Midnight in the flooded crypts was colder than the mountain pass above.
The staging wharf was quiet now, lit only by two small grease fire bowls that cast long, flickering shadows against the weeping limestone pillars. The thirty-two children were sleeping in a tight, warm cluster beneath canvas tarpaulins, watched over by Sergeant Justin and his three new students, who had stripped the white tabards of Dawn from their armor and ground the church sunbursts into the stone with their boot heels.
From the northern drainage chimney pipe came the sound of splashing boots.
Ren turned, his ivory bone awl instantly ready in his palm. But the tension drained from his shoulders as a familiar figure emerged into the fire bowl light.
It was Mira.
She was wrapped in a giant charcoal-wool shawl pinned with her boxwood brooch. Her face was pale from the cold descent. Behind her strode Old Father Garrow, his blind eyes covered with clean linen, guided by his apprentice Pip, who carried a steaming iron pot of barley broth on a wooden yoke.
Mira walked straight past the sleeping children, straight past the armored knights. Her dark eyes were locked on the corner of the wharf where Brother Ren lay propped against a dry salt barrel.
Her right arm—the smoky, semi-clear quartz limb—hung motionless at her side. It caught the embers’ amber glow. But her left hand carried a clean linen rag and a small clay jar of elderberry ointment.
She dropped to her knees in the dirt beside the monk.
Brother Ren tried to pull his charred habit over his ruined chest, ashamed of the blackened, quarrel-torn meat that covered his ribs. His hollow eyes looked away, staring down at his linen-wrapped feet.
“Don’t look at me, Mira,” the monk whispered. His voice shook with an old, unbearable shame. “A corpse has no right to demand an audience.”
Mira didn’t answer with words.
She dipped her linen rag into the cold river water, leaned forward. Then she gently wiped a crust of dried blood from the corner of his eye.
Brother Ren flinched, his scarred shoulders tensing as though she had struck him with an iron bar. Tears welled in his hollow eyes, spilling down his scarred cheeks, cutting clean paths through the soot.
“I told you to stop,” Mira said softly. Her voice was steady, dry, but laced with a quiet, devastating grief. “I told you in the kiln. And here you’re, twenty-four arrows in your chest, smelling like burnt pig-fat, lying on a heap of wet sacks.”
“They were going to shoot the girl, Mira,” Brother Ren cried, his forehead bowing until it touched the stone flags beside her knees. “Little Elspeth. She was only eleven. In my world... I stood thirty paces away when the Justiciars fired. I closed my eyes because I was afraid of the silver barbs. When I opened them, she was pinned to the church doors like a dead sparrow. I could have taken the bolts. My meat had already learned how to mend around iron. But I was afraid. I held back.”
The monk’s scarred hands clenched into tight fists in the gravel.
“For eighty years,” Brother Ren choked out, his voice breaking into a ragged sob, “I woke every morning and saw her face in the dark. I took every plague in the province. I swallowed the black fever of four thousand miners. I let the church burn my skin with holy oil. And it never washed the blood from my eyes.”
Mira set the wet rag down on the salt barrel.
She reached out with her warm left hand and took Brother Ren’s charred right fingers in hers. Then, with deliberate slowness, she lifted her right arm—the cold, beautiful, terrifying limb of smoky quartz—and rested her stone palm against the monk’s scarred forehead.
The contact was cold, yet a faint, melodic chime rang between them. Not the wild sound scream of the cathedral drain tube, but a slow, quiet, peaceful shaking that tasted of winter twilight and quiet hearths.
Brother Ren froze. The trembling in his chest began to ease.
“Look at me, Brother,” Mira commanded softly.
The monk lifted his tear-stained face.
“In your world,” Mira said, looking directly into his grey irises, “I lived for eighty years. And you told Ren that for seventy of them, I looked upon your scars and hated you.”
Brother Ren swallowed hard, his throat clicking. “Yes.”
“Do you know why I hated you?” Mira asked.
The monk shook his head slowly.
“I didn’t hate you because my arm was glass,” Mira whispered, her thumb brushing a tear from his cheek. “I hated you because you stole my right to grieve. You took every wound, every fever, every ache. Then he locked it inside your own chest like a miser hoarding gold. You left me with an empty house and a brother who was merely a walking scar. You thought you were saving me, Ren. But you were just running away from the pain of watching someone you love suffer.”
Brother Ren’s breath caught in his throat.
