iktsuarpok (v.) the feeling of anticipation while waiting for someone to arrive, often leading to intermittently going outside to check for them

The man at the counter was lean and narrow and sharp-featured, dark hair slicked back from a face hardened by long-worn cruelty. He was wearing a long grey coat of excellent quality, some kind of Swendish wool, with shiny white buttons that might have been made of bone. Khalore would have mistaken him for a member of the Security Bureau, if not for the soft, shocked whisper from Naidia, who was peering out from the workshop beside her: "a Warrior."

Then Khalore had seen it. The red cuffs of his sleeves, the black arm-band tied tightly around his bicep – as though he was already mourning his own death. The young woman who had accompanied him was wearing one as well, a little higher-up on her arm, tied a little neater. She had bronzed skin stained with black freckles and tousled dark hair shorn short, like she had taken a razor to her own head. They looked alike, enough so that she thought they might be related: cousins, or siblings, or maybe even twins. Was she a Warrior as well, then?

Clearly Mrs. Seren Angelo had believed so. She had stuttered as she spoke to them, her words leaping out past one another in a desperate attempt to maintain any semblance of respectability, her hands braced against the counter like she was expecting to be physically struck. "Well, yes, uh – yes, I suppose so, but I think you'll find that – "

He wasn't listening. He was inspecting the garments on the counter, turning over the edge of each cuff to study the stitching and running the collar between his fingertips. They were not men's clothes; they were not military attire. And he wasn't happy. He clearly wasn't happy.

Khalore had watched her mother's reaction, enthralled. Who were these teenagers, that they could command such respect and fear in a woman as fearsome as Mrs. Angelo?

Khalore had no idea, but she knew this for certain: she would do anything to be like them. To have the strength they had. To command the respect that they commanded. To be something better than Khalore. To be something greater.

"It was just," Mrs. Angelo said, her voice raising in that familiar nasal whine with which Khalore was so familiar, "such a strange request..."

He paid her absolutely no attention. "Voski."

The young woman had slapped some coins flat on the counter. "Keep the change."

Khalore almost hadn't realised that Annika was standing next to her mother. That fact only became apparent when her sister spoke up, her tone a little sharper than Mrs. Angelo's, rising sharply as though in concert with a sudden burst of anger in her chest: "this isn't the amount we agreed…?"

The man had not even looked at her. "And?"

Khalore had stared at the Warriors as they left, unable to contain the abject fascination etched upon her face. The dark-haired man had glanced back at her as he had left – he had worn a set of open wounds on his face, like a man who had just been tortured. She remembered that. She remembered staring at them, awe-struck.

Arsen Grigoryan had looked at Khalore as though he could flay her open with his gaze alone. He had looked at her, stone-faced and cruel, and then he had walked away.

Just like that: a path determined.

What would have happened if Arsen Grigoryan had chosen a different seamstress that day? What would have happened if the Hanged Man had passed by? Had never shown a tired, scared little girl the kind of power to which she could aspire as a Kur, as a twin, as a girl who was good-for-nothing, whose very birth her mother regretted? What would have happened?

He could see it: Khalore would have been dead by thirty.

As it was: she would be dead by twenty-six. Earlier, most likely. Earlier – how much earlier? When would they lose her? A voice he barely recognised as Arek held him back. Don't look. Why shouldn't he? Wasn't this why he was here? Wasn't he their Hierophant? Shouldn't he know? It was Khal, their Khal, their Lore. How long did she have left? How soon would she follow Ghju?

One path – Arsen Grigoryan lurking in every open wound and in every unseen reflection, hanging, eternally hanging, in her dreams. Pain, eternally: a lost arm, a lost half, loss and loss and loss. And at the end, the sword waited…

The other – a life spent hunched over, both arms at dedicated work, a few sparse moments of softness where she could eke them out. A husband. No children.

Four extra years. Would they have mattered? Would they have made a difference?

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Zoran would have done anything to give her just a single moment more.

A monster crested the mountain, ink-black and malevolent, enormous leathery wings blotting out the sun; the two children below, threading a path through the ruins of what had once been Siarka, barely even looked up at the sky, continuing their steady trudge up a broken set of temple stairs as the enormous beast tilted between the clouds and dipped down into the valley, vanishing. There was a boy and a girl, both dark-haired, though one was pale and the other quite brown. She was taller than him by less than half-an-inch; he had a cloud of dark curly hair, which did a lot to make up the difference between them.

