taarradhin (n.) a compromise where everyone wins; a win-win situation.

Someone had left a cream-coloured vellum envelope on the stoop of the atelier, addressed to Khalore Angelo in a neat cursive script. Within, there was a small slip of paper, ragged at the edges as though torn from a notebook in haste, covered in the same elegant blue ink and signed in the name of the first-class Scholar, Lorencio Suero. Upon that slip of paper lay a heaped silver chain with an oval dog-tag hanging from it, the name upon it printed starkly:

GHJUSEPU MANAZU

They had misspelled his name, Khalore had pointed out, her voice dull. They had misprinted it, that name that was not his name. She had, nonetheless, refused to part from it; even now, Ina could see it wound tightly around her wrist, the tag itself bound to the place her pulse was strongest. The Hanged Man's sleeve mostly covered it; it was only when she raised her hand, as now, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear that the silver shone and drew the eye. Ina kept half-imagining that it was one of the threads of her curse, but – no.

She had watched Ghjuvan's thread snap. She had almost reeled from the sudden violence of it. Just like that: then, and then gone, trailing away into the smoke which had billowed from the burning buildings on all sides, vanishing as though it never existed at all. Khalore's silhouette seemed somehow pale without it; it had been the brightest of her threads, the brightest and strongest.

"Did you write a reply?"

She turned Suero's note over in her fingers; Khalore's mouth tightened as she turned away, her shoulders setting like a girl expecting a slap in the face that never came. In her new, pilfered, dress, she seemed much smaller than Ina remembered her being. With her hair grown long now, tied back into a loose ponytail, and purple bruises beneath her eyes, she looked oddly lost. She had lost weight in Illéa; they all had. It might have seemed pitiable if not for the knife glinting malignantly in her belt. "Inanna." She sounded as tired as she looked.

"Lore." Ina did not relent, setting the piece of paper firmly back onto the work counter and speaking as softly as her throat would allow, rubbed raw as it was with the previous night's sobbing. She was relieved that no one had seemed to hear her, though she had felt a strange and sudden coldness upon waking without Zoran beside her, or his footsteps in the hallway outside. When she had descended the stairs to the workshop in the morning, Eero had made her a hot drink with mint leaves and lemon juice, and said nothing, and that had warmed her slightly – only slightly. "His offer won't stay on the table forever."

"Can you really imagine it, Nanna?" Khalore's voice was laced with bitterness. "Me? A Scholar?"

"Why not?"

"If you have to ask," Khalore said coldly, "then you have the same odds as I."

Ina didn't take it personally; she wasn't sure she physically could, not now, not after all that had happened. It was understandable, wasn't it, when all that was left of your best friend was a mispelled metal chain and the offer of tutelage in devilry?

Khalore had refused to even meet the excubitor who had come to the door to break the news to them. The tagma soldier hadn't seemed to take it personally; she certainly hadn't lingered for long. There were so many houses to visit, so many families to inform, so many people scattered after the fall of Aizsaule District. She had been brisk and business-like, though Ina had detected something approaching guilt in her voice – survivor's guilt, Eero had said afterwards, the awful shame of living after better men had fallen. She had known Ghjuvan, she said; he had saved her life in Mag Mell.

"I owe him everything," Rakel Sjöberg had said. "And I am so sorry it came to this."

"That means," Ina had said, "more than you can know."

She was, of course, lying.

Ghjuvan had recorded Khalore Angelo as his only family, but that meant little; despite their jokes, he had no belongings to distribute, no things of his own to leave behind. There had only been condolences – businesslike, for there was, in Illéa, an entire industry in grief and bereavement. Inanna had not wanted to keep the girl with the scarred face on the doorstep for long, not when there were another dozen families to notify before the day was up. She had thanked her quietly for her time, and offered her a loaf of bread, and watched her retreat back down the road, her red hair shining beneath the sun like a long lick of fire.