“I don’t need a savior made of iron,” Mira said, her voice fiercely tender. “And I don’t need a martyr to die for my bones. I need my brother. Both of you. The clever one with the awl, the angry one with the counting frame. The stupid, bleeding one with the bucket.”
She pressed her quartz fingers against his temple.
“So stop dying for me,” Mira whispered. “Live with us instead.”
Brother Ren closed his eyes, leaning his battered head into the cold curve of her stone hand. Then he cried in silence.
Old Father Garrow knelt on the wet flat stone slabs beside Elspeth, his scarred, blind hands trembling as they traced her pale cheeks, her small nose, and finally rested upon her right foot.
The old man’s fingers felt the smooth, cold smoky quartz of her heel. But beneath his touch, there was no fever, no sound shaking, and no pain. The child was sleeping with the soft, unrushed rhythm of natural tiredness.
“She lives,” Garrow whispered. His sightless face lifted toward the dark vaulting as tears soaked through his linen eyepads. “The stone has gone quiet. In fifty years in these wells, I’ve never known the singing bone to fall silent.”
He turned his head toward Ren. He reached out until his calloused palm touched the sleeve of Ren’s lambskin apron.
“May the salt protect you, scribe,” the old man said, his gravelly voice thick with emotion. “May the deep earth remember your name when the cities of the sun have crumbled to dust.”
Across the wharf, Pip was ladling steaming barley broth into cracked wooden bowls. Vane Vale sat on an overturned lard tub. He held his bowl with two kidskin-gloved fingers, sniffing the broth with extreme high-born skepticism.
“Barley husks boiled in stone water with wild leeks,” Vane muttered, poking a floating green leaf with his silver-headed cane. “A culinary monster. If my club in High Khorat served this, the chef would be horsewhipped on the courthouse steps.”
“Eat the broth, Vane,” Mira said. She walked over with her small clay ointment jar, her dry, amused eyes looking down at him. “You’ve spent three hours whining about calories. That bowl contains at least two hundred of them. If you starve to death in this crypt, I’m using your velvet coat as a blanket for the little ones.”
Vane glared at her, but under her unbending gaze, his arrogant sneer cracked. He picked up the wooden spoon, swallowed a mouthful of the bitter broth, and grimaced theatrically.
“Appalling,” Vane declared, though he took a second, larger spoonful without pause. “Fully empty of salt. But I suppose from a purely body-energy standpoint, it prevents cellular collapse. You’re an unbearable tyrant, girl.”
“I’m Ren’s sister,” Mira replied smoothly, sitting on the bench beside him. “You should have known what you were getting into when you stepped out of that mirror.”
Mira remained seated on the salt barrel beside Brother Ren, her fingers gently adjusting the rough linen bandages wrapped around his ribs.
“Ren tells me you don’t sleep,” Mira said quietly, her dark eyes searching his scarred face in the firelight.
“Sleep is... Difficult, little sister,” Brother Ren replied softly, looking down at his scarred palms. “When I close my eyes, I still hear the coughing in the lazaretto. In my world, we had sixty beds and three jars of oil. Every night, someone stopped breathing. A man becomes accustomed to keeping vigil. The dark feels safer when you’re awake to watch the door.”
“Well, you’re sleeping tonight,” Mira commanded. She pressed a fresh wad of elderberry ointment against a chemical burn on his wrist. “Even an unhinged martyr needs four hours of rest before he goes to fight an archbishop. If your hands are shaking, you won’t be able to hold your lead buckler. Then Ren will have to do the bleeding for both of you.”
Across the fire, Vane Vale was watching them, his gold-trimmed counting frame resting silently on his knee. For once, the sharp-tongued merchant had nothing cynical to say. His dark eyes, reflecting the amber embers of the fire bowl, held a strange, sad stillness. The look of a man who had spent twenty years counting gold in an empty palace, realizing that the only wealth that mattered was sitting on a heap of wet sacks in a leper’s cellar.
Mira turned her head, catching Vane’s gaze. “What are you staring at, velvet?”
Vane cleared his throat sharply, adjusting his silk cravat with exaggerated dignity. “I’m appraising the depreciation rate of sentimentality, girl. An utterly unprofitable emotional indulgence. But I suppose under the present total circumstances, it serves as an adequate substitute for medical morale.”
Mira smiled—a rare, brilliant flash of warmth that lit up her pale, tired face. “Go to sleep, Vane. Your goatee is crooked.”