This was a new part of the world, new despite its ancient nature: the sky overhead was grass-green, pale and crystalline; the grass underfoot was yellowed and browned, scalded away in black gashes of ruined earth.

She lived in a little house on the mountain, where the beams and floorboards were made from an old ship's timbers; he lived in a cottage with a thatched-hay roof in the valley below, but always walked her to her door first.

Even though she was taller.

They went through the gate; they crossed the courtyard. Her sister was sitting on the doorstep, legs drawn up, a chipped cup of tea clasped tightly between two hands with fingers that were ever-so-slightly too long for her hands. She beamed to see them – it was an angelic expression.

"Hi, Ragnar!"

"Hey, Jaga."

His friend scowled. "You always say hi to him before me."

"Clearly I like him better."

He was pleased to hear that. She, decidedly, was not. She sat next to her sister, and pulled gently at her sleeve, more to inspect the blood on the cuff than to get her attention, although it happily did both. "We saw Dasha on our way here."

"She's on her way back from the front."

"Is she doing a good job saving the world?"

Jaga said, with a smile, "it's still burning."

Ragnar crouched in the yard to greet the little ginger cat that had wandered out slowly from the cosy sun-beam strewn shelter of the nearby yard. His name was Iggy, short for Ignacek, which was probably short for something even longer, and Ragnar was starting to suspect that he was not the first cat to bear that name. After all, the last time that he had seen the cat, it had been a tabby.

Jaga said, "where's the old man, Kinia?"

"He's not here?"

Kinga glanced over her shoulder, into the kitchen behind them. He wasn't. She hadn't thought that Jaga was lying, but even so… he was always here when she got home.

Maybe he had gone to see Dagmara.

"I can make you dinner," Kinga said. "If you're hungry." She could not be any older than ten years old, but she sounded so much older sometimes. "I'm sure he'll be back before..."

Jaga shook her head. "I have to get back to the academy."

"Already?"

"Sorry, short guy – I was just passing through. We'll spar next time."

"It's fine." Kinga smiled. Her boots were stained with mud the colour of maroon and madder. "You've got more important things to do than hang out with your little sister."

From the expression in Jaga's eyes, it was clear that she disagreed. But she did not say so; she just lifted up the small package on the step next to her, wrapped in brown paper and butcher's twine, and handed it to her sister. "From Matthias."

Kinga peeled back one layer of paper, and smiled at the glint of something dangerous and sharp wrapped carefully within. "He really wants me to like him. This charm offensive of his is getting out of hand."

Jaga smiled. "Has anyone ever told you that you are too sceptical for your own good?"

"I think it's just that," Kinga said, "he and I understand one another."

Jaga laughed. "Words to keep me from sleeping."

She was silent for a moment, staring down at her cup. Kinga said, "what is it?"

"It's not definite," Jaga said, "but Bogumiła is thinking that maybe..."

She understood – hell, even Ragnar understood. Maybe the cat itself understood what was happening. To her credit, Kinga did not cry. "It's not the final decision yet, though, is it?"

Céluiz Facundo had come to the threshold of the courtyard to walk Jaga back to the compound. He waved at them, smiled at Ragnar, but came no closer. Jaga had to finish her sentence in a rush. Kinga kept smiling. She was the only girl who could be tempted to tears by the idea of living a long and happy life.

"It seems… likely."

It should have been. He wanted to tell her. He should have told her – he should tell her now. Was this the only thing Matthias had ever managed to keep to himself? He had always been so much kinder to Kinga than he had ever been to Jaga. It had come to him easier. After all, he had loved Kinga less.

Four paths fractured here. He could see it. Kinga could have done nothing. It would have saved her. It would have saved Ragnar. It would have saved Małgosia. It would have saved Azula.

He saw it, suddenly, with such clarity. Kinga should not have been the Moon, he said, and Matthias did not deny it – she should have lived. She should have lived, and she should have fed her children to the war machine, and she should have lived as old as Bogumiła, and continued her work of producing monsters.

And if she had chosen to be the Moon, then Ragnar should have been the Devil, he said, and Matthias again did not deny it. And if Ragnar had not been the Devil, then the cursemaker would never have….

He reeled.

How heavily had Matthias stacked the deck?

