mourn


They had repainted the door. It had always been a dark blue colour, for as long as she could remember, not quite the colour of the sky or the ocean or the Hämäläinen irises which overflowed the boxes on the windowsill. It was maroon now. It had been an uneven paint-job, peeling at the edges where the salt-tinged air had lifted it up into sharp curlicues; the wood underneath was varnish-stained and damp.

It had always been the only blue door on the scoliosis-crooked street; now it was one of six which were red.

Spring was creeping in through the avenues: the roofs and balconies and windows were strung with newly-blossomed garlands, souvenirs from every city Inanna had ever heard of and a few that she hadn't. They had different names in Illéa than the names Irij had given them: like these purple flowers, with broad, flat petals and pointed tips, which Ina had always known as tears-of-Siarka, had, in Aizsaule District, been called Ezeria.

Zoran had always mispronounced it as Herezia, but Inanna was trying not to think about Zoran.

Ina stood on the doorstep and stared at the red door. The brass numbers hanging on the door were slightly crooked and tarnished. Across the courtyard, the Hämäläinen homestead was dark and quiet, with the curtains drawn tightly across the windows and chopped wood abandoned at the doorsill to collect rain and moss. Kaapo had not repainted his grass-green door. It remained the same colour as ever it had been.

Ina's right hand was bound up in new threads, wrapped around and around and around her fingers like a boxing glove. She raised her hand, and knocked on the maroon door, the threads doing little to muffle the sound. There was a scramble inside; Ina stepped back, apprehensively, as her sister appeared in the frame.

Sherida had been a young girl when Ina had left, her mother's shadow, an artist with whose work Inanna had papered her corner of the academy dorms. She was eighteen years old now, taller than Inanna or their mother, and willowy in her shape, slender where Ina had inherited her curves from Hani. Inanna had not cut her hair, for fear that her father would not be able to recognise her upon his release, but Sherida clearly held no such compunctions: she had shorn her hair short and boyish. It gave her an air of mischief that Ina would never have thought to attribute to her shy baby sister.

"Ina," said Sherida, quite flatly. She was wearing a flower-embroidered dress that had belonged to Inanna originally, belted tightly around her waist to make up for their differing sizes. The hem skimmed her fingertips where it would have reached Ina's knees. "Just in time for dinner."

She retreated to permit Inanna to enter the house; the thread which bound them, a greyish purple badly dyed and fading, strained with the movement. It linked sister-to-sister and finger-to-thumb. A second string tied Sherida to the house across the street, a pale orange like the last ray of a dying sun; Ina pushed past it, ignored it, and went into the bowels of the house. The house was thin and tall, much like the bakery building in Aizsaule; the house smelled, as it always had, of herbs and flowers and baking bread. In the hallway, the old clock tick-tick-ticked, six minutes out of sync with reality.

"Ina?"

Her mother's voice floated through the hallway like the last, hanging note of a melody. Inanna rushed towards it, quite unable to help herself. "Mama," she said, and rounded the corner into the kitchen, and watched the expression of horror flit across Hani's eyes at the sight of her own daughter's face. Was it really so awful? Inanna had examined herself in the mirror before the debrief that morning, and decided that perhaps she was just desensitised. When she smiled, her eyes creased, and when her eyes creased, the half-scabbed wounds beneath her eyes split and chased ivory-white tears down her cheeks, burning her all over again, scalding anew.

She tried not to smile as she embraced her mother, even as she felt the tears run hot down her face. She held her mother tight. Bones would have to crack before she would lessen her grip: she felt again, as she had felt the day before, the sudden sensation of weightlessness, as though she had alighted upon a buoy in the midst of a storming sea. Her mother was smaller and thinner than she remembered; there was a birdlike quality, an agedness Inanna had never perceived before.

"I'll make a poultice," Hani was saying, as Inanna withdrew, "we can alleviate the worst of the scarring – "

"There's no need, mama," said Ina. She had never used a tone of authority with her mother before; it hung heavy in the air, like so much lead, and she shrank back from it again, unfamiliar as it was. This house had always been a sanctuary from the simple brutalities of the Warrior programme: the tablecloth was embroidered with thickets of grass and sheaves of wheat, and the cups, chipped though they were, each had a different fruit painted on its ceramic sides. "It doesn't hurt."

