At first, the words didn’t even register.

Keri couldn’t take his eyes from Rika, whose hand remained on Sohvis’ arm. One winter, when they were young men, he and his cousin had dared each other to swim in the icy waters of the Okuthet - the small river that tumbled down from the heights of Menis Breim into Cold Harbor. Keri had leapt first, and immediately found that the shock of the sudden cold completely prevented him from moving his arms or his legs. If Sohvis hadn’t pulled him out, he would have drowned right then and there.

His body felt precisely the same now.

The only spot of warmth and comfort in the entire cold world was his son. Rei was balanced on Keri’s hip, his little arms wrapped around his father’s neck. The boy shifted against enchanted steel armor, squirming in an effort to get comfortable, and the motion snapped Keri out of his shock. His father and his aunt, on the path just above Rika and Sohvis, were watching him.

“Father,” Keri began, cleared his throat, and then continued in Lucanian, “I’ve brought guests and allies to Mountain Home. First, this is Livara Tär Valtteri kæn Syvä, Journeyman of the Lucanian mages guild. Her companions include Arjun Iyuz of the east, and Rosamund Lowry, both apprentices. It may be that we are joined by Wren Wind Dancer of the Red Shield tribe, if she catches up to us here before we depart.”

He shifted, turning about to face the three companions with whom he would be venturing into a rift. “It is my honor to introduce you to my father, Ilmari ka Väinis kæn Bælris, and my aunt, Väina Tär Väinis kæn Bælris – both elders of my family.” Keri had to force himself to continue, and he hoped that no one could hear the strain in his voice as he forced the next words out. “My kwenim, Rika tär Kalevis, and my cousin, Sohvis ka Auris.”

If Liv had noticed the tension in the air, Keri was thankful that she made no sign of it. Instead, as elegantly as you like, she performed a Lucanian curtsy, inclined her head, and greeted his family in turn. “Elders,” she began, “it is a pleasure to finally meet you. I’ve known Keri for nearly seven years now, and he saved my life in Freeport. It is an honor to visit his home.”

“You’re Valtteri’s half human girl, then?” Aunt Väina observed, speaking Vakansa. She didn’t say the word ‘bastard,’ but Keri could tell that Liv heard the implication from the slight flush that colored her cheeks and the tips of her ears. He suddenly felt the nearly overwhelming urge to defend her, but thankfully his father spoke first.

“Welcome to Mountain Home,” Ilmari said, walking forward. He proceeded directly down the path, forcing Rika and Sohvis to step apart and make way for him, and when he reached Liv, he reached out and took her hand in both of his. “You are most welcome.” For a moment, Keri’s father examined the girl’s eyes. “Look at you,” he said. “Blue eyes like a winter storm. There’s no doubt who you’re descended from, is there?” The old man looked to Keri, and their eyes met briefly.

“And this,” Keri said, turning his body so that he held his son toward Liv and her friends, “ is my son, Reikis.”

Liv released Ilmari’s hands and closed the distance to Keri; he was surprised to see genuine warmth and pleasure in her eyes, and in her smile. But then again, he’d never seen the young woman with children before.

“Hello, Rei,” she said. “I’m a friend of your father. You can call me Liv.”

Keri felt his son turn slightly away from where he’d buried his face in his father’s neck, and straighten, so that he could examine the stranger who’d greeted him. “You’re pretty,” the child said, simply.

“We will have rooms prepared for all of you,” Ilmari announced, with a vigorous clap of his hands. “You look like you have been on the road for quite some time.”

“A few days in Al’Fenthia recovering,” Liv said, turning back to Keri’s father. “But before that, yes – we haven’t really had a chance to stay anywhere for long since we left Coral Bay. And even in Al’Fenthia there was an eruption.”

“You can tell us everything over the evening meal,” the old man declared. “But first, I think some time in our hot springs would do you all some good. Sister, please inform the cooks we will be pushing dinner back until the seventh hour of the evening. Sohvis, show our guests to the springs, and be certain they are brought all the necessary supplies.” He stepped over to Keri and held out his arms. “I will see my grandson put to bed.”

Rei made an unhappy noise and clung to Keri tighter.

“Come along, child,” Ilmari said. “Your father and mother haven’t seen each other in many months. Let’s give them a moment to themselves. You’ll see him in the morning.” It took a few moments to pry the boy off of Keri, and in all honesty, he would have preferred to be the one putting his son to bed. It would certainly have been more pleasant than the conversation that he was seemingly about to have.

Sohvis ushered Liv and her friends away, though the white-haired girl was slow to turn away from Keri, and he got the sense that she wanted to say something to him. He met her eyes, nodded his head, and tried to convey that they would speak later without actually saying anything aloud.

