Chapter 100 Ch 100: Epilogue: The Years We Kept

Thora arrived while it was raining.

Afterward, Lexander would remember that more clearly than the hour. Rain against the windows. Water ticking into a copper gutter outside the room. Io’s hand in his, tightening until he could feel the bones move, and her voice telling him, with remarkable precision, where he could put his assurances that everything was going well.

He stopped assuring her.

He stayed.

There were people in the room who knew what to do. He had to let them do it. That proved more difficult than facing most armies he had encountered, and considerably less dignified. Once, when he tried to stand, Io pulled him back down without opening her eyes.

“Here.”

“I was only—”

“Here, Lex.”

So he remained where she had asked him to be, and wiped her forehead when someone gave him a cloth, and learned that there were hours in which loving someone meant having no useful answer at all.

Then there was a cry.

A small, furious, entirely new voice.

Io turned her face toward it. Her fingers loosened around his. For a moment Lexander could not move, not because anything held him, but because the world had changed while he was sitting in a chair and he needed a moment to catch up.

Their daughter was placed against her mother.

Thora objected to the air, the light, the indignity of being handled, and perhaps several other things for which she did not yet possess words. Io laughed through her exhaustion and bent her head.

“Oh, there you are.”

Lexander had heard Io speak to kings and frightened children, to the dying and to gods who had forgotten how to listen. He had heard her angry, triumphant, brokenhearted. He knew her voice across more loss than he could bear to measure.

He had never heard it quite like that.

He leaned close enough to see the little face, the tightly shut eyes, the mouth still trying to explain what a terrible arrangement birth was.

“Thora,” he said.

The baby did not acknowledge him.

Io smiled. “You will have to earn her attention.”

“I thought I had made a reasonable beginning.”

“You sat in a chair.”

“I did it faithfully.”

She laughed again, more softly this time, and he kissed her damp temple.

Outside, the rain continued.

No stone answered from beneath the palace. No old command reached for the child. There was no bargain to interpret, no piece of either parent being taken in payment for the life between them.

Lexander did not need anyone to test that truth again.

They had done the work. They had broken what Varrick had made. Their daughter had arrived into the life that followed it.

He put one finger beside her hand. After several attempts at catching something else, Thora caught him.

Her grip was astonishing.

“Oh,” he said, and could find nothing better.

Thor waited outside with Seraphina and Ignatius.

She had been told that pacing made the children nervous. Accordingly, she was standing still with such determination that both children had begun watching her instead of the door.

When Lexander opened it, all three looked up.

“Well?” Thor demanded.

“Io is resting.”

His sister’s expression changed before he finished speaking. The great hard line of her shoulders eased.

“And Thora?”

“Has opinions.”

“Good.”

Seraphina pushed past them both.

She stopped inside the room without being told, suddenly careful in a way that brought an ache to Lexander’s chest. Ignatius came behind her, his hand touching the doorframe as though the room had become somewhere unfamiliar.

Io lifted her eyes.

“Come and meet your sister.”

They approached together.

Seraphina wanted to hold her immediately. Ignatius wanted to know how to hold her correctly. Between those two intentions, with pillows and supervision, Thora was settled into her eldest sister’s arms.

“She’s very small,” Ignatius said.

“She has only just started,” Io answered.

Seraphina looked offended on the baby’s behalf. “She’ll grow.”

“Yes,” Lexander said.

He said it easily.

That mattered enough that Io looked at him.

Years earlier, he might have heard a threat in those words. Growth had once arrived in their family accompanied by calculations, fear, the urgent need to discover what some old power intended. Now his daughter said that her sister would grow, and he could simply agree.

Thora yawned.

Thor made a sound behind him.

Lexander turned. “Was that you?”

“No.”

“Certainly sounded like you.”

“Watch your children.”

He did.

Later, when Lisbeth arrived, the baby’s full name was pronounced with suitable gravity.

“Thora Elizabeth Dinar,” Io said.

Lisbeth looked from the child to her daughter.

“An excessive thing to do to someone who cannot object.”

Thora chose that moment to object loudly.

“There,” Lisbeth said. “Sensible girl.”