Frida had gone grey at some point over the summer. Ilja had not been prepared for how strange it would make him feel to see her like this – to see her visibly old and visibly aging. When he took her hand, he had to be as gentle with her as she had once been with him, and oh, wasn't that a strange irony: they each acted as though the other might crumple into dust with the slightest movement.

"I wept," she said, softly, "when I realised that you were Kur. Such a beautiful child. Such a terrible burden."

She had cupped his face in her soft hands. Was this how a mother cared for you? Was this how a mother conveyed her sincerity? He had to believe so. He had to.

"How fortunate," she said. "How wonderful. A Warrior. At last."

He was not a Warrior yet, but he would not tell her that. He was ranked highly enough that she seemed to take it as a given. She knew – as he knew – that his zealotry would drive him. He would not relent. For her. For his blood. For all of the children he had known, and for the child that he had been.

She was Irij. Her blood was pure. He had always been so grateful that, despite that, she had lowered herself to caring about him. She had given him the name intended for her own child; she had given him an instruction.

Repent. Atone. Salvation. The sermons had practically made his ears bleed as a child, so often had they repeated the refrain. Repent, repent, repent. They had played at being Irij in the playground – they had pretended to be anything other than what they were. Repent, repent, repent. He had been good at it, the best. A fine actor. Crafty, Preacher said, and it was a craft. He had feigned at being mother and father to the other children in the orphanage. He had counselled them, when they cried at being Kur. He had been soft with them.

He had urged them, too, to repent. To atone.

Salvation lay close. So close he could touch it.

Frida had chosen him, when they had come to the orphanage in search of candidates. She had pulled him from the line, and asked the custodian for his name, and had smiled widely when she heard it. Ilja. Her Ilja. He had not recognised her, of course, though she had changed little. She still spoke, even now, after all these years, with that same odd cadence: rushing all her words, pressing out all the air from her lungs until she hiccupped it back in, managing one word between each wheezy gasp. Crinkled paper. The cigarettes would kill her in the end.

But in this moment, she was alive and she was proud of him. He was doing enough, she said. He was repenting.

When she smiled, she had tears in her eyes.

His time with her had been short. She usually came to the compound to see him; this was one of the rare days that the cadets were permitted to leave and visit home instead. He had gone to the orphanage, leaving the colourful bustle of Opona behind and taking an old rattling train all the way north into the grain-filled heartland of Old Kur, where the orphanage lay, squat and grey, as a blight on the landscape.

He had stopped off in New Baryz on the way back, to see Frida, to give her the portion of his stipend to which she was due. She was too weak to walk him back to the train; she was too Irij to embrace him before he left. She only patted his hand, and thanked him, and told him to keep working hard.

As though he needed a reminder.

The train journey back to Opona was long and lonely. Ilja had a book with him that he did not read; he watched the sun race them back towards the south, searching for any glimpse of the sea rising up before them. There was a group of young soldiers in his carriage, perhaps similarly on day-release from their training; there was a girl with very red lips and an arm petrified in a sling, resting her head on a pile of papers, and there was a handsome man with wild dark hair dealing cards like it was as easy as breathing, and there was a smiling boy with very white teeth holding court, saying something witty about a recent act of sabotage that made the rest of them laugh and laugh and laugh.

So these paths intersect, must always intersect, even once determined, finalised, paved in the years it will take to pace them to their end.

Did the Chariot know then that it was so close to its future vessel?

Did Decebal realise how close he was sitting to the man who would take his place?

Did Ilja know how far the curse would carry him from any hope at redemption?

Of course not. Of course not. Of course not.

Ina had stumbled across her in the woods. The woods were the domain of the cadets, at once familiar and dangerous, the place where Commandant pushed them to their physical limits and the place where she and Pekka sometimes crept to have some simple, blissful moments alone. It was both – it was neither. It was a place untamed, more akin to the curses than the children who would inherit them. The forest was gloomy and deep, occupied more by sounds than by any living thing: somewhere in the distance, a red-freckled deer trotted across stone, and a wolf crept closely after it. There were no paths – any way through the woods was thickened with grass, sloe, blackthorn, nettles, chiaroscuro of thickets dappled golden-and-grey with the light that managed to penetrate the dense foliage overhead.

