are the worst age, but everybody says three comes around and then you know the true meaning of pain. And sleeplessness.” She smiled at him in that pleading way. “Any chance we could reinstate the royal nannies before then?”
“No,” he said flatly. “You made that child, and now you get to lie in his shit.”
“Woe!” Varia put a hand to her forehead and feigned fainting before instantly bolting upright. “Very well. I’ll tell Fione you heartlessly declined our request for a day off. She’ll be disappointed, but I’m sure Zeran will be overjoyed to get the chance to vomit on us some more.” She paused. “He hugs now, you know.”
“Marvelous. I’ll make an appointment.”
She’d noticed his flinch at the word “heartless.” Of course she had. But even with all her mellowing after the War of Trees, she still had that edge of pride that never allowed her to take back what she said. Though she did tend to apologize more now.
“Sorry, Luc,” she started. “I didn’t mean—” She stopped herself and smiled on his behalf. “Honestly, though, if you keep sneaking out to the city, I’m going to start to think you hate the palace.”
“Never.” He chuckled softly. “It’s just…the memories.”
Varia blinked her dark eyes. His same eyes. Their mother’s eyes. “Right. I get it. That’s why I go out to the Bone Road, you know.”
“I know,” he agreed.
Every month after the end of the War of Trees, Varia would trek out to the Bone Road. At first it was by foot, a hard task with one leg and a cane. But then they found the surviving horses, and it became easier. And then he learned to spell her leg, and it became even easier after that. He wasn’t sure what she did out there, but she insisted she had to do it alone.
He’d asked Fione, and she’d only shaken her head, saying something about offerings. He never went out to the Bone Road when Varia did, but he did once go a week after her visit, and found the hundreds of graves spread out over the marsh—every single one, the new ones from the War of Trees and the old ones from the Sunless War—newly and neatly cleaned of moss with a brush and salt, and each adorned with a little bouquet of fresh wildflowers.
Penance, he supposed. Or her way of doing it. To watch over the dead—the ones she killed, and the ones who killed in the service of their family all those years ago.
The d’Malvane siblings watched the gardeners go about their business for a moment, the air laden with heavy honey scent, before Varia put a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ll come for dinner tonight. Fione’s making some sort of heartfelt stew abomination, and I’m terrible at suffering alone.”
“She’s gotten better,” he argued in her defense.
“Oh, absolutely. Just not at the rate my bowels hoped,” Varia agreed. “I’m leaving for Windonhigh in the morning—they’ve made a new monument for the fallen. So I must be there. And so you must come to dinner to see me off.”
“I will,” he assured her.
“Good.”
She held his hand, her wooden fingers in his wooden palm for a long moment, and her smile crinkled on the edges. A smile that said more than words ever could; a smile that told him it was all right to be sad. But that they—the world—had been given a second chance, her least of all, and that to not forge forward in it was a waste.
“She’d want you happy, Luc.”
It was a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to respond to, but the gift of siblings was that one knew you didn’t always have to. Some words were just meant to be said and left to the wind, and as the two of them parted—him to the city and her to the palace—that knowing was most poignant of all.
He buried the loneliness frequently in the rush of the New Vetrisian crowd. The capital was still called Vetris, for convenience and something for the country to hold on to in the midst of rapid change, but it resembled little of its old self. The waterways were perhaps the one constant feature—too entrenched to be removed but not entrenched enough to resist an update. The pipes had been relaid in white mercury alloys and the pump systems completely overhauled thanks to Yorl’s efforts. Fione helped where she could, but for the first year while she was heavy with pregnancy, it was Yorl who did the majority