CHAPTER 462: 462: MOSQUITOES AND ONE PROMISE PART FOUR

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He looked over Thea’s shoulder at the ragged dozen who had started the day as fifty and the ragged ten who had started as twenty. He looked past them to Yavri’s wedge, where discipline sat with its hands folded because it is polite until called up to the table. He looked beyond that to the edge of the forest, where shadows had decided that tonight they would be honest and not hide anything useful.

"Silvershadow, Shadeclaw — clean the field. Take the tracking stones if you find them. They’ll tell us who paid for this. No trophies. No joy. Work."

"Yes," they said together, which is how you know you are standing in the right place when the world is trying to push you.

Yavri raised a gauntlet just enough to make courtesy without kneeling to anyone’s crown.

"Permission to resume prisoner status after the line is reset," she said, scrupulous as a ledger that refuses to lie even when lying would make your dinner hot.

"Granted," Kai said without hesitation. "Your obedience tonight is written down where it matters. It will buy your women warmth and food and not be watched like thieves. It will not buy you their freedom. That belongs to someone else’s mouth right now. Wait."

Yavri inclined her head as if measuring the weight of that answer and finding it acceptable because it could not be improved by argument. Her captains turned without being told and began to count instead of bleed.

Mia leaned back an inch to look at him properly in good light.

"You’re really here," she said.

"I am difficult to miss," he admitted, a little rueful, glancing down at the plates that had decided to be part of his skin and the way Apex Plus had left him shaped like a problem that owns the room it walks into.

She bumped his chest with her brow. "Arrogant," she accused, fond and exhausted.

"Correct," he said.

She turned then, because the part of her that is responsible for other people had noticed Thea standing like a well-carved pillar and had decided pillars deserve to be leaned on too sometimes.

"Come here," she told her sister, softer than iron and not softer like sisterly love.

Thea took two steps and stopped because three would have put her inside something she was not sure she wanted to understand yet. She looked at Kai. She looked at Mia. She looked at the bodies. She looked at Vexor and decided to inventory his faults later with an itemized list and perhaps some yelling if she could do it in a room that did not contain anyone else’s hero.

"Why," she said for the third time, but the word had lost its teeth. "Why is everything not the shape I left it in?"

"Because you left," Mia said gently. "And it turns out we are not clay that waits for you to come back."

Thea grumbled a very quiet profanity that would have made their mother sigh and then smile because both girls had inherited their worst habit from her. She rubbed her face with the heel of her hand and tried to scowl the blood off it. The blood did not care about her scowl.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. But if he breaks your heart I will break his body."

"I’d like to see you try," Kai said, not unkindly. "It would be educational."

"For me or for you?" Thea snapped.

"Yes," he said, and the corner of his mouth warmed again.

A drone hurried up with a bundle of cords and a bag that glimmered inside with the dull intent light of tracking stones.

"Found these in their belts," the drone reported. "And in their boots. And one man had one under his tongue."

"Of course he did," Thea muttered, disgusted in a way that promised efficiency. "Spit them into a bowl and wash your hands before you touch anything I am going to have to sit on later."

Kai took the bag. The stones pulsed against his palm like little, rude hearts. Someone far away thought they were still pulsing in the field and would find only sand when they came to collect the story.

"Later," he said to the bag.

He turned to the ledge above, where the song had changed under Skyweaver’s hands and the wind had decided to wait for instruction instead of offering any of its own.

"Ten minutes," he said quietly, because he did not need to shout. "We keep moving work quietly. Then we go inside. We have things to say that do not belong to the air."

"Like why you hate me," Thea said dryly.

"I don’t hate you," Kai said, surprising himself with how easy that truth came. "I dislike the shape you put around people when you think they aren’t doing what you want. But I do not hate you."

Thea’s mouth opened and then shut because she had expected to have to push. Being met with a soft place where you had not planned for one is disarming. She took a breath that tasted like the inside of a church and decided to forgive his face for being on his head.

"Fine," she said again, and it was starting to sound like a word that belonged to her more than to argument. "We will...talk. Later."

