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Tuyana saw the wisdom in it, of course. Sahba Usp’tae was nothing if not coldly, precisely wise.
The woman in that lonely brick house by the river – Lara Ravel, they called her, a name that spun around the tongue and landed neatly on its toes – was a chain around the heart of Burakh’s heir. For people like her, he might choose to betray the people, the People, who needed him so desperately now. It would be sensible to cut that chain before it could pull him from his course.
It would be wise. The young Burakh was striding off down the street now, towards whatever else tugged at his heart. Tuyana had fulfilled her other task where he was concerned, showing him how the roots groaned with thirst and would stretch up through the soil towards him, to beg him for relief. With her own blood, she had shown him how to give it.
Only Lara Ravel was left. Her heart was fragile, Sahba had said. A crack already ran almost clean through it. All it would take was a tap in the right place to shatter her.
Tuyana had spent the morning learning what she could from the roots and a distance. Listening to the whispers underfoot and watching those who came and went from the house. She had asked the tree, first, for the right place to tap its mistress’s heart.
Bowing low and solemn, it had told her stories instead. She had learned more from it than a mother would have been able to tell her about Lara. The grass chattered fondly around her feet.
The people who came looking weary left looking sated. They stretched to Lara Ravel for relief, and then they whispered about how sad it was for her to give relief so freely.
So sad, as if she were trying to fill a hole in her heart. A grave she would never find. How sweet, yet how pitiful, for her to serve them all, as if at an endless funeral feast.
So they all said. And Tuyana listened from under the tree, and had to wonder.
Could there be another way? Sahba was wise, but she had only said Lara was in danger of causing Artemy to stray. What if she could be saved from that danger without destroying her?
A woman with so much love in her heart. Who might open her veins if she had no other sip to offer a thirsty guest. There was one who would not spurn her love. Who would not pity her for it behind her back, but would lavish her with it in return. Could a seed be planted in that crack in her heart instead?
Could she be pulled into the earth’s embrace instead of a grave? If so, whatever loyalty bound Artemy Burakh to her would pull him to the earth as well. Yes – it would have to be best that way.
Tuyana stepped from under the tree. The grass caressed her steps; the trick would be just finding a way to plant that seed.
#
The house had been echoing with knocks and worried voices since the first of them had roused Lara from her bed. Each visitor brought her worse news than the last – unrest in the streets, then trouble, then death. Simon, dead. Isidor, dead. Artemy had looked like a corpse himself. She had tried to insist he stay longer to rest, to let his innocence work its way through the rumour mill, but he had insisted in turn that there was just too much to do.
He had looked so weary, a bowed silhouette in the sunlight as he’d stepped through her door. Now, for a rare moment, the house had fallen silent.
As if it had run out of breath to tell her all the terrible things happening outside. She trudged towards the kitchen to start a fresh kettle anyways – the silence wouldn’t last. Worse days had to be coming, with so many harbingers crowding through her door. She would see what she had left to feed the next guest, and then-
But she was too late. Someone was knocking at the door already, turning her on her heel towards the foyer as if tugged by a thread. Not the frantic, booming three-and-wait that heralded most guests and had started to sound like a headache – this was a soft, steady rhythm of taps, like the nagging tick of a clock.
“Coming,” she called. Most of those who knew her well knew they could let themselves in, but more than a few unfamiliar faces had appeared wan and fearful on her doorstep that day. People who knew only that she offered a safe place to eat a warm meal; she opened the door prepared to greet another of them, and the knob slipped from her numb fingers at the sight of the woman standing outside.
The herb brides never came to her for succour. They had their own shelters, their own ways. Yet here, unmistakably, was one of them, staring at her with none of the fear that had been on so many other faces.
With mud or dark paint smeared across her face and a pale, steady serenity in her eyes, like dawn across the Gorkhon. The way the mist rose from it on the mornings when Lara sat staring out her back door and wondered, just idly, how the water might feel rising around her hips.
This bride, less modest than even many of her kin, was bare to the hips. Only an artful wrap of leather straps and hanging bones clothed her above, strung about her neck and into her elaborate hair.
“Is this where people can come for rest and food?” she asked.
Lara blinked. Her gaze had caught and hung on how easily the bride wore her nakedness; she brought it firmly, bashfully back up to those calm eyes.
“Yes, but...” she began, but how to finish? A bride had never come to her door before, but did that mean her answer ought to be different than it would have for anyone else? “Yes.”
“I’ve walked far. I’m tired and hungry,” the bride said, for all she didn’t look it. “And I’m frightened of what’s happening in the town. The streets aren’t safe for one like me now.”
She looked even less afraid than she did tired. But the terrible stories had come to Lara of how people sought a shabnak to blame for Simon and Isidor’s deaths, and how they seemed to think a bride the most likely guise for one. What had happened in the Bone Stake Lot...
She wouldn’t be able to forgive herself if she turned a guest away only for something so awful to happen to them. Besides, this bride very clearly had firm, fine, human legs – not a spur of bone to be seen.
So, “Of course,” Lara said, stepping from the doorway to let her latest guest in. “I was just about to put on more water for tea. And there’s still bread and butter, though not much. We’ve been waiting so long for the train...”