She tried not to flinch as her mother took her by the face and ran her thumbs over the new scar tissue, as though testing her daughter's claims. Sherida hung at the threshold to the kitchen, watchful and quiet. She had the Nirari eyes: it was as though she had stitched one of Zoran's mirror shards into her face, so that every time Inanna looked at her the Lover could only see herself.

Hani continued, undeterred: "I'll give you some tea. It will lower the inflammation."

"Thank you. I would appreciate that very much."

Ina's head rocked back as it was released without ceremony; her mother turned to the stove. Without anything else to occupy her hands or her nerves, Inanna sat down and ran her fingers across the little black hole on its edge where Pekka had dropped a match on Sherida's fifth birthday. Sherida remained in the shadow of the dark hallway, even as her younger brother burst past her to inspect the Warrior sitting at his kitchen table: fifteen-year-old Marduk was tied to his mother and sister with dark red butcher's twine, and to the Lover with a dark brown thread the colour of oakwood.

They had embraced her the day before. She supposed she had seemed a miracle then, rather than a living person and a xrafstar. She said, "it's good to see you, Marduk."

Marduk had changed little: broadened a little, perhaps, or maybe he had started to grow some stubble around the edge of his jaw. All of his strings wrapped around his wrists, like manacles. He edged around the table as though circling his prey, amber-gold eyes fixed upon her. He had never had the patience or tact of his siblings and parents: the words burst from him.

"Is it really true that you killed the Star?"

Inanna stared at him. "No," she said. The words stung as she spoke them; she bit each one out, brittle and uneven. "I would never have hurt – I didn't kill Ghjuvan."

"Oh," he said, as though disappointed.

The door swung open and shut again. Inanna's twin called a greeting from the door as he kicked off his boots. Sherida retreated from her position at the wall to go to him, with the air of conspiracy about her.

"Sit," Hani said, "and we'll eat."

Inanna had pre-empted her mother's orders, and remained sitting, hands knotted in front of her, as Marduk fetched the settings for the table. The plate he put in front of her had a chip in its face where Eero had dropped it into the sink after too much wine at Fall Day celebrations. Ina turned it around and around in front of her, until the chip lined up with the scratches on the table, and her mother had set the stew in the centre of the table. Hani seemed unwilling to leave her daughter for a single moment: she was spooning rice onto Inanna's plate now as Ishkur came into the kitchen, and saw his twin, and recoiled: physically recoiled, as though struck.

He had not come to the docks the day before. Had he been afraid? Inanna had not seen him for six or eight or twelve months; he had not seen her for three years. He was unaltered: browner, maybe, his hair a little shaggier, a new scar on his lip, callouses on his hands, shadows beneath those golden Nirari eyes. They had always looked similar, particularly as children, even as adolescents, enough to confuse, enough to amuse.

No one would be confused now.

He and Sherida sat together at the other end of the table: though it was a small space, the gulf yawned wide. Marduk was pouring tea, saying something to his siblings which Ina could not quite focus on. Her mother was setting more dishes onto the table, bowls of apricots and figs and walnuts and pomegranates and tabbouleh and fried aubergine. Did she think there had been no food at all in Illéa? Did she think Ina could not feed herself? It almost roused a smile from Ina, until she caught sight of her mother's tired eyes, and realised.

Her mother watched her worriedly until Ina reached for a piece of flatbread, and tore it, and said, as lightly as she could manage, "in Illéa, I made this more times than you could count."

"Yes?" Hani was clearly afraid to pry: afraid that she was not permitted to do so, afraid that she was.

Inanna nodded. Her mouth was dry; when she took a bite of it, she found that she could not quite swallow, and had to take a drink of water, doing so slowly and deliberately, Ishkur and Sherida and Marduk staring and staring and staring. The black armband around her bicep constricted tightly; she wished she had not bound up her hair in a knot, so that she might be able to hide behind it.

She said, "where are the twins?"

Hani said, quickly, "will they let you stay the night, Inanna?"

She nodded, and twisted the bread between her fingers until it splintered into feathery chunks. "If you want."

"Please do." The words came quickly but Ishkur's voice was very quiet.

The thread between them practically glowed: sun-white, bone-white, whiter-than-white.