Keri’s father carried Rei away easily, and both Linnea and Olavi bid farewell on their way to drop their armor and weapons off for cleaning. “Tell the armorers I will see them tomorrow,” he murmured. “With our guests.” Linnea nodded, and both warriors headed up the path.

Aunt Väina was the last to leave, and Keri had the feeling that if the old woman had an excuse, she would have remained to listen, but finally she left Keri alone with Rika on the path. The very last light of the setting sun had dyed the western clouds deep shades of purple and burnt orange, and the first stars were emerging in the east, over the mountains.

“Sohvis, is it?” Keri asked, finally breaking the silence. He found, suddenly, that he couldn’t stand to look at the mother of his child, and instead turned to face downhill, toward the town and far beyond, the lights of Cold Harbor, where the land met the sea. “How long?”

“A few months,” Rika said, after a long stretch of silence. “Since the summer.”

“I wrote you a letter,” Keri said. He remembered the night before the assault in Varuna, how he had tried to put everything he was feeling onto the paper, in case he never saw her again. How much care he’d taken to choose words so as not to frighten her, and how he’d promised himself that once the waystone had been secured, he would take time at home to see his family again. The thought that she’d already been with his cousin turned his stomach. The two people he’d trusted most in the world had gone behind his back, in secret.

“I received it,” Rika said. There was a distance in her voice that he’d never heard before. “This has been a long time coming, Inkeris.”

He turned back to her and frowned. “You’re not even calling me Keri anymore?”

“Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years ago, we made a commitment to each other,” Rika began. “To support each other. To care for each other. To raise a child together. Only, you haven’t been here.”

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“I’ve been fighting to protect you!” Keri roared. He took a step toward Rika, and couldn’t believe it when she flinched back. “You think I didn’t want to be here with you and Rei? I wanted it more than anything,” he told her. He felt like the words had broken open something he’d been holding onto tightly for so long, and now he couldn’t stop them from coming out even if he’d wanted to.

“Every night, when I was in Varuna, I thought of you and him,” Keri said. “When my arms were so exhausted from a day paddling up river I thought they’d fall off, when the bites of those incessant bugs itched and scratched all over my body, when the air was so hot and wet that I tossed and turned in my tent without a moment’s sleep, I told myself: I am doing this so that my family will be safe.”

“You can’t imagine the things I’ve seen,” he continued. “I watched a woman’s leg torn off in one bite, her body flung aside. She was still alive while the mana beasts ate her, Rika. I couldn’t even tell who it was in the dark; we had to figure it out later by counting bodies, and whose corpse we’d found and whose we hadn’t. Soile of House Syvä. She used to sing around the campfires at night, and she died in the mud in Varuna, so that people like you could be safe. And you can’t even write me a letter – you can’t even wait till I come home.”

For a moment, Keri thought he might have gotten through to her. He was desperate for the woman he’d known since they were children together to just understand. Then, she set her mouth, and he knew that she hadn’t heard him. Even if she’d listened, she hadn’t really heard.

“I’m sure she was a good woman, and I’m sure it's a tragedy that she’s gone,” Rika said. “But I’m not talking about Soile of House Syvä, Inkeris, I’m talking about you. You had chance after chance to choose us, to choose your family, and you never have – and now I understand you never will.”

“I used to tell myself, back at the beginning, that it would be over soon, and you’d come back to me,” Rika said, plunging forward. Keri recognized the same awful desperation in her to speak that he’d felt himself only a moment before. “In the beginning, when you were riding all over the north, hunting cultists. Sooner or later, I thought, you’d find them all, and then that would be it. Or you’d send Sohvis out instead, while you stayed home.”

Keri felt his lips twitch into a scowl at the mention of his cousin’s name, but he remained silent and let the mother of his child finish.

“But it only got worse,” Rika said, waving her arms in frustration. From the breaks in her voice, Keri guessed that if her face hadn’t been concealed by the darkness of the evening, he would have been able to see her crying.

“You went to Lucania,” his kwenim said. “You went to Varuna. Coral Bay and Kelthelis and Al’Fenthia. I feel like you’ve been to every place in Isvara except here. Months at sea, months in the jungle. Your son is growing up, and you aren’t here for it.” She took a deep, audible breath. “And eventually I realized it wasn’t going to ever end. There’s always going to be some crisis, and you’re always going to rush off to deal with it, because that’s who you are. You’re never going to be the man to stay home and raise our son.”

“So you found someone else,” Keri said. His heart felt as dead as old, dry branches fallen in the forest.

“Yes!” Rika raised her voice for the first time. “Yes, I did. You weren’t here, and Sohvis was. I was all by myself, trying to raise our son, and he helped me. He cares for us.”

“This isn’t how things are done,” Keri argued back. “I shouldn’t have had to come home and be surprised by this! If you wanted a new daiverim, you were supposed to speak to me about it first!”

