The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

I didn't ask her what she meant. I've learned, with Vesalia more than with anyone, that the worst thing you can do to a woman working up the nerve to say something true is to rush the silence before it. So I waited, my chin resting against her hair, one hand moving in slow, absent circles against her back — not the deliberate reading motion Ilyrisse does through my own hair, nothing so practiced, just the plain animal comfort of a hand that wants to be useful and has nothing else to offer.

"Do you think," she said, at last, into my shirt, muffled enough that I had to hold very still to catch all of it, "that it's actually possible. That I'll find her."

She didn't need to say who. There has only ever been one her in Vesalia's vocabulary that carries this particular weight — not the empire she built and lost, not the throne, not even the gods who spent her whole life deciding what she was allowed to want. Just the one silhouette she has spent the entirety of her existence in the Between searching for, one crowded street and one indifferent crossroads at a time, without ever once catching more than the ordinary heartbreak of a stranger who almost, almost looked like her, and wasn't.

"I don't know," I said, because it was true, and because I have learned — slowly, expensively, across every mission that has ever taught me anything worth knowing — that false comfort costs more than honest uncertainty, in the end. "I know the Between is vast enough that I don't have a number to give you. I know it's also strange enough, and stranger every year I spend in it, that I've stopped believing anything here is purely a matter of odds. I think if anyone were going to find one silhouette out of however many wander this place, it would be someone who has spent this long refusing to stop looking."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only honest one I have."

She was quiet again, and I felt, rather than saw, the specific tightening that runs through her whenever she's about to say the part of the sentence that actually frightens her — the smaller, softer half hiding behind the larger question, the one that had clearly been doing the real damage all along.

"And if I do," she said. "If I find her. Do you think—" She stopped. Started again, quieter. "Do you think I'll be able to forgive her?"

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I didn't move. It would have been easy, dangerously easy, to assume I understood what she meant — to hear forgive her and file it neatly under grief, under a mother's ordinary ache to be reunited with a lost child, and answer accordingly. But something in the way she'd said it, some particular hollowness underneath the word her, told me the sentence wasn't finished doing what it needed to do yet, and that if I answered the version of the question I assumed she'd asked, I would miss whatever she was actually, carefully, terrifiedly circling.

"Forgive her for what?" I asked, as gently as I knew how.

"Do you mean forgive her," I asked, carefully, "for existing? For being born out of something that was taken from you rather than given?"

"Perhaps," she said, and I felt the word cost her something, a small, reluctant honesty she hadn't planned on giving so soon. "Or perhaps I mean something crueler than that, something closer to — will I be able to forgive myself, standing in front of her, for every year I spent unable to love her the way she deserved. I don't know which version of the question I'm actually asking. I think that's part of why I've never been able to answer it, even alone, even after all this time. The two questions have grown so tangled together that I can no longer find the seam between them."

Vesalia didn't answer that. Not yet. Instead she pulled back, just far enough to look up at me — and I have seen a great many expressions cross that composed, carved face across however long I've known her, but I had never, until that moment, seen her look quite this unguarded, quite this much like someone standing at the very top edge of a decision she couldn't take back once she'd made it.

"I've never told anyone this," she said. "Not all of it. Not even the parts you already think you know."

"You don't have to."

"I know." Her hands tightened, just slightly, in the fabric of my shirt. "I want to. I think — I think I've wanted to for longer than I've let myself admit. I just needed to be sure, first, that whoever I told would still be holding on afterward. Not because they pitied me. Because they chose to."

I tightened my arms around her, not enough to trap, only enough to answer the question underneath the question. "I'm not going anywhere, Vesalia. Whatever this is. Whatever it costs you to say it."

She held my gaze a moment longer. Then, slowly, as though lowering something heavy she'd been carrying so long she'd half forgotten it had weight at all, she let her head rest back against my chest, and began.

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