Kass District was a genteel place, more elegant than the quaint and provincial feel of Aizsaule District. It was a town of merchants and small businesses, the kind of place where middle-aged fellows stood on street-corners reading newspapers together and loudly discussing the latest news from the palace on the hill. She could hear them now, like amateur town-criers: encroachments from the south you say? The tagma will be overwhelmed before long – who would willing go to service there? It was nice here, relaxed; the tagma here were few and wasted. What was the use of druj-killers here, so far from the druj?

Eero had an atelier here, though it wasn't immediately clear to Ina what work he did in the workshop; it was a small, cramped space, far more so than the bakery, so that Ina and Khalore shared one bed in the loft while Eero slept on a futon in the workshop, where they also ate and quietly planned their next steps. There was a small space beneath the stairs, what might have been a servant's quarters, where they had laid a glassy-eyed Hyacinth. The World often whiled away afternoons thus, sitting on the floor next to her bed, limbs splayed, Hyacinth's pale wrist held gently in his strong grip, doing whatever healing work he could. She was still alive, he had said, though he had agreed with Zoran's conclusion on the matter – she was simply gone.

Azula had cut her strings. It was looking doubtful as to whether the World could stitch them back together.

Khalore felt similarly about it all, if the way she spoke now was any indication: "if you wanted a Scholar, then Schovajsa, maybe Estlebourgh… not me, Ina. Not me." She was holding a screwdriver in her hand, bloodied at the tip where Khalore had used it to rip out a tooth earlier in the week; in a single fluid motion, she drove it into the stone surface of the work counter. The rock split and fractured without even the slightest amount of resistance, so that the screwdriver stood on its head, utterly straight and fixed into place. A veritable Excalibur. "This is what I'm good for."

She hadn't needed to remove the tooth; it hadn't been giving her any trouble. She had done it on a whim when neither Ina or Eero were watching her, maybe partially to give physical shape to her pain, maybe partially to test the limits of her curse, maybe partially just because she had wanted something to do with her hands.

"You can be good at two things, Khal."

"You can," Khalore agreed, "but I tend not to be."

She wrenched the screwdriver out of the counter again and tucked it into her belt, next to her knife; she was building a veritable artillery, Ina thought. If she ever tracked down the machete used to amputate her arm, then she would be absolutely unstoppable. She did not express this sentiment, however; she just said, softly, "your signature isn't that hard to forge."

"I usually," Khalore said dourly, "sign with an X. Illiteracy, you know. It's a burden."

Ina had to laugh, just a little bit, at that – how did that saying go? If she didn't laugh, she would cry.

They were interrupted by the door slamming open and shut as Eero slipped back inside; the wind threatened to bring it off its hinges, so strong did it rip through the street beyond. He was knocking the rain off his boots as he came up the stairs; it was a gesture that made Ina's heart ache all over again. Pekka had always done the same, particularly after it had snowed. Of all the things she had expected to find difficult in the aftermath of Aizsaule, she had not quite counted the sheer and constant sting of familiarity. He smiled like Pekka; he made his tea like Pekka; he ladder-laced his boots, like Pekka.

There were ways in which he was different – more, perhaps, than similarities. He turned over pages in books to mark his place, rather than use a bookmark; he slept on his side, rather than on his back; he cracked his knuckles when he was thinking, which had always irritated Pekka more than he was willing to admit. But it was harder to see those, sometimes. Like searching for landmarks through a cloud of mist.

He said, "there's a storm coming," and that sounded like Pekka too, the simple way he said it, like it was true by virtue of him pronouncing it so.

"Good," Khalore said, rather darkly, "we were overdue."

He came up the stairs, hefting a rope bag of provisions over his shoulder. He was slow and deliberate in his movements – Ina refused to draw any parallels there, though they screamed for attention – as he moved across the workshop and eyed the mark Khalore had left in the stone. He said nothing, but Ina saw the edges of his mouth quirk into a slight smile, particularly when he flicked his gaze towards the screwdriver in Khalore's belt.