She took her granddaughter and kept her for most of the afternoon. Thor sat beside her and offered advice that Lisbeth accepted with the politeness generally reserved for strangers who were wrong about the weather.

Lexander watched them from the bed, where Io had finally fallen asleep against his shoulder.

He had known great halls emptied by war. He had known a silence so complete that a single footstep seemed an intrusion.

This room contained whispered arguments about blankets, a baby refusing sleep, Seraphina asking when Thora could visit Greykeep, and Ignatius carefully repositioning a cup nobody was in danger of knocking over.

He would have chosen the noise every time.

The years did not arrive as a procession.

They arrived as shoes that no longer fitted, workmen coming to repair a stair, a second set of lessons, a winter cough, a birthday breakfast at which someone was missing a tooth. They arrived through the transit gate carrying Evelyn’s letters, through the council chamber in arguments about warehouses, through the nursery with mud on their hems.

There were difficult days.

People who had been hurt did not all recover at the same pace. Some did not want to remain in Concordia. Some left and returned. Some built lives elsewhere and sent letters for a while, and then stopped because being safe had finally become ordinary enough that they no longer felt obliged to report it.

Lexander learned to accept that last silence.

He kept the letters they had sent.

The city grew around them. Houses acquired rooms. Workshops took apprentices. A street first laid out for emergency carts became a place where children could spend an afternoon being told to get out from under everyone’s feet.

Concordia’s castellan learned which sounds meant danger and which meant that Seraphina and Ignatius were attempting to teach Thora a game with rules she strongly disliked.

Thora disliked many rules.

She disliked being too small to reach a latch. She disliked being told that the twins had lessons to attend when she had brought a perfectly good book for them to look at. She disliked the implication that an unfamiliar door might reasonably remain unopened.

Ignatius followed her with an air of weary responsibility that fooled nobody.

Seraphina defended her until the day Thora opened a cupboard and distributed the contents of three sewing baskets across her bed. After that, Seraphina began to appreciate the distinction between a brave explorer and a person who should occasionally be stopped.

Io recorded something else about their youngest daughter in the family’s flame records.

Thora did not carry the First Flame.

She wrote it clearly, beside the child’s name, so that nobody coming after her would mistake an absence for damage or begin looking for something that had never belonged there.

Lexander stood beside her while the ink dried.

“Will that be enough?” he asked.

“It will be plain.”

He looked down at the page. “Good.”

They had both seen what happened when adults made a child’s difference into a question that demanded an answer. Whatever Thora became, she would not grow up being told that she had failed to resemble her siblings.

She resembled them quite sufficiently when she was stealing fruit.

On the sixth longest night, Lexander stood on Greykeep’s battlements with Io’s arm through his and watched the lamps come on across the city.

Below them, the gates stood open.

People were still arriving. A cart moved slowly through the entrance with a lantern swinging beneath its seat. Two travellers walked beside it, their heads bent close together. Farther down the road, more lights marked the way through the dark.

He knew enough of those roads now to imagine the individual hands.

Someone lifting a wick. Someone checking the oil. Someone moving a chair nearer a fire because a guest had come in cold.

The great alliances had signatures and seals. Lexander had signed plenty himself. But much of what had held the kingdoms together had happened beneath the notice of any treaty, performed by people who had seen a need and made room for it.

Beside him, Io shifted closer against the wind.

“Cold?”

“A little.”

He opened his cloak for her. She accepted the offered warmth without pointing out that she could have made her own.

At the far end of the wall, Thor stood beside her hammer.

Lexander followed the direction of her gaze. Beyond the river and the dark forest, a red light burned.

He knew whose it was. He knew, too, that keeping watch did not make all old wrongs disappear. Adriana owed Surtr no forgiveness, and nobody had found a clever arrangement of words that could change that.

Thor came to this watch because she chose to.

For once, Lexander did not interrupt her with a question.

From below came an indignant cry, followed by Seraphina calling Thora’s name. Ignatius appeared at the stair a moment later, carrying his youngest sister beneath the arms while she explained that she had only been looking.

“At what?” Io asked.

“The latch,” Ignatius said.

Thora twisted to face her mother. “It moved.”

“Most latches do.”

