The Fate of Miss Furina Focalors

by midnightsnapdragon

Furina adjusts to anonymity. Neuvillette adjusts to her absence. In between, they both remember an opera singer from three hundred years ago, who during her time as prima donna captured not only the Hydro Archon's patronage, but her particular fancy.

…

Operation Soup hit the first snag when she found herself in the middle of her tiny kitchen and realized that she had never been inside one before.

A kitchen, that is. Not a soup.

She'd been on kitchensetsbefore, but it wasn't at all the same thing. There were actual pots in the cupboard (which she'd had to drag a chair in from the tiny living room to check) and pans hanging over the stove (which she didn't know how to operate) and actualknivesin the knife block (which she didn't dare touch). Were you supposed to put on some kind of uniform in a kitchen? A … bib? Apron? Maybe that was housewives. She had a vision of a stout farmer woman carrying freshly-laid eggs in her skirts and then throwing them into the air one after the other, the way Maman Tourtière did in La ComédieBête. It had bored her at the time, but now she was starting to think she'd rather try her hand at juggling than at — what was it called again? Cooking?

Whatever. She could get an apron later.

On the kitchen counter she had laid out, after a painstaking three hours' indecision:

3 vegetables. (1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 … potato? She was pretty sure it was a potato.)

Knife. (The smallest one).

Rolling pin. (Maman Poulin used it to clobber a thief, so it would probably come in useful.)

Pot half-full of water. (Boiling water DID come into it somewhere, right?)

She was tired of cereal. It was … how to put it delicately … not what she was used to. She may not have been the Hydro Archon anymore, but she had standards to maintain, god damn it. It was a matter of personal dignity.

Personal dignity took a flying leap out the window when she picked up the kitchen pot and gingerly placed it in the middle of the stove. Between the ominous-looking black circles seemed like the best place for it. She stood and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And leaned against the wall.

And waited.

And felt her stomach grumble.

And waited.

And finally lost her patience.

Her leaving-the-house disguise was by the front door. Hat, scarf, sunglasses, heavy overcoat. Furina stomped across to it and threw it on, shoving her hair under the hat like it had personally caused all her suffering. Couldn't Neuvillette have at least left her an instruction book or something? There were books out there with cooking instructions, weren't there? Yes, he'd assigned her the house; yes, he'd seen to that most of the necessities were provided; yes, he'd personally escorted her there and withdrawn all the leftover moisture from the walls and ceilings and carpets and sofas and groutings or whatever they were called, but she was hungry! He should have …

Should have known how useless you are? jeered a voice in her head. Like he doesn't already?

She stuck her head out through the door and looked both ways before hurrying to her next-door neighbour's house. She racked up her courage and rung the bell.

Madelle Sophie opened the door. "Oh, hello, Cosette," she said, squinting into the blinding sunshine. "Is it your kettle again?"

Furina winced. "No."

"Your radiator?"

"No —"

"Sophie!" yelled a man from somewhere inside the townhouse, "The cats got into the pantry again!"

"JUST A MINUTE! I'M TALKING TO SOMEONE!" bellowed Sophie, then turned back to Furina as though she hadn't just effortlessly out-shouted a concert trumpet. "Sorry, dear. What seems to be the problem?"

"My oven's broken," Furina said faintly, her ears ringing. "Could I possibly trouble you to take a look?"

"Of course," Sophie said. "Just let me get my toolbox. I'm sure it's an easy fix."

Furina's cheeks burned with mortification under the wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses. Easy fix was Sophie's tactful way of saying basic lesson in household implements. Yet she always went to fetch the toolbox, as if this time she was sure it really was something caused not by Furina's ignorance but by the apocalyptic flood that had wrecked hundreds of residential buildings throughout Fontaine and all the household implements inside them.

It wasn't, as it turned out. The implements in Furina's house, as in maybe five or six other houses in the citadel, worked fine. Apparently you were supposed to put the kitchen pot on one of the ominous-looking black circles and then turn the dial.

"Just throw your stuff in when it's hot enough and you're all set," Sophie told her, tying her boots back on in the entryway. "Right now I should probably go rescue Antoine from those monsters, but you let me know if you need anything else, okay?"

"I will," Furina said, intending not to mean it but knowing she probably wouldn't have a choice. "You've been ever so kind, Madelle."

"Don't mention it. How are your eyes doing?"

"Oh … fine."

"Do you need anything from the kitchen? Sugar's in short supply, but we've been allotted a few more grain rations. Because of the children, you know."

How long did it normally take people to lace up their boots? "No, no," Furina said. "I have enough. Thank you. I don't want to keep you too long."

"No such thing as too long between neighbours. But I'll let you get back to cooking. Let me know how it turns out afterward, all right, dear?"

The front door closed. Furina lunged to throw the lock, then slumped back against it.

Okay. Well. That was humiliating.

But Operation Soup was on a roll and would not be stopped.

She stood watching the pot on the "element" for a while, wondering how you could tell if it was hot enough for cooking. Touching the bottom of the pot revealed — not a distant warmth, exactly, but a warmth that had just boarded the aquabus for the journey home. Frustrated, she nudged the pot to the side, turned the dial up a wee bit more, then touched the pad of one finger to the edge of one slowly reddening element.

It registered not as heat, but as pain. She yelped, jerking her arm back, and accidentally elbowed the bowl of water off the counter and sent the kitchen knife whizzing into the sink.

"Ow!" she said, belatedly, and only really because she felt like she needed to communicate the raging injustice of being assaulted by her own stovetop. Then added, with a burst of inspiration, "Fuck!"

Immediately the old reflex kicked in and she whipped her head from side to side, like there might be someone hiding behind the fridge who would give a rat's ass that the biggest fraud in Fontainian history said fuck in the privacy of her own home.

There was no one. Anxiety fled. She felt, if anything, euphoric.

"Fuck," she repeated quietly, just to see how it felt. And, more daring now, "Fuck!"

It felt great. Neuvillette had probably never said fuck in his life.

Imagining it should have made her laugh. It had first occurred to her maybe fifty years into their acquaintance, at which time she'd burst into uncontrollable giggles all by herself in the silence of the Palais Mermonia library and then marched directly up to his office to demand what it would take for him to swear. "A great deal," he'd said, without even looking up from his paperwork.

"How about the apocalypse?"

"Perhaps. It would have to have been a truly upsetting experience."

Who was going to make him answer for his dreary sobriety now that she was gone? Not Clorinde, who was just as bad. Not the Melusines, who all thought he'd hung the stars in the sky. Maybe the prison warden. There was no one else he really spoke to on a regular basis. Anyway, it wasn't like she poked at him for his own good; she did it because it was funny, and because he made it easy. And because she couldn't poke at anyone else without giving the impression that the Hydro Archon considered herself of low enough standing to tease common mortals like they were her friends.

She crept across the living room and pulled the curtains aside just far enough to glimpse the townhouses across the street — currently being scurried over by a dozen temp workers who'd lost their livelihoods in the flood — and above them, the rounded columns of the Palais Mermonia with their distinctive vents, not unlike organ pipes, casting long blue shadows over the sunlit citadel.

That palace had been her seat of power for five hundred years. Her throne, and her prison. Now the archon's mantle was Neuvillette's to wear, and she would likely never have business with him ever again.

Whatever. It wasn't like he was going to miss her. She yanked the curtain back across the window and had to give her eyes a moment to adjust; she couldn't remember the last time Fontaine had seen sunshine like this.

The doorbell rang.

She froze, one hand still clutched in the curtain.

Sophie never rang the bell. Sophie knocked. There was water all over the kitchen floor and the element on the stove was still on and — had someone seen her in the window? Her shirt was all wet! And there was a scratch on her arm from the knife when she'd elbowed it! Who was trying to —

Actually, no. She was better than that now. Freer. In touch with her true self.

Who, pardon her Fontainese, the FUCK was trying to get into her house?

Wait. Of course! Who'd gotten her this address in the first place? Who'd told her to get in touch if she wanted for anything? Who was the only person left who was likely to care if she starved to death living off of cereal? There was hardly anyone else it could be. She ran to the front door, fluffed her hair, cleared her throat, then unlocked it and flung it aside.

"Well, well, well! Look who finally looked up from his desk to —"

And seeing who it was on her front doorstep, choked.

"Um," said Charlotte, with a sheepish smile. "Hi."

Furina slammed the door shut. It was too late. Charlotte had already got one foot over the threshold and was trying to get her shoulder in as well.

"Lady Furina —"

"No!"

"Please, if you would just —"

"No!"

"— hear me out, I promise I'll be out of your hair in literally two seconds —"

"Go away!" Furina cried, straining to close the door on her. "I don't want to talk to you!"

"Two seconds!" Charlotte ground out, pushing just as hard from the other side. "Please! That's all I ask!"

"I said," Furina started, only to be shoved back against the wall by an inexorable force; in other words, a door driven open by a very determined woman in a journalist's uniform. Charlotte burst through onto the entryway carpet, and Furina, who'd been using her entire body weight against the door, fell against it as it banged shut.

"I'm … I'm so sorry to barge in," Charlotte said dazedly. "I didn't hurt you, did I?"

Furina, propping herself back up on the doorknob, goggled at her.

Charlotte glanced anxiously at it, as though expecting to see a Furina-shaped imprint in the painted wood. "Are you all right?"

"No!" Furina shrieked. Her voice shot through two octaves in a single syllable; she was stressed, for mercy's sake; a journalist had just broken into her house, and now she would never, ever know any peace. "No, I'm not all right! You just forced your way into my house!"

"Reflex! It was reflex, I'm sorry! I just —"

"I want you to leave! This instant!"

"Lady Furina —" Charlotte raised her hands to signal peace. "Please, two minutes of your time is all I ask. You have no idea how hard it was to find you."

Furina stopped, chest heaving, feeling as though all the blood had just drained from her face. The number of people who knew where she lived couldn't have held up a birthday banner. "How did you find me?"

"Well," Charlotte said slowly, "I went to Chief Justice Neuvillette —"

"And he gave you my address?!"

"No! No, he refused. He said you wouldn't want to talk to me. So I had to track down the traveller instead —"

"And they told you?"

"No," Charlotte admitted. "I got it out of Paimon."

That rotten snitch would do anything for food. Furina drew herself up to her full height. "MissCharlotte," she said, trying to recuperate the tatters of her dignity, "I'm well aware of who you are and your extensive record of — irregular tactics in investigative journalism —"

"Ehh," Charlotte said, wincing, a high-pitched that's-not-what-I-would-call-it noise.

"— and quitefrankly, I'm not interested. Shall I save you the time? Yes, I'm a fraud; yes, I was found guilty; yes, I'm mortal now, but none of that matters, because if you breathe a word to anyone of where I am or what I'm doing on my own time, you'll have to answer to Chief Justice Neuvillette, is that clear?"

"Of course, Lady Furina. Clear as crystal."

"Perfect!" Furina said. "Then we're done here. Kindly see yourself out."

"Actually, I'm here because I was hoping this would be an opportunity for the both of us," Charlotte blurted out, as though the faster she spoke the more likely Furina was to not throw her out on her ass. "I can understand why you don't want to speak to me, but I'm asking you to please reconsider. I don't know if you know, but there's still a lot of confusion about what really happened that day, especially considering how few people were at your trial —"

"Miss Charlotte —"

"— and there's so much hearsay going around that no one knows who was innocent or guilty in the first place!"

If anyone said those words to Furina's face one more time, she was going to scream or cry or throw up or — or — or just lie down and have a tantrum. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, it makes things easier for people to understand, for a start —"

"Does it! I, personally, would love to understand!"

"The point is," Charlotte continued doggedly, "a full feature would give you the chance to tell your side of the story and straighten out some of the —"

"I have better things to do, Miss Charlotte," Furina said, raising her voice to a singsong pitch.

"— mysteries surrounding the day of the flood," Charlotte barreled on, raising her voice to match, "because there's so much that your people want to ask you and the longer you go on without clearing your name, the likelier it is that some crackpot story will take root in the public's imagination!"

Furina laughed.

Interrupted in the middle of what she probably thought was an impassioned speech fit to move an archon, Charlotte stopped with her mouth half-open and stared at her as though she'd completely lost her head. Furina covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers to stop the hysterical titters bubbling up from some bitter wellspring of her heart.

"Oh, Miss Charlotte," she managed at last, "I thank you, truly. I needed that. But you've wasted your time. There's nothing left of my name to clear. And I would so hateto report you for your conduct …"

She crowded her toward the door, and Charlotte retreated, step by step. "Wait, Lady Furina! Just a moment, I swear." She was starting to sound increasingly desperate. "Don't you want people to know the truth? If you really did save Fontaine, like the Iudex says, shouldn't your people know about it?"

"They know I'm a fake, and that's all that matters," Furina said. She reached past Charlotte and opened the door for her. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other things to attend to."

Charlotte tripped over the threshold to the front porch. She caught herself and straightened her hat. "Wait, please, I know I didn't go about this the right way, but now that we're here, you should really consider —"

"No, thank you," Furina snapped. "My entire life has been a crackpot story, Miss Charlotte, and it stopped being funny about five hundred years ago."

She slammed the door. The last thing she heard was Charlotte's yelp as she flinched backward, narrowly avoiding a flattened nose.

Furina slumped against the door. For a while she waited, chest heaving — for the knock, the bell, the hammering fists. None came. As if through deep water, she heard Charlotte's voice, mumbling curses, trickle out of earshot.

Some crackpot story. She looked out across the sparsely furnished living room she had inhabited for six weeks.

"Well," she said aloud, her voice shaking a little. "That wasn't so bad."

Then she slid down to the floor, huddled with her arms around her knees, and burst into tears.

…

The heavens had all cried themselves out. That there had been no more rain was fortunate; not only might it have set off a wave of public hysteria, it would have ruined the efforts of every person on Fontainian soil still trying to rescue their clothes, sheets, rugs, towels, curtains, couch cushions and feather pillows from mould growth. Those who had managed to recuperate some of their personal belongings, in any case. Neuvillette stood at the window of his office with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out at the myriad waters surrounding the Court of Fontaine, and carefully, for the umpteenth time, redid his mental tally of the Court's not-so-myriad resources.

Things were not as hopeless as they'd first seemed. Like the tides, the world would return to its normal state in time. They would continue to receive aid from Liyue and Sumeru. Public anxiety would fade. The nation would rebuild.

And he would remain at the Palais Mermonia alone.

"Excuse me," said a muffled voice.

He turned. There was an impressive stack of portable chalkboards in the doorway, each as wide as a standard-issue bureau. And, tottering to hold it up, a Melusine.

"The latest batch of property damage reports, sir."

"Thank you, Javerte," he said. "You may leave them on my desk."

She did as he'd asked and vanished.

Neuvillette eyed the stack with regret. Paper was in short supply given that the flood had reduced Fontaine's eight pulp mills to little more than piles of broken timber and machinery, so he'd had to get creative, as humans liked to say. Chalk was mined, broken and refined into usable styluses much more quickly than pens, pencils or indeed paper to write with could be manufactured. Needless to say, he was being extremely vigilant about his one remaining respectable coat.

The palace bureaucracy and Maison Gardiennage had been hotbeds of fluctuating morale ever since the flood. Every day he heard — mostly in passing or by accident — a dozen different members of his staff complaining about the shortages, the backbreaking work of reconstruction, how long it would be before they could ratchet their quality of life up to what it had been before. They all fell silent if they realized he was within earshot, but did not usually look particularly ashamed of themselves. Neuvillette left them alone in part because he knew they would bolster each other's spirits when it became truly necessary. This being the performance evaluation of a lifetime, they could scarcely do anything else; what would any of them live on if they were turned out with two weeks' pay?

But for the most part, he left them alone because their discontent had little effect on his own morale. There were many hundreds who had perished because they'd never learned to swim, or because Wriothesley's ark had not reached them in time, or for any other number of reasons. The grief of the nation could be better spent on mourning them than on bemoaning lost typewriters. Hisgrief was for one person only, and it was buoyed up by a mixture of guilt and gratitude that he had never felt before.

Humans believed in jinxes. Perhaps he might have jinxed her into the room. He glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to see her lounging on the settee. How sad, my dear Iudex. I turn around for one minute and it's like I never existed for you. As if you could be rid of me that easily!

Wishful thinking, of course. The office was empty.

He turned back to the window. It was too high up to afford him a clear view of the street; he could only make out half the boulevard and a row of demolished flowerbeds along the outer edge. He waited for a while, watching several dozen people pass in and out of view. Then, feeling a little foolish about it, he leaned closer to the glass in case the extra inch of street-level perspective revealed her to be strolling along near the palace walls where it was most difficult to see.

It didn't.

"Monsieur Neuvillette?"

He turned. Another one of his staff was in the doorway, holding a piece of chalk and a blackboard slate attached to a string around her neck. Clipboards, like paper, were on indefinite leave of absence.

"Yes, Fantine?"

"I've finished gathering Lady Furina's belongings. They're in her old parlour."

"Ah. Thank you."

"Shall I have a message delivered to her?"

Fantine was one of the few members of palace staff to whom he had entrusted Furina's new address. "No," said Neuvillette, after a pause. "It can wait." He would prefer, if at all possible, to avoid giving the impression that he was trying to eradicate whatever was left of her presence from the palace. The ideal thing would be if she returned to the palace of her own accord and demanded that her possessions be restored to her.

Which she surely would. By this point it was only a matter of days.

"Of course." Fantine scribbled something on her chalkboard, scattering white dust over the office carpet. "How long should I wait?"

"A week. Perhaps two."

"Very well."

When she had gone, he peered out the window one last time, a wistful impulse he could not make himself ignore, before returning to his desk. Those property damage reports had gone ignored long enough.

All would be well. The nation would rebuild, and he would continue to watch over this corner of the world as was his sovereign right; and perhaps when they next spoke, Furina would pardon him for the part he had played in her suffering. He could not regret putting her on trial, nor exposing her deception — nothing that, in the grand design, had left her the master of her own fate — but he could not help but feel that he had failed her. Not once in five hundred years could she have relied upon him in the way he always thought she did. When they next spoke, he would tell her …

"Ahem."

He looked up, realizing that he'd stopped like clockwork with a chalk slate in either hand. Fantine was in the doorway. She brought her fist up to her mouth and cleared her throat against it.

"I am sorry to interrupt," she said politely. "There's someone here for you."

Neuvillette stood at once, pushing his chair back with more haste than was truly necessary. "Lady Furina?"

"No, sir. It's the Liyue envoy. She arrived a little earlier than we expected."

The envoy. It had completely slipped his mind. "At Lumidouce Harbour? When did they dock?"

"We don't know," said Fantine. "Because she isn't at Lumidouce Harbour. She's downstairs." She stepped back from the threshold and gestured toward the office behind her. "I think I had better warn you, monsieur … when we offered her something to drink, she asked for a drink."

"Something mild?" Neuvillette suggested, without much hope.

"Rice wine. There wasn't any in the cabinet, so I let Javerte go through Lady Furina's stash. Isn't it funny how all human things get ruined except the perishables they keep bottled up? Anyway, you had better go see her before the Maison Gardiennage arrives."

"Why, were they not informed of her arrival?"

"Oh, they were informed," said Fant. "Whether or not she was informed of anything before coming here is another matter, monsieur. I believe she reached the palace only by dint of evading arrest."

Neuvillette frowned. "Arrest? On what charges?"

Fantine heaved a sigh, and told him.

…

Apparently the Liyue envoy to Fontaine was a pirate. By mid-morning it was all over the news, which was no longer distributed to the people of the citadel every morning by newspaper but via the ancient and respected tradition of town crier. It was a new one every couple of days or so. Furina wouldn't have heard about the fiasco at all if she hadn't ventured outside for groceries, wrapped in her disguise, but for once she wasn't keen on scurrying home as fast as possible. Even the grocer — one of many chosen distributors of food aid, who barely looked twice at her ration card before dumping a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, a few packets of tea and sugar, and a selection of fruit and vegetables into the burlap sack she held out to him — was craning his neck to better hear the news being announced to the market square.

"HER EXCELLENCY CAPTAIN BEIDOU OF THE CRUX HAS ARRIVED AT THE COURT OF FONTAINE! HERE TO NEGOTIATE RELIEF AND HUMANITARIAN AID MEASURES! AS A SPECIAL ENVOY OF THE LIYUE QIXING!"

"There you go miss," the grocer said absently, trying to see over the crowd.

"Thank you," Furina gritted out.

The town crier, clearly some random unfortunate who'd either lost a bet or been directly requisitioned by the palace bureaucracy, glanced down at his left hand, where coloured threads had been tied around each of his fingers, a few of them in repeating patterns. "YOU WILL HAVE HEARD, GOOD PEOPLE, THAT PIRATES HAVE ARRIVED IN FONTAINE! THIS IS — uh — A MISUNDERSTANDING! THERE ARE NO PIRATES! THERE IS ONLY CAPTAIN BEIDOU! WHOSE WORK AS A PRIVATEER HAS WON HER GREAT RENOWN IN LIYUE AND INAZUMA AND — um — MANY OTHER PLACES!"

