so scared, and they were everywhere. I did what I did not for any good reason, only because I was terrified for my own life. And for that I am terribly sorry. I hope that you can forgive me, but if not… I can live with that.”

-Stepan Zelenko, to his son Aleks

Etyslund, 14 days after Marga’s death

Hands against the cairn-stones, rough and callused. They were wet and salt-flecked, crusted. The great stone where she’d fallen was broken into tiny pieces but even once a thing was transformed it held the properties of its component. Stepan Zelenko didn’t know if it was wrong that a cairn to the dead should incorporate the blood of the dead, but there were too many corpses and not enough decent stones to go around. The old Sower, broken and failed and then unbroken and broken again, leaned down next to that pile of jagged rocks marking the spot where Marga died.

Two weeks later, a hundred deaths later, what felt like years of fighting - the moment it happened was still fresh in his mind. The Invictan soldiers standing there behind Marga’s blindfolded form, as Fatih Karga held up two spears and smiled. Stepan recalled seeing Luca’s Devotee, that strange Solist magic, hold Fatih up in the air while the villagers beat the minelayer to death. It was the sweetest memory Stepan had of these pas two torturous weeks.

Plato Arap stood aside and looked on impassively. Stepan recalled returning to the library only to find Plato’s corpse – according to the other soldiers it was his own daughter, Kamila, who’d killed Plato, shot him three times before snapping his neck and beating Zoe Bari half to death besides. He was proud of his daughter.

Then again, the soldiers also said that Kamila had beaten Hilda unconscious before turning on the Invictans, throwing the prone Hilda over her shoulders, and running from the town. Stepan didn’t know if that part was entirely true. Why wouldn’t the soldiers lie? It was their duty to lie, when it was necessary for the mission. But he could only hope that his daughters were okay, that they were safely on their way to the city. Surely they must have made it by now...

He remembered the lump in his throat and the feeling in his heart when Fatih Karga had driven those two spears through Marga. How she’d screamed… and how he had laughed. As though it were all a game to him, their lives just pieces. Their pain the natural reward for his hard work.

Bent next to the cairn he whispered, running his fingertips along the stones and feeling their every rough-hewn edge. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there with you, at the end,” he said. “I was weak and I chose to live – not because I had a plan, not because I had purpose, only because I was scared. But now I have a purpose, now I have a plan, and for you I’m going to live as if it was that which made me choose to live from that day. I’m going to make you proud, Marga. I know you would never say it to me, but you knew as well as everyone else that I was a failed Sower. How many people could we have saved if I’d fought beside you when they came? Everyone? But it’s okay. I won’t forget why I’m here – I’m here because of you, and because of me.”

He stood up slowly and turned his face toward the library. Some of the ruins of the fighting still stood throughout the village, but the corpses had all been buried and marked by cairns where they had fallen, and a few of the houses were already rebuilt. It was shoddy construction, yes – there would be time later for clay and stone, after many months of replenishment to the village’s supplies.

He wove through the village, between the wreckage of homes and past the cairns marking the sites of murders. Stepan kept his eyes in the middle distance, where the library had returned to something similar to its old shape. Chunks of stone were missing – some tossed into the distance during the battle and never recovered, some turned to dust by the bullets and explosives of the Invictan soldiers.

He stopped at the door of the gathering hall, passing by two cairns where they stood not far from the door. Inside, the place was clean, as though the recent grisly battle had never happened there. The windows were still boarded up – a mark of the days of Invictan soldiers squatting there. Otherwise, though – the tables had been moved back to their original locations, the bodies removed and the blood cleaned from the walls of the cellar. Still the place stank. Stepan took a chair from near the bar – one of the heavier metal stools – and propped open the door. He briefly wondered if he could get Luca’s help, forcing air to flow more quickly through the building and get the horrible smell out.

Sighing and shaking his head, Stepan turned around and made for the library.

Inside, the place was a complete mess. Although he had reshaped the stone into something close to its original shape, there was no time to rearrange the interior. Everything else was higher priority – no one had time to take the books from the floor and set them back on their shelves.

Except, strangely enough, Luca Buday. He found her humming quietly to herself as she swept some of the detritus up into piles with her hands. When Stepan pushed open the great door – bent and rusted on its hinges, creaking loudly – she turned and nodded to him. “How are you holding up?” she asked, straightening.

“Better than I would expect,” Stepan replied honestly. “And you?”

“Well, better than most, as you can imagine.” Luca sighed. “But I just…” she gestured at the piles of books. “I wanted to get away from it all, while still making myself at least a bit useful. Figured I could help out here.”

“It’s appreciated,” Stepan replied as he went to help her, taking piles of books in his hands. He stretched out his fingers as wide as they would go to accommodate larger handfuls of books and placed them on those parts of the shelves that hadn’t been completely destroyed by rippling and writhing stone or by explosions or by bullets. “How is our guest of honor?” he asked in passing as he worked.

“Fed, housed, and secure,” Luca replied in a voice only slightly above a whisper. “We’ve been talking about the South.”