Our little butcher, he had called her. Ina still wasn't sure how he had managed to make it sound so affectionate, but he had. They had spent days in Aizsaule after it had fallen, watching the pyres from the roof of an abandoned house and killing druj as they came. Seeing the World's curse in action – it made a little more sense, Ina thought, that he had survived alone in the long journey across the monster-filled sea, the forest full of nightmares. Ina's arms still ached; sometimes she found her fingers itching for the phantom weight of the sword in her grasp. After six months of relative peace, it had taken only a few hours of violence to return her to a restless state of tension, brutal in its utter refusal to loose its grip on her, sleeping or awake. She couldn't imagine what it was like to exist like this constantly, as their little butcher did.

It had been a full week from the fall of Aizsaule. Some part of her still wanted to hurt the world for how much it had taken from her. A larger part of her just wanted it all back.

"Any luck?"

Eero shook his head. "Ilja and I will scour again after dark."

"All those bodies," Khalore said. "We're never going to find him."

"A little faith," Ina said, tiredly, "please."

If anyone could, it would be Eero and Ilja – the World and the Chariot. Ilja was a veritable vessel of strange knowledge and intuition. And they knew where Ghjuvan had died; it was just a matter of finding the right pyre.

They needed to retrieve the curse. No one involved wanted to be the one to lose a curse back to Illéa.

Eero leaned against the counter. His hair was still too long; he had brushed off all offers to cut it. Ina didn't blame him – it suited him well like this, offering some hint of softness to a face that could otherwise have been carved from flint. Neither Hämäläinen had a face which suggested how gentle they could be. Eero's hair looked particularly like gold in this light. She was getting used to the strangeness of his stringless silhouette, how empty the room seemed when there was only a single thread binding Khalore and Inanna, how difficult it had suddenly become to gauge her responses to him without the subtle shift of colour and thickness upon which she had slowly come to depend for context cues.

"Any news on the Selection?" Khalore asked, reaching towards the bag for one of the oranges rolling free across the counter.

"Ilja didn't say much."

Did he ever? Khalore scowled. "He's almost as useless as we are."

Eero smiled. "Oh, much more so."

Ina had been surprised to learn that he was impressed by their progress in their mission, rather than derisive of the same – he had seemed genuinely taken aback when Khalore had mentioned that they had been in Illéa for six months. Six months, he had said, you've infiltrated every level of their society in six months?

When he put it like that…

Ina hadn't been alone. Khalore had practically preened beneath his praise. Now, however, she just adjusted her empty sleeve, Ghjuvan's dog-tags glinting on her wrist.

The sight of them made Ina's heart beat somehow harder and more hollow, like a drum beating out some warning she could not decipher.

I love you, Nanna. You do know that, don't you? We're family.

Not family.

Ina said, "got some time before dinner?"

Eero's smile broadened and sweetened when he looked at her. He understood immediately; it must have been apparent in her eyes. "Get your sword."

"You're putting too much weight into it. Let the sword do the work."

"I am." A laugh, ground out through teeth gritted with effort that suggested his criticism was more accurate than she would like to admit.

A smile in his voice stained the words golden. "You sure about that?"

He twisted his wrist, hard; her sword flew from her hand, as it had a dozen times that afternoon. Inanna swore loudly; in a flash of silver, the flat of his blade was kissing Ina's throat, very gently. It was just a reminder, just a gentle suggestion of what might be or what might have been.

"Well," Ina said, "maybe not as sure as I should have been."

Eero's smile was very white in the fading light; he lowered his sword, spinning it in his hand, as Ina went to retrieve her own. It was still strange to think of it as hers, though Eero had been explicit on that point. It was a gorgeous artefact of gold and intricate white engravings crawling across the blade, like something enchanted. "Commandant never taught you this one?"

"He never taught me this one." Inanna smiled. She was not a natural dueller; she had worked hard at this particular skill, to master the intricate and strange equilibrium of balance and speed and strength that the discipline demanded, and she knew that Commandant had never really viewed her as a doyenne of swordsmanship – not when she shared each sparring session with the likes of Kinga and Khalore. But Pekka had helped her; she had lifted herself, slowly and painstakingly, out of mediocrity under his tutelage. "He always was a man of common sense."

"Reckon you can manage it this time?"

Ina said, "oh, probably not."

She always did try to be realistic.