Furina backed away from the grocer's stall, furiously tying her burlap sack into an inexpert but by now well-practiced knot. She was not letting any of her food fall out and roll down the street, nor was she about to chase after it in front of everyone and their mother while trying frantically to keep her hat, scarf and sunglasses on at the same time, thank you very was too busy seething: five hundred years of never actually getting to meet a real pirate, and now a world-famous pirate captain had waltzed into the Palais Mermonia right when she'd walked out of it forever! Trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, she edged around the plaza toward the town crier, looking for a place where she could both hear him better and remain unnoticed.

"SHE HAS SPOKEN WITH CHIEF JUSTICE NEUVILLETE! AND ARRIVED AT A DECISION!"

"What does she look like?" called a man not far from Furina, cupping his hands around his mouth.

"How should I know?" shouted the town crier at something approaching a normal volume, looking around for whoever it was that had spoken.

"Well, you're here to tell us the news, aren't you? What does she look like?"

"Please!" said the crier, finding his heckler in the crowd. "You think anyone tells me anything?" He brandished his colour-coded fingers. "I get the report and I pass it on. I've never even seen this Captain Beidou myself."

The man in the suit crossed his arms over his chest. "The Steambird would have been able to tell us."

"The Steambird is a pile of rubble in the eastern district. Now shut up and let me do my job!"

Furina pulled the brim of her sunhat lower over her eyes. A drop of sweat had begun trickling down the back of her neck, and she was itching to wipe it off, but the instinct to do so only in privacy was too deeply ingrained.

"Anyway — AS I WAS SAYING," the town crier continuted, giving the man in the suit a dirty look, "CAPTAIN BEIDOU AND CHIEF JUSTICE NEUVILLETTE HAVE AGREED THAT IN FOUR WEEKS' TIME, ONE HUNDRED FAMILY UNITS AND AN ADDITIONAL TWO HUNDRED INDIVIDUALS WILL BE TEMPORARILY WELCOMED IN THE CHENYU VALE REGION OF LIYUE! WHILE WE REBUILD, THOSE OF US IN THE GREATEST NEED WILL BE PROVIDED WITH A HOST FAMILY AND ACCOMODATIONS UNTIL THEY CAN REASONABLY BE EXPECTED TO RETURN TO THEIR LIVELIHOODS!"

Furina turned away in disgust. She should have known better than to expect any important details, like how this Captain Beidou dressed, or how many ships she'd taken as prizes, or how she'd been granted a pardon for piracy in the first place. Trust Neuvillette to get his priorities all wrong.

By the time she returned to her little townhouse, she'd worked herself into a first-class sulk. She locked the door, dropped the groceries in her kitchen and slumped back against the wall with a melodramatic sigh that no one was even going to hear, let alone pointedly ignore from a desk piled with affidavits and various other tedious indentures.

Then something came to her attention. Her head jerked up as she focused on the kitchen sink. A drop of water had coalesced under the tap.

Then, slowly, tantalizingly, it stretched, warped, and fell.

Drip.

Furina squinted. Another drop emerged from the tap, wobbled, and followed its short-lived forebear into the drain. Drip.

Sophie was not so quick to answer the door this time. Furina, shifting her feet on the welcome mat (dry only after several weeks of being laid out in the sunshine), heard children laughing and screaming from behind the front door. Then their father's voice, shushing them, clearly organizing them into separate rooms. The door sprang open as if torn back by tornadic winds, revealing a frazzled Sophie holding a wrench in one hand and a dirty rag in the other, looking as though she were on the point of using either or both as point-blank projectiles.

"Yes? What is it?!"

Furina ducked instinctively. Sophie blinked and looked down at her, as though she'd been gearing up to answer the door to someone much taller.

"Oh! Cosette, I'm so sorry, I thought it was the solicitors again. They were sniffing around here all last week, trying to convince us we needed our air ducts cleaned. How are they even still in operation, I ask you? Fraud? Some kind of jiggery-pokery?!"

"I really couldn't say," Furina managed.

"Well, anyway, I'm glad it's you and not them." Sophie tucked the would-be projectiles into the pockets of her overalls. "What can I do for you, dear?"

It didn't seem like she was on the brink of rampage. "The tap in the kitchen sink is dripping," said Furina, eyeing the pocket with the wrench in it. "Could I possibly trouble you to take a look?"

"Hmm," said Sophie. "I can do you one better. I can teach you how to take a look. How about that?"

"Um," said Furina.

Sophie raised her eyebrows.

Furina winced.

Sophie tilted her head to the side, putting on an exaggerated Oh, come now! expression that would have been difficult even for the best actress in the world to feasibly misinterpret.

"Well," said Furina, "I don't … that is, I've never …"

"I know," Sophie said kindly. "But you know the old saying. Give a girl a fish and you feed her for a day; teach a girl to fish and you feed her for a lifetime. I'll get my toolbox."

If this were before, and if it were anyone else, Furina would have declared haughtily and without hesitation that she would rather eat a worm than learn plumbing. But this was now, and it was Sophie, and she would eat that worm in a heartbeat if it meant Sophie didn't find out that she'd spent five hundred years living in luxury as the Hydro Archon.

So she let Sophie get her toolbox. And they went to fix her kitchen faucet.

"It's pretty simple," Sophie told her cheerfully, far more cheerfully than anyone, in Furina's opinion, should be when they were elbows deep in the guts of a kitchen sink. "Remove the handle of the faucet, screw off the cartridge and add the new one. No problem, right?"

"I don't haveany new cartridges!" Furina protested.

"That's all right," Sophie said. "I had some in storage that didn't get lost. Now go on."

It was a stressful afternoon. Sophie made her do everything herself, albeit to the tune of patient instructions, and it was difficult to see with sunglasses on in her poorly-lit kitchen. But she was not removing them for Sophie to see her distinctive eyes and go running to the press, or whatever was left of it. And it was something of a relief to stop the drip. Her skin crawled the whole time, her body apparently convinced that at any moment her sink would explode and flood the house and drown her and all of Fontaine with it, but instead what happened was that Sophie packed up her toolbox and patted her on the back on the way out

"Good job. I knew you had it in you."

"Thank you, Madelle."

"No worries."

Furina shut the door behind her with an enormous sigh of relief. Groceries and plumbing, all in one day. Neuvillette had probably never done either in his life. She'd be lording it over him for years.

Well. She'd be lording it over him if she were still in a position to lord anything over anyone. She'd never again be in a position to tell him anything that wasn't "Your Honour, I swear it wasn't me," or "Your Honour, I had no idea I was going that fast." How depressing that now his company would be more of a privilege than hers! That old stick-in-the-mud wouldn't know what he'd lost until a hundred years passed and someone mentioned "fun" to him and he found himself asking, "Fun? What's that?"

She turned away from the door. Then, abruptly, froze in her tracks.

No.

Surely not. She couldn't have seen right.

Could she have?

Heart hammering, she wrenched the door back open. On the doormat, dirtied by Sophie's bootprint, lay a single ordinary playing card.

Furina would not have been where she was — a fraud, sure, but a living one — if she broke into a cold sweat at anything that unnerved her. But if you could break into a cold sweat on the inside, that was what she did now. The jack of spades stared up at her with a twinkle in his eye. Very calmly, with hands like ice, she closed the front door.

Waited there, breathing deeply, for a count of ten.

Then opened it again.

The playing card was gone.

She lifted her gaze and let it roam what she could see of the boulevard. After her upsettingfinal experiences in the Palais Mermonia and the courthouse, she knew what she thought she was looking for, but there was nothing to find.

"Could you people leave me alone?" she said aloud.

The strength of her voice faltered mid-sentence when she noticed a group of children playing across the street; hearing her, they stopped and turned their heads to stare at her, like gophers. She gave a sniff, tossed her hair back haughtily in case anyone more discerning was still watching, and vanished back inside.

Where there was a jack of spades, there was usually a knave not far behind. But she was nobody now. If they thought she had anything left which could be extorted from her, apart from the petty remains of her dignity, they would have to live with the same disappointment which the people of Fontaine had shouldered so heroically since the day Neuvillette announced her premature retirement.

Neuvillette. Would he want to know?

No. He was probably busy with his own affairs, like … oh, keeping the country running, to name just the one thing. He wouldn't appreciate her trying to skip a million official channels like she still had any right to it. Besides, what did he care? She wasn't the archon anymore. If they ever met again, he'd call her Miss Furina, as though she were anybody; maybe Madelle if by some chance they ran into each other before she died of old age or goiters or whatever it was people usually died of if they weren't stoned to death for high treason first. He would never again address her as Lady Furina, the way he had for five hundred years.

Let Arlecchino come for her if she wanted. What could she take from her now that she would be sorry to lose?

…

The first six weeks after the flood, sunlight shone down brilliantly upon the citadel from a bright blue sky. He watched hopefully from his office window, and still there was no sign of her in the boulevard.

On the seventh week, white clouds scurried like sugar mice through the sky overhead.

"Shall I go today?" Fantine offered, poking her head into the office.

Neuvillette did not turn around from where he had been contemplating the horizon.

"No," he said. "Let us give her a little more time."

On the eighth week, the clouds sank, turned gray, and gathered in number.

"It wouldn't take long," Fantine said, having picked up a stack of chalk slates from his desk to be distributed through the lower offices. "I could even bring her a few things to prove that not everything of hers was lost."

Neuvillette paused with a stub of chalk in one hand, which after several hours had coated his palm in dry white dust. "That is all right," he said, regretting deeply, and for the hundredth time, having had to put his gloves away until the palace laundry service could be restarted. "I believe that when she wants to return, she will. She has never let anything get in her way of going where she pleased."

"The end of the world might have done the trick, sir," Fantine answered placidly.

"Let us wait another week," he said. "Perhaps she is still settling in, or making friends."

Fantine nodded, adjusting her grip on the stack. "You are being hopeful, monsieur. It is very admirable of you in these trying times."

By the ninth week, the clouds had coalesced into a single thick, woolly layer that hid the sun from view. This time it was not any of his Melusine staff who approached him but the Champion Duellist in her peaked cap and uniform.

"If I might speak bluntly, Your Honour, you need to cheer up," she told him, having waylaid him in the palace vestibule. "She'll come back when she's ready. In the meantime, stop moping around and making everyone panic. It's too soon for rain."

Neuvillette did not immediately know how to reply. He had indeed caught glimpses of city inhabitants casting nervous looks heavenward, and trying to calm half-hysterical children who didn't know any better than to think they were about to be flooded all over again. And of course Clorinde knew about the rain; she along with everyone else in the uppermost echelons of the Court's administration had had to be told what made his claim to sovereignty legitimate. But it was discomfiting that his happiness and unhappiness would now be known to them as well. "Thank you," he said stiffly, and returned to his office to cheer up with a goblet of plain Liffey water.

Javerte found him there perhaps a quarter of an hour later, staring down at his chalky hands where he'd clasped them around the goblet's stem. "Monsieur Neuvillette?" she asked, hovering in the doorway.

He looked up. "Yes?"

"I found something."

"In …?"

"The attic yes," she said. "And in fine condition too. The water never reached it."

Neuvillette stood. "I will get my coat."

The aquabus lines had only recently started running again. He and Javerte rode in silence to the Opera Épiclèse, where she led the way through the front doors, up the leftmost staircase, down a corridor and into a discreet concierge's passageway that took them up twenty levels of tightly switchbacking steps. The smell of damp permeated the air until at last they emerged in a musty attic space with a domed roof, where shelves stacked with performance memorabilia had been shoved up against set pieces draped in old-fashioned, yard-long dust sheets.

"Over here," Javerte said, skipping across the room. Neuvillette, ducking his head, followed cautiously. When she gestured for him to remove the dust sheet from one of those ghostly, strangely shaped furnishings, he pulled it off, and then let it fall in astonishment.

"Isn't it amazing?" Javerte ran an admiring forepaw over the lacquered sound box, the brass horn. "Everything in here has been completely preserved."

"She must have left it here and forgotten about it," said Neuvillette. "Are there any records?"

Javerte nudged the box under the table with one foot. "In here. Dozens of them."

"It is perfect. Thank you."

"Shall I tell Fantine to clear an hour from her afternoon?"

"If you would."

Javerte sketched a curtsey and left him alone in the attic. Neuvillette went on gazing at the antique gramophone, searching for blemishes and finding none. It was perfectly, miraculously unscathed.

How few people this one, single attic could have protected. What an insignificant shelter it would have made. Did Furina realize how close her nation had come to apocalypse? That while it was to her and Wriothesley that the people of Fontaine owed their lives, Focalors had ultimately gambled on Neuvillette's own aptitude for mercy?

This gramophone must have been stored here for well over a century. Surely Furina hadn't simply stopped listening to music.

He knelt and pulled the box out from under the table. Flipping through the first dozen records yielded nothing very out of the ordinary, but doubtless he wouldn't know what extraordinary opera looked like if it landed on his head, as she had so enjoyed reminding him. It mattered not. He would choose a dozen of the best-looking ones and have Fantine bring them to her. When his fingers brushed against the texture of paper, however, something silenced the clock in his head counting how long he had already stayed away from his work. He pulled out a record sleeve with a yellowed old newspaper clipping pinned into it.

The record was Elissa. None of the songs on the set list, printed on the back in black and white, were familiar to him, so he turned it over to read the piece of paper. It was a cutout from the Steambird, a review by a long-dead theatre critic and professor of dramaturgy, who had apparently been extremely impressed by the performance of one Christine Daaé, a then-unknown cantatrice, in the starring role of this particular opera.

I cannot attest to it myself, for my seat was directly below Her Ladyship's box, wrote the professor, but the few who were able to tear their eyes from Christine Daaé that night say that Lady Furina leapt from her seat and gripped the railing before her. They say that her eyes shone with a rapturous admiration, and that when the cast took their final bows, her applause was the loudest of all. Such was the power of the enchantment Daaé cast that night, and all her confrères and consœurs in the opera house. Who but a gifted performer can claim to ever have captured the heart of an archon?

Christine Daaé. Now there was a name he hadn't heard in decades. She had lived perhaps three hundred and fifty years ago, but her meteoric rise to stardom had left an impression even on him, who did not overly concern himself with the artists of the Opera Épiclèse. Lady Furina had attended her debut, and from then on never missed a single one of her performances. Such an unprecedented mark of favouritism had propelled her into stratospheric heights of prestige. Had any singer ever managed such a feat, before or since? He didn't think so. He could not remember anyone else Furina had ever been sufficiently taken with to invite them over for tea with such regularity, nor anyone else whose death she had ever mourned so bitterly.

The record he set aside for Javerte to pack up later, along with five others. The newspaper clipping, on a curious whim, he tucked into his coat. One day soon, when everything settled down, she would be able to attend the opera once more. She might even let him accompany her, and afterward explain everything that had happened onstage in impatient but exhaustive detail. And all would be well at last.

…

"It is from Monsieur Neuvillette," Fantine explained patiently. "He hopes that you are settling in well, and that this will help make this place feel more like a proper home to you."

Hearing it a second time didn't make it any easier to understand. Furina gaped at her, then at the gramophone sitting in the middle of the dining table, then back at her. "But," she started, faltering, "where did you … Idon't …"

Fantine tilted her head.

"He doesn't give gifts!" Furina burst out, not knowing why this was not self-evident. "We're not on those kinds of terms!"

Fantine heaved a gigantic chalkboard out from behind her back. "He also wanted you to have this."

It looked like it had been lifted clean off a classroom wall. "What public school did you rob?" Furina demanded. "Does he think I need lessons?"

"It's a letter," Fantine said patiently, turning it around to face her. "The palace doesn't have any more paper to use than the average citizen does right now, you know."

The message inscribed upon it in chalky cursive was indeed in Neuvillette's loopy, old-fashioned handwriting. Furina scanned it once, hastily, too eager to know what he wanted to say to her now that two months had gone by, and then read it over again properly for good measure.

Lady Furina,

I hope you are well. I understand that while the situation in the citadel is improving steadily, reconstruction efforts have put great strain on those portions of our infrastructure which have been repaired to function in the short term. We at the palace are doing everything in our power to maintain essential services and supply lines while long-term renovation measures are being set into motion.

As the palace did not have many open doors or windows on the day of the flood, many of your nonperishable possessions have since been found and recovered. If you would like to come and take a look at them, please feel free to visit at your earliest convenience. I am usually in my office from dawn until midnight. Alternatively, if you do not wish to return to the palace, it would be no trouble to deliver them to your address. I have asked Fantine to bring you your old gramophone, which we discovered intact in the attic of the opera house along with a few dozen records. I was uncertain of which you would prefer to hear presently, so I chose the ones whose names I recognized, as those were likely the ones you spoke of the most often and with the greatest passion.

If there is anything more that I or the Palais Mermonia can provide to you in gratitude for your long term of service, please do not hesitate to contact me personally.

Yours, &c.

Neuvillette
Chief Justice of Fontaine

Furina looked up from the chalkboard to see Fantine holding out a piece of chalk to her.

"If you like," she said, "I can wait while you write back."

Furina contemplated the piece of chalk. Then she contemplated her own sock feet.

"Why are you acting so normal?" Her voice came out very small. "Don't you hate me?"

Fantine tilted her head. "Why would I?"

"I made you treat me like the archon for hundreds of years."

"For all intents and purposes, you were our archon."

"Yes, but I'm not a god! I'm human!"

"So?"

"So my claim to power was false! I was an illegitimate ruler —" Furina cut herself off, humiliated at hearing her own voice start shaking with frustration.

"Monsieur Neuvillette told us a little of the situation, you know," said Fantine. "You weren't just anybody. You were chosen of the true Hydro Archon. Her human half."

"Yes," Furina said, miserably, "but —"

"So why on earth would your rule be illegitimate?" Fantine set the chalkboard down to lean on the wall behind her. "Maybe you couldn't have proven it in court if you were caught. But that doesn't mean you weren't right to do what you did."

"But only archons have the right to rule in Teyvat."

"I would advise you not to say as much in front of Monsieur Neuvillette."

Furina flushed, looking away.

"I do not hate you," Fantine repeated, gazing up at her placidly. "I doubt he would, either."

"How is he?"

"Busy. But in good health." Fantine proffered the piece of chalk to her once again, emphatically. "Concerned for you."

Furina bunched her hands into fists. "He's better off without me. Everyone is."

Fantine glanced out the nearby window, where the curtains were halfway drawn to show the houses across the street and the heavy gray sky above them. "Whatever the case," she said, "it's not my place to comment. It is my place to bring that chalkboard back if you're not going to use it, though. They don't exactly grow on trees."

"I want to keep it," said Furina.

"Are you going to write on it?"

"Not with you here staringat me."

"That's fine," said Fantine, and put the piece of chalk into Furina's outstretched palm. "I can come back for it in a few days."

"Make that a week," Furina said without thinking. She couldn't explain it, but she didn't want to erase Neuvillette's message right away. It was one of the nicest things he'd ever said to her. "At least a week."

"All right." Fantine skipped to the door and opened it without waiting for any further cues. "See you then, Lady Furina. Remember to eat properly and stay hydrated! That's from the rest of us in the palace," she added confidentially, and then shut the door behind her.

Furina was left alone with Neuvillette's schoolroom-teacher letter on the chalkboard.

Guilt was as familiar to her as her own reflection. Shame was not. Shame was still new enough to scorch her horribly. She reached out with one fingertip and smudged the tail end of the L in Lady. It came away dusty white. He had written this himself. Maybe even bare-handed, given how fastidious he was about keeping his clothes tidy. Didn't he hate her for laying claim to the authority Focalors had usurped from him? Didn't he resent her for basically appropriating five hundred years of his life and making him work for her as a common bureaucrat? She would. Yet here he was, repaying her for this thankless job with the sort of kindness and civility that she herself had never deigned to show him.

I hope you are well.

She was doing fine. She was doing great. She was —

...

She was doing about as well as could be expected, considering the fact that she'd worn her most stylish outfit to a trial that had crashed and burned.

"What a waste," she moaned, throwing a hand back against her forehead. "I could have saved this for something really good. I should have waited until I got to prosecute someone myself. But noooo, I just had to show the world. As if anyone will remember a trial where the accused gets off with community service and a fine."

"Please put down the vase, Lady Furina."

"I was moving it," she said crossly, without opening her eyes or putting down the vase of pluie lotuses she held balanced in her other palm, "to where it might be better appreciated from your regular, boring viewpoint from behind your desk, thank you very much."

"I will not be able to appreciate them if they've been emptied onto my couch," said her Chief Iudex, from his regular, boring viewpoint behind the desk. "There is a side table to your left. I ask you to put them down."

