Chapter 267: The Voice in the Dark

They’d given Xuan a good room, which was its own small strangeness.

It was somewhere in the guest wing of the palace, high up, the kind of room the empire kept for people it wanted to impress and hadn’t decided how much to trust. Dark wood, a wide bed he wasn’t using, a writing table, a shuttered window he’d opened despite the cold because the air inside had the stale, waiting quality of a space that had stood empty through a war. Someone had left a lamp burning low. He hadn’t asked them to. He’d stopped being surprised by the small comforts that appeared around a man the new Empress had decided to keep close.

It was very late. Past the deep middle of the night, into the hours that belong to nobody, when even a city that has been busy healing itself finally lies down.

Because the city was healing. He could hear it, faintly, through the open window: not the sounds of a dead place anymore, but the low, patchy noise of one coming back. A cart somewhere below, moving supplies that no longer had to move by stealth. A watch changing on a wall, calling the hour the ordinary way. Once, distant and startling, someone laughing, actually laughing, in a capital that a handful of nights ago had held nothing but monsters and the wrong kind of dark. The living were reclaiming their streets one small noise at a time, and Xuan sat in a borrowed room above them and could not sleep, because the one voice he wanted to hear was the one that wasn’t there.

So he did what he’d been doing. He talked to her anyway.

"You’d hate this room," he said aloud, quietly, to the empty air, because the door was shut and locked and there was no one to see a man talking to nothing. "It’s trying too hard. Somebody’s idea of what a hero’s owed. There’s a scroll on the wall about the virtue of perseverance, which, given everything, feels a little pointed."

He turned the lamp up a notch, more for something to do than to see by.

"The city sounds alive tonight," he went on. "First time. Somebody was laughing out there a minute ago. I forgot what that sounded like up here." He rubbed the heel of his hand against his sternum, where the scarred channel sat quiet and would apparently sit quiet the rest of his life. "You’d have something to say about all of it. You always did. I keep leaving you the openings and you keep not taking them, and I’ve decided I’m going to keep leaving them anyway, so you’d better come back and put a stop to it, because I am genuinely running out of material."

Silence. The lamp hissed. The cart below rolled on out of hearing.

"That’s fine," he said, to nobody, and heard how thin it came out. "Take your time. I’ll wait. I’m good at waiting, I’ve had practice."

He sat back, and closed his eyes, and let the quiet have him for a while.

[ You’re really not, ] said a voice in the dark. [ Good at waiting he says. You’re terrible at it. You’ve been pacing that channel of yours like a caged thing for days.]

Xuan’s eyes came open.

He didn’t move otherwise, not for a second, because moving felt like it might scare it off, like a bird landed on a branch you’d been staring at an empty patch of sky waiting for. The voice was there. Faint, and frayed at the edges in a way it had never been, thinner than he’d ever heard it, but unmistakably, undeniably there, dry and unhurried and pressing at the edge of his mind exactly where it belonged.

’Mira.’ His own inner voice came out unsteady, and he didn’t bother to steady it. ’You’re back.’

[ Barely. Provisionally. Don’t throw a parade. ] A pause, and even that little bit of tartness seemed to cost her, the words coming slower than her words came. [ And put your face back together, would you. You’ve gone all wet around the eyes. After everything you sat through this week without cracking, this is the thing that gets you? I go quiet for a few nights and the great Lin Xuan turns into a leaky faucet.]

’I am not.’ He scrubbed a hand across his face on principle, though there’d been nothing there, quite. ’I’m relieved. There’s a difference.’

[ Sure. Relieved. ] He could hear the ghost of the old smirk under the exhaustion, and it did more to reassure him than any diagnosis could have. [ Cry about it, host— ] She stopped, caught herself, and Xuan felt something like a wince run through the words. [ Cry about it, Xuan. There. Old habits. I’m too tired to be careful and it slips out. Don’t read anything into it.]

’Wouldn’t dream of it.’ He let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding since the seal closed. ’You had me worried. Actually worried. You’ve never gone dark like that.’

