Something at the edge of Shade’s mouth threatened movement.He didn’t let it.
Pages drifted past them like leaves that had forgotten how to fall, catching no wind, landing nowhere, circling with the patient aimlessness of things with all the time in every world.The cold had settled into a particular quality of stillness, not peaceful, but waiting.
“You blamed yourself.”Myanin’s voice came without preamble, stripped of its usual armor, landing flat and certain in the quiet.It wasn’t a question.She’d already arrived at the answer; she was simply telling him she had.
Shade looked away.The answer he needed to give sat somewhere behind his back teeth and declined to move quickly.The pause stretched long enough that she would have noted it–she noted everything, catalogued it, filed it somewhere behind those sharp eyes for later deployment–and he knew better than to pretend otherwise.
“I was the reason he ran,” he said at last.
“You were boys.”The reply came immediately, no deliberation, no softening at the edges.
“We were warriors.”
“No.”Her head snapped toward him, and when he turned to meet it, he found something unexpected in her face, heat that had not been there a moment ago.Anger, but wrongly directed to be aimed at him.Angerforhim, which was an entirely different thing, and considerably more difficult to process.“You were boys carrying weapons.There is a distinction, and I will not let you collapse it just because it’s more comfortable to carry guilt than to admit you were handed something too heavy at the wrong age.”
The heat in her eyes caught him off guard in a way that very little managed anymore.He held her gaze for a moment, feeling the strange, unmoored quality of being defended, genuinely defended, without agenda or performance behind it, and then looked away first because the alternative was continuing to look, and he hadn’t decided yet what to do with the feeling that produced.
“I told his mother he laughed before he charged,” he said.His voice had gone quieter.
Myanin’s brows rose.“Did he?”
“No.”
She waited.The pages drifted.He felt her patience, like a hand held open and waiting.
“What did he do?”
Shade was silent long enough that he wondered if she had begun to accept he wouldn’t answer.Then, delivered with the flat, careful tone of someone releasing something they’d held for a very long time, he said, “He vomited.”
The laugh escaped her before she had any chance to stop it, a sharp, surprised sound, entirely involuntary, the kind of laugh that happened to people rather than being performed by them.Her hand came up and pressed hard over her mouth, and her eyes went wide above it with the specific horror of someone who had just laughed at the wrong moment and was fully aware of it.“Oh, Great Luna, forgive me?—”
“You’re laughing,” Shade said.
“I amnot,” she said, muffled behind her hand, shoulders shaking in direct contradiction, “laughing at death.”
“You are.”
“I am laughing,” she managed, removing her hand once she’d constructed enough composure to continue, “because what should have been an epic and tragic warrior memory has just been fundamentally ruined by battlefield vomiting.Those are different categories of response, and I stand by the distinction.”
Against his will, something in his chest loosened.The smile arrived before he could prevent it, small, treacherous, entirely real, and vanished nearly as fast.
But not fast enough.
Myanin’s hand shot out and pointed directly at his face.“There.”
He felt the smile disappear and schooled his expression back into something reasonable.“There what?”
“That.”She gestured.“That face.”
“I don't have a face.”
“You absolutely have a face, you moron.Everyone hasaface.You happen to have many faces.Thatone is the one where you stop looking like the world ended several years ago and never quite recovered.”She lowered her hand.The teasing settled, and underneath it, like the floor under a rug, was something that hadn’t been performing.“You loved him.”
The answer came before he could measure it, slipping out clean and unguarded.“Yes.”
Simple.True.Heavier for being both at once, because the things that were both simple and true always were.
The silence that followed was different from the one before it, less occupied, more open.Myanin scuffed the toe of her boot against the parchment ground in a gesture that felt almost fidgety, which was so unlike her that Shade filed it away without comment.The pages continued their slow, purposeless circling.