"I know where the side table is. You haven't moved anything in your office in two hundred and forty years. Also, it's a settee."

"Is there a remarkable difference between the two?"

"Settees have arms and backs. Couches do not necessarily have arms and backs. All settees are couches but not all couches are settees. Ergo, my dear Iudex, it's a settee."

"That is not," said Neuvillette, "what I would call a remarkable difference."

There was a brief period of silence as he, presumably, turned his attention back to signing release forms, arranging court dates, or reading petitions to change one bylaw or another or whatever else it was he did to keep the court system running. He'd insisted on returning to his office from the Opera Épiclèse, and as she got a perverse, childish satisfaction from being a personal nuisance to him whenever she could get away with it, she'd followed him in and flopped onto one of the settees directly in his field of vision. Two hundred and forty years of being the Hydro Archon had made her deathly bored whenever she wasn't busy being deathly afraid.

The office was silent but for the scratching of his fountain pen against the papers. Furina started humming something under her breath, the overture from La Sylphide, and let the glass vase in the palm of her right hand slowly, slowly tip forward in her grip, as though she might be on the point of falling asleep.

The scratching stopped. "Lady Furina."

"Mm?"

"The water is tipping."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"How curious! I hadn't noticed at all."

"Please put down the vase."

He'd precisely enunciated each word, with the kind of miniscule pauses in between that one provided only to very small children having trouble understanding something complicated. Furina swung her legs down from the settee and sat up with the vase held in both hands. "You're no fun. Who brought you these, anyway?"

"Jean Valjean."

"The one at the front desk?"

"I helped her carry a number of packages that fell to her to deliver. They were too cumbersome for her to lift all at once."

Furina peered into the vase. The flowers really were quite pretty, their petals a purplish-blue colour somewhere between cornflower and violet, only a little more intense than Neuvillette's eyes. "So she gave you the equivalent of a rare bottle of wine to enjoy in your office?" She shook her head. "I'm shocked, monsieur. I thought you were above this sort of unprofessional conduct."

"We have had this conversation before, Lady Furina," said Neuvillette, a touch of irritation audible in his voice. "I do not drink from flower vases."

"So why were you so worried that I'd spill it all? You know I could just get rid of the moisture for you, as a little treat."

"I would rather you did not put yourself to the trouble."

"You mean you'd rather I didn't deprive you of a delicious midnight tipple."

There was a pause. Then, a whisper of paper as the fountain pen was laid down on the piece of scrap he used to keep ink off his desk.

"Lady Furina."

She set the vase onto the side table, just to prove she was on her best behaviour. When she looked over at him, Neuvillette had steepled his fingers and focused on her in a way that very clearly said, I know what you're doing, and I don't find it amusing.

"I understand that the trial was a disappointment to you. I understand that you are looking for something on which to expend your energies. As there is a great deal of work to be done before the palace opens again tomorrow morning, I cannot amuse you just at present." He paused. "If you truly are concerned for the flowers, you may take them with you. Jean will be more pleased than offended."

Furina paid the admonishment exactly the amount of mind it deserved, which was none. "Why would she be offended by her flowers falling into my hands? I'm not as likely to drink up their nutrients if I get thirsty."

Neuvillette's left eye twitched. "Yes," he said, "but she grows them herself. It was a gesture of appreciation that you have not necessarily earned."

Furina gasped. "How dare you!"

"But perhaps she will see it as a compliment to her gardening skills."

"Earn it? Earn it? So you carried some boxes! I bestowed the justice system upon all of Fontaine!" She flounced off the couch and smoothed out her dress. "If you can't make the offer in good faith, my dear Iudex, I shan't accept. Go to sleep early tonight and maybe tomorrow you won't wake up such a tedious person."

It was spoken half in jest, but he didn't smile. "I do not have that luxury when there is work to be done."

"So take a nap or something!"

"Justice does not nap. Just as crime never sleeps."

It was comforting to know that he belonged in the opera house just as much as she did. She could grandstand until the end of the world, and probably would if she couldn't find a way to thwart the prophecy, but those were the fruits of necessity and practice. Neuvillette was just like that. "What if crime did go to sleep one day?" she asked, just to be a pest. "Would you take a holiday? Would that finally make you happy?"

"What would make me happy at this present moment," said Neuvillette, obviously approaching a state of exasperation, "would be if you went to have a good night's rest."

"You mean if I left you alone in your office to work." She swept her fascinator off the couch and pinned it back into her hair. "Suit yourself, monsieur. It's not like I have people lined up six deep for the honour of taking tea with me."

"We see one another every day, Lady Furina. The opportunity to take tea together is not scarce."

"It will be one day, and then you'll be sorry you were ever so rude to me!"

"I do not doubt it," he said, and picked up his pen. "Good night."

Furina sniffed. "Try not to resolve them all out of court while I'm gone."

Once she had sailed across the room and through the doors, he pressed his fingertips to his temple, a gesture he had learned made humans feel better when they were stressed, and exhaled through his nose.

Peace and quiet at last.

...

It was too quiet in the Palais Mermonia. He had been reduced to drinking water drawn from the northern shore of the city, a flavour so bland and so close to what his taste buds recognized as the standard that scarcely any enjoyment could be derived from it. Preparations for the ship that would carry one hundred families and two hundred individuals to Chenyu Vale were such that he could no longer afford to waste time on personal expeditions for better refreshments. But even if he could have done, he wouldn't have had the heart for it. Several days had passed since Fantine had gone back for Furina's reply, only to return empty-handed; the shutters had been drawn over the townhouse windows, she said, and no one had answered the door.

"Monsieur Neuvillette," said Jean, popping her head into his office, "there's someone here for you."

He had long since stopped leaping to his feet at every visitor announced to him. "Who is it?" he asked, looking up from where he'd been resting his brow on knitted fingers.

"Mister Wriothesley, sir. He says he has some business with you."

"Send him in."

The Fortress of Meropide had been a critical danger zone in the first few weeks after the flood. He had not then been preoccupied with paperwork — or chalkboard-work, as it were — but with visiting each of these danger zones in turn, on rotating intervals, and redirecting seawater back to where it would not put anyone in danger. Until he could ascertain their stability, they remained functionally unlivable. And that was just as well, for the legal records which had survived the flood were so few as to leave them with no hard evidence with which to ascertain who might still be serving a sentence and who was not. They'd had no choice but to declare that the inmates of the Meropide had been released and pardoned en masse. Indeed, one could not say "People of Fontaine, your sins are forgiven" and then demand that they return to their cells.

Wriothesley had visited him twice since then: once to toast the end of their working relationship, and once for legal permission to keep the ark. Neuvillette had been circumspect about answering that one. "Given its capacity and symbolic national importance," he'd pointed out, "one might argue that it should belong to the state, in case such a catastrophe were ever to occur again."

"Given that most of Fontaine owe their survival to my ability to plan ahead," Wriothesley had countered, "one might argue that the state has no right to requisition what it did not itself create."

"You made it part of the public domain when you used it to save thousands of lives."

"I'm a national hero now, monsieur. Everyone knows I'm the one who built this thing. Not you, not the Palais Mermonia. Quite frankly," Wriothesley said coolly, "I would defy you to refuse me."

They had still not resolved that particular issue. Neuvillette sighed: his desk was a mess of white dust, as was the carpet, partially thanks to the bucket half-full of chalk styluses that had taken up permanent residence on his floor. There were blackboard slates stacked on every available surface. It was not the image of authority and reliability that he might once have so effortlessly projected.

Wriothesley wouldn't let it pass, of course. He appeared in the doorway, took a long, smirking look around the office, then ambled over looking like a cat that had not only gotten the cream but rolled around in it unsupervised. "Wow," he drawled. "I gotta say, you don't look so good."

"Wriothesley," said Neuvillette, in lieu of hello.

"I'm just saying …" Wriothesley stopped on the other side of the desk and raised one eyebrow at Neuvillette's bare forearms, where he'd carefully buttoned back the sleeves of his shirt. "This isn't something common mortals like me get to see every day, is it?"

"I don't take your meaning."

"Come on. The Iudex himself in a state of undress? Is the sun in eclipse out there?"

"Very amusing. Is this a social call, or do you have some greater purpose here today?"

Wriothesley reached into his coat, which seemed unusually bulky, and pulled out — of all things — a wine bottle. "Call it a mix of both. Oh, keep your knickers on," he added, seeing Neuvillette grimace. "This one's for me. This," pulling a flask out from the other side of his coat, "is for you."

He unscrewed it and held it out over the desk in clear invitation. Neuvillette, bracing himself on the arms of his chair, leaned forward to sniff it. The earthy scent of distilled Liyue water reached his nostrils.

"Oh," he said, surprised. "Thank you."

"Try it first, then thank me. I want to know if it lives up to your standards."

His office had only two goblets left to its name, but that would suffice. Neuvillette retrieved them from his desk drawers while Wriothesley uncorked the wine bottle. They each poured a measure for themselves, touched their cups together, and drank. Neuvillette found himself wishing he could be a little more respectably dressed; he had removed his robes of office earlier that day in a somewhat desperate attempt to protect them from smudging, and was presently clad only in jacket and shirtsleeves. At least he'd kept the cravat. In any case, the water was good: it tasted faintly of clay and sea brine, as though it had been kept in an urn on a ship for the better part of a month.

"So," said Wriothesley, setting down his goblet, "I hear you've been brooding."

"And you have been speaking with Mademoiselle Clorinde."

"Sure. Who isn't? She has more free time than ever now that court is out of session."

"I am touched by your concern, truly. But there is no basis for it."

"No?"

"No."

"I mean," said Wriothesley, squinting into the lamp on the desk, and appearing to choose his words with uncharacteristic care, "if my closest friend turned out to be someone completely different and disappeared on me without a word … all I'm saying is, I might be upset too."

Neuvillette had not told him, as he had told a few trusted Melusines, the truth about Focalors. His first impulse was to object to the insinuation that Furina was in any way responsible for the rift between them, but that in itself would imply that there was more to the truth than what the public had been told. Unless Furina herself consented to it, he would imply no such thing. "I would not have called her that," he said, after a pause.

Wriothesley lifted his eyebrows. "Ouch."

"She would not have called me her friend, either."

"Didn't you know her for, like, five hundred years?"

"I did. But that is not necessarily enough to make intimates of any two people." Neuvillette's gaze drifted to the window. "There is an idiom in Liyue. 'Some people know each other until their hair turns white, and remain as strangers to one another. Others might cross each other in the street and be as old friends.'"

"It's probably a little more succinct in the Liyue tongue," Wriothesley remarked.

"Yes, thank you. I am aware of that."

"I mean, usually they're done in sets of four characters —"

"I am a judge, not a professional translator."

"I know, I know. I take your point." Wriothesley contemplated the inside of his goblet. "What was your relationship, then, if you don't mind my asking? Were you just colleagues?"

"That does not seem adequate." Neuvillette was beginning to wish he had not entertained this avenue of conversation, but it would give more away than it would hide if he were to simply shut it down. "To Lady Furina, I suppose I was many things. I was her guardian, in a sense. Her chief advisor. Her right-hand man."

"Her silly rabbit?" said Wriothesley.

"Pardon?"

"Nothing. Go on."

"I may have been the closest thing she had to a friend," Neuvillette finished, giving him a strange look. "But true friendship requires a depth of trust which I don't believe we ever truly extended to one another."

"Makes sense," said Wriothesley, the corner of his mouth twitching. "And … what was she to you?"

My charge. Neuvillette turned the goblet around in his hands. My responsibility.

He was silent long enough that Wriothesley seemed to realize there was no more to be had from him on the subject. "Well, I hope you're able to make up with her, whatever happens. People who've known us for as long as she's known you don't come around every day." He set his goblet down on the desk. "Anyway, I'm here because I have a solution to propose."

Neuvillette looked up at him, uncomprehending. "For … Lady Furina and myself?"

"No," said Wriothesley, slowly and with a very emphatically unspoken you imbecile, "for the ship."

"Ah."

"I'm guessing you really don't want to relinquish any claim the court might have to it." Wriothesley lifted his eyebrows. "I'm also guessing that you know I could make an awful ruckus about it if I wanted to."

"It has occurred to me," Neuvillette said dryly.

"Well, then, how about this. You and Captain Beidou have been in negotiations as to how to ferry all those people across to Chenyu Vale, right?" He braced both elbows on the arms of his chair and crossed one leg over the other. "Commission me as a privateer. Let me have the ark without a fuss. I'll take them all and have room to spare, and you won't have to waste resources building another one on short notice."

"I had already volunteered the ark for the mission."

"Oh, I know. But you haven't chosen a captain yet, have you?"

"No."

"And you would never requisition a ship that didn't belong to you if you could keep it and avoid a public scandal at the same time, would you?"

"You don't strike me as someone who would enjoy being at the centre of a scandal."

Wriothesley smiled crookedly. "Come on, Your Honour. You owe me. You know you owe me."

"I suppose I do," Neuvillette conceded. "It would be ideal if you were able to submit an official cover letter, so there could at least be documentary evidence, but …"

Wriothesley's gaze slid to the blackboards stacked on the desk, then back to him, with an incredulous expression that seemed to say: Really?

"But these are extraordinary circumstances," Neuvillette sighed. "Very well. Consider yourself officially commissioned, as a Fontainian privateer, to fulfill the obligations agreed upon between myself and the Liyue Qixing regarding the temporary housing of our citizens in Chenyu Vale." He stood and proffered a hand to him across the desk. "Congratulations."

Wriothesley rose to shake it, now grinning from ear to ear. "I knew you'd see sense."

"Am I correct in assuming that you are already in contact with Captain Beidou?"

"Oh, yeah. She won a couple rounds off me last night."

That explained where Wriothesley had procured the water. "That is just as well. If you would liaise with her at your earliest convenience, we may begin tripartite consultations by eight o'clock tomorrow morning. I will also need a full report on the ship's functionality and carrying capacity."

"I'd say it's pretty state-of-the-ark," Wriothesley said, straight-faced.

"Thank you," said Neuvillette. "That will be all."

His spirits were buoyed for a little while after that. Until, of course, his thoughts circled back around to what Wriothesley had asked him, and then he could not help but dwell upon what he knew to be the truth.

He may well have been the closest thing Furina ever had to a friend, but she was likewise the closest thing he had, or was ever likely to have, to a lifelong companion. Did he not know her moods, her idiosyncrasies, her aesthetic preferences, the things that depressed her or made her merry? Had he not come to know her as well as he knew the law? The cadence of her voice she kept measured and musical, until something provoked her to excitement; her bearing was childish, yet queenly; she was high-spirited and magisterial and conceited and proud, and she held him in just high enough esteem to enjoy imposing her company on him whenever she liked. Why would she hesitate to do so now?

Growing restless, he rose and crossed the room to one of the grandiose windows, and found that the moon had risen above the eastern wall of the citadel. He contemplated it, hands clasped behind his back.

Surely the only recompense in his power to give was time away from her prison. Surely the only thing she would want from anyone now was to be left in peace.

If the moon was high, midnight had come and gone. He would get no more done today. On his way out of the office, he swept his coat from the back of his chair and started when a yellowed old piece of paper fell from its folds. It was the article on Christine Daaé's debut on the opera stage, the one he'd found pinned to the record in the attic. He'd put it in his pocket and forgotten about it completely.

When he picked it up and unfolded it, his eyes were automatically drawn to the same passage as before.

The few who were able to tear their eyes from Christine Daaé that night say that Lady Furina leapt from her seat and gripped the railing before her. They say that her eyes shone with a rapturous admiration, and that when the cast took their final bows, her applause was the loudest of all.

Who but a gifted performer can claim to ever have captured the heart of an archon of Teyvat?

Indeed. However much of the past five hundred years had been an act, her love of theatre had been real. Neuvillette was sure of very little these days, but he was certain of this one thing: nobody, not even the best actress in the world, would attend opera performance after tedious opera performance unless they truly had a passion for it.

What was it about this singer that had so captivated Furina? What inner chamber of her heart had opened to Christine Daaé which even he had never been permitted to see? If only he had paid more attention to this attachment when it first revealed itself, it might have shown him a portion of the truth, but Furina had announced it in so grandiose a manner that he had never seen anything more in it than the ardour of an opera enthusiast, and a callow fascination with beauty that he had thought, if anything, inappropriate for a being hundreds of years Daaé's senior.

...

Christine Daaé was an opera enthusiast's dream. So far, she had performed Elissa, Esmeralda and La Sylphide, and Furina had attended each performance just to marvel at how she interpreted each principal character. Her body language was so alive, her expressions so clear, like windows to the soul — and her voice — her voice!It had frightened Furina the first time she'd heard it. What kind of human voice achieved, in piano, the tremulous purity of a threaded needle, of a single solitary cry of pain, and in forte, borne on the waves of a symphony orchestra, power like thunder rolling over the sea? Furina knew all the old operas off by heart, but Christine Daaé made them new again. She had never heard anything so beautiful. And every time she went to see her perform, Daaé gave her a priceless gift: for a few precious hours, immersed so deeply in the story that nothing outside of it could intrude on her consciousness, Furina forgot herself. She forgot the prophecy, her soap-bubble façade, her loneliness, her despair, as perfectly as she had forgotten whatever may have lain beneath it all so long ago, because so long as Christine Daaé was onstage, no one in their right mind would be paying attention to her.

The morning after La Sylphide's final performance, Furina sent Daaé a personal invitation to join her for tea and pastry at the Palais Mermonia. This being an honour she had not granted anyone in over a century, the whole city knew about it before noon. There was even a feature about it in the papers the next day, in which Daaé modestly declined to comment on the fact. "All I am at liberty to say," ran the only quotation, "is that I have long yearned to look upon the face of divinity, the ideal to which artists like myself can only aspire in vain. To meet the gracious Lady Furina in person would be a blessing beyond compare."

"You're very humble, Miss Daaé," Furina told her approvingly, having permitted Daaé to pour them both tea from the tray on the table between them. They sat primly on opposite settees with their teacups and saucers, her in her suit jacket and fascinator, Daaé in a soft blue gown and matching shawl. "A good quality in an artist, wouldn't you say?"

"Of course, Lady Furina," Daaé agreed. She bore herself with unusual composure for a woman in a tête-à-tête with the god of her nation, but one supposed she was used to maintaining poise in prestigious company. "Especially for a singer, it is crucial to know one's limits and how far they may or may not be stretched. As onstage, so offstage — that is what my teacher has always taught me." She lowered her eyes. "But, your ladyship, I confess that I was never prepared for so great an honour as this. Was it permissible of me to speak of it to my family and friends? I had blurted it out before I quite knew what I was doing."

"Of course!" Furina said; and, hearing the overzealous pitch of her own voice, forced herself to modulate it back to its usual lofty carelessness. "That is, as far as I'm concerned, Miss Daaé, your fame ought to overflow the banks of Fontaine and flood through every nation on the continent."

Daaé blushed. "Your ladyship is too kind."

"Don't be silly. I don't give empty praise. I have been attending operas at the Épiclèse for three hundred years and ..." Furina paused, tasting the honesty of what she was about to say next. "And I have never seen your like. You must put your heart and soul into your work."

"I have a good teacher."

"Oh? Have I heard of him?"

"You wouldn't have, your ladyship. He never performed. But if he had, he would have moved the heavens to tears."

Doubtful. Furina tapped the side of her teacup with her fingernail. "Tell me something, Miss Daaé. You imply, perhaps out of truth, perhaps out of loyalty, that your teacher is better than you. Is it possible for a student to surpass their teacher, or only to attain their level of expertise?"

"It must be possible," Daaé answered immediately. "Not for me, but for others. If no one could ever surpass their teachers, the world of fine arts would only deteriorate over time."

"How does one surpass one's teacher?"

"That is a more difficult question, my lady. I can only speak for what I know."

Furina nodded, granting permission.

"Talent and hard work put together can do a great deal. But the artists I know who have surpassed their teachers … well, I suppose what they all have in common is that if they were to stop singing, they would die. They strive to attain greater and greater heights as though their lives really depended on it."

"Because they love music?"

"No, your ladyship. Because they can't do anything else. Sometimes to love a thing gently is not enough. For me … if I were to lose my voice ... it would be the end of everything."

A shadow had passed over her face. Furina hesitated, knowing that what she was about to ask was not the kind of thing she should be asking, as an all-powerful archon.

"I am curious, Miss Daaé … How do you do it?"

"Do what, your ladyship?"

"Act so well. Lose yourself in your character. I understand that opera singers must control their breath, project their voice, maintain good stage presence, and move in choreographed patterns with their colleagues all at the same time. I have never had the chance to ask anyone personally, you see. How do you manage all those things together, and so gracefully?"

"A great deal of practice and effort, your ladyship," said Daaé.

