Just as she felt ready to do it, though, the two figures from the other side of the river rejoined her.
The dissonance of their presence—Aniver’s, so very living and mortal, and Hers nearly indescribable—startled a curse from Semira. “Bloody hell!”
Kahzakutri glanced at her. “Not here.”
Semira swallowed hard, then dipped into the lowest bow she could manage. “Your Majesty.”
“Don’t scrape as if you owe me allegiance. You’re the least ideal subject I’ve ever met.”
Beside Her, Aniver smiled wanly. The smile vanished as Kahzakutri turned to him.
“Though I permit this thing, that does not mean it will be easy.”
“You’ve already made that clear, Your Majesty.”
“Has She?” If Semira’s homage would not be accepted, she felt oddly secure in dispensing with it.
“You had better tell your friend.” Kahzakutri turned to Aniver and added, as if in explanation, “You don’t have much left, wizard. Not enough for creating a Grace.”
Maybe Semira should have gasped at that, but she did not. Perhaps it was because a Grace and its beloved king had murmured stories in her ears the past quarter-hour. At best she was puzzled. Beyond surprise, she stood listening to every immense, hollow word the Queen said.
“And what remains, Aniver? What can you use?”
Semira couldn’t make out Kahzakutri’s expression. But she saw Aniver’s expression become a rictus of denial. “Not her.”
“Well, there’s hardly any you—”
“Not. Her.”
The Queen drew Herself up. “Then you rely too much on my generosity.”
“I would think, in your generosity—” he all but pulled the word through his teeth “—you would understand. Nobody loves the liv—”
“Is that envious love the only reason you won’t use her?”
Semira’s gaping stopped. “Don’t you think ‘she’ might have a say in this?”
“Of course you do,” Aniver said. “That’s why I’m refusing to use you.”
“To bring Nurathaipolis back.” She half waited for him to disagree, to tell her she was misunderstanding. “That’s been the goal all along, hasn’t it? And that’s what you’re refusing now.”
“If it means giving you up.”
“Why, what does it matter to you?” Turning away, she found only the rush of the river. The dead had retreated, leaving her with Aniver in strange, vacant space. “You won’t be around to bear the consequences.”
“But I want you to be.” Aniver came to stand before her, so they had no choice but to face each other.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s just it.” He had tried to protect her sometimes, a wizard mindful of his companion’s vulnerabilities, but that was never his role, and she would rather he not take it on now if this was what he would leave her with.
“I’m sorry. In Arisbat—”
“It’s not about Arisbat, you fool! It never was! You’re forgiven—I forgave you even before you returned to me. Gods and Graces—” The irony of the oath struck her and she laughed, almost sobbing.
He laughed along with her, a low and ragged chuckle.
She reached out for him then. They held each other, laughing, beyond the westernmost edge of the world. Touch—mortal flesh to flesh—seemed more fluent than words now, and surer than anything else. And it was comforting, in a simple and childlike way, to press her face to his chest and hear her friend’s heartbeat.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
He rested his chin on her hair. “I’m not quite sure.”
“You aren’t?”
“We’re going to summon a Grace. It’ll take all of my... power.” The pulse at her ear stammered. “And when that’s gone—well, I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
“We’re only taught not to expend all of our souls. Not the details of what happens if we go against that lesson.”
“Maybe there’s more of your soul left than you bargained on.”
“Semira—I have to think long and hard to remember the name of my mother.”
She felt a jolt to their embrace that she realized came from his shoulders shaking. She reached out, put her hand to his back, and rubbed small circles until the trembling stopped.
“And it means nothing,” he continued. “Do you understand? There is nothing left that means anything to me anymore. Except this.” He stepped back, taking her hands. Red touched his pale cheeks and the rims of his hazel eyes. But nothing could offer a semblance of life in this ash-cold twilight.
Aniver took the hourglass pendant from around his neck and offered it to her. Semira accepted it without protest.
