phosphenes (n.) the colorful stars glimpsed when rubbing one's eyes.

Ina had grown up on a narrow street, scoliosis-crooked, paved with small square pieces of red brick that had been left over from construction of the harbour-master's offices, overhung by tall tenement apartments occupied by sailors berthing from ships of every modern nation. Her family had owned one of the little, squat houses hemmed in at regular intervals, with three square windows on every storey and a gently sloping red roof. The air sang with a dozen different languages, a hundred different spices, every flower for which Ina knew the name – the roofs and balconies and windows were strung with garlands and blossoms, plants brought from every city Ina had ever heard of and a few that she hadn't. They had adopted local names, eventually, when their original titles had proven too unwieldy for Irij tongues: 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 Hämäläinen irises.

Pale blue – still a warm colour, of course, but closer to the sky than to a blueberry. A lovely pale blue. Not like the electric shade of the stringless man. She wasn't sure why she was so hung-up on the colour of his eyes, but she thought it had something to do with precisely that absence, the lack, of the strings. She had become so accustomed to the threads, without ever wanting to – still resented their presence, in a way, the manner in which they cluttered her vision, the way they laid bare people's most immediate perceptions and emotions. She could recognise lust, dismissal, irritation, with a single look; she could see how threads frayed, even as she searched desperately for a way to stop it. And this man, devoid of that context, empty of that baggage… she could only think of brown eyes and blue eyes, and her mind could only turn over and over and over, caught in place, as uselessly as a butterfly in a jar.

It was exhausting. It was pointless. It would lead nowhere. Not like this.

So Ina called him by his name.

And he stopped. There was a roundness to his shoulders now, as though merely hearing the word had worn him down. It must have been a while since he had last heard it, Ina thought, for him to react so – or perhaps it was simply hearing it like this, in a harbour accent, with the practice of one who does not speak the language of Swendway but who knows a thousand words in that tongue nonetheless, pronounced the way his family would have pronounced it. It was a soft name, all rolling rhoticity and open vowels; it lacked the harshness of his brother's, the way the letter k seemed to slit Ina's throat every time she spoke it aloud.

"Eero," she said, "where are we going?"

"Just for a walk," he said, "Ina."

Eero said her name like he used to – not he, but he – and it was disquieting, unbalancing, gutwrenching, to hear it said that way after six months of fading memory and pinioned grief. She was almost surprised to hear how quietly he had accepted his name from her mouth; she was certainly surprised to find that it was her name, from his mouth, which galled more, seemed less natural – or perhaps more natural, which things in Illéa rarely were. It was like Eero himself: jarring for its ordinariness, untouched by the oddness of the kingdom, unblemished by the strangeness of the curses.

He still wasn't moving. She had drifted a few paces behind him as they moved away from Kivi Bakery, but she was caught up to him now; she could have reached out and touched him, but she stilled her hand. She was only now allowing herself to believe, truly believe, what some part of her had known all along: that Eero Hämäläinen was alive. That Eero Hämäläinen was in Illéa. That Eero Hämäläinen was here, in front of her now, and had bought her bread, and had saved her from unfriendly paqūdus earlier in the week. That Eero Hämäläinen was stringless, threadless, without connection or tie to the world around him.

Did he know?

Oh, god, was she going to have to tell him?

Eero said, "have you been to the night markets?"

She had. She and Zoran had drifted that way one night, recently enough, on a night that Zoran could not sleep and Ina did not want to. Walking down to the square had been spent in a companionable silence, which Ina thought might be the only kind of silence she and Zoran knew how to share. She had bought him a little canvas bag of sunflower seeds, and he had bought her a set of little painted clay animals, which now decorated Azula's otherwise sparse bedroom. Neither of them had been familiar with the Illéan currency then; it was the first time since initiation that Ina had found herself giggling, fumbling gold coins from her pockets and trying to pick out the right denominations from Zoran's open palm when he offered it to her, protesting futilely everytime he shut his hand over her fingers and insisted she was doing it wrong. She had been wearing gloves; he hadn't mentioned it.

She said, "once."

"Would it bore you to go again?"

Ina found herself smiling, very slightly. "Is this small talk, Eero?"

He inclined his head, and started to walk again – still looking a little uneasy at the sound of his own name. "Nothing small about it."

They angled down Dvyliktokas Street, which looped gently around the hill upon which Kivi Bakery sat. Ina wondered whether the other Warriors had noticed that she had left; she wondered if Zoran would be able to sleep before she was back. Well, she knew the answer to the latter, at the very least. A resounding no.

"How long have you been here?"

The night markets snuck up on you: one moment they were in a dark residential street, without even the suggestion of life behind many of wood-bracketed walls they passed; the next, they were rounding a gentle corner into a marshalled set of canvas-covered stalls. Between each long line of stalls, tiny alleyways were overhung by swaying cages in which tiny birds twittered and twitched, lined with lanterns lit brightly with tiny candles burning pale red and paler orange. The whole place was utterly bathed in gold and amber, as though this ordinary place could somehow be made divine simply by communion of enough people, the passage of enough hours spent in quiet companionship.