Furina leaned her cheek on one fist, supporting her elbow with the other hand. "Many opera singers put in practice and effort, Miss Daaé. Not all of them bring their characters to life onstage. How do you convince people that it's all real?"

Daaé appeared to consider that. "Your ladyship flatters me," she said at last, her eyes settled on the carpet, as though to buy herself time to think of an appropriate answer. "If it came down to any one thing, I suppose it would be having compassion for your character. Where they come from, what they want, their position in life. And you cannot immerse yourself in them halfway, with half your heart. It's dangerous to assume that your audience won't be able to tell the difference. If they're not convinced, then they're not convinced. The slightest flinch will make itself known to them from the stage."

Furina laughed. "That easy, I see."

"Indeed, your ladyship."

Furina didn't have to suppress any more of her enthusiasm: it had vanished as quickly as it had come. It had been foolish to hope, even for a moment, that a mortal singer could tell her the secret to maintaining an impeccable façade. There was no secret. It was nothing less than perfect confidence, perfect self-control, perfect commitment to the act, and a healthy dose of stage magic. She already knew how to achieve all that. What she wanted to know was how to bear it.

Before Christine Daaé left the parlour, she paused by the door, took the hand Furina held out to her, and curtseyed so low she sank into her own skirts. "Your ladyship, thank you for taking time out of your busy day for me this afternoon," she said, touching her brow to Furina's knuckles. "I can't tell you what a dream it has been."

"The pleasure was mine," Furina said beneficently. "Do come again, Miss Daaé. I will be waiting for your next performance."

"I will, my lady. The next time I sing, it will be for you."

And indeed, during the next several shows in which she played starring roles, Daaé sang with both arms outstretched as though to heaven, toward divinity, and during her bows she always took a moment to curtsey and kiss her hands to Furina's box. In public she was demure, humble, soft-spoken and quick to blush, and in Furina's company doubly so. She never failed to thank her archon for her patronage when speaking with the papers or making the speeches she was inevitably invited to make. In return, Furina gave her every public accolade that was in her power to give, up to and including attempting to persuade Neuvillette to make an appearance at the Épiclèse. "You haven't been in at least eighty years," she wheedled, having coquettishly perched herself on the corner of his desk. "It's about time you showed some interest. And she's incredible —you've never seen anything like her!"

Neuvillette closed his eyes and exhaled a little through his nose, in the manner of long-suffering chaperones everywhere.

"Well, fine, that's not saying much," Furina admitted. "But I'venever seen anything like her, either. And you should see the way she takes her bows at the end. She absolutely adores me."

He looked up at her over the top of the rectangular spectacles he wore to do long stretches of reading. Dragons in human form, he had once told her, invariably suffered from hyperopia. "Does she," he said, transparently disapproving.

"Okay, I can just tell you're going to be an old fogey about this. Can you not put your work aside for one night? You aren't that busy."

"Neither do you believe that, nor would you have hesitated to say the same if you knew that was not the case."

"Obviously not! I'm trying to get you to go out and have some fun, not that you would know fun if it fell on your head!"

"I have heard of this Christine Daaé," Neuvillette said abruptly, putting down the papers he'd been reading. "And of your partiality toward her. Lady Furina, forgive me for speaking frankly, but can you not see the danger in what you are doing?"

Furina affected surprise. "Whatever do you mean?"

"She is human."

"Yes? So?"

"So?" Neuvillette sat back in his chair, as if to focus his farsighted eyes. "So she is mortal. You are immortal."

"And the sun likes to rise in the east."

"Have you never before had occasion to learn this lesson? Must I be the one to caution you?"

"My dear Iudex, I really don't know what you're getting at. There's no law against our associating with common mortals."

"I am not talking about the law," said Neuvillette. He no longer looked reproachful. He looked almost sorry. "You are free to associate with whomever you like. I am warning you not to … not to give your heart to someone who will die before the century is out."

Furina stared at him in genuine astonishment. Then she threw her head back and laughed like someone who'd just heard the funniest joke in the world.

"Oh, heavens!" she cried, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. "Oh, you sweet, romantic old soul. I'm not in love with her."

"I have never seen you as taken with anyone as you are with her."

"Did you not hear me when I told you of her genius? Her mastery?"

"You have heard other masters. You never spoke of them the way you speak of her."

"Jealous?" Furina asked, her tone light.

"You are yet young, for an archon," Neuvillette said stiffly; removed his spectacles, folded them, and set them aside. "You have not met many of your peers. You do not yet know how to guard yourself against dangers such as this —"

"Neuvillette!"

"— and I would rather you knew ahead of time to save yourself the pain."

"You forget yourself," Furina snapped. "I don't need you to tell me how to guard my heart, and I certainly don't need you to patronize me." She slid off the corner of the desk. "You might be my deputy, monsieur, but you are not my keeper. Kindly remember that."

Needless to say, she issued him no repeat invitation to the opera that night. It left her free to waltz through the backstage area half an hour to the overture, making carpenters, seamstresses, and chorus members throw themselves against the nearest wall, bowing and curtseying, and quite easily receive directions to Christine Daaé's personal dressing room. Peculiarly enough, it lay at the end of a deserted corridor. Were prima donnas issued rooms so far out of the way as a matter of course? She neither knew nor cared. Dismissing the opera members trailing behind her with a wave of her hand, she walked right up to the dressing room door and raised her fist to knock.

"And you are certain that she will support your claim?"

Furina froze, her fist in midair.

"Oh, yes," said Christine Daaé. "She adores me. If I cried my heart out to her, she would write to the managers herself."

"They would not dare overlook you, dear Christine."

"They might offer the position to someone with a better pedigree."

"They might as well sign their own dismissals. You have the wealthiest, most powerful patron of all, my dear. And you have me. The world will soon lie at your feet."

One was a man's voice, low and musical. The other belonged to Miss Daaé … Miss Daaé as Furina had never heard her. Her every word was strongly enunciated, self-assured, imbued with sardonic pragmaticism. It was so far from the shyness she usually affected that she might as well have been an entirely different person. Goosebumps rose on Furina's bare legs, the back of her neck. She put down her hand.

"When will they announce their decision?"

"Tomorrow at noon."

"Then we can do nothing more to prepare. You have proven yourself beyond a shadow of doubt, Christine. I will do the rest."

"Thank you, maestro."

"You must dress. Sing well tonight. I will be watching."

Then nothing more. Furina stared through the door in front of her, not seeing it. Daaé's voice had been grimly satisfied and perfectly steady.

If I cried my heart out to her, she would write to the managers herself.

The door opened. Christine Daaé gasped. Furina looked up at her, her own expression perfectly smooth.

"A word, mademoiselle?"

Daaé backed into her own dressing room. Furina closed the door and took a good long look around herself, unable to make heads or tails of it. There was no sign of her maestro. Nowhere, not even in the open garderobe, was there anything that might constitute a hiding space for a grown man. "Well," she said airily, "this is quite the mystery."

"Your ladyship," Daaé said, waveringly, "I beg of you, I don't …"

"No. Of course not. I would never ask an artist to betray the secrets of her teacher. But tell me, Miss Daaé, what was that all about?"

"Please," Daaé whispered, "to what do I owe …?"

"Just popping in to wish you good luck before your performance," said Furina. "I do take a personal interest in my favourite artists, you see. I like to support them. One might even say that if one cried their heart out to me, I would move the heavens to dry their tears."

Daaé, her face white as a sheet, did the worst thing imaginable then. She crossed the room and fell to her knees at Furina's feet, her skirts puddling around her, and then she well and truly poured out her heart.

The truth was that she was an orphan. She had grown up on the streets, with no talents, no prospects, no hopes. She would have lived a life of poverty and dishonour if some kindly instructor of the Épiclèse had not heard her singing in the plaza for coins one day and taken her in. She had become a chorus member and begun earning a slightly greater number of pennies for a living, but she knew that if she did not make herself invaluable to the opera house, she would be thrown out as soon as she could no longer sing — or when her beauty faded, whichever came first. Her mysterious maestro, whose name she swore not to know, had raised her up to where she was now, a candidate for the position of prima donna. But this door might yet be shut to her, a street urchin with a no-name teacher. She needed this. She needed her archon's help. She would do anything to avoid giving insult to the deity of her nation.

"Kindly do not represent yourself to me as an ingénue," Furina said. She had folded her arms over her chest and begun tapping her foot, but in truth, she was not sure what to feel. This woman — this child — had manipulated her, yes, but she had also out-acted her. "You are not the bashful creature you portray yourself to be. You have ambition."

"Of course I have ambition!" Daaé cried, looking up at her with a half-furious, half-desperate expression. "My ambition is to never go hungry! My ambition is to be more than refuse in the gutter!"

"You might have told me as much, and then you could have avoided this embarrassment for yourself, couldn't you?"

"I would sooner have died," Daaé said. "Your ladyship would never have looked at me in the same way. In this world, one can either be well-born and ambitious or lowborn and grateful. Not both. Opera is my salvation, your ladyship. It is all I have. And the fact is that if you denounce me, I will have nothing."

"I could denounce you, couldn't I?" Furina mused. "Would that be justice, do you think?"

"I don't know, your ladyship." Daaé clenched her fists in her skirts, as though she were on the point of tearing them with her bare hands. "Justice is the province of divinity. It is not for me to decide."

Furina looked down at her, stung pride warring with a kind of grudging respect. At last she crouched down before her and took her chin in the fingers of one hand. Daaé caught her breath.

"Tell me something true, then, Miss Daaé," Furina said softly. "I will know if you lie. Do you love the opera?"

"Yes," Daaé whispered.

"Why?"

"Because … because I'm good at it. I have a gift for it." Daaé swallowed. "And because when I sing, I … I transcend myself."

"Explain."

"No one used to see me. I was the dirty little thing on the street corner they turned away from. It was like I didn't exist. But not one person can turn away from me when I'm on that stage," Daaé said fiercely. "Opera makes me more present than I ever was before. Like every character I play is more real than I am."

"So you act for everyone you meet."

"Yes."

"You would act forever if you had to."

"Yes."

Furina drew back her hand until she held Daaé's chin only by her fingertips. "And live in fear? With no solace, no shelter, no one to turn to?"

"All the world's a stage, your ladyship." Daaé's small, pointed jaw was stubbornly set. "I know the part I signed up for."

Furina stood. Daaé hung her head, her fingers scrunching in the modest skirts. Her hair, pulled over one shoulder and gleaming brighter than gold thread, bared her neck for the axe to fall upon.

"I am not going to denounce you, Miss Daaé," Furina told her gently.

Daaé looked up in shock, her lips parted. Furina smiled the smile of a god who could not but take pity on one of her people in pain. She said, "I am going to make you the greatest singer that Teyvat has ever known. Now rise and dress, my dear. The show is about to begin."

...

Never before or since had she promised such a personal favour to any one of her subjects. But for Christine Daaé, she didn't think twice. She made herself her patron in all but name, and the young singer's career rose like a star in the sky above Fontaine, above Sumeru, above all of Teyvat.

And for what? Furina thought, staring down at the record folder in her hands. Christine Daaé was dead, as were her children and her children's children's children. Only her music was left. A fraction of it, really, given how much had been lost in the flood. It turned out that all the artistry and ambition in the world wasn't enough to grant anyone immortality, even in the form of a few fragile recordings.

When she fit the record onto the gramophone and set the needle to play, she wasn't entirely sure what to expect from herself. She didn't think she was about to burst into tears. She didn't think it was going to magically cheer her up, either. The overture of Elissa began to play. She sat, folding her hands in her lap, then decided she didn't need to look dignified for no reason and curled up on the sofa, hugging one of the pillows.

How blissful to be able to listen to music with no eyes upon her. And how pathetic. She could lie here all day and listen to these records if she wanted. No one would care. She was of no use to anybody now except herself.

Song after song played through the living room, brought to life by voices of a richness and purity attainable only after decades of training. She lay in one position until the end of the first act, when Christine Daaé's recorded self launched into Elissa's famous farewell aria.

Think of me, think of me fondly
When we've said goodbye
Remember me every so often
Promise me you'll try …

Furina sat up on the sofa, realizing too late that she was about to cry after all. Two months out of deityhood and she'd completely lost her touch.

On that day, that not-so-distant day,
When you are far away and free,
If you ever find a moment,
Stop and think of —

She lifted the needle with the tip of her finger. The voice was cut off, and the record quietly spun out.

As though Daaé had been silenced in death all over again.

Morbid thoughts like that were becoming difficult to repress. Only yesterday, she'd been out getting her food and clean water rations when she'd heard the town crier say her name. Not the one commissioned by the Palais Mermonia, but some random woman who'd taken it upon herself to do what the Steambird couldn't and deliver news "for the people, by the people."

"— found guilty of FRAUD and GROSS MISREPRESENTATION, now presumably in hiding!" the woman shouted to a sizeable group of people, who were all nodding and murmuring to one another. "HOW did she do it? WHY did she do it? The people want ANSWERS! And WHERE is she now?"

"Surely she's left the country!" some fishwife called, having braced her basket against one hip and cupped the other hand around her mouth.

The crier pointed at her. "Perhaps! But WHO'S to say?" She swept the crowd with her pointer finger and her burning eyes. "She could be AMONG US at this VERY MOMENT!"

Leaving the country was starting to sound like less of a crazy, last-ditch plan and more like something she'd have to resort to sooner or later. That journalist still came to knock on her front door every few days or so, and then when that didn't work, to peer into the windows, shading her eyes with her hands as though that might help her see through the curtains. She might have been the first to sniff her out, but she wouldn't be the last. Eventually they would find her. And when they did … well, it was all a little vague in her mind, but she probably would never get to live in peace again.

If she got to live. It wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility for some upstanding citizen to take the Oratrice's final judgement into their own hands. Everyone still knew her as the Hydro Archon, albeit retired in disgrace, and there weren't two ways to interpret "to be punished via the death sentence."

On the plus side, there was a nest of spiders living in one of her kitchen cabinets. They'd scared her half to death this morning when she'd reached inside for her soup pot (which she'd finally figured out how to use). The fact of them being there gave her hives, but it had also given her an excuse to go knock on Sophie's door. She was yet too spoilt, or perhaps no longer too proud, to shy from making someone else fix things for her, even if they did occasionally insist that she learn to do something herself. And these days it was a luxury to talk to anyone apart from herself.

Sophie's husband had answered the door and informed her, not unkindly, that Sophie was out working on site and would be back to help her as soon as she could. So here Furina was, waiting on the couch. Loafing. Languishing, even. Forced to admit to herself that she was both lonely and bored, indubitably the two worst feelings known to both gods and humankind.

It was due to this unfortunate mixture of boredom and loneliness that when someone knocked on the door, she didn't hesitate before scrambling off the couch. It was partially due to her hatred of spiders that she didn't think twice before opening the door. And it was due to the long two and a half months that had passed since they last saw one another that it took her a moment to recognize the person on her front doorstep.

"Good day, mademoiselle," purred Arlecchino, and brushed past her across the threshold.

…

The waterline had held steady these last several weeks. Neuvillette, having arrived to conduct one of his regular inspections, opened his eyes and looked down at the sunken village below him, cast in blue-green shadows by the waterfall.

Poisson had been established below sea level four hundred years ago by a carpenter with early dementia and more money to his name than was good for him. If the flood had not wiped it from the face of the earth, then it was likely that nothing else would. Neuvillette half-turned to leave, then stopped, hesitating.

Miss Navia was likely here. She had a wealth of experience in matters regarding human relationships. Surely, if there was any one person who could advise him on how to reach Lady Furina, it would be her.

He attracted a number of blatantly fascinated stares on his way down the wooden scaffolding, held up by the docks at the base of the sinkhole, where several villagers had gathered to build fishing boats from scrap timber. A young boy sitting on a crate spotted him as he approached and yanked on his fisherman mother's sleeves.

"Maman! Maman, look! That man's got a cane! And one of those fancy neck things!"

"Just a minute, Luc," his mother said waspishly. Then she glanced up, saw Neuvillette, and dropped her hammer on her own foot. "Nom d'un chien!"

One by one, all her comrades caught sight of him and fell silent. "I apologize for intruding," said Neuvillette. "Would any of you be able to direct me to Miss Navia?"

"What are those blue things in your hair?" the boy piped up.

His mother was still hopping around on one foot in silent pain, so one of the others caught him by the ear. "Luc! Don't be rude!"

"The president's up there," said a woman with a fishing net looped over one arm, jerking her chin up at the great barquentine anchored halfway up the sinkhole. "Caught her just in time, Your Honour."

"Thank you."

The boy, Luc, reached out to catch one of the antennae in his hair as he passed, only for his hand to be slapped away by another sharp-eyed villager. "Wouldn't the shortcut below water have been faster?" someone whispered.

"I'm sorry," said the woman with the fishing net, clearly bridling at their tone. "Would you rather it looked like I was telling the Chief Iudex to go drown himself? And bring the law down on all our heads?"

"Imbecile! How do you think a hydro dragon is supposed to drown himself!"

Between them, the boy Luc heaved a sigh. "In tears, uncle. Obviously."

But the two villagers were now thoroughly abusing each other to their faces and didn't hear him.

Navia seemed pleased to see him, if startled, probably because he hadn't personally come to greet her on any of his previous public safety visits to Poisson. She showed him into the parlour, sat him down, and offered him a glass of tap water, which he took a moment to taste according to his personal preference: swirling it around in the cup, sniffing it to gauge the levels of plant and mineral content, then finally sipping it for the greatest possible delectation.

"Delicious," he pronounced. "Clear with notes of potassium, kept in balance by a smooth, full-bodied texture. You must enjoy your local water very much."

"It just tastes like water to me," Navia said, amused. "Brioche?"

"No, thank you."

"Suit yourself."

Lady Furina once said the same to him on a regular basis. Neuvillette deliberated, trying to choose the best way to approach the subject, while Navia dug into a small wedge of sponge cake. "Poisson is once again safe to inhabit, I trust," he said, eyeing the signs of water damage on the parlour walls around him.

"Oh, yes," Navia agreed, polishing the powdered sugar from her fork. "The reservoir levels are finally back to normal. We had people falling in left and right, but Jean-Claude finished the safety barriers this week and only one person has fallen in since then."

"Were they injured?"

"No, someone fished her out. Normally I'd trust them to swim to shore or haul themselves to safety, but she was all of six years old. She'd leaned too far out trying to reach a toy she'd dropped."

"I am glad to hear it."

"Mm."

Silence fell between them. Navia scraped the last of the crumbs from her plate and set it back down on the tray. Then she looked as though she regretted no longer having something to occupy her hands. "I'm sure you already know everything you need from the reports we send, though," she added, with a nervous little laugh.

"I do," Neuvillette said. "I confess that I am not here to ask for specifics regarding the arduous rebuilding process, which you no doubt have well in hand." He turned his mug of water around with one hand; ceramic, because all the crystal Spina di Rosula once owned was destroyed in the flood. "I am here to ask for your counsel."

Navia blinked. "My counsel?"

As it spun, the mug made a not unpleasant whirring sound on the dark wooden table, which had probably been too heavy to get swept away. Neuvillette's gloved fingers stopped, lingering on the handle.

"I am confronted with … a situation," he said slowly, choosing his words with care, "which I have never before had to confront. If I may, I would ask your opinion on how you would proceed in my shoes."

Navia blanched. "It's not a legal matter, is it?"

"No, it is a personal one."

"Oh! Oh, thank heavens. Good. I mean, not that I wouldn't have been happy to help, but it's a bit like … like if Lesser Lord Kusanali asked for my help on a math test, if you'll excuse the comparison."

Neuvillette frowned at the implication that he would have breached regulations so far as to share the intimate details of a court case. Seeing his expression, she hurried to add, "But of course I'll help if I can."

"Thank you."

There was a silence as she let him gather his thoughts.

"I have not seen Lady Furina since after the flood," he began, watching the mug under his fingers. "I believe she is well. Fantine checked on her recently, and she said she looked as though she were eating and resting as she should be. Her address remains, at least for the moment, a closely guarded secret. She may choose to return to society, but no one is going to force her hand. Least of all myself."

"Okay," Navia said.

"All you know is that she was found guilty of fraud and gross misrepresentation. I cannot tell you more without her express permission. But I can tell you that all of you owe your lives to her, as well as Fontaine's continued existence. She spent five hundred years in fear and under unimaginable pressure to accomplish what she did. Now that she is free, she will most likely wish never to return to the Palais Mermonia, or indeed anywhere she might have to suffer public scrutiny again."

"Okay," Navia repeated.

She had crossed one leg over the other and folded her hands on her knee in a posture of attentiveness. It was comforting to Neuvillette, who appreciated professionalism as something humans, dragons and Melusines could all have in common.

"I sent her a letter asking if she wished to collect her belongings from the Palais in person, or if she would rather I had them sent to her. She has … not answered," he said. "We have not otherwise been in contact."

