"And?"
"And that would be for me." My throat tightens, but the truth holds. "Not them."
The blank spaces remain what they are: proof of people. I used to think an unnamed dead person was a failure of memory. Now I think sometimes the honesty is leaving the gap visible.
"Then we leave it empty," Leoric says.
"No." I touch the stone beneath the carved names. "We leave it open."
He understands the difference. Later, when someone comes with a name, there will be room for it.
Below us, someone calls for more water near the garden beds. A child laughs, then shrieks when another child throws mud. The sound should feel wrong here. It doesn't. It feels like the only argument against all this stone that has ever made sense.
I look down at the valley: the garden beds, the low roofs, the cooking smoke rising straight in the cooling air.
"You know what you gave back to me?" he asks.
I glance at him. "I'm not sure I want responsibility for anything else today."
His mouth almost moves. Not quite a smile, but close enough to count.
"The part that could care without turning it into orders," he says. "The part that could stand in front of names and feel grief without needing to make it useful. The fire nearly took that from me. Then the war taught me to call the absence strength."
He looks back at Senne's name, then at the blank spaces beside it.
"You made me want to feel again. Not as a commander. Not a warning. Not the thing they painted on walls."
The words settle between us without asking to be softened. I used to think loving him would be another punishment. Back at the estate, the idea would have been obscene. Impossible. A betrayal of every dead thing I carried. But that changed slowly. Then all at once. The hand I trusted at my back. The voice that could pull me out of smoke without touching me. The life I kept building even while I pretended I had not chosen it.
"Loving you used to feel impossible. Then it started feeling inevitable. I fought that longer than I fought most soldiers." I admit.
"And now?"
"Now I'm done keeping one foot on the road."
His fingers close around mine.
"No more halfway," he says.
"No more halfway."
We leave the memorial as the dark comes on. Behind us, the names hold their place in the hillside. Below us, lamps appear one by one, small and stubborn against the blue evening. I walk toward them with dirt under my nails, Leoric's hand in mine, and nothing in me reaches for the nearest road.
36
LEORIC
One year after the fortress fell, the valley has learned how to make noise without fear hiding underneath it. That is the thing I see first each morning.
Not the new roofs. Not the trade road through the lower field. Not the watch posts where human archers and dark elf wardens argue over patrol routes as if the world has always allowed them to stand shoulder to shoulder. It's the noise.
Children shouting over breakfast. Isolde scolding someone for treating fever salve like cooking fat. Drogan laughing too loudly at something that does not deserve it. Corrine swearing at the goats. Peace, I have discovered, is undignified.
War was easier to understand. A blade had purpose. Fire had direction. Peace arrives in smaller problems and expects me to answer them with the same seriousness. Drainage channels. Roof pitch. Missing flour. A goat painted blue for festival week and accused of crimes against cabbage.
"Three heads' worth of seed credit," I decide. "The fence is repaired before sundown. The goat remains alive, though undeserving."
The farmer opens his mouth. I glare at him. He closes it.