"Here, in Illéa?" They had moved past a few stalls before Eero answered; Ina wondered whether he had been thinking about his answer all that time, or whether he had forgotten that she had asked anything, or if maybe he had been hoping that she would forget. The woman manning the chocolates stall smiled at them sweetly, and offered them free samples, and shook her head sadly when Ina indicated that they were here to stroll, rather than shop. There was no malice; there was no bustle here, not like daytime markets. It was a more gentle, relaxed ambiance. One could simply wander, if one wanted to, for as long as one wanted to – and Ina did want to. Eero said, "I'm not sure."

Not sure? How could he not be sure? Ilja kept track of each sunset; Khalore carved tallies into her wooden tabletop; Ghjuvan needed only to count his bruises to give a good estimate.

Eero reached to touch, gently, a bracelet with an anchor charm hanging from it. The jewellery vendor had threads dripping from him, pale violet, to the other stall-holders and to many of the customers, a companionable and relaxed colour. It struck her again how noticeable the absence made Eero; how much it made him stand out. He was an oasis, in a cloud of noise and colour. She might have blamed a curse – which curses were left, really, which one could she blame? – but the other Warriors had their strings, didn't they, and Ina had hers. Would Pekka? Maybe it was a Hämäläinen thing. Or maybe, as before, she was denying the obvious.

She said, softly, afraid of the answer, "how long do you have left?"

In his eyes, it was apparent – painfully apparent – that he didn't want to tell her. Not the full ten years, certainly not, certainly less, but less, how less, how much less? She found that his blue eyes were utter blank slates when she searched them for this answer. Would he even last the year? He'd died eight years ago – not died, clearly not died – but he had left, left eight years ago. So two years, two at the most, two if he was strong and his curse was kind? Insofar as strength mattered, when it came to these things; if strength mattered, when it came to these things.

Hadn't his brother been strong?

"Long enough," was his answer, which wasn't really an answer at all, and rather sounded like something Kinga might say. Pekka had always compared the two; Ina was starting to see why that was. She was also starting to see the larger gaps, where exactly the comparison didn't quite draw together. There was greater kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness in Eero, and far less blistering intensity. He was taller, too, with neater eyebrows. "Long enough for what we need to do."

She said, somewhat sadly, "Eero, you're not really giving me much to work with here."

But what had she expected? That he would talk to her, confide in her, trust her – and why? Because his dead brother had loved her? Because she had loved him?

And Eero, wearing the look that men wore when they couldn't bear to see Ina sad, replied, "you know, I always thought that was why people cry at old plays, and at traditional ballads, and at dead men's poetry."

She blinked at him, like a sparrow stunned by the sensation of falling, not exactly sure where he was going with this.

"Because everybody's doomed. No one in the song can help themselves in any way. The tune will always be the same. The story always has to end as it did the last time. It's a staked claim." He smiled. "Are you hungry? Should we eat?"

They did eat, from carved wooden bowls heaped high with questionable cuts of meat steeped in strong-smelling sauces. They dipped thick chunks of reikäleipä into the stew, and ate it together, as was tradition. For a long moment, there was silence – no, not silence, because the night market continued to buzz about them, conversation and laughter melding all around them. Rather, Ina and Eero were silent. He was watching her; she was attempting, furtively, to watch him too, and doing a bad job of it. Finally, he said, with a tone that suggested he was inclined to smile, "I'm being cryptic."

"Yes," she said, "I can tell." A string twitched and pulled taut around her middle finger – a pale steel blue, nearly grey, but with the slightest threads of pale purple. She couldn't see where exactly it disappeared to. Perhaps one of her customers, one of her neighbours, one of the neighbourhood kids to whom she occasionally donated excess kleicha if she thought they looked particularly thin that day.

"I'm sorry." He folded his hands. His ring caught the light, flickering like jewelled fire along his knuckle. His skin was very tan, almost golden – like his hair. "I'm not used to… it's been a while since I could be honest."

It must have been lonely, Ina thought. She couldn't imagine being here, arriving here, spending so many years here, alone – without Ghju or Kinga, without Zula, without Khal and without Ilja. Without Zor. Ina hadn't realised how deeply entwined the xrafstars had become, how deeply embedded in her heart, until the thought of doing it without them flickered across her mind. It was utterly unnerving; she resolved not to think of it again. Ina had no need of more sorrow in her life.

And, anyway, they were here now, for Eero. She was here for him. He didn't have to be alone anymore.

"So," Eero said. "Allow me to be a little less cryptic. What would you like to know?

And, well, Ina didn't quite know where to start with that.

At the beginning?