"Okay," Navia repeated again, more slowly.

Neuvillette had been prepared to lay out the facts in this need-to-know fashion. He'd had five hundred years of practice. But now they were laid out, and the last relevant truth felt like a very strange thing to confess.

"And I am uncertain as to how to proceed."

"What do you mean?" Navia asked, after a pause.

"I did not," he started, then stopped, unable to decide what exactly it was that he had not done.

Navia searched his face, but didn't attempt to finish his thought for him. Neuvillette took a sip of water to stall for time, then tried again.

"I failed to see …"

And trailed off, not knowing exactly what it was that he had failed to see. The actress's true face? Or the stage she stood on? The card trick, or the magician's despair?

"There is a great deal of context that I cannot give you," he said at last. "Even if I could, it would be a long story to tell."

"Okay," said Navia slowly. "Then … do you think you could tell me instead what it … made you feel?"

The hesitancy in her voice seemed to acknowledge, wincingly, that this was the sort of question one might ask a ten-year-old child. "What it made me feel," he repeated.

"Sure. Why not start there?"

It was not difficult. He recalled Furina's expression during the trial, how desperately she had tried to defend herself. How she had slumped back into her seat upon hearing the guilty verdict. He did not need to be an empath to know what she must have been thinking at that moment. I failed. It was all for nothing.

"Pity," he said. "Compassion." He remembered his first and last conversation with Focalors, which played on his mind so ceaselessly that he had begun to hear it in his sleep. "Remorse."

"That's understandable," Navia says. "I mean, that's all very … human."

"Compassion and remorse do not belong solely to the human sphere."

"No, of course. Clearly not. I just meant those are things I am familiar with." She knitted her hands in her lap and looked down at them. "I've talked a lot with Clorinde, you know. She told me she felt … similar things toward me after my father's death."

"You two maintain a cordial relationship," Neuvillette observed.

"We do. But we wouldn't if we hadn't been upfront with each other about everything that happened. If Clorinde hadn't told me she felt sorry about having to … to do her duty, I might have gone my whole life thinking she'd done it with pleasure. Or without feeling anything at all. That's not the case, obviously. I know her better now. The point is: she was honest with me, and she let me come to terms with it on my own. If we owe our cordial relationship to anything, it's to that." Navia rubbed her thumb over the knuckles of her other hand. "I guess that's what I would recommend."

"I see," said Neuvillette. "That is astute advice. I will do my best to put it into practice."

"I'm flattered you think so. But you know, you could always go with Plan B and invite her out on a picnic or something."

"A picnic?"

"Well, it doesn't have to be a picnic. I just like eating pastries outdoors. It could be a party, or … I don't know. A party wouldn't really be the thing right now, would it? I just meant that if you were to ask her for a — personal rendezvous, that might be a good way to start over fresh, especially if you think you have reason to apologize to her."

"I do," said Neuvillette, feeling that he ought to have put emphasis on Furina's having either refused or forgotten to reply to his chalkboard letter. "But those have never been the terms of our relationship. We do not have personal rendezvous."

Navia frowned. "Haven't you known each other for centuries?"

"I cannot …" he began, intending to say I cannot recall, only to stop midsentence.

He didrecall. It was only that he hadn't thought of it in years.

"Sorry?" Navia asked.

Neuvillette stared down at the table, brow furrowed. Trying to capture the memory that had winged past the edges of his mind: Lady Furina seizing his forearm, her grip powerful even through his sleeve and her gloves, as applause erupted around them like the roar of the tide.

Perhaps he was bound to remember the currents of the mortal world by how she responded to them. He had first recalled Christine Daaé because of how Furina had wept over her death. Now, it seemed, the only reason he could remember their last personal rendezvous — if so it could be called — was because it was the last time in a hundred and thirty years that she had lain hands on him. It was enough to anchor even a memory as long as his.

Navia half-raised her fingers, as though to wave them in front of her face, then seemed to think better of it. "… Monsieur?"

Frowning, Neuvillette said slowly, "We have, on occasion, taken leave of our duties together for short periods of time. But the last time was over a hundred and thirty years ago."

A hundred and thirty-six, to be exact, since the night Christine Daaé gave her last encore.

...

Forty-three years on the stage was more than most opera singers ever managed, even if they retired before their fiftieth birthdays to teach. The two students Daaé took on afterward became prima donnas of the opera house one after the other without even trying. One departed Fontaine on a counter-clockwise expedition through the world, receiving invitations from every capital city she so much as looked at; the other stayed behind to command the attention of hundreds of spectators every night during each annual performance season.

Lady Furina maintained that neither would ever be Daaé's equal.

"They are but shadows of her," she declared, affixing teardrop earrings to her earlobes. "They are talented enough, of course. She would hardly have chosen to teach them if they weren't. But that is not the same thing as genius, my dear Iudex. Try to understand that."

"If such a genius comes only once in ten generations, as you say," said Neuvillette, watching her turn her head from side to side in the window, where the bright lights of his office offered her her own reflection, "then after tonight, you will forever be dissatisfied with the artists at the Épiclèse, will you not?"

She sniffed. "Give it another hundred years and I may yet grow accustomed to mediocrity. Not that I should have to."

It was always thus with Lady Furina. She loved spectacle. She lived for pageantry. Whatever else she might say about her thespian standards, there was only one thing she ever really seemed to want from the Opera Épiclèse, and that was to be astonished. Christine Daaé had astonished her more deeply than any other performing artist in three hundred and sixty-four years, but no human singer, even a gifted one, could sing forever. Tonight Daaé would appear onstage alongside her second pupil, perform a solo piece for the encore, and then remove herself from the public eye for good. Lady Furina was taking the news with more maturity than he had expected from her, but one could still expect many decades of complaints that no other vocalist would ever compare.

Satisfied with her earrings and the roguish angle of her fascinator, she turned away from the window. "Well? Are you ready?"

"I await your pleasure," Neuvillette said, setting aside his paperwork.

She gave him a look of disbelief. "But you aren't dressed!"

Had he forgotten something important? He took a quick mental inventory of his ensemble and realized what was missing. "Ah," he said, and opening the top drawer of his bureau, withdrew a pair of formal gloves. "You are right. Thank you."

She watched him pull them on as though he'd chosen to climb up onto the bureau and do a little jig instead. "Not that! Aren't you at least going to change your outfit?"

"Why, is there something the matter with it?"

"It's what you wear every day!"

And it was impeccable in every respect. "Lady Furina, I don't see the issue."

"It is customary," she said, rolling her eyes with enough vigour to have given any normal person serious nausea, "to don one's glad rags for specialoccasions."

"I doubt I will be turned away at the door," he said dryly. "In any case, will we not be out of sight once we are in your box?"

"People don't just go to the opera for the music, you know. They go to see and be seen." She heaved a sigh. "Whatever. Do as you please. I want to see the festival before the show starts, and if we don't leave now we'll be late."

"My thoughts exactly," he said. "Shall we?"

The Opera Épiclèse had timed its final performance of the season to coincide with the Fontinalia Festival, and the plaza facing it, when they arrived, was overrun with stalls selling food, party ornaments and merchandise of every shape and size. Thousands of coloured pennants had been strung overhead, the better to nearly catch fire every time a flame-breather blew through their torch into the sky. Lady Furina stood at the edge of the circus performance with her hands clasped before her, looking lost in thought, watching the jugglers and tumblers in their intricate clockwork dance, for a while before Neuvillette realized that she would stay there for hours unless compelled to do otherwise and politely reminded her that if she wanted to see anything else before the curtain rose, they would have to start walking. She startled, and, with a haughty toss of her head, swanned away to a different attraction. But not before Neuvillette perceived the mask: clean, smiling porcelain, not whatever true thing had been in her face a moment before.

Nothing seemed to please her that night. The food wasn't tempting enough, the ornaments not pretty enough, the merchandise too dull. Every vendor whose stall she visited welcomed her with starry eyes, clearly praying that she would confer upon them the once-in-a-lifetime honour of making a purchase, then watched her leave looking thoroughly crushed. Neuvillette trailed beyond her like an overdressed bodyguard and did his best not to sigh.

"Perhaps we ought to go find our seats," he told her meaningfully, after what felt like the fiftieth such exchange.

"Not yet," said Furina, scanning their surroundings. "There must be somethingworth seeing this year."

She approached a fun-house of mirrors next, greeting the custodian standing sentry with an airy little wave of the hand. "I haven't seen a fun-house here for at least a few years," she said, while the custodian blushed and bowed. "It's fallen a bit out of fashion, hasn't it?"

"Ordinary fun-houses, perhaps, Lady Furina," said the custodian, still looking vaguely as though he might faint. "But not … ah, not this one."

"Oh? What makes it so special?"

The custodian cleared his throat. "My grandfather was a glazier, madame. He specialized in mirrors. In fact, his shop was so successful that it attracted the attention of …" He looked left, looked right, then leaned forward so as not to have to shout over the hubbub. "… an abyss mage. But my grandfather wouldn't sell to it, so it cursed him."

Furina brought her fingertips to her mouth. "No!"

"Yes!" The custodian lowered his voice even further. "No mirror he made ever worked properly after that. They warped from the inside, no matter how well he applied his craft. He went out of business, and my father packed up the mirrors and put them in the attic, never to be seen again. Until I had the idea of showing the world a little magic."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense!" Furina said, craning her neck to look into the entrance of his grand tent, where the first full-length mirror stood in a gilt iron frame. "What kind of magic do they …"

Whatever she saw, she gasped and recoiled from it so violently that the fascinator pinned to her coiffure dislodged itself from its pins. The custodian widened his eyes, turned to see what she'd looked at, then turned back around in confusion, the cause of her alarm not immediately making itself apparent; and sent Neuvillette a half-fearful, half-baffled look, as though to plead with him pre-emptively not to sue him for whatever had so displeased the Lady Focalors. Furina scuttled out of line of sight of the gilt-framed mirror.

"What is it?" said Neuvillette.

"Nothing," Furina said. She reached up for the fascinator and pinned it back into place, averting her gaze from his, then straightened out her suit jacket and brushed imaginary dust off the lapels. When she spoke again, her voice was clear. "Nothing. I thought I saw a spider. Isn't that silly?"

The custodian was slow to process this. "A … spider, madame?"

"I loathe spiders," Furina explained confidentially. "But you were about to tell me what kind of magic your mirrors have?"

"Oh," said the custodian. "Well — uh. They all have different kinds, madame. No two of my grandfather's mirrors are the same. But the one in the entryway there is a bit of an anomaly. Supposedly it shows everyone their true self, who they really are on the inside. It's never worked for me, though. I only ever see myself in it as I am."

Furina tittered. "My true self, indeed! I've never heard anything so outlandish!"

"Of course, madame," agreed the custodian, who had evidently never felt more confused in his life. "Of course. Quite."

Neuvillette narrowed his eyes at her. Her image had flickered somehow, in the instant that she had lost her composure, like a ship's wheel spinning out of control. Now it was still again and the same as ever. The only evidence that anything at all was amiss was that she'd gone bloodless white.

"I do regret to tell you, but the Iudex and I are running a little short on time." She turned to disappear back into the crowds, flicking a hand in farewell over her shoulder as she did. "We'll have to come visit some other time, I'm afraid. Ta!"

Neuvillette couldn't repress a long exhale through the nose, the closest thing he would permit himself to a sigh. "Good night."

The custodian bowed. "Monsieur."

As Neuvillette turned to follow his charge — between one step and the next, no more than half a heartbeat — he glimpsed the gilt-frame mirror out of the corner of his eye, in the shadows and folds of dark red cloth obscuring the entrance to the tent, and within it his reflection: a pearlescent, serpentine shape with blue antennae and gleaming gray horns and eyes like washed-out periwinkles, a reflection he had never cared for when it still belonged to him, and which he would never now see again. Not while the Hydro Archon's authority endured. Then the turn was complete, and it meant nothing but that the custodian was not a liar. He did not need a magic mirror to tell him what he was. And he had no wish to approach and see precisely to what degree his power had diminished.

There were other concerning matters just at present. Lady Furina was forging a path across the fountain plaza with what seemed like blind disregard for whoever or whatever was in front of her, without even looking backward to see if he was still there. Neuvillette was forced to lengthen his stride to catch up with her, an indignity which did not please him in the least.

"Lady Furina, are you well?"

"Right as rain," she said airily. Then she pointed at something at the very edge of the festival. "Over there. I want to make one more stop before we go."

"We have twenty minutes before the curtain rises."

"I'm aware of that, thank you."

"If we are late, the performance will be delayed on our account."

"It won't take a minute," said Furina. "I just want to feel like this little detour wasn't a complete bore."

The shabby, run-down stall she'd spotted belonged to a cartomancer. Unlike every other shopkeeper who'd been graced with their archon's presence that night, this young woman — a girl, really; she could not have been older than fifteen — looked shy but not especially overwrought when Furina appeared on the other side of her reading table. "My lady Furina," she said, rising to greet her with lowered eyes.

"Good citizen," Furina said serenely. "Might you have time for just one reading?"

"Of course, my lady." The cartomancer noticed who was standing behind her and curtseyed. "Monsieur."

Neuvillette inclined his head. "Mademoiselle."

The cartomancer gestured for Furina to sit. "Please. It would be my honour."

"How does this work, exactly?" asked Furina, taking a seat and crossing one leg over the other. She seemed — at least to Neuvillette's well-practiced eye — a little miffed that her presence hadn't sent a lowly card-reader into paroxysms of shock and reverence. "I've heard of cartomancers using as many as seven cards to tell a querent's future."

"Begging your pardon, my lady, but my gift isn't in telling the future," said the cartomancer. "It's in the present. I use a spread of three cards to pierce the truth about my querent, which they may then use to change course or make a difficult decision. My lady would be surprised at how much it can help sometimes, to tell someone about themselves." She placed her deck onto the plain cotton tablecloth and, with a smooth glide of her hand, spread the cards out in a face-down arc. "Would it please my lady to inspect the cards before we begin?"

Furina tilted her head. "Inspect —?"

With a flick of her wrist, the cartomancer took one end of the arc and flipped it over. The entire deck followed suit in a wave that sounded like snap-snap-snap-snap-snap. Furina oohed appreciatively and bent over the tarot images, allowing the cartomancer a moment to tuck her hair behind her ears and smooth out the tablecloth.

"Everything seems to be in order," Furina announced, sitting back. "You may begin."

The cartomancer flipped the deck back over, gathered it into both hands, and shuffled it. Then she spread it out once again and, hovering both palms over it, closed her eyes.

The hue and cry of the festival washed over them as they waited. Furina restlessly bobbed the leg she had crossed over the other, but did not interrupt, though she must have been impatient by now to cross the plaza to the opera house. Neuvillette turned his attention to the cartomancer, who had begun drifting her hands over the arc of cards. Apropos of nothing, she withdrew a card; after another minute of hovering, a second, and almost immediately afterward a third. These she laid out face-down on the tablecloth. Furina leaned forward eagerly, hands clasped on one knee.

The cartomancer reached for the first card. Without opening her eyes, she flipped it over. "Seven of swords," she said.

The painted image showed a man with two swords clasped in his arms, looking furtively over his shoulder at the battlefield he'd stolen them from, where five blades had been staked into the ground. "What does it mean?" Furina asked.

"Deception," said the cartomancer, in a strange, hypnotic monotone. "Strategic action … Getting away with something … Reversed, it speaks to impostor syndrome … or self-deceit."

"That's the wrong card," Furina said sharply.

A crease appeared in the cartomancer's brow. "… My lady?"

"It's the wrong card." Furina's face was rapidly losing colour again. "You must have made a mistake. No one in my palace lies to me."

"Of course not, my lady."

Neuvillette watched her flip over the next card. It showed a woman in ornate robes on a throne, flanked by marble pillars.

"The High Priestess," the cartomancer intoned. "Sacred knowledge … The subconscious mind. Your life has been defined by a truth you know … intuitively, which both did and … did not come from you. But how can that be?" she added in a murmur, as if to herself.

Furina's face was humourless. "Aren't you supposed to give me answers?"

"This intuitive truth has been your only guidance …" The cartomancer's eyelids flickered. "Like a lighthouse on shipwrecking rocks …"

"Enough, cartomancer. I've had my fun. Show me the last card and we shan't disturb you any longer."

The crease in the cartomancer's brow became a furrow. "Yes, my lady." She hesitated over the third card, then flipped it over. "Five of Cups."

Neuvillette leaned over to see. The image showed a cloaked figure weeping over five goblets overturned on a banquet table.

"And what does this one mean?" Furina said, in a tone of voice implying that she didn't think it could possibly be any less accurate than the others.

The cartomancer hesitated again, as though the reality of her archon's imminent displeasure were finally intruding on whatever reverie had come over her. "Forgive me, my lady. I must still be attuned to the energies of another querent. May I have permission to try again with just the one card?"

Furina waved a hand. "Do what you like. It's a party, after all. Did you know Christine Daaé is singing for the very last time tonight?"

"We have ten minutes, Lady Furina," said Neuvillette.

"No, my lady," said the cartomancer, looking relieved that she'd escaped judgement. "I did not know that." In a single smooth, practiced motion, she gathered up her cards and reshuffled them. "But everyone says that Fontaine will never see her like again."

She repeated the process of spreading out her deck and hovering her hands over it with her eyes closed. This time the selection did not require much time. She picked one out from the very end and flipped it over. It showed a blindfolded woman holding a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Except this time, it wasn't upside-down from their perspective, but from hers.

"Justice," she said, and swallowing, opened her eyes. "… Inverted."

Neuvillette looked sharply at Furina, intending to issue a silent warning if necessary, but all she did was sigh theatrically and hop off her chair.

"Well, it was worth a try. I do beg your pardon, mademoiselle. I find I tire of charlatanship much more quickly than I used to." She tossed a small pouch of coins onto the table. "For your troubles."

When she had gone, Neuvillette sketched a small bow to the cartomancer, who looked as though she'd been slapped. "Please forgive her," he said. "She is not usually so temperamental."

"Gods always are, monsieur," the girl said in a small voice.

There was no answer he could make to that. He left her at her booth, staring miserably at the pouch of coins on the table.

Lady Furina had nearly made it through the festival crowds before he found her again. "There you are!" she said, glancing over her shoulder at him. "I was beginning to think I'd have to go into the opera house alone."

"You should take better care of your subjects' regard for you," he said, falling into step with her.

"Whatever do you mean?"

"You are upset, and you are taking it out on everyone you meet."

"Don't chide me, Neuvillette," she said, her tone chilling considerably. "It isn't your place."

They had reached the steps of the Opera Épiclèse. "I acknowledge your position as my superior and the deity of these waters," he said, stopping at the bottom of the staircase. Their deity, not their rightful sovereign. "But even deities have been known to act like children."

Lady Furina had already climbed a few steps ahead of him. At these words, she rounded on him.

"I'm here today to enjoy myself, my dear Iudex. I know the concept is unfamiliar to you. But as you've agreed to accompany me, and as this is a night of some significance for me, could you please save your criticisms for literally any other time?"

For once they were at the exact same eye level. "A time when you are more amenable to criticism?" asked Neuvillette, for once unable to check himself. "I shall have to save them for the end of the world."

Furina made a primly disgusted noise, whirled around and proceeded with aristocratic hauteur up the steps.

He followed. None of her antics could exasperate him anymore, nor any of her rebukes still sting his pride. After three hundred and sixty years, everything they could possibly have said to one another had already been said. You could only take offense at one thing so many times. It was the gulf in dignity — and in maturity — between them that remained difficult to abide.

The opera house teemed with people like fish in an overripe pond. The moment they appeared on the threshold, their presence rolled through the crowd like a wave. Furina sauntered through the grand foyer toward the doors that led upstairs to the private boxes. She had given Neuvillette to understand, on their way from the Court, that she almost never entered the opera house the usual way — there was a private, exclusive entrance which only she was entitled to use. But she would accord Christine Daaé every conceivable accolade on this, the night of her last encore, up to and including making her attendance as public as possible. "And if that means persuading you to come with me," she'd said, "that's what I'll do. I should have dragged you along to see her back when she was in her prime, but — oh well! This really is the next best thing. Let them talk for decades of how the Iudex himself turned up to pay his respects at her farewell gala!"

There seemed to be a hundred fashionable members of Fontaine's upper echelons in that grand foyer, all wishing to greet the archon, to exchange words with her, to curry favour. Furina waved her hand and called out in various general directions: "Is this not a fair evening?" "How lovely to see you all!" and so on and so forth, which drove her onlookers into a fits of adulation. Each person appeared convinced that when she addressed the crowd, she was addressing them personally. Neuvillette wondered what they would think if they saw her, as he did from time to time, dozing on one of his office settees with one arm folded behind her head and a plate of shortcake balanced on her stomach.