The sands within still fell at an unvarying pace, eternally in one direction. She braced her fingers at the point where both narrow bulbs met.
“You’ll need my help, then,” she said.
“I can’t demand it.”
“If there’s not enough left of you—” She tried to be cool. “Well, it will just take the rest of the power that it needs from me. That’s what you were suggesting, Your Majesty?” She met Kahzakutri’s stare and saw nothing, but felt better for having done it. “Even though I’m not a wizard, I can do this much? And something of me will remain?”
“Yes. To both.”
“There,” she said to Aniver. “The consequences. I’ll live with them.”
“Are you agreed, then?” Kahzakutri turned to Aniver. “You’re the one who will drive it.”
He nodded. “Only— I’m not sure how.”
“I’ve never made a Grace before, either.” At that the Queen of the Dead formed a smile that might have been called rueful. “But I’ve seen it done. I’ll guide you as much as possible.” She closed Her eyes. “Once started—it goes on its own from there. It is not easily stopped.”
“I understand,” Aniver said.
Semira lowered the chain of the hourglass pendant over her head and let it settle against her chest.
* * *
Wizards lost their souls to spells every day, in tiny scraps and pieces, like flames gradually guttering, coals burning out one by one, stars that fell and vanished with barely a glimpse in the night; drops of water sucked away in a growing desert. No one drop could increase his thirst.
Aniver had awakened one day to realize he was not the same man he’d been three months before. That he was less of a person, worn to a shadow of himself. It didn’t hurt.
He knew it was the cost of magic. If he resented how much of the cost he’d had to pay, over these mad adventures —well, he shouldn’t, it was simply his bad luck.
He was the one who decided to stretch those adventures out, preferring to leach drops than spill the entire flask at once.
It was hard, even for him, to say what made up his soul. A hundred thousand small experiences, five or six great ones. Lessons, adventures, smiles from strangers, the contents of books and stories, placid afternoons. Twenty eight years of life. Lost as rapidly as he’d gained them these past months, and faster. The less important bits first, when he could direct the expenditure.
No use doing that now. It was all going to go.
“This is a miracle.” Kazhakutri could be whispering in his ear, Her voice intimate and hushed at once. “You cannot expect there to be no price.”
The Queen of the Dead raised... not Her hand—it was not a true physical gesture—but the idea of Her raising Her hand reverberated across space. Beckoning. A command. An invitation.
For an instant, they stood among the dead again—in the midst of an unbroken mass of indistinct figures.
Indistinct only because the living could not see into them—into those forms made up of memories and dreams. Dead but whole. A flash of envy passed through Aniver, marking his soul with ache for one moment.
He’d need as much of such substance as he could get. Never mind if possessing it, and being made up of it, was unpleasant; it wouldn’t remain for long.
; Kahzakutri’s hands, or the idea of them, made a shifting gesture, and the plains cleared, ghost-shadows melting away, until it was just the three of them—and one other, not yet come.
Aniver had expected to be taken moment by moment, the same way that, not long ago, he had nearly bled to death drop by drop. Instead, the losses were much more abrupt.
The first thing to vanish was his... boundary seemed the best word. He was limitless.
It was clear, then, why Kahzakutri had sent the dead away: to be clear of their interference.
...boundless, Aniver’s soul tangled with the others around him...
Kahzakutri’s—now that was barely a soul. Ages, not of loss but of awareness of loss, had left Her to shrink upon Herself. That first knowledge of dying—the shock of fear and grief and dread that had made Her more than mortal—twisted Her shape without adding to it. She knew everything the dead knew. Most especially, She knew the end of things. It meant nothing to Her anymore; it was Her everything.
The sheer force of Her emptiness shaped something, a mold to be filled. Fashioned, it seemed, after Cassiel—Kahzakutri could not create a Grace from whole cloth—but on a greater scale. Was She even being grandiose? Sabotaging them by creating something impossible to finish?
