her new council—one noble, one not—was selected, the stars fell. The coronation had started at dusk and the celebration would last till dawn, a new day for Demeine. As the last tendrils of red had seeped from the sky and faded to deep-ocean purple, falling stars had streaked through the dark, gold and burning. Annette, eyes silver in the light, stared up at the sky with the same tight-lipped smile she wore every time I saw her. Even without magic, she could read portents.
“What does it mean?” I asked, sliding through the crowd to her.
“Not a clue.” She glanced at me. “Estrel had a pamphlet on natural occurrences being misread as omens, but I left it in Bosquet. Seemed silly to bring it here after everything.”
“Most things seem silly these days.” I kicked my feet through the strips of dyed paper and pamphlets on Coline that littered the ground—all handwritten, some portraits, mostly frivolous. “What we did…”
“We did what we had to,” Annette said quickly. “Do you regret it?”
Sometimes, if I looked just right, I could see the threads of quicksilver that still infected her. It made my head ache catching the flickers in the corner of my sight. Neither of us had left that day unchanged.
“No,” I whispered. “I regret so many people died before Henry XII and his ilk were stopped.”
Annette nodded. A gaggle of children raced by, splitting us and kicking up a fog of paper. One of the crinkled pamphlets caught in the lace of Annette’s skirts, and she grabbed my arm for balance as she picked it from her dress. Her fingers closed around my arm, real and familiar. We had neglected each other during our swap.
We neglected each other no more, writing constantly to each other from my place in Delest and hers in Serre. She’d taken to accounting like I had taken to surgery, and within the first two weeks of working had found the “errors” of the noble houses. She had an eye for patterns, picking them out before the rest of us could even finish reading the ledgers. It turned out that quite a few noble families had taken to slightly adjusting their numbers in their favors. Coline had been thrilled.
There was so little accessible, tangible evidence of wrongdoing that we were clinging to everything we had to make sure the posthumous charges were believed.
“You were willing to die for people,” Annette said softly.
I stiffened. “I always would have, as a physician should be.”
“No, you wouldn’t have.” She shook her head, and the wrinkle between her brows deepened. “You wouldn’t have. You’d have said it, but you wouldn’t have.”
“Please don’t say that.” I ducked, so only she could hear me. “I don’t like hearing it.”
It was true, of course. I had wanted to be a physician always, but being the physician had been the important part of that dream. The patients had been faceless and in need, and I had been their savior. Good deeds for the sake of good feelings.
“You might not like hearing it,” she said, “but it’s true.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m working on it.”
Annette smiled, laughing. “Course you are.” She squeezed my wrist. “What part of ‘you were willing to sacrifice yourself’ did you not understand as a compliment? I mean, it was ridiculous. There was no need and—”
“All right.”
“—it wouldn’t have worked—”
“I got it.”
“—and you deserve better. Like I do.”
A piece of celebratory scrap paper drifted down and landed on her nose. I left it there. “You live to mock me, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.” She hugged me and held up the pamphlet. “Look.”
Portents and Propaganda by Estrel Charron.
“Well,” I said, “that is my cue to leave. If tea leaves are beyond me, I can’t imagine I’ll be much better at deciphering how that got here.”
“It’s been odd.” Annette tucked the pamphlet into her pocket.
For the first time all day, I laughed. “Unbelievably.”
* * *
I had returned to university not as a hack but as a surgeon-in-training. Medicine without magic was a wholly different beast, and the new studies had distracted me from my loss. Charles was wondrously busy between school, his new project with Yvonne, and learning how to run Monts Lance for when the time came. We had gotten into several marvelous fights about the ethereal nature of bodies, though, and set to testing the more intriguing of the concepts. It was invigorating.
I had turned my quarters in Serre into a small laboratory to study. I went there now, needing the quiet. I was all right