Attendants closed the private staircase doors behind them; and a minute later, drew shut the curtain of her private box. Neuvillette took a seat and flipped through the program leaflet some thoughtful concierge had placed there for him. The opera that Daaé's student was to perform tonight was Candide, a two-act production in a light and humorous style that was coming back into fashion, or so claimed the synopsis. It was centred on Candide, a young woman with an unfortunate knack for fatally stabbing people by accident, and her fiancée Cunégonde, who, caught in a treason plot and left to fend for herself in a hostile city, had no choice but to share her favours with two different wealthy patrons.

"Hm," said Neuvillette, turning the page. "This looks …"

"Frivolous?" Furina asked as she took her customary seat. "Contrived? Far-fetched?"

Her indifferent tone was that of someone offering her guest a choice bit of cake. "I was about to say promising," he said. "It says here that the story is set in motion by a serious miscarriage of justice, which the characters treat with 'sardonic forbearance.' Not many playwrights dare to entertain such topics."

"Not many playwrights would dare to confront the idea of a world without me," said Furina. "Not publicly, anyway. Wouldn't that just be deliciously heretical? But this one takes place in a time 'before the Archons,'" she added with a sigh, "so I suppose I can overlook it."

"Do you usually?"

"If it's done with flair, my dear Iudex, I can find it in myself to overlook most anything."

"Then it is fortunate that the administration of justice is my office, and not yours."

"No," she said, "the fortunate thing is that art and justice have nothing whatsoever to do with one another."

Neuvillette put the program away and set his hands on the armrests of his chair. They'd had this discussion before, but for once she seemed not at all inclined to be entertained by a familiar argument. "That is one sentiment which never seems to fade from human understanding," he said. "It is an act of wisdom on your part to bridge the gap between their mode of thinking and ours."

"Well, of course it is," Furina said. "Like water, everything must equalize. Including the distance between an archon and her people."

She turned back to face the stage and the slowly filling auditorium. Her booted foot tapped against the floor. Her manicured fingers marked out a different, asynchronous rhythm on the armrest of her chair.

Whatever her faults, she deserved to be able to say farewell without being further admonished. "You will truly grieve her passing, then," he said quietly.

"Who?"

"Christine Daaé."

"Oh," Furina said, with unconvincing indifference. "That. Well, it's a shame her career is over. But nothing lasts forever, I suppose."

Neuvillette knew a dismissal when he heard it. He let the subject drop.

Soon enough, the auditorium went dark, leaving only a single spotlight on the stage. The two managers of the Opera Épiclèse walked out, were greeted by thunderous applause, and made a short speech welcoming their audience to the first performance of Candide in centuries. They bowed to Furina's box, acknowledging their two most prestigious guests, before disappearing into the wings.

The overture began. At the forefront, a pianist and flautist competed for first place in what sounded like a marching band, of all things, succeeded by a whole orchestra's worth of brass and woodwinds. It was a hectic introduction to what proved to be a hectic, feverish plot, and Neuvillette found himself exhausted by it after scarcely ten minutes.

One could see immediately why this operetta had not been performed in so long. It ridiculed everything; it moved at an erratic, whirlwind pace; its heroes began the story happy and sheltered and finished it disillusioned, despoiled and distanced from what they had once held to be the highest purpose of their lives. It could only have been made acceptable to the Fontainian public once social mores had been given time to change, but even after two hundred and fifty years, it remained something of a risqué choice. Neuvillette found himself frowning at how little faith the playwright seemed to place in the justice system, treating his characters' being falsely accused and sentenced in court not as a disruption of the foundation of the world but as a matter of course, something that could realistically enough trigger a further series of unfortunate events and never be addressed again. Likely enough, the only reason they had been able to put this opera on in the first place was because Furina, perpetually bored with matters of principle, had never cared for censorship, and because he was known not to pay theatre any mind at all. It was perfectly legal, but it toed the line of scandal like a drunk cavalryman stopped by a superior officer in the middle of the night.

"Meanwhile," intoned the solemn-faced narrator from one side of the stage, near the end of the first act, "we find poor Cunégonde now a full-fledged demimondaine, alone in the house paid for by the comte, and watched over at all hours of the day and night by the Old Lady …"

The curtains parted to reveal a lavish boudoir. A door opened upstage and the heroine stumbled inside, clearly overtired and more than a little punch-drunk. She kicked off her shoes, pulled her hair from its half-ruined updo, and collapsed in the chair waiting by her dressing table. She threw the back of her hand back against her own forehead and started to laugh. Then, as from within the orchestra pit the oboe began to play a disconsolate tune, her laughter turned into wrenching sobs.

The song that followed was both contradictory and peculiarly touching. The actress rose abruptly and began to sing, bitterly, as she dried the tears from her face, of her anguish at what her life had become. She was tired; she regretted everything that had brought her there; she had to summon her courage every morning and went to bed every night in despair. And yet — switching keys, the actress switched moods just as swiftly — did she not have status, the attention of adoring eyes, every material thing she could ever wish for? She sat back down at her mirror and held her jewels up to the light and gave peal after peal of piercing operatic laughter.

And yet of course I rather like to revel, ha ha!
I have no strong objection to champagne, ha ha!
My wardrobe is expensive as the devil, ha ha!
Perhaps it is ignoble to complain ...
Enough, enough
Of being basely tearful —
I'll show my noble stuff
By being bright and cheerful!

Furina was focused so intently on the performance below that she sat, for once without even seeming to realize it, in an attitude of absolute, straight-backed formality, wearing a frozen expression that he couldn't remember ever seeing her wear before. For a moment Neuvillette didn't know what had made him look at her. Then her gloved hands relaxed, as if by force, on the arms of her chair, and he realized that her grip on them had tightened so starkly that the tiny movement must have registered in his peripheral vision.

When the curtain came down for intermission, she was up and out of her seat before he could so much as ask what she had thought. "I'm going out for some air," she announced, and was gone with a swish of the drapes.

Plainly he was not invited. He picked up the program again and flipped through the actors' biographies. Christine Daaé was given pride of place at the very top of the list, under the banner of concertmaster. The face in the photograph was not youthful by any stretch of the word, but proud and firm-boned, and ever so faintly smiling. Her silver-blonde hair was pulled into a matronly chignon. If Lady Furina were to bestow her fancies on any one mortal, Neuvillette supposed this Daaé would be the reasonable choice, but as he had never fancied any creature, mortal or otherwise, he could not but regard the affair with some reserve. Anyone as old as she ought to know better than to dote on someone they would outlive by a thousand years.

Lady Furina reappeared just as the lights were dimmed for the second act. "Are you well?" Neuvillette asked as she took her seat.

"Perfectly," she said. "Now hush, they're starting again."

Whatever he'd seen on her face during the aria was gone. She appeared refreshed and newly hungry for melodrama, and this being so characteristic of her usual change of moods, he put it out of his mind.

The rest of the opera blurred and crawled past like a headache. In the final scene, Candide and Cunégonde asked their former tutor about the path to happiness, and the tutor proclaimed scornfully: "Happiness, you say? Happiness! It's all mixed up with other things, I'm afraid. But let me see …"

He pretended to shuffle in his pockets for a little scroll. The finale music started up, steadily rising, as surrounded by all the other characters, he unfurled it and read from it aloud:

"Never seek for happiness; it is an illusion. Never seek for fame; it is a whiff of smoke. Never seek to thwart your fate; it is beyond your scope. To be happy, never hope, never despair, never think …"

The two heroines took one another's hands and agreed to marry and try to make sense of life together. The curtain fell. Applause crashed over them. Furina clapped with delicate little taps of the fingers of one hand against the fingers of the other, clearly scorning any more enthusiastic show of approval. It was, Neuvillette decided, a little hypocritical of her, considering all the fuss she'd made about attending tonight's performance.

After the cast had taken their bows, the two directors walked back out onstage and made a short speech introducing their concertmaster and guest of honour, in a conspiratorial manner that seemed to suggest they knew the audience knew who they were talking about, but that they were giving her the honour of a mysterious preamble anyway. They swept their hands out to a woman in a lavish gown walking out onstage, who was greeted by a fresh wave of applause.

Even if Neuvillette had not recognized her from the photograph, he would have known who she was by the way Furina straightened at the sight of her, as though electrified.

The woman curtseyed low, hands folded modestly across her heart. "Thank you, my friends," she called, as soon as she could make herself heard above the tumult. "Thank you."

"That's her," Furina hissed sidelong to Neuvillette, without taking her eyes off the stage.

"It has been too many years since I performed on this stage for you all," said Christine Daaé in a rich, resonant voice, like a violin waiting for the bow. "You must think me very ungrateful. I have been the most fortunate of women, these last fifty years, to have had the finest of teachers, the finest of publics, and the very kindest and most magnanimous of patrons."

Here she curtseyed again, deeply, to Furina's box. Furina gave a stately little nod, acknowledging the scattered applause that rippled through the theatre.

"But the human voice," Daaé continued, smiling, as she rose, "experiences wear and tear just like any other instrument. It can be tuned and kept in shape, but once lost, it can be neither replaced nor ever fully repaired. Long ago, I pledged my voice to the service of Fontaine, and my music to the splendid Opera Épiclèse. I have loved you all, my friends, more than you can ever know. And if I may presume to have any place in your memories — in your hearts — after tonight, then I would rather you remembered me as I am now, at my full strength, than twenty years from now when I have forgotten what a scale even is, much less how to sing one."

Laughter. Daaé turned with a gracious gesture of the arm to the conductor, whose music stand could just be seen poking out from the orchestra pit.

"To that end, maestro, let us join forces one last time … Farewell, my lords and ladies of Fontaine. The song I give you now is for you and you alone. I hope with all my heart that you will not grieve our parting but rejoice, as I do, at the time we had together."

The conductor raised his baton. The theatre fell silent. Neuvillette leaned forward a little in his seat.

Christine Daaé walked to centre stage, unwound the scarf from around her shoulders, and held it before her in both hands like an offering. The stage darkened until she stood in a single shaft of golden light. Someone in the orchestra pit began to play the piano, and after two measures she began to sing.

Think of me, think of me fondly
When we've said goodbye
Remember me every so often
Promise me you'll try

Daaé had clasped her hands together, trapping the ends of the scarf between them. Muffled crying sounds came from somewhere in the theatre, as if someone had begun weeping quietly into a handkerchief.

On that day, that not-so-distant day,
When you are far away and free,
If you ever find a moment,
Spare a thought for me.

The music swelled, and Daaé began to dance. The more beseeching the song grew, the more sniffling and nose-blowing there was from the audience below. Neuvillette sat back, disappointed. He had hoped that whatever enchantment had captured Furina would capture him also.

For she was clearly not having any trouble understanding the song. She looked as though she were on the verge of floating off her seat. Her eyes were wide and desperately hungry, as though the scarf in Daaé's hands were what she wanted above any other treasure in the world.

Think of me, think of me waiting
Silent and resigned
Imagine me trying too hard
To put you from my mind

Neuvillette turned his attention back to the stage. At least he would be able to tell her afterward, with complete honesty, that he had enjoyed the performance.

Think of me, please say you'll think of me,
Whatever else you choose to do —
There will never be a day
When I won't think of you.

He had assumed that they would remain in their seats and clap as politely as before, once Daaé had wrung her final, throbbing notes from the air, but of course they didn't. The moment the ageing singer struck her final pose, the entire theatre erupted, and Furina's fingers closed around his forearm from underneath, not in suggestion but in clear command. Get up.

This was the moment that made him recall the rest of it, even over a hundred years later. Lady Furina was not shy about imposing on his office hours, his status as supreme judge or his personal space, but she did not touch him, ever. For some things there was no excuse. He remembered her trying once, forty years into her tenure. She had been circling his desk and talking about something or other, clearly bored and trying to provoke him into entertaining her, and at some point she had drawn near and laid a hand on his shoulder. He had given her a look so terrible that she had removed it instantly with a light joke about his prudishness and never tried again. And then, somewhere between the two hundredth year and the two hundred and first, she had worked herself into a state of chattering anxiety over reasons he could not now remember and tripped on one of the Palais Mermonia's staircases. He had caught her arm and allowed her to use him to regain her balance. That was all. It was not so much a boundary between them as it was a contract clause that neither of them ever bothered to invoke.

So he stood without protest. Furina was already on her feet and applauding as hard as he had ever heard her applaud anything or anyone, throwing the complete, though not so great, force of her body into the gesture. Neuvillette clapped politely. When he looked down at Christine Daaé, who was in turn gazing up into the audience, he thought he saw the light catch on tears in her eyes. But when the curtains closed in front of her, then opened again, she rose with regal dignity and opened her arms to the theatre, and turned to accept the bouquets of flowers brought out to her by two smartly dressed stagehands. And it was as though she had never been anywhere else but on that stage, exalted and triumphant, empress regent of the nation for one last, dazzling night.

When Neuvillette looked back at Furina, she was no longer by his side. The box was empty.

She was strolling down the grand staircase of the opera house by the time he caught up to her. "Lady Furina," he said, making his voice carry through the foyer.

She paused and glanced up at him, one hand still on the banister. "Oh, hello. I thought you'd want to hear the speeches."

"Should you not remain until the end for Miss Daaé's sake?"

"It's Madame now," Furina corrected him. "She's married, you know. Two children. Both perfectly happy in the national orchestra pit."

"Did you not wish to make your personal farewells?"

Furina appeared to consider this. "No," she decided, as though it really didn't matter to her one way or the other. "I've finished here. Though I'm sure you could go meet her yourself if you liked."

"I have no acquaintance with her."

"You're not likely to if you never go and say hello."

"She will be overwhelmed by well-wishers tonight," said Neuvillette, feeling in truth that even if he had wanted that acquaintance, it would be in enormously bad taste to walk into that crowd and divert attention from Daaé to himself. "I have no desire to impose."

"I see I'm to nudge you no further out of your comfort zone tonight," Furina sighed. "Shall we?"

She turned and proceeded down the steps, ignoring the staff who bowed as she passed. Neuvillette did the only thing he could at that moment and followed her lead.

...

"Did you follow me here?" Furina demanded.

Arlecchino was turning on the spot, studying the little townhouse from every possible angle. "How the mighty do fall," she murmured to herself.

"I got your calling card," Furina said.

"Oh?"

"If you told your little spies to sneak around my property, you might as well have also told them to knock."

"Well, I didn't want to impose."

"You've never had any such qualms before."

"That was before you and everyone in your nation had to tighten their belts. You're on short rations."

"I'm doing perfectly well for myself, thank you," Furina's heart was still beating fast, the way it always did when she got jumpscared by a spider. She made her voice light and scornful. "Anything else you want to know? The location of our national weapons arsenal, perhaps?"

Arlecchino laughed. "Weapons arsenal? You mean the mechs equipped with those little laser pointers that housecats like?"

It would have been so much easier to play archon in front of this woman if her voice weren't so low and husky and designed to give everyone the shivers. When Furina didn't answer, Arlecchino looked back around at her, eyebrows raised high. "Aren't you going to close the door?"

"I didn't invite you in," Furina said stiffly. She hadn't realized it, but she was just standing there with the door yawning open to the street outside. Her fingers felt like they'd been soldered to the handle. "It's rude to just barge in when you haven't been invited."

"You opened the door," said Arlecchino. "That's as good as an invitation, don't you think? Anyway, I didknock."

"What exactly do you want?"

"Close the door and I'll tell you."

"No."

"Please?"

"I don't think so."

"It's to your benefit, you know, mademoiselle."

The last word was very soft in Arlecchino's mouth, like spun sugar. "Are you joking?" Furina asked, flushing. "Nothing you've done here has been to anyone's benefit but your own."

Half of Arlecchino's mouth curled into a smile. "I kept your secret, didn't I?"

"To blackmail me!"

"Doesn't mean it wasn't to your benefit."

"Oh, would you just — get it over with! I don't want you in my house!"

"How very rude," remarked Arlecchino to nobody in particular. "Keep it up and I might reconsider letting you come away with me."

Furina's hand went clammy around the door handle. She said, "I beg your pardon?" And then, before Arlecchino could reply, "Is this supposed to be a kidnapping?"

"My lady Furina, you're assigning me a number of nefarious motivations, and I have to say, I don't really appreciate it."

"You're a Harbinger! You don't have any other kind!"

"This would be so much easier over tea and brioche. You were always more amenable over tea and brioche."

"Explain what you mean," Furina demanded. "Why are you here? What do you mean, come away with you?"

"Just that," Arlecchino said, looking surprised and hurt that anything ulterior was being searched for. "Haven't you spent the past five hundred years in a single citadel? I have some business here for the next few days or so, but once I'm done I can … how do you say … give you a lift?"

"To where?"

"Natlan, if you like. It's on my way. Or," added Arlecchino offhandedly, "if you're feeling a bit hot under the collar, you could join us in Snezhnaya. You've never been, have you?"

Furina darted a glance outside, half-expecting to see armed Fatui thugs creeping up to her doorstep.

"Please," Arlecchino said, "rest easy. I don't have a habit of making off with young ladies."

"I'm four hundred and fifty years your senior, and frankly I'd like to see you try!"

"Oh? Who would stop me?" Arlecchino looked her up and down, eyebrow raised. "You?"

Furina could have bit her tongue in two. She'd spoken without thinking, as she might have before. Seeing the expression on her face, Arlecchino made a pitying noise in the back of her throat.

"No … You think you're still under his protection?"

Furina kept silent, her fingers locked uselessly around the door handle as though any minute now she might be able to pressure the Father of Harbingers into leaving her house.

"Who knows," said Arlecchino, with a sidelong look at the chalkboard Furina had stowed between the sofa and the wall, where a smidge of chalk writing was just visible to the canny observer. "Maybe you are. But he can't protect you forever. Not from the judgement of the mob."

"No one in this citadel would dare touch me."

"Says the one who has not left her house in days. How do you suppose they'd do it? By noose? Beheading?"

Furina flinched. "Stop it."

"You aren't safe here," Arlecchino said gently. "Come with us. You don't have to stay here and wait for them to find you out. What kind of life do you suppose you can have here now, where everyone knows your face and your voice better than their own?" When Furina didn't answer, she sighed and paced forward until she stood before Furina and the door. "Think about it. Starting over in a new nation could be just the thing."

"What do you get out of this?"

"Why, a consultant. On all matters pertaining to Fontaine."

Furina drew herself up. "My peace of mind is not worth the secrets of my nation."

"What about your life?"

"I already gave my life."

"Yes, but it wasn't yours to do with as you pleased before, was it? Weren't you created for the purpose by your … other half?"

"How do you know about that?"

"I have my ways," Arlecchino said; then added, as if in afterthought, "And a number of excellent spies, naturally."

Furina stepped into the open doorway, the better to stare down the absolute worst diplomat that had ever arrived on her shores. "Don't talk like you know the first thing about me. You don't know anything."

"My lady Furina, the things you know could fit in a bucketful of water and have space left over for fish," said Arlecchino. "If I were you, I'd worry less about who might find out about your true identity …" Her eyes slid past her. "… and more about who already knows."

Furina felt all the blood drain through her body. Too late, of course. When she spun around, there was Sophie in her mucky overalls and dirty bun, holding a toolbox in one hand and a bucket of rags in the other, with her jaw hanging open as though someone had attached weights to it.

"You see?" Arlecchino said, from somewhere very far away. "It was only a matter of time."

Sophie's mouth moved, open and closed, open and closed. Furina felt as though a giant hand had closed around her guts and was squeezing as painfully as possible. "Sophie," she said, hands half-raised to shield herself, "I'm not … I didn't …"

Sophie gaped at Arlecchino, then back at her. With difficulty, she managed to say, "Lady … Furina?"

"No!" Furina said weakly, but Sophie was already scanning her face, her height, probably going through her own memory as well, and all at once the shock on her face cleared into disbelief. "Lady Furina," she repeated, her brow darkening, and all Furina knew then was that she no longer had any choice.

She yanked her overcoat from its hook by the entrance. "Oh, for heaven's sake, don't be so childish," said Arlecchino.

"I'm sorry, who are you?" Sophie demanded, and then made a sound like "Oof!" as Furina pushed past her, making her drop the bucket of rags. It clattered on the cobblestones. "Lady Furina!" she shouted, but Furina was already throwing on the coat and pulling the hood down over her head, and running down the street like a fawn who'd heard the first arrow fly.

…

There was only one place she could conceivably find sanctuary. When she arrived at the docks, the tired-looking man behind the booth was already locking his drawer of chalk styluses and chalkboard slates, dusting calcite powder off his hands. When Furina, hooded, appeared on the other side of the counter, he didn't even look up at her.

"We're closed."

"I want to sign up for the ferry," Furina said.

"We're closed," the man repeated, still not looking up.

She slammed a hand down on the counter. He jumped. "I want," she repeated, fresh tremors of anger and fright in each word, "to sign up for the ferry."