"Yes," Mia said, relief and mischief and tiredness braided. "Later."

They didn’t let go of each other’s hands when they started to move. They walked into the work like that — joined hands, the way two parts of a sentence are joined when you have chosen the right conjunction.

The field changed under the people who owned it now. Bodies became facts to be recorded, not stories to be wept over, not yet. Weapons moved into bundles. The bag of stones went into Silvershadow’s care because he knows how to not lose things and how to notice when someone else is losing something quietly. Shadeclaw oversaw a line washing hands because the mountain is a house and houses do not like their tables to smell like fights.

Yavri’s women stacked shields and sat with their backs to them and did not let their spines relax until their captains’ hands rested on their shoulders, one by one, like punctuation.

Thea’s remnant —ten who had been fifty— counted themselves in a whisper and agreed to count again in the morning to make sure grief had not made liars of them overnight.

Above, on the high altar, Miryam’s evolving song steadied into something that sounded very much like sleep and very little like danger. Luna’s hand hovered. Akayoroi’s gaze scanned the edges where edges sometimes like to pretend they are doors.

Alka fluffed once and then returned to a quieter shape, standing in the wind like a lesson about why being beautiful is sometimes a way of frightening your enemies without moving anything but your feathers.

Silvershadow came back.

"Done," he said. "Enough quiet to call it a night."

Kai nodded.

He looked at Mia, and in that look lay a day’s worth of small things that had nothing to do with knives: the way her hair had fallen at dawn when she was too angry to smooth it; the way she had said his name in the soul road as if it belonged to her mouth and not to the mouths of men who wanted to spit it; the way the world had almost made him lose the right to be seen by those eyes and had decided tonight to fail at that.

"Inside," he said.

Mia let go of him only long enough to tug Thea’s sleeve in the dumb, tender way she had tugged it when they were small and one of them had found a bug worth showing and the other had wanted to pretend she was too grand to look at bugs.

Thea rolled her eyes and came anyway.

They passed Yavri. The vice general rose because she had to, because ceremony is the last coat you take off at night. Her eyes went to Thea, and there was sharpness there that had nothing to do with envy or hurt. Professional respect. The kind you allow yourself for another woman who has had to learn the art of being heavy in the world without becoming stone.

"Captain," Yavri acknowledged.

"Vice General," Thea returned.

"Prisoner," Yavri corrected herself, to be precise. "Until spoken otherwise."

Thea’s mouth twitched. "Then sit down, Prisoner. You made yourself useful. Don’t ruin it by standing too long."

Yavri sat. Her eyes followed Mia and Kai and didn’t follow them at all, because she is polite to people she has not yet asked permission to think about.

The mountain swallowed the three of them.

On the threshold, Thea asked her question again because sometimes a thing has to be repeated to become smaller.

"Why," she said in a voice that had misplaced its teeth and was embarrassed about it, "is the handsome one named the same as the two-star you brought under you?"

Mia squeezed her hand, just once.

"Because he is," she said simply. "Because he was. Because he will be."

Thea made a sound that was half acceptance and half a promise to herself to find a better angle on this later. "If he isn’t careful," she muttered, "he will end up in a poem. I hate poems."

Kai didn’t turn. "I write terrible ones," he said over his shoulder. "You’ll be safe."

Mia laughed, and Thea, despite herself, almost did, and then the hall closed around them with the comfortable hush of stone that knows you and has decided to forgive you for being loud on its doorstep.

Outside, men and women who had not died made the night ready to receive the kind of sleep you earn. Above, an evolution cocoon sang to itself about mornings. And on the mountain’s lip, the wind carried away the last polite lies of the day and left only what had happened and what it had made of the people who had stayed to see it.

No one paid attention to Thea for a few breaths. It was a mercy and an insult and exactly what she needed to make her face remember how to be her own again.

She squared her shoulders.

"Fine," she said to the mountain, to the air, to the man she refused to admit she had almost admired at first sight. "Fine. We will do this your way, for tonight."

The mountain, being a mountain, did not answer. It didn’t need to. It had already offered its only reply: space enough for all of them to stand where they finally were.