Pale Lights

Chapter 160 33

They left Izel by the bedside, the two of them ending up at the bottom of the stairs from the sheer need to put a physical distance between them and the sight of Song Ren laid up in that bed looking exactly like what had been done to her.

Silence held a moment, Tristan forcing his thoughts to stop spinning while Angharad mastered her temper. Not so different at all, when it came down to it. Absent-mindedly, he ran his tongue against his new tooth. The physicians had only put it in days ago, after they fashioned something that would hold out of his knocked-out tooth, and it still felt almost as strange to his tongue as the hole had. In time he would make something of worth from Yaotl Acatl's gift: there were all sorts of uses for a hollowed-out tooth.

"Can you find out the names?" Angharad brusquely asked.

"I'll have them all by the end of the day," Tristan replied without hesitation.

It'd be trivial, considering this 'student association' was an open coterie. He might not have been keeping track of them, but Imani Langa was there to spy on the delve so she certainly would have. And since it was an easy ask he'd barely have to put up anything in trade, too. Angharad nodded, fingers clenched – nails digging into her palms like someone holding on to the sting like it was a lifeboat.

"I thought better of the Eighth," she bit out.

"The way Song tells it, their Skiritai didn't step in beyond disarming Ishanvi," he noted. "It's the captain and the Laurel that swung their clubs."

Historian track, the latter. One did not usually expect historian on historian violence to involve wooden clubs, but evidently Scholomance students were a breed apart.

"Almost twenty against two," Angharad hissed. "Bibek should be ashamed he was even willing to stand in that room."

She had, Tristan thought, a higher opinion of the moral fiber of Skiritai than he believed warranted. He still remembered Muchen He from the first Forty-Ninth, who had been just as mercenary as the rest. It was only natural, though: the second-year Militants had been and would be put through a crucible that forced them to rely on one another. Some trust and comradery were inevitable. It had been frightening, to realize that the Marshal's bloody games down in the Acallar were not mere callousness.

The man was force-marching the commitment and loyalty to the Skiritai Guild that would usually come from a decade of service in the black through his brutal death matches. You could not go through five years of something like the Acallar and not feel bound to the Militants, else you would be turning your back on the horrors you went through and those you went through them with.

"The Eighth was slighted first," Tristan said. "I'm not happy they lent a hand to Morcant, but Song and Maryam picked that fight to begin with. I'm inclined to call it a settled matter and let it go."

"They beat her, Tristan," Angharad said, voice cold as ice. "And that poor Kapadia girl too. Settled? I would use that word only when they are laid up in a hospital bed like our own."

Tristan sighed, looking up.

"The princess, Morcant, Guadalupe de Tovar," he listed, "the student association, the Lord of Teeth."

Her eyes came to rest on him, unreadable.

"We already have as many fronts as we do pairs of eyes to watch for them," Tristan said. "Add another and you can be sure we'll miss something we'll regret."

"What they did," Angharad said, "was unacceptable."

She did not, he noted, deny that Guadalupe de Tovar was something of an enemy now. Alizia Salas' funeral must have made that plain enough. And to think de Tovar is the one I worry the least about on that list. The captain of the Second would be out to knife them, but not to get any of them killed.

"The Eighth didn't owe us shit," Tristan disagreed. "If you're angry with Tall Bibek, that's your right and I won't shove my finger in it. But it would be best if you settled the matter with him in private instead of serving up our many enemies helpers in the form of a competent second year brigade."

Angharad grimaced.

"I had not considered that," she admitted.

"I understand the urge to settle the score," Tristan admitted back. "But I'm reluctant to start a feud with a brigade I can't honestly say was out of line to act as they did."

He honestly believed the Thirteenth would have gotten even too, if they'd been bullied out of a claim in the delve the way the Eighth had. Maybe not by allying with a slaver's catspaws, but in some way or another. And the Eighth are one of the few other heavyweight brigades that's not leaning the way of the Garrison or the free companies.

Given that the Thirteenth was already beginning to feel the squeeze from having no real backing – if they'd been in bed with the First or the Ninth, Morcant would have never dared moved against them this way – the last thing they needed was to set fire to their relations with one of the leading unaligned brigades. Using a fearsome reputation as a deterrent only worked if you did not then go around picking fights with neutral parties.