He gave her an irritated look through the glass. "I'm afraid you're too late, young miss. We had our last signup just a few minutes ago. There aren't any more slots in the program."

Furina lowered her hood, allowing the streetlight to fall on her face. "Yes, there are."

The man went pale. "M-my lady F—"

"Quiet!"

"Yes, my l — yes, Madelle."

"When does the ferry leave?"

"Tonight at eight o'clock."

That left her barely three hours to get everything she needed. Thank heavens she'd left some ration cards in her coat. "Good," she said. "Now open that drawer. Wherever you're keeping the manifest, you're going to write my name down onto it."

"But the — the homestay families —"

"I'm not asking for a homestay in Chenyu Vale. I'm going farther than that." Furina looked him right in the eye. "All I want is to never set foot here again. And I know for a fact that the ark has enough room. So do me and your nation a service and open that drawer."

The man swallowed. Reached for the key hanging on a chain over his neck. And opened the drawer.

…

Neuvillette did not learn of the Harbinger's presence in the citadel the way he would have liked to learn of it. At perhaps half past seven, the watcher he'd posted to Furina's house returned to the Palais Mermonia looking pale and guilty, and informed him that an illustrious-looking personage had knocked on the townhouse door and been admitted inside, and that hardly a minute later a figure in a cloak had run out in a great hurry. "Lady Furina," Neuvillette guessed.

"I assume so, monsieur," said the watcher. "It's just — the thing is — the Knave sort of —"

"The Knave?" Neuvillette said at once, frowning. When the watcher made a pained expression and did not answer, he demanded: "How would you know that title?"

"Because I caught her," said a languid voice from the doorway.

The watcher burst out: "I'm-really-sorry-monsieur-Neuvillette-but-her-people-got-me-and-she-made-me-come-here-and-announce-her —"

"Yes, I see that plainly," said Neuvillette wearily, rising from his desk. "I did not think we would be seeing you again so soon, Your Grace."

"Nor I you," agreed Arlecchino, pushing away from the wall. "Am I interrupting anything?"

"No, but if you would refrain from terrorizing my staff during your sojourn here, it would be most appreciated."

"I might if they stop making it easy."

Neuvillette glanced at the watcher. "Thank you, Gaelle. You may go."

Arlecchino watched her go through narrowed, smiling eyes. The watcher avoided her gaze. When the double doors had shut behind her, Arlecchino looked back at Neuvillette and said: "I won't be in the city long."

"I appreciate your courtesy in coming here in person," said Neuvillette, with only half the irony it deserved. Harbingers were not generally known for giving local authorities the time of day. "With so little notice, I am afraid we cannot welcome you with all the comforts due to a guest."

"Oh, that's fine. It's not as if I announced myself ahead of time. I just have a few investments to see to here," she said, gliding around the perimeter of the room with her fingertips trailing on the empty bookshelves. "Such a pity about your libraries."

"Indeed," said Neuvillette.

"Your legal texts …?"

"Will be dictated from memory and re-printed."

"From memory? Whose?"

"Many members of our legal department are a few hundred years old. They have our laws memorized verbatim."

"Ah," said Arlecchino. "The Melusines. Truly beautiful creatures."

She crossed the room and dropped into the chair opposite. Neuvillette sat down, leaving his hands clasped together atop the desk.

"Lady Furina," he said, not bothering with preamble, "has had an acutely stressful term of service as the archon of this nation. Gaelle said she saw her run out of her house after letting you in. Would you care to explain how and why you chose to upset her?"

"Straight to the point," Arlecchino crossed one leg over the other. "I can appreciate that. No, monsieur, I would not care to explain. But if you are worried that I or anyone who works for me would do her harm, rest assured, she is quite safe. My children have no personal grudge against her, and neither do I." Her lips parted around her teeth in something that somehow did not have the character of a smile. "I had a proposal for her, that's all. Not from Her Majesty but from me."

"What proposal?"

"I'm afraid that isn't your business."

"I have little time to waste, Your Grace. Please answer the question."

"Why not ask her yourself?" When he didn't reply, she tilted her head. "Oh, that's right. I forgot. You aren't on speaking terms these days, are you?"

"That is not your concern."

"And," Arlecchino said, as though he hadn't spoken, "you don't know where she is."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Well, do you?"

"I presume she has recovered from whatever fright you gave her and returned home."

"Oh, it would take more than me to frighten her, surely. But as for her returning home, my people haven't said a word about it."

Neuvillette searched her face, wishing not for the first time that he were better at reading human expressions. Arlecchino held his gaze. Furina's voice surfaced in his mind, something she'd said after the very first of the Knave's visits, collapsed dramatically on one of his office sofas: Neuvillette, I know you're not one for games, but for heaven's sake don't ever play her at poker.

"You did not have to follow Gaelle," he said at last. "I presume you have something of your own to say."

Her mouth curled at the corners. "I often do, don't I? In this case, I happened to find out something rather interesting today. Your refugee ark departs for Chenyu Vale at …" She flicked her eyes to the tiny clock on Neuvillette's desk. "… eight o'clock, or thereabouts?"

"So it does," said Neuvillette.

"I also happen to know," said Arlecchino, "that it will have one more passenger than Mister Wriothesley had accounted for."

"A stowaway?"

"A last-minute signup."

"Then it is perfectly legitimate," said Neuvillette. "Why should it signify if —"

He stopped midsentence.

Whatever passed over his face in that moment, Arlecchino must have been expecting it, for satisfaction deepened the little smile at the corner of her mouth.

"Why indeed?" she said softly, lightly. "Why should anyone care?"

Neuvillette scarcely heard her. Of their own accord, his hands found the edge of his desk and gripped it for equilibrium.

"I tried to dissuade her," Arlecchino went on, examining her nails, "but she wouldn't listen, of course. The poor thing's frightened half to death of her own city. Credit where credit's due: she's vain, but she doesn't quite have the hubris to think the Hydro sovereignty can still protect her."

Neuvillette spoke then, in a low voice that threatened to shake.

"You know nothing of hubris."

"No?"

"If you have been intimidating a citizen of Fontaine, you would be in violation of Article Five, Section Three of the Egeria-Kateryna Peace Treaty of Year 17, which given your status as royal mouthpiece would leave me no choice but to enact sanctions on Her Majesty through you."

"What sanctions?"

"Those described in the Economic Sanctions Act of Year 90."

"The usual kind, you mean? Please, monsieur. Look around." Her gaze slid disdainfully to the empty bookshelves. "You can't afford to sanction us right now. You can't afford to do much of anything. So let's not make empty threats, hm? A more subtle diplomat wouldn't have resorted so quickly to such crude tactics, but I know this isn't really your wheelhouse, so we'll let it pass."

"How gracious," said Neuvillette.

Arlecchino raised her eyebrows. "I thought you'd want to know about it if your little protégée flew the coop."

"Very kind."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

"I don't follow, Your Grace." He was rapidly losing patience; it would not be long before he lost his composure too. "Speak plainly, if you please."

"If you insist." She knit her hands together in a posture of frankness. "The fact is this, monsieur. Nobody could touch either of you before the flood. They can now. People would pay good money for this knowledge, and not half of them are as considerate as I am."

Anger boiled up in him like water through a volcanic vent. Half-rising from his seat, he said, "You would sell her location — her safety —?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I?"

"She is no longer the Hydro archon!"

"No indeed. She's mortal now," Arlecchino said, with something very near pity in her voice. "And as high in your affections as any god or mortal could ever hope to be."

Distantly Neuvillette realized what he looked like: braced forward with his hands on the desk, as though prepared to leap over it and bear the Harbinger to the floor. He felt hot, then cold, then hot again, his hearing muffled as if by the pressure of water. He sat back down.

"That's what I thought," Arlecchino said.

"What would you have me do?" he asked quietly.

To concede even that much he had to fight down every draconic instinct he possessed. She stood, straightened her coat, and looked down at him.

"Don't fuck with me," she said. "And if you threaten Her Majesty again, at least don't be so vulgar about it."

"It was a statement of fact," he said. "Not a threat."

Her lips curled again, not smiling. "I'm not going to make a habit of telling you things you should already know. But like you said, this is a courtesy call. You can have that one for free. Let her go or lock her up or whatever it is dragons do with their treasure, just don't come crying to me when someone uses her to leash you."

She swept back across the office without waiting for any kind of response. At the door she paused and looked over her shoulder.

"Say hello to your duke for me, won't you? Charming man. Always knows to offer a lady a drink."

And before Neuvillette could tell her that primordial dragons did not hoard treasure like common misers and that that had actually been quite a bigoted thing to say, she was gone.

Prior to assuming a human shape, he had never experienced the physical repercussions of fear or distress that imposed themselves on human beings, and indeed he had never had much cause to experience them until Furina's trial and his subsequent tête-à-tête with Focalors. That experience was the principal reason that he now knew what was happening to him. His body thrummed, nearly trembled, with the effort of keeping still until the Knave left, of not betraying himself any more than he already had; and when he rose, he had to catch himself with one hand on the desk at the pain that lanced through his breastbone.

Had she been unhappy all this time? Did she never wish to see him again at all?

For a moment he wasn't sure what was the matter with him. But it wasn't his heart: it was only that he had not been breathing properly.

Furina, he thought. Lady Furina. We were to have hundreds and hundreds of years.

And here of course was yet more cause for sanctions to be laid at Arlecchino's feet, for she had been delaying him — knowingly delaying him — all the while it took her to come around to what she really wanted to say, and left with him with only a little over twenty minutes to cross the Court of Fontaine and reach the harbour where the ark was stationed and —

And what? Persuade Furina to stay? Ask her to renounce the first personal choice she had had the liberty to make in five hundred years?

He looked at the clock, then at the darkening windows, and then he put away his doubts, his dignity and his pride, and he did what he had never once stooped to in five hundred years of bipedal locomotion.

He ran.

…

He didn't get far. Dragons were dragons, and if ever they had the misfortune to get stuck in human shape, they generally turned out to be pitiful athletes. Neuvillette emerged from the Palais Mermonia with one hand clamped over the untimely stitch in his side, having been gawked at by every staffed employee in the palace halls and now being stared at with equal bemusement by the few guards and townspeople in the public square outside.

But he had never intended to reach the harbour on foot. Instead he strode across the square to the canal running lengthwise to the marble balustrade, judged the distance, raised his arms, and dove.

Rushing water drowned out everything else; that and the sweetness of returning to one's own element, like switching from a foreign language to one's own mother tongue.

Go, he told the water, and tame as it was, contaminated as it was by urban life, it obeyed him. Go!

The Court of Fontaine was not only composed of several districts but of multiple tiers, the highest of which supported the Palace, and it was ultimately this that slowed him down. He could leap like a fish between one canal and another so long as they were on the same tier, but he could not leap from one tier to another without surfacing to judge the distance first; it would waste time he did not have. And while he knew intuitively where each flume would take him, his foresight did not extend as far as he would have liked.

She is mortal now.

He hadn't understood what it meant. Not properly. For centuries the people of Fontaine had been drifting down through time like passenger boats, borne along by an invisible current, and he and Lady Furina had stood on the riverbank and watched. Whether they had done so in affection or indifference scarcely mattered: they were bound together by the Oratrice, and they were going to have to suffer one another whether they liked it or not. Now she had climbed into a boat of her own, and if he did not act, he would lose sight of her, and she would never know of his true regard for her, and that would be not only unjust but shameful; they had barely spoken after the flood; they barely knew each other. Focalors had at least told him goodbye, but Focalors was dead. He would not squander whatever time he had left with her successor. He could at least tell her, Go well. He could at least say, This will always be your home. It felt important in a way that few other things had ever felt important. But if he didn't reach the harbour in time, it would all be for nothing.

He was so close now. He could taste the sea. It was nearly pitch dark outside, unusual for midsummer, but the cloud cover that had settled over the Court of Fontaine two months ago had never lifted. Neuvillette wove around and between the wooden struts of the grand pier, having been carried there by one of the aqueducts pouring in from the southeastern quarter of the city, and with a final burst of speed propelled himself to the surface.

But the shift and balance of water in the harbour was all wrong. Even before he hauled himself out onto the nearest jetty, he knew what he would find.

The harbour was empty. The ark was gone. When he got up and turned toward the horizon, he could just see, over the massive water-break encircling the harbour, the outline of a massive ship against the horizon.

Neuvillette stared after it, heart hammering in his chest: not with exertion but with a profound sense of urgency, even now unable to understand what he saw.

Was that a different ship? Was this the wrong end of the harbour?

No. There was no mistaking that silhouette, and there was no other pier in the city where it could have docked, gargantuan as it was. Whether by ten minutes or a year, he was too late.

Furina was gone.

She had left without saying goodbye.

And his thoughts numbly glided over that, reciting not to him but to whatever invisible observer might be sitting in judgement: This is for the best, this is what she would have wanted above all other things. To leave her gaol. To see the world. To establish herself somewhere no one had ever heard the name Focalors, let alone worshipped her, where she might gather around herself a community … perhaps a family … who knew her for who she was, whose relations with her would be built upon honesty and trust. All this she would be able to find across the border, far from the palace.

Yet the pressure in his chest would not ease. The swelling in his throat refused to dissipate.

He had first recalled Christine Daaé because of how Furina had wept over her death. But he tried not to remember the event itself, because on that occasion, and that occasion alone, he had been overpowered not by his own emotions but by hers; and had permitted them to discomfit him to the extent that he had left her alone when she might have badly needed the succor of a friend. Daaé's passing had been honoured with a front-page article in the Steambird, which Lady Furina had had delivered to her every morning, and once she had read it she had folded it, dropped it on the settee and departed in silence. Nobody realized that she had locked herself into her suite until she did not appear for her daily engagements. Anyone who knocked, or tried to cajole her out, was either summarily ignored or showered with furious injunctions to leave her alone on pain of death: a threat which she had neither the right, nor ordinarily the temperament to make. These distressed members of their staff then went to him for assistance. Neuvillette couldn't remember what he felt when they told him Daaé was dead, only that he had picked up the same newspaper Lady Furina had abandoned and skimmed the article for confirmation.

She could not neglect her duties as archon, however frivolous. He went to her suite, expecting to find her sulking in a pile of satin cushions. The head butler had left the door to her suite unlocked. He made his way through the dark rooms to her bedchamber, intending to deliver a sympathetic but appropriately firm admonishment, of the sort he had already delivered countless times. He raised his hand to knock. Then he stopped short, astonished and dismayed by what he heard from within: the sounds of a young woman crying, heaving ragged, full-chested sobs into the covers of her four-poster bed.

Disbelief made him a sculpture with one upraised fist. This could not be. She did much that could have passed for human, but she had never yet cried. The whole nation would have known about it before she reached for a handkerchief. He'd never thought her heart a deep enough vessel for any greater sadness than celebrity ennui. He wept occasionally, when assailed by mortal grief, but the heavens did all the weeping for him; he had never heard any immortal creature sound like this before. Had Daaé meant so much to her?

Why hadn't he gone inside? Comforted her, in word if not in deed? By that time, surely, he ought to have known what to do. He wasn't the novice he'd been when he first began walking side-by-side with humankind.

But such were not the terms of their relationship. Lady Furina would not have accepted his comfort any more than he would have accepted hers under similar circumstances.

And it had rained once already that week. Twice, he felt, would be shameful.

Cancel all her appointments for the next fortnight, he said curtly to Lady Furina's public relations manager, when this last person approached him about coaxing her back to her busy schedule. She is not to be disturbed. If anyone urgently requires to see her, send them to me.

This one decency he granted her without blinking. Yet he returned with slow steps to his office, hearing, as if through an underground tunnel, the sounds of the archon he had grudgingly served for centuries crying like an adolescent girl.

He heard them again now, standing frozen on that jetty, allowing the first droplets of rain to blur his vision; and woven through them, a scrap of melody from the only piece he'd ever heard performed by Christine Daaé, full of farewells that he would never now get to make.

On that day, that not-so-distant day,
When you are far away and free …

He became conscious of the droplets, and swiped a hand across his face, momentarily afraid that this time at last they would be true, human tears, issuing from human eyes for a too-human grief. But it was only the rain, after all.

…

But – no.

No.

This was folly. Furina wasn't gone: she was out of arm's reach, and that could be remedied; what was a few miles of sea to him? What had he left to lose? He brought his arms up again to dive into the water – and was arrested by a cry of pure frustration, high-pitched enough to cut through the whisper and patter of rain.

"NO!"

On the next jetty had appeared a small, sodden figure about the same size and shape as the erstwhile archon and first lady of Fontaine. It threw down a small canvas bag and stamped its foot.

"You've got to be kidding me!"

"Lady Furina?" he said.

So great was his shock that his voice emerged as a whisper. The figure didn't seem to hear him; it was already furiously rooting through its canvas bag in the manner of a field doctor who forgets to bring his tourniquet.

Seized by wild hope, Neuvillette made his shaking voice carry through the sheets of rain that would have stolen it. "Lady Furina!"

The hooded figure yelped and dropped the bag again, and in looking up to see who had called her, inadvertently showed her face to him.

It was her. She was soaked through, ragged, desperate, more vexed than he had seen her in years, and the sight of her would have made the nimbostratus above dissipate instantly if only weather worked like that. She spluttered something, but it was difficult to make out through the downpour; and she had to spit through quite a lot of the rain that was landing on her face. "Pardon?" he called.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE," she shouted, wiping the rain off with the back of her hand. "AREN'T YOU STILL AT WORK?"

This bellowing back and forth would not do. He strode back down the principal boardwalk and around to the jetty she stood on, a little faster than he would have ordinarily: not running, exactly, but anxious to bridge the distance between them. But she kept her face turned away from him as he approached, and realizing this, he slowed, abruptly uncertain of himself and where he stood with her. He stopped once she was in arm's reach — hesitated — and finally asked, "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she said; but her voice shook as though she'd spoken through her teeth, trying to maintain her self-command.

"Did you register for the ferry only this evening?"

"How do you know about that?"

"The Knave paid me a visit," said Neuvillette. "I suspect she paid you one, as well."

She'd fixed her gaze on her own sodden boots; to avoid meeting his gaze, he thought. "You could say that."

"Did she threaten you?"

"No. Maybe. Kind of, I guess."

"Do you feel unsafe? Are you able to return home?"

"No," Furina said. "Someone knows. My neighbour. She overheard me and Arlecchino talking and now she knows who I am." She sounded not only weary but defeated. "The whole city will know soon enough."

He reached for her shoulder — hesitated again — then after a moment's deliberation, swept off his coat instead, and carefully draped it around her shoulders, over her hooded cloak. She looked up at him with a furrowed brow, not shaking him off but obviously expecting an explanation for this unorthodox behaviour.

"It's cold," he said quietly, withdrawing. "You are mortal now. You must take care not to catch a chill, or worse."

She dropped her gaze, and grasping the edges of his coat, pulled it closed around her with the scrunch-shouldered posture of someone who had not realized how cold they were prior to this influx of warmth. Then, for no reason he could guess at, she buried her face in the collar.

Perhaps her nose was cold. He gestured with one hand at the pier behind them.

"Please. Stay the night at the palace. All things considered, I would rather you didn't return to the city just yet."

"Well," she said, with a sniffle. "If you insist."

If any onlookers had remained after the ship's departure, and if the Steambird'sprinting presses hadn't been a pile of rubble in the eastern district, they would have had no contest for the following morning's front page. Furina looked like a soggy vagrant, and he wasn't much better in his jacket and shirtsleeves, dampened with rain, his hair a great deal more unkempt than he would have liked it to be. But there wasn't, and so they were left in peace as they made their way back to the palace in silence.

…

When they reached the palace, she trailed after him like a shade, tugging her hood down over her face in case there was anyone still working overtime in the foyer. There wasn't, but Fantine cheerfully greeted her by name from the receptionist's desk, and Furina had to greet her back, stiltedly, before following Neuvillette up the stairs.

By the time she reached her old parlour, with its familiar sofas and side tables and pretty wallpaper, all of it a little shabbier-looking after the flood, Neuvillette was already asking one of the human staff to bring tea, blankets and a change of clothes from her old wardrobe. The servant bowed to him, then to her, and left. Neuvillette vanished for a while, too, telling her quietly that he would have her old bedroom made up for her, as it had been left untouched if not kept fresh in her absence. Furina was left alone in the parlour, hugging herself for warmth.

"Lady Furina?" asked the servant, popping their head in. "I have your clothes. There's a hot bath for you if you want to warm up — the tea might take a while."

Whatever night-shift maid they'd stuck on the tea job must have had the foresight not to brew it immediately, because Furina spent half an hour in that bath with arms wrapped around her knees, staring through the wall. Stepping into a fresh set of pajamas did make her feel better: they'd brought her one of her old sets, and an unfamiliar, patched-up robe for extra warmth. She entered the parlour again and found nothing and no one there except for the steaming tea tray and Neuvillette by one of the windows, staring out into the evening. Rivulets of rain streamed down the windowpanes.