Inanna nodded.

The tea that Marduk had brewed was sweet and familiar. Ina thought it might have been one of Äiti Hämäläinen's old recipes. She sipped it slowly, as though she could keep the silence at bay a little longer by busying her lips thus. She had touched them that morning, and had kept touching them, as though the kiss had been a bruise she could toy with by pressing and holding until it hurt. He would never forgive her. She wasn't sure that she wanted him to.

Now, she scalded her lips, and burned away the memory.

Sherida was all oranges and reds and yellows, as though she had unravelled the very sun and used its threads to weave the strings with which she bound herself to this place and these peoples. She flared and glowed with it: to her mother went a red; to her brothers went an orange and a pink apiece. She said, sharply, "what about aba?"

Inanna said, "I won't get my wish until my term is served."

There was a silence that ricocheted around the room. She had the sense that her meaning had not been understood.

She said, "they want me to do more work."

Hani said, in a voice that sounded like a sob, "you have served enough."

Inanna shook her head, although she agreed with her mother. Her heart ached. She wanted to cry, quite without knowing why. She picked up the tin fork that Pekka had used to pry up a skirting board behind which a kitten had trapped itself and used it to chase a piece of aubergine around a green-lacquer plate that had migrated to the Nirari household with one of Kaapo's gifted fish pies.

She said, "I will go to the prison tomorrow. I am a Warrior now: they will not turn me back from seeing him, at the very least."

It would be the first time in eleven years. No – fourteen. He would be old. Older even than Hani had become. Would he have his health? Would he have his mind?

Would he recognise her, even with her long, long hair?

Hani always sat very straight, and elegant. There was always something very dignified about her, and she wore that dignity with a particular polish now: "I will send you with a letter," she said, "and whatever other things you think they will let you bring."

And Inanna realised then that her mother was something a little bit worse and sadder than a widow. She reached for Hani's hand, and Hani took hers gratefully, twining fingers and clutching to her tightly. Ina said, "we are past the worst of it, and we are alive."

She did not mention those who had been less fortunate.

"We are very proud of you, Inanna," said Hani, and Marduk echoed her words distantly.

"Very proud," he said, with as much gravitas as his adolescent voice could muster. His hand crept along the tablecloth, and patted his sister's elbow very gingerly, with as much tenderness as he could put into such a paltry gesture. "Very proud."

Inanna nodded, and swallowed back a sob.

She said, again, "where are the twins?"

"Abzu is scouring the taverns," Ishkur said.

Ina blinked. This, of all answers, had stirred her from her mournful stupour, so unexpected had it seemed. She said, confusion thickening her voice, "taverns?"

Hani shook her head, and shot a look at her son clearly intended to quell any further information. She said, "Haukkuu got out of the courtyard earlier, so Abzu's gone to find him..."

"I didn't realise," Inanna said, "that the Hämäläinen dog had developed a taste for drink."

Sherida said, "the dog hasn't."

"Sherida," said Hani, and that was that. They lapsed into silence again: Marduk chasing houmous around his plate with a piece of flatbread and Sherida drinking her tea as mutinously as one could drink tea and Ishkur watching Inanna like he thought that her curse had blinded her like a Hierophant.

Ina said, "and Nanshe?"

Those were the twins: they had just turned ten when Inanna had taken on the curse. Like Ishkur and Inanna, they had been one another's reflection and shadow: sun and moon, day and night, light and dark, and inseparable in that bound. Abzu had been the excitable one, cannily intelligent, curious to a fault. Nanshe had always been dragged into the trouble he caused; Inanna's strongest memory of her was the way she had hidden behind Hani's skirt the first time Inanna had returned from the Academy, as wary of her sister as she might have been of a stranger.

She had outgrown it, after a time, but caution had always been Nanshe's way of things.

There was a moment in which Inanna thought that perhaps no one had understood her, as though she had returned to them speaking a new language and wearing a new garb and feeling new things that no one before had felt – and then Marduk looked at Sherida and Sherida looked at Ishkur and Ishkur looked at Inanna, right in the eyes, as Hani said, "Nanshe is at the Academy."

"Sorry?"