"I will take up the matter with Bibek in person, then," Angharad said, grinding her teeth.

Tristan would have preferred she not, but he knew what a line in the sand looked like. She'd already made him concessions, he wasn't going to bargain his way back out of the bargain he'd already struck.

"We'll have to get clever with the student association," he told her instead, dragging the more deserving into the line of fire. "Their numbers are the trouble: they're a significant chunk of the students involved in the exploration, so if we lay them all out we may draw Colonel Cao down on our head."

"Then the colonel also ought to intervene in this," Angharad harshly said, gesturing upstairs.

Where Song and Ishanvi laid in their beds, filled with poppy and drifting in an out. At least the physicians had put them upstairs, not down in the main hall out in the open where anyone could come gawk at Nathi Morcant's handiwork.

"Were they not her leading group of explorers, recruits she handpicked herself for the work?"

She'd handpicked them to make the exploration a success, Tristan thought. He was less than convinced Chunhua Cao would keep feeding a limping horse the good oats.

"My money is on Cao summoning the delving crews sometime in the next few days to sit them down and arrange a truce," Tristan said. "Which at first look seems like it's about preventing this from happening again, but..."

"Would be as much about preventing retaliation that slows down the delve," Angharad slowly said.

Peace on Cao's terms would be in the interest of advancing her interests, nothing else.

"It doesn't matter," Tristan thinly smiled. "Neither of us is part of the delve, and I won't be signing onto such a truce. If our friends of the student association want to serve as hired thugs, then they will be treated as such."

His fingers clenched. He'd wait until tomorrow, until the surprise had stopped feeding the anger, to begin planning. Else he suspected he would be less proportionate in his response than he'd like. He shook his head.

"Rampaging through town won't get us anywhere, anyhow," he said. "And we shouldn't act before Song has decided how she's moving forward with the delve."

Angharad grimaced. Like him, she must suspect that such a humiliation would only drive Song to double down on the work. Yet there were only so many ways to make that possible.

"You think she will take Tupoc's offer?" she asked.

I think she hates Xical but she trusts Alejandra, Tristan thought. And there were arguments in favor of that trust being deserved. Alejandra had been the one to come and tell the three of them about the ambush all the way on Lamb Hill, after the Fourth brought Ishanvi and the rest of the Thirteenth to the hospital. The Akelarre had then sent people for Maryam, spiriting her away to the chapterhouse, but the Fourth had undeniably given their friends aid during a dark time.

"I don't know," Tristan admitted. "But if she's looking to go to war, the Fourth is the right kind of ally for it."

Reckless, ruthless and with too little moral fiber between the lot to weave even a single sock out of it. Tupoc had made his brigade into the kind of force you threw at a breach in the walls, and while they were an albatross around your neck if you lacked such a need if you did have a breach you needed taken then the Fourth were the best on the market.

"It would not do to step on her plans," Angharad conceded. "She will have notions of her own as to how we should proceed."

The tall woman passed a hand through her braids.

"Will you be staying at the Rainsparrow tonight as well?" she asked.

He nodded. All his sources were in town anyway, there was no point in heading back to the cottage tonight. Feeling that Angharad was about to set out, he began pawing at his pockets as if looking for something and put a pained look on his face.

"I must have set down my powder horn upstairs," he said. "You should go on ahead, I'll likely be swinging by the Chimerical after this anyhow."

Angharad laid a hand on his arm, ever so lightly squeezing, before she nodded and walked away. Tristan waited a moment. He did not realize for what until it occurred to him that he'd not found the touch uncomfortable. When, he wondered, had he grown to trust her enough that the thought of being under the hand of a larger, stronger swordswoman with a sharp sense of justice no longer unsettled him? He honestly could not tell.

Shaking off the thought, he put a spring to his steps as he went up the stairs as if it'd allow him to leave the realization behind as well. The physicians had put Song and Ishanvi in neighboring beds, about halfway down the hall, and considering they were the only ones on this level save for the healers they were not exactly difficult to find. He wondered who had pulled a string to arrange that – Captain Wen or Colonel Cao? He'd bet on the latter, if only because the battered faces of Song Ren and Ishanvi Kapadia were a living badge of her little pet enterprise beginning to fall apart.