Stepan nodded. “Good. You know that if anyone finds out, it’ll be both our heads.”

“We both know that’s preferable to the alternative. Are you going to call the city again today?”

“Yes,” Stepan said, glancing toward the dark hallway leading to the radio room. That black corridor still terrified him every time he walked down it. When he stood in the radio room, intact at the center of a mass of living stone, he remembered Plato’s screams. He remembered everything he’d Scried, the final memories of the dead inscribed on his brain.

“Are you sure you don’t want to give it a rest? I’m sure if they make it back –“

“Don’t,” Stepan said, his heart lurching as he held up a hand toward Luca. “I am going to check each day until my children either arrive safe in the city or are found dead. Surely you must understand.”

“I understand, but you can’t just go on hurting yourself like this every day.”

“It’s been almost two weeks, Luca.” Stepan picked up a large pile of books and shoved them roughly into a torn-up shelf. He was rewarded with a plume of dust. “If they’re still out there… every day counts.”

“Well, I’m just saying that –“

“You tell me every day!” Stepan exclaimed, and pushed past Luca, past the piles of books and debris, past the piles of dusted stone, and into the dark hallway. Blood, dry, encrusted the wall to his right. To his left the door – he pulled the knob and pushed it open and stepped through. Once inside, he turned to the left – to the radio system at the heart of his library.

For days now, it had been fully repaired, and yet the only person he’d been able to reach in Kivv was Arien, a Sower whom Stepan had known quite a few years ago. The repair job on the radio was slipshod, indicator lights blinking wildly so that Stepan couldn’t tell what they were supposed to communicate. He stepped up to the wall and began to connect the radio through to Kivv. By now Stepan was so used to this sequence that he turned the dial and flipped the switches without even thinking, and when he pressed the button to initiate the connection the response was almost immediate. Repeating a call at the same time each day would tend to have that effect, he thought, although it was odd just how quickly they picked up.

Arien’s voice on the other line. Stepan’s heart sank. “Identify yourself,” the voice said.

“You already know who I am,” Stepan replied softly. “It’s Stepan Zelenko in Etyslund. I’m checking in again to ask about my children. Has there been any word of them?”

“Not that I’ve heard, Mr. Zelenko,” Arien said. “But I’ll make sure to ask around again, like yesterday. I’ve been stuck in the workshop most of the day so supposing anybody had shown up in the city, I wouldn’t really know about it yet.”

“Let me know if –” Stepan began to offer his sign-off, but something interrupted him. A noise on the other line, a creaking like the opening of a door. There was a voice – familiar, someone Stepan had known in Kivv, but he couldn’t quite put the name to the voice.

“Arien, is your call urgent?”

“No,” Stepan heard, closer to the receiver.

“Then please hand over the receiver, there’s someone who has to make a call. Who are you speaking with?”

“Etyslund.”

A pause.

“That’s convenient. Well, Aleks, why don’t you –”

Stepan didn’t hear the rest of the sentence, as his heart leapt up into his throat and he nearly lost his balance, leaning against the radio. Aleks was alive! His children… they were….

“Is that you?”

Aleks’ voice on the radio was unmistakable, even after weeks of flight, through all the fatigue and pain that was clear in the voice it was still so obviously him. Stepan, still leaning against the wall of the radio cabinet to steady himself, took a deep breath and whispered, “Yes. It’s me. And… is that really you, Aleks?”

“Yeah, dad. It’s me.”

Tears welled up in Stepan’s eyes and he felt a pressure in his hand, as though he might crush the radio receiver. “Are you alright? Are your sisters alright?”

“They’re fine, dad. We’re all okay. We made it to the city, we’re safe… I’m glad to hear your voice. I’m glad you’re okay. Zil-Antonin said Etyslund is safe now…?”

“Yeah,” Stepan said. “We… those of us who survived… we’re here. We’re rebuilding. You should come back, Aleks. You and your sisters. You should come back and visit your…”

“We will,” Aleks said. “We’ll come back soon enough. Dad, I think you should come to the city. I think this isn’t the end – it’s just the beginning. There’s a war coming to the Vale, don’t you realize that?”

“I know,” Stepan said. “But I…” He wanted to say I can’t flee. Then he thought of Aleks, two week’s walk away, hearing his father’s voice for the first time since he watched his mother die, not knowing whether they’d ever see each other again. He thought of how terrified his son must be, how terrified his daughters must be, and he knew he couldn’t put that fear in them – the fear they’d never see him again. “I’ll come to the city. I will. But not yet, alright?”

“Alright,” Aleks said.

They talked for a long time, and by the time they were finished Stepan’s tears were all dried up.

Afterwards, he left the library, finding Luca already departed. When he stepped outside he saw that the sky was growing orange. It was early evening and the air was getting colder.

Stepan crossed the field of Etyslund and came again to the place where Marga’s cairn stood. He sat by it and cried, tears of relief, until the horizon was dark and his legs shook with fatigue. He stood up and went home.