The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

For a while, neither of them said anything at all. That, too, is part of what I meant earlier, about gestures carrying weight that words can't quite manage. Eremos simply let her lie there against his side, one arm loosely around her shoulders, watching the sky hold its permanent, suspended sunset without any urgency to fill the silence with something smaller than it deserved.

It was Eremos who finally spoke first, because it usually is — not because Elowen needed prompting exactly, but because he has learned, across centuries of doing this with women who each open at their own pace, that sometimes the kindest thing he can offer is simply asking, plainly, rather than waiting for someone to work up the nerve to volunteer it unasked.

"What's on your mind," he said. Not what's wrong — he never opens with that, not with her, because what's wrong asks a person to already know the shape of their own hurt well enough to name it, and he'd learned, a long time ago now, that grief rarely arrives that neatly packaged. "You've been somewhere else all afternoon."

Elowen was quiet for a moment longer, tracing one finger idly through the grass beside her, watching a strand of it catch the gold light and hold it.

"Nostalgia," she said, finally, with the particular practiced lightness she uses when she's about to say something heavier than the tone suggests. "Isn't that embarrassing? I'm sitting in the nicest place either of us has ever owned, and some mornings I still wake up thinking about how the light used to come through the east windows of the old palace. Isn't that the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard."

"It isn't ridiculous," he said.

"It's a little ridiculous," she said. "Most of the others don't carry it the way I do. Ilyrisse doesn't look back on her old life like it's something worth missing — everything before you found her was just weight to put down. Vaelira barely remembers being anyone before she decided being someone sounded exhausting. But I liked it. Being alive, I mean. I liked Evergreen. I liked the ridiculous silk everyone dressed me in, and the ministers who hated me for choosing them by the color of their coats, and even the parts that were awful, I think I'd take most of them back if the offer were on the table." She paused. "I liked the between well enough too, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying I'd trade this. I'm only saying I'm allowed to miss the other thing at the same time, and some days that missing sits heavier than others."

Eremos didn't rush to fill the space after that. He let it sit, the way he lets most things sit with her, because he had learned early — very early, in the particular correction he'd offered her without ever needing to raise his voice to make the point — that Elowen tended to fill silence with performance if you gave her the chance, and the truest things she ever said tended to arrive only after the performance ran out of road.

It was in that quiet, unhurried stretch that the rest of it started coming loose.

"I keep thinking about him," she said, and didn't need to clarify who — Eremos already knew, the way he'd known for longer than she probably realized, that there was exactly one man in her whole long life whose name still cost her something to say out loud. She hadn't wanted to bring him into this conversation at all. Looking at Eremos, lying there beside her in the grass with that particular patient stillness he wears when he's genuinely listening rather than waiting for his turn to speak, she found she couldn't quite help it.

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"You don't have to say his name," Eremos offered, gently.

"I know I don't." She exhaled, long and slow, watching it fog faintly in air that had no real temperature to justify the fogging, the fragment simply obliging the gesture because it understood, somehow, exactly what she needed the moment to look like. "I think what frightens me isn't him, really. Not anymore. It's — " she stopped, started again. "You have so many of us. And I don't say that as a complaint, I promise you, I gave up my right to complain about that the day I chose to stay. But he chose someone else, once, without any warning at all, and I never got an explanation that actually satisfied me, and some very small, very stupid part of me still wonders if that's simply what happens to me. If I'm the kind of woman men eventually replace, given enough time and enough better options standing around."

"Elowen—"

"I know it isn't true," she said quickly, before he could finish. "I know you. I know what you are, underneath everything, better than I knew that man in half the time I had with him. If you left me, I'd bite you, and go find someone else out of pure spite, so there." She said it with a flash of her old theater, chin lifted, daring him to take the joke as seriously as it clearly wasn't meant. But the humor didn't quite land the way it usually did, and they both knew it, and for a moment neither of them pretended otherwise.

Because that wasn't really it. Even Elowen knew, somewhere underneath the joke, that it wasn't really the fear driving the sadness in her — she knew, with the particular certainty that lives deeper than any anxious spiral could touch, that Eremos was never going to leave her. That wasn't the wound. It had never been the wound, not really, not since the first month or two after she'd arrived and started understanding, slowly, exactly what kind of man he actually was underneath the reputation that had preceded him.

"Do you know what the worst part of ruling Evergreen actually was?" she asked, after a moment, apropos of nothing he could immediately trace, though he'd learned by now that her mind rarely moved in straight lines when it was circling something it wasn't ready to land on directly. "It wasn't the ministers, or the audiences I skipped to go read instead, or any of the things people love to tease me about. It was that everyone around me had already decided, long before I ever opened my mouth on a given matter, exactly what I was going to say. I was so thoroughly known, so completely predictable to everyone who'd ever dressed me or tutored me or arranged my marriage, that there was a version of me walking around that continent for years who wasn't really me at all. Just — expectation, wearing my face."

"And here?" he asked.

"Here it's different," she admitted. "Here you actually watch. You don't assume you already know what I'm about to say, even after all this time. It's — " she laughed, short and a little embarrassed at herself, " — it's genuinely disarming, if you want to know the truth. I spent my whole life being looked at and almost none of it being seen, and then I died, and the first man to properly see me happened to already have more women in his life than most kingdoms have citizens, and somehow that's the arrangement that finally worked. Life has an appalling sense of humor."

"Or death does," he offered.

"Same difference, apparently." She was quiet again for a moment, and this time the quiet had a different texture to it — heavier, more deliberate, like she was walking up to the edge of something and deciding, syllable by syllable, whether to step off it. "The real wound was smaller, and much harder to say out loud, and it had nothing at all to do with being replaced."

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