Izel's cloak and blade were on the chair by Song's bed but the man himself was missing – speaking with one of the physicians further down the hall, Tristan found – so the thief moved to claim the still-warm seat. Ishanvi was asleep, downed by the poppy, but Song was not.

She looked up from her half-trance as he approached, eyes sharp despite the drug, but the rest of her... Gods. Her face had swollen, even the parts untouched looking waxy to his eye, but it did little to hide the aftermath of the beating: she was all split skin and bruises, her lower lip bloodied on the left and both eyes blackened. There was a bloody crust near the top of her nose, and a chunk of her hair had been ripped.

The only difference between his friend and someone a coterie had made an example of was that coterie thugs wouldn't have avoided breaking the nose and limbs. Tristan only realized he was chewing the inside of his cheek when he tasted blood.

"Tristan," she croaked out.

He slipped into the seat without a word. Silver eyes silently asked why he'd returned.

"I talked Angharad out of feuding with the Eighth," he said. "But she'll be taking things up with their Skiritai anyhow. I don't believe it will escalate."

It'd fall under a private Skiritai Guild matter rather than a brigade issue, and for all that the Eighth had a grudge Tristan's assessment was that they did not want a feud either. The reputation of the Unluckies aside, the Eighth fundamentally had the same problem they did: lack of backing. They had to know that if this got bigger then the princelings of either side would be called in, and neither brigade would be eager to turn their personal conflict into skirmishing grounds for the two bigger powers.

Song breathed out shallowly, eyes fluttering.

"Thank you," she got out. "My fault."

"You definitely should have dodged at least one of those black eyes," he made himself say with a put-on grin. "Two is just bad form, Ren."

She didn't even chuckle. Well, given the state of her maybe that was for the best.

"Shouldn't have let Morcant plot," Song said.

"You couldn't really do anything else," Tristan flatly replied. "I made sure of that when I shot the girl."

And if someone in the Thirteenth should have kept an eye on plots aimed at them it was the fucking Krypteia, but he hadn't. Because his efforts had been turned on the princess and the hunt but also, he would admit to himself, because part of him had thought that if Maryam was going care so much about her strays then she could handle the consequences of picking them up herself. Even this morning, he would have run a finger against the spine of that thought and found a harsh satisfaction in it.

Looking at the mosaic of brutality made of Song Ren's face, listening at her pained breathing, that thought felt all too petty.

"On all of us, then," Song tiredly said.

He grimaced.

"You should rest," was all he found to say. "I only came up to tell you not to worry, we won't burn down the town while you're under."

"Maryam," Song said.

"She's at the chapterhouse," he informed her.

"I know," Song impatiently said. "Go see her."

Tristan's brow rose.

"I doubt I would be-"

"She got permission, told me to tell you," Song got out.

His lips thinned.

"I have work tonight," Tristan said. "It may have to wait."

"When you could both walk, the fleeing was on both," Song forced out. "Now she can't. It's only on you if you still avoid each other."

His fists clenched.

"I am not a stray dog," he said, "to be summoned with a few scraps of attention whenever one feels like giving them."

"Please," Song said. "For me."

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He swallowed a curse. Anything else he could have twisted up in knots, but a simple plea when her face looked like it had been fucking stomped on? No. He'd failed her in averting his eyes from their enemy, he'd not add insult to injury by refusing even a small favor.

"You know I can't refuse that," he sighed.

It would have been a chuckle, he thought, if she didn't start hissing in pain halfway through.

"First victory today," she rasped.

A better note to leave her on than anything he would have come up with himself, so he did.

--

Lying down in the grass, Maryam looked at the sky.

The gurgle of running water had long wormed itself into her ear so deeply as to become unnoticeable, but she could still hear the rustle of the wind against the leaves. How it brushed against the cattails, threaded through the burgeoning branches of the plum tree, the scattered petals of chrysanthemums. It was soothing, and not just to her mind: the Gloam roiling under her skin slowly smoothed down, bled out along the currents of air and water. Carried away into nothing, as every Meadow was built to do.

Amaru Wayar's seal had been stripped off her, Lieutenant Rishabh's impressed muttering about 'double locking' another thorn in her thumb even as he and Sergeant Alia dropped her in the garden like a sack of potatoes before going for tea. It'd been hours since then, and though Maryam had heard another few souls coming and going – most in the halls around the courtyard holding the Meadow, a few instead going to rest by the river – she was the last one remaining. Even Hooks was gone, though Maryam could still feel her through their tether.