"She asked for a day off," Hani said, lamely. Inanna had never heard her mother sound thus. It was a sad, pathetic kind of a sentence, which was most unlike the wonderful, strong woman who had raised her. "But the Academy wouldn't..."

Inanna laughed. The sound rang out, and bounced around the room three times. She said, "she's ten years old, mama," as though that meant anything. Inanna herself had been eight years old. Tithes had been taken younger.

"Thirteen," Ishkur said. Did he think that made a difference? Hadn't Jaga Szymańska been fourteen when they had force-fed her with the curse, killed her and left her to wander around for a decade slowly dying?

The wall behind Ishkur had a divot in the paint where she had fallen into it while she and Pekka had been learning how to dance.

Inanna felt her lips spasm. She forced herself to smile, and said, pleasantly, "I'll go speak to the Commandant tomorrow." She tried to speak with Ilja's languid confidence, and found that she could not. This was a clipped kind of certainty, brittle. "I'll have her removed from the Programme."

Hani turned pleading eyes onto her daughter. "They said there would be no…. no question of it."

"I will speak to the Commandant," Inanna said again, quite calmly.

There was a defensiveness in that way that Sherida said, "I tried to take her place."

Ina closed her eyes, and took a breath, and opened her eyes again. The world swam in front of her, awash with threads and memories.

"They said I was too old."

With her mind so full of the thoughts of gold and stone and marble and concrete, Ina could not keep the coldness from her voice. "They were right."

Sherida's eyes narrowed.

They finished eating, quietly. The Niraris seemed afraid to delve into Inanna's time in Illéa and she found that she was glad of it, for the debrief had drained her words from her: she had none now to spare, and could not have said anything that would not worry them. She would tell them beautiful things later, and she would ensure that they were true. She would tell them about summer evenings spent soaking up sunlight in the garden with Azula and Khalore and Zoran. She would tell them about hours in the bread line with Ghjuvan, trying to remember plots of books left behind in Irij so that they could try to amuse one another with dry recitations of the twists. She would tell them about Ilja and Kinga taking their turn in the kitchen, and the dinner which had resulted, a poultry pie burned darker than charcoal.

Ilja had crushed the burnt edges of the pastry and sprinkled them over Zoran's head like so much black stardust; Inanna had told him that he was beautiful.

When the meal was finished, her mother stood. For the first time, Inanna saw that Hani was bound to her Warrior daughter with a chain rather than a thread: a copper chain, red-bronzed and heavy, which seemed to displace the air with each movement that it made. It made Inanna's mother look martial; it made her look like the disciplinarian Inanna had once known. She said, "we usually do the same thing every Saturday evening, Inanna, but I don't wish to put pressure on you and you can stay here if you want."

Ina looked at her, and forced a smile. "What is it?"

Hani said, "we're going to go see Pekka. Do you want to come?"


The urnfield was set into a paltry scratch of scrubland in the corner of the Kur ghetto, in amidst the old quarter of the city, hemmed in by enormous brick warehouses and tenement buildings. To call it a cemetery was to be generous: there was just that black marble wall at the centre of the square, measuring ten metres running north-to-south. The names of the former Warriors had been carved here in white and gold, names and ages and nothing else. There were more than two hundred names etched here, and behind these names had lived a dozen Inannas, scores of Azulas, Zoran after Zoran after Zoran.

There was no space to leave flowers, and the Niraris had brought none. Inanna's hands felt empty, so she had knelt beside the gate and pulled some daisies, and pinched the yellow discs at their centre until she had stained finger-and-thumb a golden yellow which she could paint across the name on the wall in a long streak. She wasn't sure why she had done it, but it felt good that she had.

PEKKA HAMALAINEN

She had stepped back and she had stared at the letters dully. They had neglected the umlauts; they had misspelled his name. Her fingers itched for a chisel, but Sherida found them, and stilled them, and then stepped away from her again, as though afraid that she would catch curse if she touched a xrafstar for too long.

Inanna averted her eyes from the numbers which followed Pekka's name. She did not need to be told how young he had been.

