WE LEFT RENERE under cover of darkness, slipping through the eastern gate like shadows fleeing the light. The scabbard at my hip held what remained of Caesura, its broken pieces clanking no matter what I tried.
I looked back once. The city’s walls rose dark against the stars, the White Citadel a middle finger pointing at nothing. Somewhere behind those walls, Wil and Sim lay cold. Somewhere beneath that sky, Denna was gone. I turned away and made myself a promise. I would never walk those streets again. Even if it meant leaving King Alveron alive.
Some doors, once closed, deserve to stay that way.
Bast led us through the darkness with the confidence of a misspent youth. Auri followed close behind me, her bare feet whispering against the stones. The moonlight seemed to remember her and welcome her home. The longer we bathed in its silver light, the more my little moon-fey returned to herself. Where she had walked, she began to skip. Where she had been silent, she began to hum.
The Waystone waited in twilight, like a door held dutifully ajar. At Bast’s touch, the sky folded like a letter being sealed. Then it folded again, like hands closing in prayer. Then we were through, and the air between worlds tasted of copper and cinnamon, of winter mornings and summer nights.
We didn’t linger. Bast knew the paths the way a river knows its bed, and before long we were out on a hill I knew as well as my own hands. Below us, the Omethi River ran its patient course, and Stonebridge stretched across the water like a promise carved in stone.
Imre waited on the far shore, its lights glowing warm as honey. The sight of it struck me with the force of a blow I hadn’t seen coming. Not because it had changed. Because it hadn’t.
How dare Stonebridge bear the weight of travelers as if Wil’s steady stride would ever cross it again. How dare the lights of Imre glow with the same warm welcome when Sim would never again laugh his way through those familiar streets.
The world had continued its turning while my friends lay cold beneath indifferent earth.
Closer, the University spread below me, its towers catching the last light of day like hands cupped around a dying flame. Once it had been my whole world. Now it was a monument to everyone I had lost.
I might have stood there until the light failed entirely. But Auri’s hand found my sleeve.
“This way,” she whispered, her voice dancing like candlelight in a gentle breeze.
She led us down the hill and along the river, away from the bridge and its burden of memory. The path she followed was one I had never noticed, despite years of wandering these same banks. Behind a curtain of ivy that grew wild and thick, she showed us a grate I would have sworn hadn’t existed until she touched it.
The metal sang a soft note as she lifted it. Below, darkness waited.
Auri slipped through first, moving with the certainty of water finding its way home. I followed, and the darkness welcomed me like an old friend who knew better than to mention how much I’d changed. Bast came last. He drew his sleeve over his hands before closing the gate, a habit so practiced it looked like breathing. The sound of iron settling into stone sealed the world above us away.
Ahead, Auri moved through the dark, her bare feet sure on stone we could not see. For a few breathless moments there was only the sound of her steps and the smell of old earth. Then she stopped.
She woke Foxen first. The small light bloomed in her hands, blue-green and patient, and something behind her eyes changed at the sight of it. She held it close, the way you hold someone precious that you feared you might not see again. When she looked up, her smile had lost the last trace of the court’s careful polish.
She led us deeper, and the princess fell away. Her back softened. Her chin lowered from its practiced height. She began naming rooms as we passed through them, each word spoken with the tender certainty of someone greeting old friends after a long absence. “Dunnings,” she murmured. “Winnoway.” Past doors that sang in keys I didn’t recognize, through rooms where the darkness carried itself differently. “Rubric,” she said as we entered a maze of red-brick tunnels wound through with pipes, and when she touched the nearest one the way you touch a sleeping child’s forehead it seemed to breathe easier. Then a corridor full of the smell of lavender and old soap, warm and close. And then we ended in a small round room I had never seen.
It curled around us the way cupped hands curl around a candle. The ceilings were low enough to make you duck your head, the walls curved close, and Foxen’s light played across them like something happy to be home. Warmth lived here. Auri had made this place a home with treasures others had cast aside. A bent strip of silver hung from a nail, catching the light just so. A spool of thread the color of moonlight sat on a ledge beside a button made of brass that remembered being gold. On a shelf in the corner, she had arranged her smaller treasures with careful hands. A shard of blue glass. The white bones of some small, secret story.
Auri watched me look at it all and said nothing for a while.
“You are still you, even if you do not feel it,” she said softly. “Stay here while you find the rest of you.”
I wanted to say things. Thank you. I’m sorry. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead, I sank onto the floor she had prepared for me.