Whether she intended to or not, Amaru Wayar had imprisoned Maryam's sister inside her soul. It had not been... comfortable, for either of them. Hooks wanted to be as far as she could from Maryam, at the moment, which was understandable. Another kick aimed at her ribs while she was down, but it was understandable.

How long had she been here? Her mind kept drifting in and out. Her limbs had grown numb; her fingers were cold and her cloak stained with dirt and dew. Her hair was unbound, spread across the green like a crown, and something itched on her cheek but she could not seem to muster the will to scratch it. Above her the Orrery whirred in its forever-cycles, ticking on heedless of the ants huddling beneath its colored lights. And yet, for all this islet of calm, she could still feel eddies beneath her skin. Gloam roiling, bubbling up.

"I would think you asleep, if not for the open eyes."

Maryam's ears fought the words like an overeager doorman. They had to elbow their way in, past the river's whisper and the daze, and only then did she blink. Not at the words but the voice that had spoken them. She wheezed out a breath, moving insensate limbs to push herself up. Her hair fell across her face, tucked back half-heartedly as she found Tristan standing above her. His face was shadowed by the Meadow's sole lantern, shade crossing his face in a stripe under gray eyes.

Maryam squeezed her eyes shut, bit the inside of her cheek and let the sensations anchor her.

"Tristan," she managed. "I did not hear you coming."

Across either stone or grass. His tread had always been quiet, but these days it was light as a cat's.

"I can return tomorrow, if you need your rest," he offered.

"No," Maryam blurted out, then cursed herself.

That'd been too eager. Childish.

"Sit," she added in a more sedate tone.

He did, tucking in his cloak to shield his trousers as he sat on the grass. He never looked comfortable, out in the green – but then he was more used to paving stones than wood trails, wasn't he? Gray eyes rested on her, and Maryam reached for something to say but found herself at a loss. After a few beats had passed and her humiliation mounted, Tristan cleared his throat.

"Your gate guards think themselves funny," he told her. "I had to answer riddles three to enter."

She sighed, exaggerating it to hide her gratitude for him having taken the first step.

"Rishabh and Alia?" Maryam asked.

"Just so," he agreed.

"You're not all that great at riddles," she noted. "How did you even get in?"

"I only got one out of three, the one that was ripped straight out of Ruina," Tristan easily said. "But then I pointed out they only required I answer the riddles, not answer them correctly."

A small chuckle, but still warm breath against her lips. The time he had kindly expended her to gather her graces through that little anecdote had, unfortunately, been wasted. She found herself bereft of graces tonight, left with only teeth to bite.

"I told Song I'd have you put on the visitor list," she said.

He nodded.

"How long does that keep, anyway?" Tristan idly asked.

"Krypteia get six hours instead of twelve, and if you want a minute more come back with a tribunal mandate," Maryam automatically replied.

She choked a moment later, realizing what she'd just said, but instead of being offended he was grinning.

"Captain Yue?" he asked.

"It's the one lesson she teaches first years," Maryam said, coughing into her fist. "She drilled us on chapterhouse permissions. Stripes get it even worse than you, if that's any help."

Academy officers had to be added back to the visitor list after every visit, and would only be allowed in at a precise time. Such policies were set locally, not across the entire guild, and rumor had it that Yue had added that latter part just to spite Stripes that showed up early to visits. Even Song had gotten the runaround when she visited to get Yue's signature, though she'd been given a more polite version of it than most.

"One must always applaud the Academy getting it worse," Tristan agreed, "save for our own Song Ren, of course."

Maryam's jaw clenched at the name, and the reminder it carried of what had happened today. What had been done to them, to her.

"How are they?" she asked.

"The student association was very careful," Tristan said, tone clinical. "Not a thing broken on either, though one of Ishanvi's ribs was almost cracked. Song's wrist is sprained, which she seems to be angrier about than the black eyes even though those will last thrice as long."

Because it would keep her from using her rifle, Maryam thought. You needed both hands for that.

"We misread the move on Morcant's part," she said, tucking back her hair. "We thought we'd be able to walk away after taking stock of his thugs."