“If you had ever been here, I would have,” Rika said. “Of course, if you’d been here, I’d never have felt the need to in the first place. But don’t act as if you’re better than me. I see you’ve found yourself another woman while you’ve been running all across the world.”

“Liv?” Keri frowned. “There’s nothing between Liv and I. We’re fighting against the same enemy, but I’m not certain I’d even call us friends yet. I haven’t seen her for over a year, not until just a few days ago.”

“And now that you’ve come home, are you staying?” Rika asked. Before Keri could even respond, she answered her own question. “Of course not. You’ve rolled in here with no warning and a handful of human mages that look like they’ve been dragged through the wilderness. I’d be surprised if you’re staying more than a day or two. Rei will be heartbroken.”

“Let me talk!” Keri exclaimed, and Rika backed off a step.

“Fine. Talk,” she said.

“We have a plan,” Keri said. “There’s a rift in Varuna that we need to take, but in order to do that, we need Liv to get something from beneath the Tomb of Celris.”

Rika smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Just as I thought, then. You’re here long enough to fill your bellies and treat your wounds, and then off again. And when he cries himself to sleep tomorrow night because you’re gone again, I’m the one who has to deal with it. This is not what we agreed to.”

“Maybe it isn’t,” Keri admitted, finally. “But it is what has to happen. You must see that. What’s happening in Varuna has already killed dozens – likely hundreds of our people, between Soltheris, the Hall of the Ancestors, and Varuna.”

“Dragging all our warriors across the ocean will only make that number go up,” Rika pointed out. “Not down.”

“And doing nothing will doom us all,” Keri argued back. “You think that Raktia will simply leave us in peace, if we do nothing? That she’ll just forget that we used to be her slaves – that the Eld helped kill the old gods? Are you really that stupid?”

The word hung in the night air between them for a long moment.

“You think I’m stupid?” Rika asked.

“No,” Keri said, but he’d already spoken the word, and there was no taking it back now.

“You said it, you must think it,” Rika shot back at him. “I don’t agree with you, so I must be a fool. For thinking that you’d do better by your family staying here, protecting us here, than running off to fight trinity knows what across the ocean.”

“It has to be done,” Keri said. “Closing your eyes to what’s happening in the world won’t save you from it.”

“And believing you know better than everyone else doesn’t make it so,” Rika said. “It only makes you arrogant.” She took a long, shuddering breath. “I release you, Keri. I no longer consider you my daiverim.”

“Rika –”

“Go then,” she said, interrupting him. “Say the words. And neither one of us will be shackled to the other any longer.”

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Keri admitted. Overhead, the ring in the sky lit the clouds, and by its light he could see the wind toss her hair. He remembered that hair spread across their pillows, the softness of it in his hands.

“I didn’t want this either,” Rika said. “But that doesn’t change what happened.”

“You’re no longer my kwenim,” Keri said. Forcing the words out felt like ripping splinters of wood from his fingers. He felt wetness gathering in his eyes.

“Good.” Rika’s shadow turned to walk away from him, and then paused for a moment. “If you’re not coming back to stay, Inkeris, I’d prefer you didn’t come back at all. It only upsets our son when you leave again.”

He stood there in the darkness, weeping alone, until he could no longer hear the scrape of Rika’s boots on the stones of the path. For his entire life, if he’d needed someone to talk to, Keri would have sought out Sohvis, or Rika himself. Now he felt like that had been stolen from him too, along with his family. He couldn’t even go to his rooms – would Rika be there? Or would he find the chambers empty of all her things? Either way, he didn’t want to see it.

Instead, Keri turned his steps off along one of the side paths, toward the pools fed by the hot springs. He knew the way so well that he didn’t even need the light of the ring: he could have walked the stones blind. As he approached, Keri heard voices.

Sohvis had led Liv and her friends to a set of steaming pools, each surrounded by a walkway of polished wood plants. In between the pools were a set of low evergreens to provide privacy, in the event it was desired. He had to admit that it was good thinking: Lucanians were less comfortable with their bodies than the Eld were.

He paused to listen, and once he knew which way the voices of the two young women were coming from, Keri took the other branch of the path, and climbed up onto the wooden platform above where Arjun was bathing.

“Do you mind if I join you?” Keri asked. He could see the other man’s face by the light of lanterns hanging around the rim of the pool.

Arjun shook his head. “We don’t know each other well,” he ventured. “I know that we’ve only met a few times. I hope that my asking this doesn’t offend you – are you alright?”

Keri began to work at the buckles and straps that held his armor on, dropping piece after piece onto the polished wood planks. Arjun was right: they didn’t know each other. They’d only met once before, to both escort Liv to Kelthelis, for the passing of her grandfather. But they’d also built the man’s funeral pyre together, along with the men of Liv’s family. And after all, there was no one else.

“No,” Keri admitted. “No, I don’t think I’m alright at all.”