Pekka had said once that this was the kind of place where it seemed, if the moon was in the right stage of its cycle, that animals might speak to men. Irij had painstakingly wrestled a small square of forestry into submission – the whole place was laced with obstacles and traps around and over which the cadets had to manoeuvre – but there was nonetheless the silent reminder as you moved through the trees that this was still a place mostly untamed. Particularly if you left the training area, as Ina did now, and moved into the denser, less familiar woods.

She had heard someone crying, and it was not like Inanna Nirari to just leave that be.

But she had not expected that someone to be Avrova Vovk.

Avrova had turned on her with a viciousness that would have been familiar to her, if Ina had ever encountered the Lover of Kur before. The usual porcelain perfection of the older girl had been shattered; it was not a graceful weeping, but something animalistic and reddened, her pale eyes smeared black with tears and ruined makeup, her hair wild and matted. "What are you doing here?"

Despite that, for a split second, Ina mistook her for her sister. There were no similarities – Avrova was glass-faced and pastel, with all cornflower blue and gold silk, some ten years older than Sherida, who was Ina's smaller doppelganger, as soft as her sister, all umber and ink. And yet, for a moment, she was Sherida, and Sherida was crying, and Ina reached for her instinctively. "I..."

"Leave!"

Ina had scrambled back, her compassionate instincts blunted by the fear that jolted through her. Having a xrafstar scream at you so – it was primal. The human part of her had recognised that this was something wrong and unnatural standing before her, despite its clever facade of a crying teenage girl. It was something that would not recognise, would not appreciate, would not deserve, kindness.

The Lover was just the title the Irij had given to a curse beyond mortal understanding. It was nothing so mundane. Nothing that their language could truly name.

And yet, Ina ached to help her. She hated herself for being afraid.

Ina did as Avrova had ordered. She left.

It was strange, seeing this moment as it had happened. She had described it to Zoran afterwards, of course, but it was something else to glimpse it, to see both girls in the flesh, and to see – of course – how badly Ina had painted herself in this story. She had done nothing that she should not have; she had acted understandably, naturally. Zoran had told her that in the moment, when Ina had told him what had happened, her eyes bristling with the gleam of unshed tears; he was glad to see, here and now, that his instincts had been correct. She had done nothing wrong. She had acted as anyone else would have.

She had resented herself for it. Of course she had.

Had Avrova ever told Inanna Nirari why she was crying?

She could tell her later. When they met again.

On the first day that they had been permitted to leave the training compound and visit their family, Zoran had walked Ina most of the way to her house – not quite on purpose, though hardly accidentally either. It had started off quite companionably when they had realised that they were both heading into Opona; it had become almost humorous when they were delving into the streets, winding their way down familiar paths to their respective neighbourhoods; and it had wrapped all the way around to ridiculous when they found themselves bidding one another farewell outside the florist shop apparently preferred by both of their mothers.

Zoran had laughed. The alternative was crying.

All this time, they had lived just a few streets apart.

If they had known earlier…

They paraded the Warriors through the city before each mission. In the bright light of the early afternoon, typically warm and lovely as all Opona summers were, the children on the back of the truck seemed even younger than perhaps they were. They waved at the assembled crowds with a strange frenzy. It was as though God himself had crept through and painted all the light gold before tipping it wildly across the city; each of their buttons glimmered like a tiny shard of a star; their hair gleamed. They seemed a good set. They would make their people proud.

Had it really been ten years already? He couldn't believe it. What a way to make him feel old.

She had put her arms around him, looped loosely around his waist, and rested her face against his back. He felt her smile. "You're not that old."

"I didn't say anything."

"You had that look on your face."

He suspected he had not worn any look in particular; he suspected she simply knew him that well.

She had tilted her head, so that she could look out the window as well. They were standing in their book-packed kitchen in their apartment on Majnun Street, with a stew bubbling on the stove behind them - it was his turn to cook, and he knew that she was barely managing to keep from interfering with the whole process to ensure that something edible resulted. Their windowsill was so full of flowers that the parade and crowds below could barely be glimpsed: the purple ones, with broad, flat petals and pointed tips, were tears-of-Siarka; the red-and-grey ones, all intertwined vines, bleeding pollen, were Hanged Men; the blue ones, small and pale, were Milena irises.

Her voice was very small, when she finally spoke. "I hadn't realised they were being initiated today."

