I don’t reach for her. I reach for language we can stand on.
“Then we’ll be the sort of people who sweep,” I say. “Who make lists. Who write the names right. Who bring soup. Who let the kids see us cry.” I swallow. “Who stop trying to purchase the future with other people’s fear.”
Her shoulders drop a fraction.
“Okay.”
A shadow falls across the path; Rheon and Seori appear as if summoned by the part of the day that keeps score. He holds a stack of parchment; she holds a blade wrapped in cloth. Between them, the kind of peace that gets made when two sovereigns decide to lie down on the same side as the people they love.
“List?” Seori asks.
I pass her the pages.
She reads. She doesn’t hurry. When she reaches the end she presses her thumb to the last line until the ink warms like a seal.
“We’ll speak them at dusk,” she says. “In the tongue that remembers.”
Rheon hands me a short roll of vellum.
“Also,” he says, mild, “you have been volunteered to teach rookies morning drills until they stop trying to impress the stone.”
Minji coughs. I glower without heat.
“Who volunteered me?”
“Yuna,” he says, as if stating a self-evident law. “She says you look less haunted when you’re counting push-ups than trying to convince courtiers to learn mercy.”
“Her Majesty is annoyingly perceptive,” I mutter.
Seori’s gaze drops to my wing. “Salve?” she asks.
“Inventory,” I answer, and Minji sniffs like a person who did not just blush.
We stand, all of us, and for a moment I see it from above the way I used to: four points making a room into a promise. Queen and King of Below; Queen of Bloom and her Demon; the scholar with ink on her hands; the fallen who fell in the right direction at last.
“When war ends,” Rheon says, almost to himself, “the under keeps what it must. We send the rest back.” He looks at me. “Send yourself back, Jisoo. Every morning. Before the story chooses for you.”
“I will,” I say, and I mean it.
At dusk we speak the names. We don’t do it in the throne room; Yuna insists on the garden. Vines unfurl. Lanterns bow. Taeyang stands close enough to steady her breath and far enough not to be the only thing holding her up. Kaelen reads the first twenty. I take the next. My voice breaks on three; I don’t apologize. Minji finishes the last ten, each one a stone set gentle in the water.
The court repeatspresentafter every name. Notgone.Present.As if insisting on grammar could make a person stay where we can reach them.
After, the palace exhales. People touch their foreheads and the ground and each other. The world looks a fraction less armed.
I find Minji again in the shadow of the colonnade. She looks wrung out and beautiful in the way survival sometimes is when it shows up wearing unflattering clothes.
“Walk you to the Archive?” I ask.
Her mouth opens, then closes. She nods. We move through people who know a miracle when they’re inside it and still expect to do the dishes afterward.
At the Archive door, I stop.
“Thank you,” I say.
“For what?”
“For letting me help,” I answer. “For letting me be forgiven without forgetting what I did.”