Of course it was impossible. They were shaping impossibility here: a miracle so great it approached blasphemy. And Kahzakutri was not vandalizing this creation. If anything, She was generous. She gave it a core of Herself. The essence of loss, of grief—the urge to undo.
As its contours deepened, Aniver felt the power fueling it seep out of himself.
And Semira—for once he could see Semira. All of her. From childhood to a young woman striding the salt-wet decks of her uncle’s ship. And afterwards, these months with him. She had wanted to become an adventurer, a hero. That was why she came along with him. It made up so much of her now: courage, triumph, survival, joy.
Please don’t take that, he begged. Not unless it’s all she can offer—the first thing she can part with, and the least important.
It was not the least important. He could see that.
She’s become so much, she’s become what she wanted to be. Please don’t undo that.
IT SHALL NOT BE UNDONE. The answer came from the form slowly taking shape, the indistinct vessel Aniver was pouring into. I WILL ENSURE THAT.
The spell began to ravel through Semira, as if it were thread and she was the eye of a needle. It passed through her, not from her. But the corrosive magic tore small shards away, pulled them towards the creation. Tiny shards. The least significant.
And the growing thing smiled.
Cassiel, the Grace who had left the world with the death of the last King, would not become anything else. Semira had stood before that Grace—had they spoken together? Yes, he saw that now, whispered fond memories of crowned heads, thrones now vacant, lords now dead—Semira had let that pass into her soul. It was gone now. She would not miss it as much as other things. Perhaps it was better, safer that she lose these tokens from the gray place beyond the western edge of the world.
And the thing, the Grace of Turning Back, now had a face.
It looked, Aniver thought, rather like Semira’s.
Semira who?
Aniver who?
* * *
The Grace of Turning Back had six wings: three pairs unfolding from a slender back. The pinions glimmered azure on top, gray-green like old copper underneath. The Grace’s limbs could have been cast from bronze and stretched as long as the span of the wings, a little longer than might have been expected from the overall human form. The eyes were brown, and only they were warm.
The wings beat, a pair at a time, carrying the still-half-formed Grace and the two mortal souls shaping it into the world. Out of the west, leaving Kahzakutri and her realm behind. Over the rivers of Alteration and Unmaking, over all the ancient kingdoms. Past Simrandu’s sparkling gemlike estates that mimicked the Polean cities so well they were called Nurathaipolis-in-Exile. Over Arisbat, with its terrible library, and little else that was terrible anymore.
By the time the Grace landed in Nurathaipolis-That-Was, It had fingers and long dark hair and small, bare bronze feet. Its landing stirred up dust for the better part of a square mile.
Semira, landing with it, coughed on the enveloping dust and looked around, bewildered to the depths of her soul.
Aniver did not.
Dust rose into the air—evaporated. All around them, vines crumbled from green-choked towers; leaves furled and roots pulled away from crumbling mortar; crumbling mortar sealed smooth. Canals ran clean, detritus washing downstream. The city was revivifying, starting with the streets closest to the Grace. It stood as tall as the towers, wings broad as a plaza. A soft breeze stirred the fine down on Its six wings.
For the first time, Semira began to appreciate the scale of what they had created. And she boggled.
Aniver did not.
The wizards of the Polean Cities had tried and failed to affect this change: to wash away the stain of the River of Unmaking. It seems so simple now. With each beat of the Grace’s wings a gust drives away corruption, and with each beat...
Each wingbeat beat took more of Aniver away; gone to fuel the magic, to fuel miracles, to fuel impossibility, to fuel the Grace.
Nurthaipolis, the City lost to time, was returning. He saw it—he was not losing consciousness—but he was losing all else, the ability to do anything but witness. He was fast losing the reason why Nurathaipolis’s return was worth watching.
Semira was happy to see it, though; Aniver sensed that much, and was glad.
Semira who?
HER!