They probably hadn't been, but he didn't tell her that - she was the only person with whom he did not insist on being insufferably clever. They had probably been initiated several weeks ago, and hidden from sight until their curses were under control – until they were in such a state that they could feign being true, confident Warriors.

To look at them now, you would hardly know that they were dying.

"Me neither."

"Recognise any of them?"

He didn't think he did. There was a Szymański, as there always was: a short, androgynous, dark-haired soldier whose gender Zoran could not distinguish at this long distance. But none of the other Warriors held any familiarity. That was a shame; he knew that many of their neighbours had hoped to give a child to the cause, had hoped that their sons and daughters would be able to bring glory to their people and to their family name.

Ina had, nonetheless, always been silently relieved when their own were spared. It would have been treason and heresy to admit that much, and so she never had - but she had always slept a little better the day after each initiation, when there were no Czarnecki or Czarnecka, no Nirari or Lahlou amongst their ranks. As there were none now. She would sleep soundly tonight, and she would not dream.

He would spend at least a few moments wondering how he had been so lucky as to meet her.

He said, softly, "you?"

Ina stared at the group intently for a moment. "I think the big guy is probably a Hämäläinen."

The big guy was a teenage boy, no older than fifteen, with sandy brown hair and an inscrutable expression. He was standing straight, and waving to the crowd with a confidence that belied his years. Yes, Zoran thought, there was a similarity there. One of Eero's boys? "I wonder which one he is."

She offered no guesses. She simply rose on the tips of her toes, balancing herself with a hand on his hip, and pressed a kiss, very gently, to the nape of his neck. "Aba will be here any moment."

"Not with these crowds."

She laughed. It was a strangled, bloodless sound. It made his chest ache to hear it. Why did she sound like that?

"Unlike you, Zor, he probably will have taken that into account."

His lateness was famous; its reputation had trailed him since adolescence. Zuen would never let him forget it. Matthias said, Zuen would have died down this path, he would have been beaten to death, you know that. Tell me: why does Ina still have her scars?

He shot her a shy smile. Still, that shyness, after all these years, after all this time together.

It had only made her more beautiful. She had smile lines around her eyes, and a little grey at her temples – prematurely so, for life together was happy but it was hard, when work was scarce and money was hard-earned – and a new softness to the skin around her mouth. She was nearly forty-five; she would live to twice that. He knew it in his bones.

She would get to die peacefully. But not yet. Not for another forty-eight years. So much time. So much more still left to them.

And the others were all dead. They had never known them, except from afar – they had never mourned them, except as an idea: the Warriors were dead, and long live the Warriors.

Arek said, they might still have chosen her, you know. She was too smart.

Nadezhda said, mournfully, they were always going to select her. She was always going to be cursed.

Always, said Dimitar. And you wouldn't have been brave enough to follow her into hell like he did. You know that. You would have spared yourself.

Was that true?

He wanted to look. He wanted to follow that path to its conclusion, to follow it down. He wanted to reassure himself that yes, yes, he would have been brave enough, good enough, enough. He would have gone with her. He would have thrown himself into the trundling machine of war and Warriors and curses. Just to be at her side. Just to suffer the same short years.

But he couldn't. If he didn't check, he could convince himself that he would have. If he didn't look, then he would never know, for sure, what that future would have been.

He could still lie to himself.

He could still pretend.

Nadezhda said, can't you tell you're holding yourself back? What a Hierophant you could be, if you just let go.

Let go? It sounded too much like losing control. It sounded like blindness. It sounded like insanity.

When he put it like that, it rather sounded like an inevitability.

He may as well, then, follow it down. Wouldn't that be more useful? Wouldn't that be kinder? Better than dreaming of impossibilities, certainly.

Djuro Cvetković, who had been the Fifth Hierophant, said, you know we are dead, don't you?

Gracjan Sokołowski, who would be the Twentieth Hierophant, said, you are cursed, Zoran, not haunted.

Then why did he still hear their voices?

Matthias said, because you refuse to take your own advice, dumbass.

Zoran said, you really expect me to believe that this isn't you? I think I would have hallucinated you as a bit more witty.

Somewhere in the past, Matthias' hands had stilled on his typewriter, and he had smiled.

Somewhere in the future, Gracjan was standing in the sacellum and reaching for a tarot card.

Somewhere still forbidden to him, the Hierophants were watching.

And so he followed them down, and down, and down.