"I'm telling you now. I needed it standing first. I don't trust words I can't put a roof on."
She laughs, and presses her head to me, and I put my hand on her hair and let the wind do the rest. Below us the valley is loud with hammers, imperfect and unfinished and still, somewhere out there, dangerous. I'll read the roads in Vaelis's packet tonight. There will be another market, another flare, another year of teaching people to ask the second question. None of that has gone anywhere.
But I'm standing in the doorway of a house I made on purpose, with the one person who ever made me want one, andfor longer than I can measure in my life the word home is not something the war is about to take from me. It is something already standing, open to the weather, waiting for us to enter.
35
CORRINE
The seedlings come wrapped in damp burlap, and the children argue over who carries them. I let the loudest two win, because the quiet one has already claimed the trowel, and that outranks a parcel in any bargain worth striking. We've turned the strip of ground south of the well into rows—beans, a stubborn squash Isolde swears will take the thin soil, something leafy whose name I keep losing. A dark elf girl with a chipped front tooth packs earth around a root with more force than the root deserves, and I crouch to show her how to firm it without snapping the stem.
"Easy. It wants to stay. You don't make it."
She squints at me like the notion is a trick. Most of these children learned the world as a thing that takes from you. Teaching them to set something in the ground and trust it to come back is slower work than any route I ever cut.
When I sit back on my heels my knees complain, and I notice I've been down in the dirt the better part of the morning without once counting the ways out of the yard. A year ago it would have frightened me—the lapse, the softness of it. Now it's only true. I brush my palms clean and watch the girl pat her second seedlingwith exaggerated care, glancing up to be sure I saw, and I tell her she's a natural, and mean it.
Isolde finds me at the water barrel rinsing soil from under my nails. She has a ledger under one arm and the look she gets when the medicine count came out wrong twice. She sets it down anyway.
"They've adopted you," she observes, nodding at the rows. "You'll be teaching them their letters by midsummer."
"I'm teaching them squash. Letters are your department."
She leans against the barrel, watching the children with the worn fondness she gives everyone she's kept alive. I dry my hands on my trousers and find the thing I've been carrying toward her for days has come loose enough to hand over.
"I stopped waiting for it," I tell her. "The punishment. I spent so long certain it was owed that I built my whole life around staying reachable to it. And somewhere—I don't know when—I put it down. I didn't decide to. I just looked up one morning and it wasn't on my back anymore."
Isolde doesn't soften the way most people would. That's why I told her and not anyone else. "The dead are still dead, Corrine."
"I know. I'm not saying I'm clean. There are graves I helped fill that no garden makes even." I watch the girl with the chipped tooth, who has moved on to digging a hole far too deep for anything to grow in. "But I think I'm allowed to be the one who lived. I think I'm finally letting myself have been used instead of being the monster. Those aren't the same, and I've spent years treating them like they were."
She studies me, then nods—once, the way she signs off on something she's decided is sound. "Took you long enough." But her voice goes rough on it, and she busies herself with the ledger so I won't notice, that's proof it landed.
Leoric comes for me in the afternoon, when the light has gone long and gold across the new roofs. He's got dirt on hisown hands; he's been at the cistern channel again, and there's a streak of it along his jaw he hasn't found. I don't tell him. I like knowing the borderlands have finally gotten under his nails.
"Isolde says the squash will fail," he offers.
"Isolde always says something will fail. It's how she's never disappointed."
He smirks. Then he tips his head north, toward the rise where the masons finished the low wall last week, and I understand where we're walking before he asks.
The memorial is nothing grand. We argued against grand. It's a single course of fitted stone curved into the hillside, facing the valley, with names cut into it where names survived and blank spaces left deliberately where they didn't—because the gaps are the honest part. Human masons set it. Dark elf masons set it. No one signed it. We climb to it in the falling light and stand where the wind comes up off the lowland carrying nothing sharper than cold.
I read the names I can. Senne is there, near the center. The blank spaces beside her hold the children no roll ever counted. I don't look away from them. Looking away is the old reflex, the one that let me sleep the night of the fire, and I'm done granting myself it.
Leoric stands and his sleeve brushes mine when the wind moves. He is quiet for a long time. Not empty quiet. Listening quiet.
"I used to think a memorial was a place to put grief so it would stay there," he says at last.
I take in the names. "Does it?"
"No." His thumb moves once over Senne's carved name. "But it gives the grief somewhere honest to stand."
That is better than anything I would have known how to ask for once. A wall. A name. A place where no one has to improvethe dead into symbols before they are allowed to matter. I set my fingers against the blank spaces beside Senne's name.
"I wanted to put something there," I say. "A word. A mark. Anything that looked less empty."
Leoric looks at the spaces, then at me.