[ I’ve never done what I did up there. ] The lightness thinned out of her, and what was left underneath was quieter and more honest. [ You don’t come back from a thing like that the same, and you don’t come back from it fast, and for a while there I genuinely wasn’t sure I was coming back from it at all.]

Xuan sat with that a moment. Outside, the watch called the hour again, faint and ordinary.

’The rule,’ he said. ’The one you broke to give me the key. That’s what did it.’

[ That’s what did it. ]

’How bad.’

[ Bad enough that I’m not going to pretend it was nothing, and not so bad that you should sit there looking like you just got the second grief of the week.] A pause. [ Something in me tore, Xuan. The same way something in you tore, actually, which I find annoyingly poetic. You spent a channel you don’t get back. I spent... a piece of what I am. What I could do. There are things I used to be able to reach that I can’t, now. I can feel the shape of where they used to be, like a room with the door bricked up.]

He turned that over, and didn’t like any face of it. ’Which things.’

[ And there it is. ] A thread of the old dryness came back. [ You want the inventory. I knew you would. Here’s the honest answer, and you’re going to have to make your peace with it, because I did: I’m not going to tell you.]

’Mira—’

[ Not can’t. Won’t. Not tonight, anyway. Maybe not for a long time.] Her voice was gentle under the flat refusal, which was somehow worse. [ There are things about what I am, and where I came from, and what that apparatus was, that I have never told you, and that I broke myself a little to use. And every time you get close to the edge of it, I go strange, and you’ve noticed, and you’ve been kind enough to let it lie. I’m asking you to let it lie a while longer. The whole of it will come. When it’s time. When we’re both stronger, and there’s less standing on it. Just... not in a guest room at four in the morning, three days after we buried a friend, while you’re held together with pills and stubbornness. It deserves better than that. So do you.]

Xuan was quiet for a long moment.

’You know I’m going to hold you to that,’ he said finally. ’The whole of it. Someday.’

[ I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.]

’And you’re not... going anywhere. In the meantime.’

[ No. ] It came without hesitation, the one thing in the whole conversation she gave him flat and immediate and complete. [ I’m frayed, not leaving. Whatever I spent up there, I didn’t spend the part that stays. You’re stuck with me, Xuan. Scarred channel, bricked-up rooms, both of us a little more broken than we were. Same as always, just with more scar tissue.]

Something eased in his chest that had been wound tight since a light died on a stone terrace. He didn’t say so. He didn’t have to; she’d have felt it, the way she felt most of what went on in there.

[ Now,] Mira said, and he could hear her deliberately hauling the moment back toward something they could both stand in, [ tell me about the city. And don’t leave things out to spare me, I’ve had enough of being handled for one night. Somebody was laughing out there?]

’Somebody was laughing out there,’ he confirmed. ’Whole city’s starting to come back. Carts moving in the open. Watch calling the hours like it’s a normal place. Xinhua’s got them clearing the last of it and rebuilding faster than I’d have thought possible.’

[ Of course she does. She’s insufferable that way.] Fondness under the words. [ She won a throne and now she’s going to be unbearably competent at keeping it. Good. Better her than most.] A beat. [ And the box on the hill?]

’Guarded. Pei’s people, in shifts. Nobody goes up alone.’ He glanced toward the shuttered window, in the direction of the black hill he couldn’t see. ’It’s still up there. It’s going to stay up there.’

[ For now,] Mira said, which was not quite agreement, and they both let it sit, because that was tomorrow’s problem, or next year’s, or someone else’s entirely, and tonight had been carrying enough.

They talked a while longer, the two of them, in the small hours of a room the empire had lent a boy it didn’t fully understand, while a city that had almost died learned again how to be a city underneath the window. It was not a large conversation. Most of it was Xuan describing ordinary things and Mira, thin and tired and unmistakably herself, having opinions about them, which was the most ordinary thing in the world and felt, that night, like the best thing that had happened all week.

At some point, without meaning to, Xuan slept, sitting up, the lamp still burning, and for the first time since the terrace, he did it without the low static of dread underneath, because the voice in the dark had come back, and whatever it had cost her to return, she was there, and she was staying, and that was enough to sleep on.