The crew went back toward the forge in ones and twos.
Gell and Brisk first, carrying the shovels over their shoulders, their boots loud on the frozen lane. Eshel walked with Sera, holding his blistered hands a little away from his sides, and Sera said something to him that Mara missed and he nodded. Pell went last of the crew. He carried the plank of bowls in both hands, level, and never looked back, because he was watching the bowls.
Tavin stayed by the tower.
He was where he had been when the grave was filled: a step apart, between the new earth and the fence, his back to the yard. His hands still at his sides. The cold came up off the ground and the water tower ticked above them, and Hearth sat low over the river flats, its light gone the color of a banked forge.
Mara stood at the grave’s head beside the flat stone and the crate lid with its two names. She waited until the crew’s voices had faded to nothing past the yard’s back gate. Then she said it.
She had been carrying the sentence since the Tern’s cockpit, since the soup recipe and the salt. She had turned it over on the long flight while the margin gauge ticked down, as she turned over a weld she knew she would have to draw a file across. She had tried softer versions. None of them held.