It was as if his shout had attracted the attention of the Grace of Turning Back. SEMIRA IS THE ADVENTURER, It said, indicating with bronze fingers.
Still Its wings beat. They were in the midst of a storm, a storm that rebuilt.
You have her face. Aniver made the observation rapidly, scrabbling for it as though with broken nails. An observer was someone; as long as he saw, he existed. You have a lot of her, actually—
—and a lot of me.
I HAVE ALL OF YOU, said the Grace of Turning Back. Was It making an observation, or conversation?
The impression was unsettling; hearing intelligible, ordinary sentences from a creature so massive—not only in physical size but in gravity, in significance, in effect. Aniver had no room anymore for paradoxes.
A bridge over sweet-flowing water rebuilt itself with the grinding of stone against climbing, piling stone.
The wind of those wings buffeted his face, almost uprooted him.
LOOK, It said.
He looked. A city, empty but whole. Clear water gleaming in canals, waves bobbing abandoned barges and knocking them against clean docks and the piers of marble bridges. A young woman, an adventurer, stood in the midst of it, staring wide-eyed. Alone.
(There were men and women deep asleep, lying in the largest and steadiest of the buildings, where they had been moved for safety before the rotting city was abandoned, before they were abandoned. Now they began to wake up. Semira couldn’t see this, didn’t know to be glad of it. But they woke.)
The Grace of Turning Back departed Nurathaipolis.
It had returned all that It could. All that had been lost, cursed by mistake.
What had been given freely, It must take. Like any good thing in this curse-strewn world (any miracle, any impossibility), It had to be created, not by accident; not merely occurring but shaped through sacrifice.
Still, with one last smooth downbeat of Its wings, an azure feather slipped loose. Falling, it brushed someone’s cheek. Someone who, for a moment, became Aniver again.
* * *
Sunlight, falling in a long angle from left to right. Birdsong. Human songs. Coarser voices, far away. The scent of flowers, not many but close by. The scent of herbs and savory broth, from even closer.
Eyelids, heavy and a little dry, lifted higher. Sun glowed over stone walls from a win
dow beside him. Its light gilded white cloth, linen bedclothes, not very substantial or weighty on his chest and legs. Comfortable.
The wealth of new information almost overwhelmed him. He shut his eyes but couldn’t close his ears, couldn’t stop feeling his skin.
Silence to the right of him, so sudden and complete that he knew, instinctively, it was produced through conscious decision. A person sat there.
He looked towards her. A woman with dark hair, pale eyes, and a complexion somewhat in between, neither dark nor light, marked with lines that were heavier around her eyes than her mouth. Her lips pulled in a small smile.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.” More taxing to remember the words than it should have been—somehow he remembered that, the ease which with things could be said.
“Good afternoon, properly,” the woman added.
“Oh.”
She seemed to wait for something. Her smile changed—becoming flatter, while still resembling a smile. “What, no ‘Who am I’?”
“No... .Why should I ask that?”
She snorted violently. “Are you completely incurious?”
“I don’t think there is an answer.”
She sat back, regarding him as he observed her. “It is one thing to awaken not knowing who you are. Quite another to awaken and know you are no one.”
There was a mirror on one wall; he saw himself in it. Similar to her—somewhat darker hair, paler skin, taller and thinner body in a soft white shirt. A mark stood out against his high forehead: a circle.
Seeing his face should have been inherently interesting, he supposed, but all he felt was a vague disquiet at how very uninteresting everything was.
And he realized he was being rude. He turned back to the woman. “Who are you?”
Her grave expression became softer. “Lisandra. A teacher... to someone you once were. A wizard’s tutor.” Leaning close, she reached out and traced the circle marked on his skin. It was a solemn, tender gesture—and a brief one, as she pulled away and said briskly, “How are you feeling?”
Like nothing. “All right, actually.” He pushed back the covers and felt a wash of cooler air over his body. “How should I feel?” He frowned. “What happened to me?”
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