"It would have been wiser to retreat," Tristan bluntly agreed. "That said, by taking the beating you've now tied his hands in some ways – if he continues to provoke the Thirteenth, he discards the protection that is our recent record. Flicking a hound's nose once without getting bit is audacity, trying it again is courting a bite."

"He'll keep going," Maryam said, and believed it bone-deep. "Not the same way, but he'll come at us again."

She worried her lip, trying to dig out the root of that certainty.

"It's about legitimacy," she finally said. "He'll want to keep going until we make a deal with him, because if we do we're admitting he's right. That we did him wrong and had to make up for it."

Maryam shook her head.

"The worst part is I could have driven them off," she said. "If Wayar hadn't intervened, I mean. I was this close to ending things with Bingwen and then I could chase off the vultures."

"I never got a full lay of what went on there," Tristan noted. "The others were otherwise occupied, and rumors are imprecise. The tale goes that you beat three signifiers in a row but then lost control of your Gloam and the First Brigade's signifier had to step in."

Maryam's teeth clenched.

"Just before the finish line, she took me by surprise," she said. "Claiming I was being dangerous."

"So it was politics," Tristan frowned. "You hadn't lost control of your Sign, she just wanted to assert the First Brigade's prominence."

Maryam hesitated. It did not go unnoticed.

"You had lost control," he softly said. "How badly?"

"Bad if I didn't disperse the Gloam, which I was about to," Maryam insisted.

She'd caught it early enough for that, she liked to think.

"And that was when you were facing the boy from the Nineteenth, Bingwen?" Tristan asked.

She gritted her teeth. Yes, she could see it would have looked bad if out of all the signifiers she fought she only hurt the one who was part of Morcant's brigade. It would have been called an 'accident' by many even if she admitted to Grasp trouble.

"I was three duels in, some messiness was to be expected," she said.

"I do not foresee that answer getting applause if you blew a hole in the kid, Maryam," he said. "It sounds like you should be thanking her, if anything."

Her teeth ground.

"All right, so maybe she wasn't entirely out of line to shatter my Sign," Maryam grudgingly said. "But sealing me? That shut me down hard, kept me from saving the others."

"Or it kept you from killing a few of them by accident and being tossed out of Tolomontera on the next ship," Tristan said.

"You're siding with her?" Maryam said, aghast.

"I'm siding with the person trying hardest to keep you from sitting in front of a military tribunal," Tristan flatly said. "I would have hoped for that to be you, but I'll settle for Amaru Wayar if I have to."

"She told everyone I'm having Grasp trouble!" she snarled.

"As opposed to having tried to publicly execute a junior signifier on purpose?" he mildly asked.

"She didn't do it to do me a favor, Tristan," she said.

A pause.

"That, I expect, has some truth in it," he said. "The First Brigade has its own game. I very much doubt that Morcant wanted them in that room."

Maryam blew out a breath and let it end at that. She had not asked him to come so she could argue with him. What she had asked him over for, though, she struggled to name. In her mind it had been simple – like all that was needed was his presence and all would be fixed, it could all go back to normal. Now that he was here, though, she found that she struggled to phrase what she wanted to say. Gods, what did she want to say? She tugged her cloak tighter around her, crossed her arms for warmth.

"I feel like I should apologize to you," Maryam finally said. "But I can't seem to decide for what."

He cocked his head to the side.

"No?" he mildly asked.

Too mildly. Like he was holding back a knife. Her fingers clenched under the cloak.

"You're not making this easy," she said.

"I'm not even sure what this is," Tristan said, just honestly enough she believed him.

That had her swallowing the things she might have said otherwise. She might not be the only one feeling lost here, for all that he'd been more skilled at keeping the tune going.

"It's been different," Maryam said. "Between us."

"We have been dedicating ourselves to different works," he said. "It eats up time at large, and time shared even more so."

"Tristan," she simply said.

His lips thinned.

"What do you want me to say, exactly?" he asked.

"Anything, at this point," she said. "It'd be better than letting the silence stand."

And Maryam watched him watching her, how the gears turned behind his eyes.

"You ran," Tristan finally said, his tone frightfully even. "You made a choice, and instead of facing what it means you ran, because you always run."

Her stomach clenched, but while maybe there was truth in that there were blinkers too.

