stitched over the heart. Vardi Tayna was sitting on her bed, playing music - true or false, it may be but she's still out to get me – and produced a pen to add a few requests on the bottom of the list in neat, clipped handwriting that looked like she had learned to produce latin letters as an adult, and still had to think about where each line went. As Yue picked up the list, Vardi said, "your hair is a little crooked, come here", and Yue sat down on the edge of the bed as Vardi carefully unpicked her ribbon, laced it through her fingers like a cat's cradle, and began to neatly braid Yue's hair again with a quickness and gentleness that seemed entirely foreign to the little sharp rebel. "If aneurysm was a colour, this would be it," she added, and just like that, the spell was broken, and Yue laughed lightly.

"Thanks, Vardi."

She shrugged and fell back against her pillows. "What? It's such an ugly purple."

"I like it."

"Exactly."

Yue tucked her list into her hand, and went downstairs, still smiling slightly. The pale man was at the base of the stairs, stepping in after his cigarette, and he looked at the list as well and asked politely for more asafoetida. Yue still wasn't sure to make of Täj, but despite how frightening and off-putting he had seemed at the beginning, she was beginning to realise he was not all that bad.

Liara and Atiena were waiting for her in the courtyard, Feste looking morose at the prospect of being left behind. Atiena put her hands in her pocket, and the three girls turned and walked out onto the street as one. Yue still missed Cor and Ekaitza – there was no one quite as sharp as Cor, no one quite as blunt as Ekaitza – but the quiet companionship accorded by the Angeles socialite and the Tammins rebel was nonetheless respite. They asked little of Yue; Yue could tell that they thought of her as a much younger, much more delicate girl, one who needed minding, one who would break easily.

She wished they were wrong.

They bid goodbye at the crossroads, and Atiena and Liara took the road out of town towards the soldier's encampment, where Uzokuwa and Wick spent most of their days doing whatever it was that soldiers did. Yue carried on along the winding cobbled street that linked the safehouse the town square. She dropped into the bakery, already all abustle with customers despite the relative youth of the day, the air within and without fragrant with the scent of fresh bread, its warmth almost palpable even from the street and overwhelming once you stepped inside. The tiny old woman working the counter knew Yue by now, and called a greeting, and told her assistant to hurry up and get the bread ready for the future queen of Illéa, which was the same joke she made every single morning and which nonetheless always made Yue laugh. She stepped outside and wrapped the bag tightly inside her jacket, as she hurried past the library, still closed, its windows shuttered with its blue volet brightly painted with tiny white and yellow daisies. She had begun to spend many of her lazy afternoons in its depths, working steadily through its collections of poetry and love stories, joined occasionally by Saran who preferred to sort through the glossy magazines on the bottom floor, all of them saved from about a dozen years ago and badly out of date. She walked past the doctor's clinic where Raphael worked four times a week, its shutters covered in geometric designs in red and dark purple, an asklepian drawn in broad, clumsy strokes by a child with more enthusiasm than talent, stretched between the two like a bar holding the windows shut. Some of the children had signed their windows - she could still see their smudged initials by the hinges.

At dusk, Yue knew by now, when all the shops were closed, the town was much brighter and more colourful than it ever was during the day. But Yue liked the quiet serenity of the morning. The shops were started to flutter open now, in a wave down the street, just as the gaslight lamps that had lit the night were beginning to die, one by one, almost as though Yue herself were dousing them simply by walking past.

As she reacheed the square, she saw that men and women of the village and the surrounding territories were starting to set up their stalls for that morning's market, fruit spilling across table, fish lying dead-eyed and staring in heaps, books heaped high with pages sticking out at every point. She loved, on quiet mornings, to browse the stalls, to move peaceably from place to place and see all that there was on offer. Here was a stall selling messages from the dead and a stall selling body armour and a stall selling fresh-brewed salep and freshly-baked baklava. Yue passed by the clocktower, and began her shopping as she always did, moving south to north as though she intended to go home.

It was always the same young man working at the fish stall on Friday mornings, tall and lean and dark-haired and what Saran called boyishly handsome. His name was Kün, and Yue knew that, just like Täj, just like many of the market's merchants, he was, or had been, an Anchorite, part of that small community of isolationists who had called the Wastelands home almost since the time that Illéa had been founded. Before the rebellion began, it was where those unhappy with the totalitarian Illéan regime would flee to find some semblance of freedom; after the rebellion, they had become the first civilians of the Kingdom in Exile, totally unlinked to the fighting, but beginning the difficult work of forming some normalcy in the carnage left behind.

"Lady Yue." He had already prepared her usual order, she saw, or rather, Agares' usual, the salmon and the catfish and the walleye, neatly butchered, and he set it gently on the counter in front of him and waved away her coins as she held them out. Yue frowned, and Kün hastened to explain, "oh, don't… I won't… no money today, Lady Yue." He smiled. He had a very even smile – not like Demetri's, which was always a little higher on one side, always a little crooked despite the polish of the rest of his appearance.

Yue blushed. "Oh, no. Please, let me pay."

He shook his head, looking abruptly shy. "Don't worry about. It's been taken care of."

She picked up the bag. "I don't want anything for free."

Kün said, "gifts are usually free, Lady Yue."

"A gift?" What she really wanted to say was, fish?

He looked shy again, and turned away, and a wave of shyness abruptly overtook Yue as well so she just said, "thank you very very much, Kün," and hastened away before she could make too much of a fool of herself.

When she got back to Raphael's, there was another book lying on her bed, another note tucked inside. She had to smile all over again at the message enclosed.

My dearest, Yue -

I haven't had as much time to read as I had hoped, but so far I am happy to give you credit for how well chosen this particular book seems to be. Happy endings indeed – it seems impossible at this late juncture, with the lovers separated and he at war and she betrothed to another, that there shall be any kind of a conclusion which is not tragic, but I shall take you at your word, and persist, and hope for the best. Tragedy suits me, anyhow.

This one – well, I'm not really sure yet myself if I enjoyed it. It's based somewhat on the Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes, which was a kind of Hellenized Shakespeare screwball comedy and adventure, all love triangles and mix-ups and mistaken identities. Much lighter fare than either of us seem to be used to, but sometimes a little levity is needed in this world.

Let me know what you think of it? Clearly I need some help making up my own mind.

With sincere and enduring affection,

Demetri