This time, she also tried to be proactive, moving before his signal – that was a Nerezza Astaroth move, if anything was – sword flashing, she stepped inside his reach, left foot in front of right, so that, as he thrust a quart across the arm, she could parry it high into what Commandant had always called second position, driving his sword higher than his balance could comfortably countenance.

She ignored that he seemed amused, rather than impressed, by this turn of events. She seized his wrist, spun on her heel, and pulled his fist down strongly, pressing the forte of her blade strongly against the back of his in what Commandant had always called third position. It was comforting to think of it like that – numbered positions stacked atop one another, like figuring out a mathematical problem. It didn't demand any thinking on her feet; she could focus on getting the motions right, rather than determining what those motions should be.

He could have countered this disarm with a simple feint. He knew it; she knew it as well. He could have, but, ah, Ina thought, he hadn't.

She twisted her wrist, hard.

Let the sword do the work.

The sword jumped from his hand as though it had burned him.

His sword clattered to the roof loudly; the sound almost bolstered her. His elbow bent over her shoulder thus, she could have broken it in a single moment. It was the simplest way to throw someone, Commandant had always said, particularly someone who was larger than you – make the alternative considerably more painful to falling. Most of the times, the other person would practically hurl themselves over your shoulder to avoid permanent damage.

Kinga had always delighted in pulling this move on Pekka; once, just once, he had been stubborn – stubborn, young, and stupid. He ha refused to move. She had fractured his arm in two places before the Commandant had ordered them pulled apart. They had laughed about it over dinner that evening; the Szymańska girl had the decency to look abashed, particularly when her sister had heard what she'd done.

Eero had more sense than his younger brother, it would seem; he went willingly. Ina remembered Pekka always turning to grab his poor opponent's collar before they could actually hit the ground and hurt themselves. She tried that now, but too slow, a single moment too slow – and she needn't have worried. She might have thrown Eero, but he twisted as he went, and landed on his feet, and steadied her with a gentle hand on her shoulder when she spun to try and catch him.

"Nicely done," he said, very softly. "Very creative."

She didn't mention the uncertainties, slight though they were, brewing in her chest at this method of training. They were preparing, transparently, to fight people rather than druj; she remembered Ghjuvan saying that he had drawn some attention for that when training with the tagma, for the fact that he seemed better able to kill a person than to slay a monster. It made sense – she knew it made sense – she had already killed two people here. But the pleasantly coloured threads tied around her wrist, orange and pink and yellow, binding her to Illéan neighbours all around the district…

It was strange, she thought, how quickly the fall of Aizsaule District had disabused them all of the notion that this was a situation from which they could extricate themselves. Mielikki was dead; Ghjuvan was dead; Hyacinth was gone. There was no version of this mission where they won, not completely, not unadulterated.

There was no such thing as a win-win now, if there ever had been, if there ever could have been, if there ever should have been, with ten years trickling away behind their backs like so much sand in the hourglass.

They had already lost too much for that.

"Thank you," she said, softly, "you didn't do too badly yourself."

"You flatter me, Inanna."

She knelt for his sword, and returned it to him, running her eyes over the engravings as she did so. They looked familiar – elegant characters running into one another in a sinuous continuum of loops and lines and dashes. Like something her mother might have had on a piece of embellished jewellery. She said, "how much longer?"

Accepting the weapon from her, Eero flipped it in his hand, and paced to the edge of the roof, drawing it through the air as though testing it. Was that some legacy of the World, the way the tip seemed to carve a silver line through the simple fabric of the air itself? "Once we find the Radiance," he said. He always sounded like this when he spoke about the Radiance – urgent, and wondering, and hopeful. It was his ticket home. His key to a tentative redemption. His only path back to Eero Hämäläinen. Ina couldn't blame him. She knew that Ilja and Khalore felt similarly about their mission, even if Khal had seemed to soften slowly over the past six months. "Once we find the Radiance…"

We.

"Once," she said, "not if?"

"It has been awakened now." He shrugged. Something glinted silver near the gold of his hair; his eyes were brighter than any sky she had ever glimpsed. "It's only a matter of time."