“I wanted to see.”

“I believe you.” Io held out her hands. “Come here.”

Ignatius delivered her and then stood at the parapet, pretending he had not been worried. Seraphina arrived with Caitlin, who had apparently been invited to assist with the investigation and had sensibly remained on the correct side of the door.

Lexander looked down at his son.

“Thank you.”

Ignatius shrugged. “She was going to do it anyway.”

“Yes. But she came back with you.”

The boy considered that.

Beyond him, other children were gathering around the adults. Garrick’s hand rested near the sword at his side without reaching for it. Carol was saying something that made Seraphina grin. Across the courtyard, Benjamin walked beneath the pear tree while Aurelia kept him company. Fenrir lay nearby with the deep patience of a creature who had finally obtained a patch of ground he liked.

Lexander had once measured safety by the distance between his family and everyone else.

Now he watched his children moving among people who knew them, people who would call them back from a dangerous stair, put food in front of them, listen when they spoke, and refuse them when refusal was needed.

Io’s hand found his beneath the cloak.

They stayed until the wind drove them indoors.

Ignatius’s first sustained argument with the council concerned a roof.

Not a magical roof. Not a roof concealing some ancient weapon. A leaking one, above a room where apprentices were expected to work through winter.

The money had been allocated. The repairs had not been made. Three offices had exchanged memoranda and managed, between them, to make the existence of rain somebody else’s responsibility.

Lexander sat at the head of the table and watched his son discover how much patience government required.

“They have buckets over their benches,” Ignatius said.

The official responsible for the estimates cleared his throat. “We are awaiting a revision.”

“Of the buckets?”

“Of the cost.”

“It is costing them work now.”

There was enough of Io in his voice that Lexander had to look down at his papers.

Ignatius did not win everything he asked for. He stayed after the meeting, worked through the figures, found the missing authority, and returned the following morning with a proposal that could actually be used.

The roof was repaired.

He went to see it himself.

That evening he came into Lexander’s study carrying a sheet covered in notes and looking far more tired than he had after most of his weapons training.

“I could have fixed the whole thing.”

“I know.”

“In an afternoon.”

“Yes.”

Ignatius dropped into the chair opposite him. “Instead it took six days and eight people.”

“Will those eight people know what to do when the next roof leaks?”

His son frowned at the paper.

Lexander waited.

“Some of them,” Ignatius conceded.

“More than last week.”

It was a small lesson. There would be many others, and Lexander would not always teach them well. Sometimes he lost patience before his son did. Sometimes Ignatius saw an answer his father had overlooked because he had been looking at the same problem for too long.

Preparing him to rule meant learning to be corrected by him.

Lexander found he could bear it.

He found, unexpectedly, that he liked watching his son become capable of things that did not require his help.

Carol came through the gate often during those years. At first she arrived with Garrick, then alone more frequently, and eventually nobody pretended that every visit concerned lessons or shared work.

She and Ignatius walked down through Concordia together. She knew the stalls he liked. He knew when she wanted company and when walking quietly beside her was company enough.

Their affection settled into the household without a proclamation.

Their decision not to marry took longer for some people to accept.

One council member suggested that the matter might eventually require clarification for the sake of stability. Lexander asked which part of the city had become unstable as a result. The council member found another matter to discuss.

Io still asked questions occasionally. She was a mother, and curiosity had never required an official reason in her household.

But the answer remained theirs.

One evening Ignatius stayed after supper while Carol went to find Seraphina. He stood beside the window for long enough that Lexander set his book aside.

“Something on your mind?”

“We aren’t waiting for permission.”

Lexander looked at him.

“To marry,” Ignatius said. “We aren’t waiting until someone approves, or until things are easier. We simply don’t want to.”

“All right.”

His son turned. “That’s all?”

“What else did you need?”

“I don’t know. An argument, possibly.”

“I have already had three today. I would prefer to finish my book.”

Ignatius smiled, but there was relief beneath it, and Lexander regretted that relief had been necessary.

“Does she know she is welcome here without a title?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Make certain you know it too.”

Seraphina married Garrick Grey on her twenty-first birthday.