“We’re safe now,” she said with quiet certainty, weaving the words around us like a blanket.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. Not trusting anything.
I slept on a floor that smelled of cedar and soap. For a time, the world grew small and quiet. I ate when Auri brought food. I stared at the curved walls and breathed.
The Underthing cradled us in its ancient hands, keeping the sharp edges of the world at bay. I felt myself begin to heal in the way a broken bone heals, slowly and imperfectly, leaving marks that would ache when the weather changed. I tell you this so you understand that healing happened. It is a kinder word than the thing deserves.
Sometimes I would catch myself smiling at something Bast said, and for a moment the expression would feel natural on my face. Then I would remember Wil’s dry wit, Sim’s gentle laughter, and the smile would fall away.
Bast saw this happen more than once. He never mentioned it, but I could tell by the way his eyes followed me afterward, careful and quiet, the way you watch a crack in a dam.
One evening he called me to a small alcove off Cricklet. “Hold out your hand.”
I did, finally showing him the ruin Cinder had made of it. Three fingers gone, the wounds healed but the absence screaming.
Bast spoke with the beauty of the Fae. The words tasted of glamour. Of lies that tell the truth. The air shimmered, twisted, and suddenly my hand was whole. The missing fingers returned, perfect and unmarred. And on that hand there were once again rings of stone, iron, amber, wood, and bone.
“They’re not real,” Bast said. The grin was there, but it wasn’t reaching his eyes. “The illusion will hold as long as you’re cautious. As long as you don’t try to use them for anything that matters. But even illusions can be useful.”
I flexed my false fingers experimentally. They moved when I thought they should move. They looked whole, looked real. But there was no feeling in them, and the gap between what I saw and what I felt made my teeth ache.
“Thank you, Bast,” I said, and meant it, though the words came out hollow as a broken bell.
He shrugged with studied casualness, but his eyes lingered on my face, reading something there I couldn’t hide.
Days passed in the quiet darkness. Maybe weeks. Time lost its grip in the Underthing. Without sun or moon to mark its passing, the hours forgot their order and the days stopped keeping count.
Then one day Auri came to me where I sat trying to remember how to be human.
“The moon was lovely last night,” she said, her face turned up as if she could still see it through the stone above. “It sat so close to the world you could almost touch it.”
“You went above?”
“To see Fela.” Her voice stayed light, but weight gathered beneath the words. “She needed to know about Simmon.”
I should have been the one to tell her. I should have climbed those stairs, knocked on her door, and spoken the words that would break her heart. Instead, I had hidden in the dark while Auri did what I couldn’t bear to do.
“She cried,” Auri said. “But she cried clean tears.”
The next morning, if morning had any meaning in the Underthing, I sat with paper and pen and wrote two letters. One to Wil’s family. One to Sim’s.
Each word was agony. Each sentence a confession. The pen felt heavier than Caesura ever had. I told them the truth the Maer would never speak. Their sons had died as heroes, not traitors. They had stood against impossible odds with courage that would humble the greatest warriors of the old stories, and paid the full price for my failures.
My hand shook so badly I had to stop several times. That damnable potion, though to be fair, two fingers tremble less than five. My tears spotted the letters and smudged the ink, but I finished them. I owed them that much. I owed them so much more, but this was all I had to give.
Those letters sat beside me for days, growing heavier with each passing hour. I thought about delivering them myself. Standing at their doors. Seeing their faces. Speaking their sons’ names aloud. My hands shook at the thought and would not stop.
Bast noticed, because Bast noticed everything that mattered.
“What are these?” he asked, picking up the sealed letters with careful fingers.
“Letters,” I said, my voice flat as stone.
“Letters to the dead don’t often change much,” he said gently. “But letters to the living sometimes do. Do you want me to take them?”
I wanted to say no. This was my burden to bear, my duty to fulfill. But I was so tired.
I nodded.
Bast tucked the letters inside his coat like precious things. As he stood to leave, he touched my shoulder with surprising gentleness. “You’ll be all right, Reshi,” and the name wrapped around me like a heavy blanket. “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday.”
After he left, I sat alone in the warm darkness of Auri’s gift. I thought of Wil and his steady strength. Of Sim and his gentle heart. Of Denna and the music we would never make together. Of Auri, who had saved me when I couldn’t save myself. Of Bast, who had given me a name I was still growing into.
For the first time in weeks, faint as starlight through storm clouds, I felt something shift. It wasn’t hope, but I could see tomorrow. It wasn’t joy, but I could see a friend.
And for now, that was enough.