"It wasn't a choice," Maryam said. "I have an obligation to the Orels."

"That obligation was not inflicted on you," he said. "It's a choice you made, and not just once either."

He wasn't listening. She finally had means, had leverage. What could she possibly do but use it to help them?

"So I should have gotten them out of chains and then what - turned them loose in the Trebian?" she snapped.

"Yes," Tristan flatly replied. "They are all grown, save the boy who has a father to look after him. You could have paid for their passage to some Tianxi port and let them find their own way, as everyone else under firmament does."

Everyone else didn't get dragged halfway across Vesper in the hull of a slave hulk. And there was respect, in the way he did not think of the five as helpless or lesser, but callousness as well. Too much for her to swallow.

"None of them even speak Cathayan," she spoke through gritted teeth. "Not that if fucking matters, Tristan, because they're my people. Of course I took care of them."

"On what grounds, Maryam?" he asked. "Who are you exactly, to be taking care of them? Their queen, their captain, their patron? Watchwomen don't have subjects, in case you forgot."

But she hadn't been born a watchwoman, and didn't intend to stay one for the rest of her life. Right? And if not her, then who? There was no one else, and the way he just refused to see that was infuriating.

"Of course you'd say that," she retorted. "You hate you Sacromonte, you'd torch the place given the chance. Just because you won't lift a hand to help another rat doesn't mean I can't help my enslaved countrymen who were dragged halfway across the world."

"I don't care that you helped them," Tristan sharply said. "I care about the debts you're running up on their behalf with little care who ends up settling the tab. You think this is just about me?"

She could see how he clenched his teeth.

"Izel's given you enough hours of labor on that skimmer he could buy his own boat if he'd charged you the going rate," he said. "Most of us leant you gold at no interest so you wouldn't miss payment on your loans and no one said a thing when we began using brigade funds to pay you to hold goods in the ship that we could have easily kept in the Rainsparrow instead."

She swallowed. It had never been laid out for her quite so starkly, how much had been given her. Or rather it had always been there, looming just out of sight, and she had been careful never to look at it directly. He leaned in.

"But it doesn't stop there, does it?" he said. "After that mess on the docks Song cleaned up behind us, and she's been paying up on your behalf ever since. She bound herself to the delve for you, she's letting Yue dig into her soul for you."

"She has her own reasons. You don't get to speak for her," Maryam rasped out.

"I don't have to, to say someone who loved you less would have cut you loose over half of that," Tristan snapped back. "Do you think that just because you're doing the right thing you get a pass on being an asshole?"

"Do you?" she bit back. "You went savage when Fortuna was caught, Tristan, and we've all been walking on eggshells about it."

She smiled cuttingly.

"Someone who loved you less would have cut you loose over Ahuic," she parroted.

"I'm not trying to hurt you, you fucking thornbush," he snarled. "Are you truly incapable of even looking one of us in the eye and admitting that what you're doing is fucked? Angharad's life is on the line, I could lose the last of my family in a matter of weeks and you sold us both out for what - the right to keep your countrymen underfoot, play princess-in-exile?"

"I owe it to them," Maryam shouted. "I made it out, I got saved. Snatched out of Malani hands and spirited away to safety beyond their grasp. They got stuck with the world my mother made, and it ruined their lives. How could I just leave them after that?"

She swallowed after the last word left her, panting. Feeling oddly drained. How long had she been choking on those words? It was almost a relief to finally have them out in the open. To acknowledge that Mother had fought a war and she'd lost and everyone had been forced to pay for it except for her.

"You were a child," Tristan said. "And you were just as ruined as the rest of them."

She opened her mouth but he gestured sharply.

"Pain is not currency," he said. "You can't trade it or owe it, and if you try to bleed for everyone your pity you will run dry."

You had to tell yourself that, she thought, because it was the only way the Murk wouldn't break you. If you told yourself everyone must save themselves, and the devils take the hindmost.

"I'm not trying to save a continent, or even a city," Maryam said. "Gods, not even a village. Five people, Tristan. Are five souls really too much to ask?"

"No," he said. "But you've made other oaths, Maryam. Does every debt and bond you made since leaving Juska stop mattering the moment one of your fellows shows up downtrodden?"

His fingers clenched.