The night before, Lexander found Io sitting beside their daughter with a length of fabric across her knees. The sewing had stopped. Their heads were close together, and he waited in the doorway rather than entering.

“Power is the easy part,” Io was saying. “Anyone can have power. The hard part is having it and not using it, every day, for the rest of your life.”

Seraphina looked down at her mother’s hands.

“Were you always good at that?”

Io laughed.

Lexander did too, unfortunately loudly enough to give himself away.

Both women turned.

“Your father,” Io said, “has come to provide an example.”

“I was looking for somewhere safe.”

“You chose badly.”

Seraphina held out her hand to him.

He crossed the room and took it.

She was grown. The evidence was everywhere: in the decisions she made, the work she carried, the way other people listened when she spoke. Yet some part of him still expected her hand to fit entirely inside his, still remembered lifting her so she could see over a wall.

He had learned not to say so every time.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation.

“Then I have no useful advice.”

“You never let that stop you before,” she said.

Io made no attempt to hide her satisfaction.

Lexander sat on their daughter’s other side. For a while they discussed entirely practical things: who had arrived, whether the flowers were where they ought to be, how many people Thor had told she would personally remove if they made the ceremony longer than necessary.

Then Seraphina grew quiet.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing bad.” She looked between them. “I was only thinking that I always knew you would both be here.”

Lexander felt Io’s gaze on him.

Their daughter said it simply, without any idea that she had put her hand upon the deepest wound they had ever carried and found healed skin there.

She had always known.

They had given her that.

He bent and kissed her forehead because there were things a man could not answer while remaining composed.

“We’ll be here,” he said.

The next day he stood beside Io and watched their daughter make her promises.

Garrick looked at Seraphina as though he knew her thoroughly and remained astonished by her. Lexander approved of that. Knowing a person for years did not excuse anyone from paying attention.

Uriah stood near enough that their shoulders almost touched.

“Are you managing?” his friend murmured.

“Perfectly.”

“You’re gripping the chair.”

“It is an excellent chair.”

“Yes,” Uriah said. “My father-in-law makes those.”

Lexander let go before he damaged a family heirloom.

There were witnesses and words, laughter in the wrong place that made the right people laugh harder, and afterward more food than anyone could possibly eat. Helena nevertheless watched the tables with the expression of a woman who suspected somebody might attempt it.

Thor cried once and denied it twice.

Thora saw both denials and wisely kept the information for later.

Carol stood beside Ignatius. Their hands touched, separated as someone passed between them, and found each other again without either looking down.

Lexander watched them and felt no lack in the arrangement.

One child had chosen a wedding. Another had chosen a life without one. Neither had asked to be rescued from happiness.

Later, Seraphina caught him alone for a moment.

“You look as though you’ve survived something.”

“I have survived a great deal of advice about where to stand.”

She laughed and put her arms around him.

He held her carefully, mindful of the dress, then stopped being mindful and held his daughter.

“I’m not going far,” she said against his shoulder.

“I know.”

“There are gates.”

“I have noticed.”

“And if you start visiting every morning, I will tell the castellan you are there to inspect the drains.”

“That would be cruel.”

“I learned restraint from Mother.”

When she drew back, he touched her cheek once.

“Have your life, Sera.”

She smiled at him, bright and certain.

“I intend to.”

Thora left home with two bags, a book under her arm, and more advice than either bag could reasonably have held.

She was eighteen. She was going south with the Council’s peace embassy. She had been asking to go for long enough that Lexander could recite the argument from either side, and on several regrettable occasions had done so.

Lisbeth had supported her.

“You won’t teach her patience by keeping her where everybody knows her,” she had told him. “Let her sit in a room where nobody cares whose daughter she is.”

“They will care.”

“Then let her learn what to do about that.”

It had been excellent advice. He had resented it for an afternoon.

Now Thora stood in the departure courtyard with her pale hair tied back and her mother checking a fastening that had already been checked twice.

“Letters,” Io said.

“Yes.”

“Actual letters. Not a message telling the castellan that you are alive and busy.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And if plans change—”

“I will tell you.”

Seraphina embraced her for a long time. Ignatius gave her something small wrapped in cloth and told her to open it later. Thor had already offered a list of people who could be contacted in an emergency, followed by a shorter list of people who should be contacted only if the emergency required making a great deal of noise.