She had not thought of it until just now, and now she found that she was disappointed to see that there was no room for her own name to follow his: Mielikki's name had been etched below Pekka's, and Ghjuvan's had been carved below Mielikki's, and Ghjuvan's murderer's had gone below that again. No space for Eero, although the rest of the column had been left empty for those who would follow, sooner or later or sooner again. After that morning's debrief, Inanna imagined it would only be a matter of time until Azula and Hyacinth took their place here. And when the Irij army returned to Illéa, and recovered the bodies of the xrafstars they had left behind, Kinga's name would take the place she had so dearly craved.

After that: Ina, Ilja, Khalore, Zoran, in whatever order fate took them.

The generations stretched northward, two hundred of them, overwhelming. Ina could not help but stare.

AVROVA VOVK

They had come here to pay their respects before initiation, and Inanna had prayed – to whom, for what, she couldn't remember and maybe she had never known – but she felt suddenly claustrophobic in this open field. So many of these names were no longer letters and numbers to her: they were people, Warriors like her and her comrades, children who had gone into danger and emerged… well, still as children.

Despite what they said. Still just children.

She drew her yellow-stained fingers across Avrova's name as well, and searched for Gijsbert's. The wall had been methodically laid out – she knew exactly where to look – and yet she found that her eyes roved across the names, as though she would do a disservice to each and every dead child and teenager if she did not acknowledge them, here and now and uselessly.

There were some that she had not seen before. They had memorised the past generations, of course, but they had been defined by their curses and their numbers, not by names or families or lives or loves. She thought of Allegra, and her awful lover Dimitar, and found them on the wall, to stain them too, to mark them, to remind herself that others had lived and suffered as she had.

ALLEGRA SAUER

Her family watched her stalk the lines of the wall, searching for something she could not name. Her family watched her, and her family said nothing. This was tradition to them: this was rote. Was she ruining it? Was this usually a lovely, sterile affair? They could come here, and take comfort in the idea that the neighbour boy had gone to his heavenly rest; they could come here, and hope that he would hurt no longer.

She wanted to scream, properly scream, as she had in the sacellum, as she had in flight over Illéa, as she did in her sleep and in her waking. She felt like something wild had taken shelter under her skin and in the sinews of her heart, and clawed to be free of the cage her ribs now formed.

Had she forgotten how to be a Nirari, so long she had masqueraded as someone else? She had shed her name with an eagerness; Kinga had always flung it back at her like a reminder. Even Ilja, so keen to uphold the charade, had never seen her as anything other than Nanna Nirari, friend and sister and Lover and pathetic.

She stopped, abruptly. Her eyes stung. She stared.

KREINER GEHORTNICHT

She had forgotten that Kreiner and Azula had shared that awful surname.

Azula would be immortalised in this wall thus, once they had found the time to etch her into it. She would be fifteen forever, and they would put that awful name with her, and she had never wanted it. She had never used it, not when she could get away with it. Ina had given her a name that hadn't been Ina's to give, and they had both clung to it, feverishly. Ina felt that horrible gasping panic rise up in her lungs once more, the same feeling as when she had spotted Azula's body on the airship, even as her limbs deadened, lead-like.

Azula Gehortnicht, they would call her, Azula-who-does-not-belong-anywhere, the little girl murdered three times over: by her brother and by her mistress and by her country.

And Inanna would join her, and Khalore would join her, and Ilja would join her, and Zoran – Zoran, Zoran, Zor – would join her, and then Ina's baby sister would wither and start a new column of her own on that black marble wall. Would Nanshe make it to fifteen? Sixteen? Seventeen?

Would she fall at initiation, as the best always did?

Ina said, numbly, "mama, it's all gone wrong."

That's what she had said, on the day of her seventh birthday, when her father had been beaten and taken from her, when Eero had been beaten and taken from his family, when Pekka had taken a long lash across the arm and chest and face to cover her body with his own. Mama, it's all gone wrong.

She sounded like she was seven years old again.

"I know," Hani said. "I know, my darling."

Inanna accepted the embrace when it was offered; she softened and weakened into it, as though her bones had tired of carrying her. She pressed her eyes, dry, into her mother's shoulder; she shook, and she did not cry, and her mother held her tight, as though fearing fragmentation.

When Inanna went to her knees, her mother came with her, and held tight. The Lover's black hair shone with the tears of her weeping mother, and Ina wasn't sure who was comforting who, only that Ishkur had come to stand beside them, a hand placed on his sister's head, as though offering absolution for a sin she had yet to confess.