Wordlessly, she took one side of the sofa and picked up the teapot. There were two heavy-duty mugs laid out on the tray, so she filled them both, wrapped her hands around one, and waited.

Neuvillette came to sit beside her. She pushed the tray over, but he made no move to pick up his tea. He'd changed into fresh clothes too, jacket and shirtsleeves, his hair newly brushed out, the antenna-strands a little more sprightly than they had been in the rain. Jarringly, he was in sock feet, which on a regular day she would have ranked somewhere between "pigs fly" and "water runs uphill" on a list of things that were likely to happen.

He saw where she was looking. "Ah," he said. "I only have the one pair of boots right now, I'm afraid. They'll be dry by tomorrow morning."

"I see," she said, feeling weirdly as though she should avert her eyes, and did so. This was probably how people used to feel about seeing ladies' ankles. Not in a sexy way, just in a let's-all-pretend-we-don't-have-feet kind of way.

There was a long silence. He waited, apparently willing to let her set the terms. Furina sipped at her tea, then lowered her mug and stared into it, as though it could give her the courage to say what she needed to say.

"… thank you for the records."

Neuvillette leant forward and braced his elbows on his thighs, as though he too felt tired. "I thought they might lift your spirits."

"They did," Furina admitted. "For a while, anyway."

Quiet settled over them. He glanced at her. She turned the mug around and around in her hands, feeling wretched and not knowing why. She'd only let down one person this time, after all. Not a nation. Only the closest thing in the world she had to a friend.

"I'm sorry," she said at last, very softly. "You deserved better than that from me."

"Better than what, Lady Furina?"

"Ignoring your letter. Leaving without saying anything. All of it." She put down the tea and buried her face in her hands. "I lied to you every day for five hundred years and I didn't even know what I was doing half the time. If you even suspected, it would have destroyed everything."

Neuvillette didn't say anything. She went on, a little desperately, "I don't know what else I could have done. She never even gave me the full picture. All I knew was that I had to save everyone, and if I had you on my side it would be foolproof. But we were supposed to be a team. You never gave me anything but total honesty, and I repaid you by lying to your face."

"Lady Furina —"

"Don't call me that." She squeezed her eyes shut and scrunched her fingers into her hair. "You're not my subordinate anymore."

"No," he agreed, after a pause. "But it will take some getting used to. Lady Furina, I think you are under a misapprehension. I am not angry with you for lying, given that it was for just cause. Neither am I angry with you for leaving, or attempting to leave, as the case may be. If you wished to go without giving me notice, that would be your prerogative."

Furina glanced at him from beneath her hand, half afraid to confirm her suspicions. "But you are angry."

"No," he said. "I am …" He stopped, apparently searching for the right word.

"Disappointed?"

"Disappointed," he echoed, after a pause. "Because you would not rely on me. Or go to me, as to a friend, when you were in trouble. Even now that I'm in a position to help you. We have known each other for five hundred years, and you would not do me the decency of telling me you felt unsafe in your own city."

"I was in a bit of a hurry!"

"So tonight was the first night you felt unsafe?"

"Yes. Of course."

Neuvillette held her gaze, with that same somber, searching quality about it. Furina looked away, not knowing how to alleviate her own discomfort, and lifted her mug to her lips again so she could hide her face. But when the tea ran out she had to put it back down and self-consciously wipe her mouth on her pajama sleeve, and none of her problems had gone away.

He watched her, then looked away, apparently mulling something over. Whatever it was, he seemed to make up his mind.

"Do you remember the day we learned of Christine Daaé's death?"

It was quite the non sequitur. "I suppose," she said, darting a sidelong glance at him. "Why?"

"You were upset. You locked yourself into your room and wouldn't come out. You threatened the staff with grievous bodily harm if they disturbed you."

"But they didn't. You told them not to." Coming from him, that had been an uncommon kindness. "I don't think I ever told you how much I appreciated that. Honestly, I kind of expected you to try and make me go back to work yourself."

"I nearly did. I went to your door intending to offer my sympathies, and to chide you for neglecting your duties."

"You never knocked."

"No." Neuvillette hesitated. "I heard you crying."

"Oh."

That did explain it. But it didn't make it any less mortifying. She waited, wringing her hands, while he deliberated on how to come to his point.

"This will be difficult for me to say," he went on at last. "I may not properly express myself. But you and I have only just begun to be honest with one another, so I must give you the full truth if I can." He looked down at his clasped hands. "It's not uncommon for us to get caught up in the mortal world, or in mortals themselves. On an intellectual level, I knew you were grieving the death of someone you cared for deeply. But I did not understand. I felt that whatever friendship you had formed with her was beyond my scope of comprehension. In any case, I learned long ago not to attach myself too strongly to any one mortal creature." His focus seemed to have buried itself somewhere in the bedrock beneath the palace. "To do otherwise would have meant my sanity."

Furina stared at him. He had never, not once in all their long acquaintance, spoken of grief, never even alluded to the possibility that he had ever been close with anyone. She'd given up on nagging him for personal details somewhere around year two hundred and forty.

"Now," he said, "I think I understand. Whatever Christine Daaé was to you, it is not far removed from what you are to me. And what I felt today, when I thought you had left for Chenyu Vale, was but the ghost of what I knew I'd feel when you were gone for good."

In the ensuing silence, she had to swallow, twice, to loosen her suddenly clumsy tongue.

"… when I died?"

He nodded.

What a small confession. What a terrible, awkward, sweetly unexpected thing for anyone to say. "My dear Iudex, are you saying you'd miss me?"

Neuvillette looked up at her, and she tried to smile at him through ferociously smarting eyes. But it was too late: the smile wobbled like a candle in a draft, and her vision was blurring, and she had to fight to keep her voice anything remotely close to steady. "That's embarrassing for you," she said.

"Furina?" he asked, dismayed, and something hot and wet ran down her cheeks; she inhaled once, sharply, humiliatingly, and turned away from him.

But there was nowhere to go. Her house was compromised, and the city itself wasn't any safer. She had to sit here and face this, whatever this was, and cry in front of the last person in the world she wanted to see her cry.

There was a tentative touch at her wrist through the bathrobe sleeve.

"Furina?"

"I don't know why you don't hate me!" she burst out, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. "The gods stole everything from you, and I've just been their puppet. Five hundred years of being the Hydro Archon and now I'm not good for anything else. I don't know what I'm supposed to do or who I'm supposed to be, and I only have so much time to figure it out before my life is over and I'll have squandered the freedom she died to give me!"

"Furina." The touch moved to her shoulder. "I'm not sure I understand. Your only concern now should be to heal."

"And then what? I can't hide forever. Someone will recognize me and then I'll get the people's justice."

"I won't let that happen."

"You don't know the way they talk about me! They think I sat by and did nothing while Fontaine met its own prophesied apocalypse!"

"Then we must tell them."

"What, the truth?"

Neuvillette hesitated. She dropped her hands and looked at him through reddened eyes. "We can't. It'll get someone killed."

"Perhaps not the whole truth," he conceded. "But enough to clear your name."

Furina swallowed. Her throat had tightened painfully, like a fist closing around the stem of a wineglass. Neuvillette pulled back from her shoulder.

"Apologies."

"No," she said, emphatically shaking her head. "It's fine. I don't mind."

Another great sniffle, another blink, and more tears rolled down her cheeks. She couldn't seem to stop. Seeing this, he slid off the sofa and knelt in front of her, as gracefully as though he were still in his customary robes of office. This thoroughly discomposing gesture had the effect of putting him into her direct line of sight. She averted her gaze, cheeks hot.

"Look at me," he said. "Please."

When she lifted her eyes to his, she was prepared for a lot of things: pity, perhaps, or insistence; but not even five hundred years could have prepared her for the depth of tenderness in his expression.

"You protected Fontaine. And you protected me."

"From what?"

"From solitude. And a life lived in ignorance." He'd pitched his words low, almost at the bottom of his voice. "Do you think I would be what I am now if I had not spent five hundred years by your side? Love does not come easily to me or my kind. But I will protect your people now, with the whole of my power, and I will be a friend to you if you will let me."

Furina's eyes welled again, and she had to press her lips together so she wouldn't make any noise. Neuvillette knit his brow.

"Did I say something wrong?"

She shook her head.

"Should I continue?"

She nodded.

He hesitated, then seemed to choose perseverance. "Then listen to me. You have more than earned the right to go wherever you wish from now on. No one will stop you, and you may always come back. The rest of your life is yours to do with as you please." With ceremonial gravity, he reached for her hands, which she'd clasped loosely in her lap, and scooped them in between his own, covering her topmost knuckles with one bare palm. "But let us be friends first. And if we must part ways, let us not part ways any sooner than we must."

After a long moment Furina managed, with a watery smile, "I think you've seen one too many operas."

"If I have, it is thanks to you."

"Probably."

The second wave had passed. She swallowed again and took a few deep breaths, looking down at where he held her hands between his.

Funny how such a small gesture could make her feel so queenly. She'd never felt smaller or more insignificant than she had on that pier, watching the ark wink out on the horizon. Yet here he was, showing her deference when he no longer owed her any such thing, and it was enough to remind her of who she was and what they were to one another. And his hands were very warm.

"I don't mind," she repeated quietly. It came out thin and muffled-sounding from all the crying, but at least her voice didn't shake.

"Only say the word," said Neuvillette.

She shook her head mutely. They remained that way for a moment longer, allowing the late-night hush to fill the parlour. Rain dried in streaks on the windowpanes.

He broke the silence first, sounding apologetic.

"I did ask Sigewinne what she would recommend for a human in your position."

"What? Why?"

"If you had been an ordinary human being, your health would have certainly suffered after such a time of stress. She would know better than either of us if there are ill effects we should guard against."

"I suppose," Furina said dubiously. "What did she say?"

"That she would prefer to examine you in person if at all possible, but that all must be well with your physical health if you have not already fallen sick."

"But my mental health, not so much?"

"Something to that effect." Neuvillette paused. "She also said that it would be paramount for you not to isolate yourself from others so soon after your ordeal."

"Well, that can't be helped."

"Perhaps not with things as they are. But after we clear your name, when you are more comfortable with the city at large, I thought we might … take a walk?"

"A walk?"

"Yes. In the city, if you like, or outside of it. The northern shoreline is only just returning to its normal dimensions. It's in an unusual state — many crabs and clamshells are having to reacclimatize themselves to different homes. It's quite interesting."

He looked so earnest that she couldn't help ducking her head in an attempt to hide a strange and entirely unfamiliar shyness. "Okay," she said, and sniffled again; the crying was still working its way out of her system. "We'll take a walk. And I want … I want you to show me what we need to fix. The whole extent of the damage."

"Of course."

"The nation is still my responsibility. I can't just abdicate and leave it in shambles."

Neuvillette smiled. "I am glad to hear you say so." He smiled so rarely, and it was always such a tiny thing — a curve of the mouth, a softening around the eyes — that you couldn't really be sure he was smiling unless his expression went back to how it was before. Furina wouldn't have traded one of those smiles for all the jewels in Liyue. "You will stay, then, for a while?"

"Maybe ten, twenty years," she started, then stopped, her heart sinking into her stomach. "No, wait … I only have …"

He remained silent. She asked slowly, "How far along would you say my biological age is right now?"

"Twenty-five?" he offered, after a pause.

"Right," she said. "So maybe six or seven decades …?"

They looked at one another, each expecting confirmation from the other.

"Not long," he finished somberly.

"No." Six or seven decades had been only as long as it took for her to develop and abandon interest in one performing artist or another, usually the length of that performing artist's lifetime. "I suppose I'll just have to be careful in how I use them."

Neuvillette let go her hands and returned to his seat. "What is it?" she asked.

"I wish you had more time." He spoke very quietly. "It doesn't make it easier, that I've seen thousands of humans come and go. I'm afraid to see the day you die."

"All because you heard me crying that one time?"

"It reminded me forcibly of everything I have ever tried not to feel. Everything I knew I was capable of feeling. If that was how you grieved for a woman you knew for sixty years …"

"That's awfully sweet of you," Furina said softly. "But it's not Miss Daaé I was mourning that day. Not really."

Neuvillette looked at her, uncomprehending. She replied with a rueful little half-smile. "I was too busy pitying myself."

"What do you mean?"

"I thought she was like me. When we first met, I mean. A lifelong actress trapped in her role. For a while it was like I wasn't alone anymore." Daaé's face had long since faded in her memory, like a blurry daguerreotype, but the sharp, lancing pain of that day had only somewhat dulled. She looked down at her own knees. "It didn't matter in the end. She got her curtain call. I never got mine. I think I was more envious of her then than I ever was of anyone in my entire life."

"Envious," Neuvillette repeated dismally.

"I'm not afraid to die," Furina said. "There are worse things. As long as I go gracefully, I'll be glad to go. And I'll be happy if just … one person grieves for me."

"You will have more than one."

"I don't need more than one." She angled herself so that she could look him full in the face, hardly knowing where she found the courage. "Neuvillette, you are … my oldest, truest, most loyal friend. And if it rains a little on the day I die —"

"Furina!" he said, aghast.

"— then that's all I can ask for," she finished, throat swelling. "I'll be the happiest fake archon in history."

It was the strangest thing imaginable, but as soon as she said it, the tightness in her chest eased, and the pressure behind her eyes abated. She felt lighter than she had in months. Conversely, Neuvillette looked like she'd just handed him the treasured belongings of a dead best friend.

"Then you must promise me something in return," he said. "Wherever you go … whatever new life you establish for yourself … you must come back."

"Of course."

"If I am your friend, then I ask, as your friend, that you not disappear without warning as you tried to do today."

"I won't."

"And that …" He stopped.

She was too impatient to hear the rest. "What?"

"Wait a moment. I am trying to remember." His brow had creased with thoughtfulness. "Perhaps if I expressed myself in the language you knew best …" With the greatest imaginable solemnity, he extended his hands. "May I?"

She placed her hands inside his, now strongly suspecting what other advice Sigewinne might have given him about touch-starved humans with no friends. "What is it?"

Neuvillette cleared his throat.

"'Think of me,'" he said liltingly, gaze fastened on their joined hands, "'say you'll think of me — whatever else you choose to do …'"

Five hundred years of hearing the general public flatter her, seek favour with her, quote all her favourite works of art in the hope of winning a second glance from her, and none of them — not one — had ever made her flush so brilliantly scarlet as she did now. When he looked up, he saw instantly what he'd done.

"Have I embarrassed you?"

"Obviously!" she spluttered; for he had adjusted the pitch, inflection and rhythm of his voice to mimic music, and the reference itself was unmistakable. "I can't believe you remember that!"

He seemed surprised at the strength of her reaction. "I have a good memory."

"Have you been listening to my records on the sly?"

"No. The only intact copies I know of, I gave to you."

"But before that? Before the flood?"

"I only heard it once, in your company."

"You remembered," she repeated in growing delight, and laughed: how good it felt to hear exactly what one had always and ever wanted to hear. "I don't believe it. That must have been over a hundred and fifty years ago."

"About that, yes."

"I knew you were a sentimental old serpent."

He smiled his slight, lovely smile again. "I have never denied that."

"Well, then." Red in the face, she dropped her eyes to gather herself. "It's only fair, I suppose …"

She hadn't sung anything in ages; she hadn't had the heart. But she was much more familiar with the aria, and had a great deal more musical experience, than he did, and when she sang out, softly, her voice was only a little hoarse from disuse.

"'There will never be a day / When I don't think of you …'"

This was followed by something of a reverent, self-conscious pause, during which neither of them looked at the other.

"Then we are in agreement," he murmured, after some time had gone by; he had tactfully lowered his gaze to their clasped hands, which granted her a few moments at least to recompose her expression. Furina looked up at him, at his ageless, elegant face, human in structure though not in essence, so familiar and so very dear to her; and was sorry all over again.

"I truly upset you today, didn't I?"

"It was not your fault."

She made her tone as light and nonchalant as could be managed under the circumstances; if he said no, she could always make a joke of it and cry about it later. "Would a hug make you feel any better, do you think?"

He paused; and then answered gravely, "It may well do."

Later, she would scarcely be able to remember how exactly it had been accomplished, only that she'd had to pull her hands free first and that he'd had to lean forward quite a bit to mitigate for their difference in height. Then she was clasping him tightly, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, and he took a moment to decide where to position his arms before doing the same. Him being much larger than she was, they fairly engulfed her. But he figured it out. His jaw came to rest on the crown of her head, and his breath ruffled her hair. Furina closed her eyes.

Neither of them had ever hugged anyone before, so neither was aware that hugs tend to end naturally when the patience or comfort of one or both participants wears thin. He was several thousand years old, and she had never before had cause to count the minutes; and there is no substitute, in any universe, for the embrace of a friend. The closest comparison Furina could have made would have been to the sensation of sinking into a hot bath. They held one another for a stretch of time that would have made any pair of ordinary mortals antsy, but which to a pair of deities would feel just about suitable, and were silent.

In the back of Furina's mind, some part of her came to a final conclusion.

"Neuvillette?"

"Mm?"

"When do you suppose the Steambird's presses will be repaired?"

"Not for many months," he said, catching on at once. "But if you intend what I think you do, I may know of an alternative we could use."

…

It took some time to arrange, which allowed her to repeatedly trick herself into thinking it wouldn't ever happen every time her brain tried to panic about it. You don't transport an entire printing press from one country to another in a day. But when the time came, she found herself frozen in her chair in the cleanest, most neutral available room of the Palais Mermonia while two dozen members of the Steambird ran around in pre-photoshoot pandemonium, calling for the backdrop drapes to be adjusted and for the borrowed lights to be dimmed or brightened and for that goddamn photographer to get in here and earn his keep or Chief Editor Euphrasie would have his hide.

"Where have you been?" Euphrasie shouted when he at last slunk into the room, head hanging low. "We're due to start in five minutes and you haven't even set up yet!"

Charlotte the journalist skidded to a halt in front of Furina, slightly breathless. "Apologies, Miss Furina. I don't know what kept him, but I'm positive we're still on schedule."

"He was on a stress-induced smoke break," said Furina, who had been watching him out the window out of the corner of her eye for the last twenty minutes and neglected to mention it to anyone. "Tell Madelle Euphrasie it's no trouble at all."

Charlotte shook her head. "It's poor professionalism on his part. We're on a deadline; in journalism that's serious business."

With that she ran off again, leaving Furina to reach into her pocket for the letter, for the hundredth time unconscious that she was doing any such thing.

Let me know if there are any issues with the machinery, ran the bubbly, curlicue handwriting. I'm sure your engineers would be able to solve them in no time, but I'd like to hear about it anyway, as I've never had to repair such a complex invention myself before. Besides, you and I are sister-archons! We should get to know each other. It's true that my own imprisonment was of a vastly different nature than yours, but there's still a lot we could learn from each other, and you're about to embark on the greatest adventure of all — that of being human!

By the way, everything arriving at your harbour is a gift, not a loan, so tell Iudex Neuvillette from me that the only return I will accept is your using them to bolster the recovery of Fontaine and her people. One day, when you visit Sumeru City in person, I hope you'll tell me all about it yourself.

A nearby bustling caught her attention. Chief Editor Euphrasie was directing Neuvillette toward the dais, one hand hovering at his elbow at a chaperone-like distance.

"Just here, Your Honour," she said, motioning for him to mount the low steps and come to stand beside Furina. "We'll take the photo first, then move on to the interview. Charlotte! Where did that girl run off to —?"

It was noisy enough that they could have spoken to one another without being overheard, but they didn't. They waited, side by side, while spotlights were focused upon them, while the drapes behind them were adjusted fashionably, and while the sweating photographer hunched inside the drape of the studio camera and fiddled with the controls. Something must have dissatisfied him, because without even emerging from under the cloth, he gestured at them, voice muffled.

"Could you move a little closer, Your Honour, Miss — ah — Miss Furina?"

Neuvillette stepped closer to Furina's chair. The photographer made smooshing motions with his hands.

"Closer …" Neuvillette placed one gloved hand on her shoulder. "Yes, that's perfect."

Furina straightened automatically, allowing her elbows to rest on the chair's arms and her hands to clasp loosely in her lap. She knew what the final photograph would look like: herself, enthroned, staring with uncharacteristic gravity into the camera, and Iudex Neuvillette like the scales of justice behind her, posed in such a way that anyone beholding it would understand all they needed to about the past five hundred years.

Well … maybe not everything. But that was what the interview would be for.

"Ten seconds," said the photographer, signaling from under the drape to the light crew.

"Are you all right?" Neuvillette murmured.

Furina reached up to where his gloved fingers rested on her shoulder, and let the touch linger, drawing strength from it. Then she let go. "I will be," she said.

And the camera went off.

…