Lexander waited until the others stepped aside.

His daughter looked at him with Io’s eyes.

“Well?” she asked.

He had prepared a speech. He had abandoned it during breakfast. There had been another, shorter speech on the walk down, but now that he stood before her, he could remember none of it except the parts he was certain would make her roll her eyes.

“Do the work properly,” he said.

“I will.”

“Listen before you decide what people mean.”

“I will try.”

“And come home when you want to come home. Finishing something is good. Making yourself miserable because you have declared an intention is less useful.”

Thora’s expression softened.

“You know I want to go.”

“Yes.”

“You believe me?”

“Yes.”

She put down her bag and hugged him.

He closed his eye. For a moment he remembered a newborn hand around his finger, and then the memory made room for the young woman in his arms.

“Write about the places,” he said into her hair. “Not just the meetings.”

“The places?”

“What you liked. What you ate. Who made you laugh.”

She drew back and studied him.

“All right.”

He carried her second bag to the waiting party. He did not carry it farther than she asked.

After she had gone, Io stood beside him in the courtyard while the business of departure settled back into the ordinary business of a morning.

A porter collected a dropped strap. Someone called for a cart to be moved. A sparrow hopped along the edge of the fountain and found nothing of interest.

“I dislike this part,” Io said.

“So do I.”

“She is ready.”

“Yes.”

Io slipped her hand into his.

They went inside together.

By the twentieth year of peace, Haven’s Reach had become so large that Lexander sometimes failed to recognize streets he had helped pay to build.

Concordia and Greykeep’s city were joined by three transit gates. He could remember when one had seemed an achievement sufficient for a lifetime. Now there were arguments about goods traffic, visiting hours, students arriving late, and whether somebody’s aunt could take seven baskets through a gate intended for pedestrian use.

He preferred those arguments to the old ones.

The rules remained clear. One side asked. The other answered. Either could close the way.

When people complained that the recognition took too long, he suggested they use the roads. Most decided the delay was bearable.

The alliance had become visible in a thousand smaller ways. Concordian apprentices went to Haven’s Reach and came home with different methods and alarming opinions. Greykeep’s students occupied rooms near the college and brought business to booksellers. Rebuilt kingdoms drew upon Eleanor Stonehand’s knowledge and the castellans’ patient work. Old acquaintances met across council tables where once they had shared crowded refuge.

There were more voices now.

Elves, dwarves, humans, and representatives whose needs were not best accommodated by chairs all expected to be heard. The werewolves had joined the peace. Dragons acquired favorite roofs. A phoenix could make an ordinary morning difficult for anyone who had hung laundry in the wrong place.

Aurelia led the gods’ Council.

Lexander still found the sight of her with Benjamin more moving than any formal gathering of divine power. He had watched the man regain a walk, a laugh, a place beneath a tree. Such things did not grow smaller because twenty years passed.

Names traveled into a new generation.

Elenos Benjamin Grey. Faelan Ansel Grey. Mirelle Hollis Grey.

Io remembered each arrival. She and Evelyn and Adriana had long since stopped pretending that their hours together always required a purpose beyond being together. Sometimes they discussed children. Sometimes they discussed the people the children were becoming. Sometimes they talked about subjects that interested nobody else in either royal household and were happier for it.

Lexander had his own company.

Once a month, unless something genuinely prevented it, he went fishing with Uriah, Thor, and Loki.

They possessed a thoroughly inadequate boat and no shared desire to replace it. Jörmungandr offered opinions. Fenrir occasionally ate fish whose capture nobody could satisfactorily explain.

The conversations stayed on the lake.

Lexander had learned that friendship could mean trusting another person to sit beside an old grief without making it the whole morning.

He had learned other things too.

There was gray in his beard. His shoulder objected to weather occasionally. His daughter Seraphina looked young in a way the First Flame would preserve long after most people had ceased expecting time to alter her. Ignatius carried the same enduring fire.

Lexander no longer tried to make all their years move at the same pace.

They were here.

He had time to know them as they were.

