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Pietro took a long, slow breath, though he wasn’t sure why he bothered. The entire conversation was undermining his will to live. “You have to tell her,” he said. “She might—if she understands the situation—she might be a willing martyr.”
“In my experience,” Harlo said, “people aren’t nearly as civic-minded as you’d hope. They’d much rather live for themselves than die for the good of the world.”
“Wouldyoudo it?” Pietro challenged. “Sacrifice yourself?”
“Now that I am an old man who has already seen too much? I would lay down my life tomorrow. But when I was young and hale and had my whole existence before me? I would like to think I would give myself willingly to the requirements of the god. But I suspect I would try desperately to think of another solution.”
Harlo did not turn the question back on Pietro, but he mulled it over anyway. He had been a passionate and overly dramatic youth, and the abstract idea of protecting a loved one with his life would have held a sweeping romantic appeal. “I think I would havebelievedI would do it right up until the very moment the blade came down,” he said. “I would have gloried in the idea—and quailed at the execution.”
“Which is why we proceed in secret.” Harlo sat there for a moment, seemingly lost in thought, then shook his head and glanced around as if seeing the apartment for the first time and not finding himself particularly impressed. “Is there anything you need?”
Pietro was at a loss. “Need for what?”
“Need from here. From this place. Before we go.”
“Go where?”
Harlo gazed back at him, looking as bemused as Pietro felt. “Back to the temple, of course.”
“But—I’m not going back to the temple.”
It was like they were speaking to each other in different languages, both incomprehensible. “But I’ve found you. There’s no reason to keep hiding.”
“I’m not hiding. I’m just living.”
“But you can go on living once you’re back at the temple.”
“I’m not—” Pietro flattened both of his hands on the table and leaned forward, trying to speak clearly and precisely. He wasn’t sure if he was laying out the argument for Harlo or himself. “I can’t be a priest anymore. I don’t know what I am now, but I can no longer serve Cordelan. I’m not coming back to the temple.” He made himself keep his steady gaze on Harlo. “I’m not coming back to you.”
Harlo held his eyes for one interminable, heartbreaking minute. The older man’s face, already grooved with age, seemed to wither; his thin body shivered once, as if all his bones splintered simultaneously beneath his skin. It was not as if his expression had been optimistic before, but now it seemed to lose its last faint trace of hope, as if he had witnessed every accumulated bleakness of the human condition. He looked extinguished.
“I see,” he said at last.
Pietro wanted to take it back—he wanted to promise to reconsider—he wanted to say anything, do anything, to ease that pain from Harlo’s face. But he had no words. He had no solutions. He couldn’t live with what he knew and he couldn’t support Harlo’s actions, and he honestly didn’t know how to go forward from this time and place. He just knew he couldn’t do it at Harlo’s side.
Harlo pushed himself to his feet and Pietro leapt up, afraid the old man would topple over, dizzy from the emotional blow. But Harlo stood with his usual straight spine and squared shoulders.
“Sometimes I wonder why I try so hard to avert the end of the world,” Harlo said. “Sometimes I think it’s already occurred.”
Chapter Twenty-one:
Jayla
Although Jayla would have preferred to keep Aussen safely locked up in the Alayne mansion where no one could ever see her, that seemed unfair both to Aussen and the cook who looked after the little girl whenever Jayla was gone from the house. So on her next couple of days off, she took Aussen with her and they explored the city. They visited parks and museums, sampled food from street vendors, and even strolled through the great temple so Aussen could gawk at the high pillars and gorgeous walls.
But they never took a chugger all the way to the island district. When Jayla visited that part of town, she went alone.
Cody accompanied them on almost all of their outings. He had picked up a few words of the Zessin dialect, and Aussen had been practicing her Cordish, so they managed to have halting but enthusiastic conversations as they tried exotic new foods or wound through the flower banks in the public spaces. He even raced with her down some of the graveled paths in one of the larger parks.
“You’re fast,” he told her after he’d let her win. “You can be a courier one day.”
“She’s not going to be a courier,” Jayla said.
“Why not? Whatisshe going to be?”
Of course Jayla couldn’t answer that. Her visits to the Zessin district had yielded her no new information, even though she always asked the temple guardian the same set of questions.Has anyone come looking for Aussen? Have you learned anything about her family?The guardian always gave the same replies.
Once Jayla had thought she spotted Pietro strolling down the main boulevard of the district, looking around with deep curiosity. She couldn’t be sure; she had quickly ducked into an alley so he wouldn’t see her, and when she peeked out again, his face was turned away. But the man she spotted had the same slim build and confident stride.