"Because I'm not doing this again, Maryam," he evenly said. "I don't have enough kindness in me to forgive being tossed out in the alley twice."

She choked down an indignant that's not what I did.

"I didn't choose them over you," Maryam said instead.

"You did," Tristan replied. "And that you refuse to own it only adds salt to the wound."

He shook his head.

"I don't want to fight you," he said. "Your day has already been a gauntlet. But you don't get to pretend that this is nothing, that this was done to you and not something you chose on your own."

He pushed himself up.

"We – I thought I understood it, what we are," Tristan said. "Maybe I do not. That's not the end of the world, Maryam, it just means adjusting expectations. All things change."

A pretty way to put cutting her out, she thought. Maybe she'd run, but he was the one on his feet now.

"I didn't even know what we were two months ago," Maryam tiredly said. "Why should I suddenly know it now?"

He froze, like a startled rabbit.

"We don't talk about that," he finally said.

It sounded more like a question than a warning though, and gods what was there left to lose anyway?

"Maybe we should have," she said. "I could use some clarity about at least one thing in my life."

Gray eyes only studied her, unreadable. He did not agree, but neither had he left.

"I like you," Maryam desperately said. "And not just as..."

She shook her heads, almost angrily, at the shyness of not being able to speak the words.

"And I feel like you do too, sometimes," she continued. "Like we're walking on that side of the line. But neither of us ever do anything about it."

Sometimes she had preferred it that way. As a secret thing that was their own, unseen because it had not yet been named, and they could stand in the half-light together. It has been thrilling, and not as heavy as something made known would have been. A flirtation with the idea without having to pay any of the dues the real thing would demand. But they'd gotten stuck in that, as time passed, until inertia turned on them. Now she would have to drag in something she'd once expected would simply come to her on its own.

"Now you want that have that talk," Tristan said, jaw clenched. "Of all times."

And yet he sounded almost admiring.

"Fine. You're..."

He breathed out.

"I've thought about it too," Tristan said, and even furious as she was with him her heart leaped into her throat. "And I think – it's often so easy, with you. Or used to be. And you're impressive even when you don't know it. But I'm not sure what I would want it to be would be the same thing you'd want it to be."

"Because you have no interest in sex," Maryam said.

His face blanked, but he nodded.

"That won't change," he said. "Not even for someone I feel for. Affection's not a key that somehow unlocks me."

"I wouldn't ask you to," she said.

"Never?" he softly asked. "Because I've been told that before. And no matter how plain it was said they thought I meant I needed romancing first, or a few drinks, or that I'd change my mind with time. But I won't. Didn't. And not everybody takes that graciously when it finally sinks in."

"I am not," Maryam calmly said, "those people."

His lips thinned, but he searched her face and after a moment he nodded.

"No," he conceded. "You're not. But that's half the trouble, really."

She blinked.

"What?"

"It wouldn't just be a few months with you, Maryam," he simply said. "If we became a pair, you think I'd ever want to let you go?"

Her face heated and she coughed into her hand.

"And that means I have to ask myself – even if you're all right with it now, would you be in three years? Because if we thread fingers, I don't think I'll be the one to let go. And that means I have to think about what down the road will be."

And the urge was there to assure him it wouldn't be, but she held back. Made herself really think about it.

"I don't know," Maryam admitted. "I don't think I can know, without going there."

She snorted.

"But we could be dead in three years, Tristan," she reminded him. "This year, even. And we take chances on everything else, so why not on something that'd be good for once?"

"You know how I feel about gambling," he said. "And faith's harder to come by with one less god around."

"So that's the answer?" she softly said. "Conversation kicked down the street, to perhaps be picked up again when Fortuna returns."

"Would you prefer I say no?" he asked.

"It might be more honest," she said. "It's what you really want to say."

His face tightened.

"If that were true, I would have," Tristan stiffly said. "But you want honesty, so have it: it's a question of trust, Maryam. And I want to trust you, I'm used to trusting you, but now every time I'm up to my neck in death and I look to the side and there's no Fortuna and no you it feels like bile in my mouth. Like I'm alone. And I find it hard to swallow that."

He pulled his cloak close, nodded jerkily.

"Good night, Maryam," Tristan said, in the tone of a conversation finished. "See you tomorrow."