The first time little Uriah fell asleep against his chest, Lexander remained in the same chair until his leg went numb.

Io came into the room, saw his expression, and stopped.

“Oh, Lex.”

“He was tired.”

“So I see.”

“I thought moving him might wake him.”

“An entirely reasonable concern.”

She sat beside him. Their grandson slept on, his cheek warm against Lexander’s shirt, one hand tucked beneath his chin. Somewhere beyond the windows, a bell sounded. Neither of them counted it.

Seraphina had named her son for Garrick’s father.

Little Uriah, the family called him, because a household containing kings, gods, repeated names, and several generations of Garricks required occasional concessions to clarity.

Lexander rested his hand against the baby’s back.

He could feel each breath.

He had held his own children this way, yet the wonder was different now. This was Seraphina’s son. Her decisions, her sleepless nights, her fierce love. She had gone into a life of her own and brought this small person into it.

He had lived to meet him.

The thought returned several times, quiet and enormous.

Io leaned against his unoccupied shoulder.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

He looked at her. It was the question he had asked Seraphina before her wedding, and perhaps she knew that. Perhaps after so many years they had simply learned which questions were worth asking.

“Yes.”

She touched the child’s curled hand with one finger.

“So am I.”

They stayed until Seraphina came looking for her son and found both her parents behaving as though they had been assigned a sacred office requiring absolute stillness.

“He can sleep in a cot,” she told them.

“We have heard the theory,” Lexander said.

She laughed, took her baby, and kissed the top of her father’s head.

“Grandpa Garrick wants him tomorrow.”

“Grandpa Garrick wanted him yesterday.”

“And the day before,” Io said.

“He has a workshop to run.”

“He says the boy is assisting.”

Lexander looked at the sleeping infant.

“Excellent. Someone in the family ought to learn a practical trade.”

A letter from Thora reached them on a morning when the palace windows stood open to the harbor.

It was longer than her usual letters, and there was a stain across one corner which she had identified, in a small annotation, as soup.

She wrote about a meeting that had taken all day and settled less than she had hoped. She wrote about a woman who had spent the meeting silent and then solved the difficulty while everyone else was putting their papers away. She wrote about a town where the bread tasted different, a dog that had followed the embassy for half a mile, and a room with a good window.

Near the end, she wrote that she was glad she had gone.

Lexander read that line twice.

Then he passed the letter to Io.

She read it at the window, smiling before she reached the end. He watched the morning light move over her face and thought of all the times he had once feared he would lose the sight of it.

Varrick had made a machinery of their deaths. He had reached into love and tried to turn it into a route that returned, always, to loss.

They had ended it.

That ending had not required them to become fearless people. Lexander still worried. Io still stood too quickly when a message arrived at an unusual hour. They still had dreams from which waking took longer than it ought to.

But the dreams did not govern the house.

Their children grew, chose, left, returned, and loved people their parents could not choose for them. Their grandson slept beneath a roof where nobody counted his breaths as installments on an ancient debt.

The years had continued.

Outside the study, Ignatius was speaking to someone about the afternoon’s council agenda. Carol answered, amused by something Lexander could not hear. Their footsteps moved away together.

Io folded Thora’s letter.

“Evelyn will want to read this.”

“Shall we go through?”

“In a little while.”

She set the letter down and came to him instead.

Lexander stood. Io put her hands against his chest, looked up at him, and smiled as though they had met that morning and she already liked him.

He kissed her.

There was no urgency in it. Nobody was leaving for a battlefield. No door was closing. They did not need to make the moment hold all the words they might never have time to say.

When she rested her forehead against his, he kept his arms around her.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

He considered telling her about the old fear, and the letter, and their daughter’s wedding, and the impossible weight of a sleeping grandson.

Instead he said, “We should have breakfast before we go.”

Io laughed softly.

“Yes,” she said. “We should.”

They left the study together.

Downstairs, Concordia was beginning another day. There would be work waiting, people to see, a crossing to Greykeep, and some small difficulty neither of them had yet imagined. Someone would have forgotten something. Someone else would need an answer.

Beyond all that were the children’s lives, opening farther than he could see.

Lexander took Io’s hand on the stairs.

They went down to breakfast.

The End