It didn’t feel like a sufficient excuse for how sparse her hospitality had become. A better hostess might have anticipated this and laid away stores to make sure people would still be able to rely on her. She had balanced it out as best she could by sweeping and scrubbing and perfectly setting every room that wasn’t closed up, though the bride’s bare, muddy feet fell now among the tracks of the many guests who had come before her.
“Here.” Lara beckoned her towards the chair where another woman had sat pale and staring forward, trembling fit to spill her tea, while explaining what had happened in the Bone Stake Lot. “Rest your feet. I’ll find something for you to eat.”
The bride considered the chair as if she could still hear that trembling voice in the air around it. As if it lingered the way twyre’s dizzy scent did around her, woven into her drooping hair. Before Lara could ask her what was wrong, since it couldn’t really be that, she folded herself down neatly to sit on its edge.
The peace that also lingered about her couldn’t make her look any less out of place there. Still, better for her to be out of place in Lara’s living room that day, surely, than to be out in the streets.
Lara might have been saving a life by letting her rest there. It was a comforting thought to carry with her to the kitchen – in all that chaos and cruelty, she had found something more useful she could do than listening to bad news.
Carrying that thought, she moved more quickly to boil fresh water and slice what was left of the bread. It would feel like a mistake, a miscarriage of her duty, if she returned to find that the hungry bride had disappeared.
She had not. She sat as stiffly perched on the chair as before, like a single twyre stem in a vase. She must have sensed how strange she was in the context of that place, too. How far from home, hemmed in by the river and the dangerous streets. Still, she settled somewhat at the sight of Lara, and that, too, felt like a useful thing Lara had been given the chance to do.
She set the tray she had collected in the centre of the table, and the bread, thickly buttered, and tea and milk and the tiny china sugar dish in front of her guest from there. “I’m afraid there isn’t much sugar left,” she said. “If you like, I can...”
But the bride seemed content to pour a healthy gulp of milk into her tea. The bones woven into her hair swayed with her every movement, morbid and hypnotic.
The tea was practically stale, but the bride breathed deep and appreciative before her first sip. The steam wound around those bones like new flesh.
“Thank you,” she said only once she’d drained half the cup. The paint streaked across her eyes seemed to darken as she frowned at the bare side of the table and the chair Lara hadn’t taken. “Won’t you sit? Aren’t you hungry?”
“No,” Lara said to the latter, though she dropped herself onto that chair before it could be taken to mean the former, rudely, as well. “With the news today, I haven’t been able to eat a bite.”
Simon, Isidor, and then the town’s kind nature, all dead, it seemed, in that order. How could they survive this?
“What is your name?” she asked the bride, rather than answer herself. “You seem to know who I am, but I don’t know you.”
The bride considered the thick slices of bread, just starting to go stiff at the edges, that Lara had cut for her. Taking one, she passed the plate and the other across the table.
“Tuyana,” she answered. “You should eat. You’ll need your strength.”
Her gaze seemed to hold more than Lara’s. It held her in place, enfolding her, like the mist on those mornings when she sat watching the river. Did she, Tuyana, also feel this day was a wave that hadn’t yet reached its crest?
“I’m all right,” Lara said, leaning forward to push the plate back. As if, by refusing that selfish bit of extra strength, she could ensure she wouldn’t need it. “Really. You should-”
But before she could push it past the midpoint of the table, a warm hand fell on hers. Tuyana’s hand, streaked with dirt, dark with it under the fingernails.
So warm, for someone walking about nearly naked in September. Lara’s felt cold and fragile beneath it, no more real or living than the plate she had been pushing across the table.
When she looked up from it, she found the rest of herself enveloped again in Tuyana’s soft gaze.
“You don’t have to give all of yourself away,” the bride said. “Kindness should flow back to you as well.”
She squeezed Lara’s hand as if tucking the words, that secret, into her palm. Lara’s heartbeat burned in her cheeks.
“I don’t give charity to be rewarded,” she said.
And would have continued by saying that to make kindness a trade robbed it of its soul. But Tuyana was looking at her with such a particular, peculiar sadness, and still holding her hand.
“Of course not. It should come back naturally, not in trade.” The bride stroked her thumb across Lara’s, tenderly back and forth. “We tend the earth, and the earth tends to us in return. Nothing is bartered or held for ransom. Love moves freely between us, the way blood moves from your heart to your veins. If blood flowed from the heart and the veins didn’t return it, you would quickly die.”
It had been a very long time since anyone had touched Lara in more than greeting or passing. That alone lent the bride’s words a sort of hypnosis, the warm lilt of her thumb finding its way to Lara’s palm and rubbing small circles as if to bury the secret there.
“I...” Lara’s voice wavered, thrown off-balance. That brought her back to herself – the cold realization of how close she was to tears. It had been a numb, terrible, frenetic day, and no one had asked whether she was afraid. She had sat and watched others cry for Isidor and Simon.
Then she had watched them leave, the way this woman would. She took her hand back to herself, tucking it under the other in her lap.
“I’m not one of you,” she reminded the bride.
Though it didn’t stop Tuyana from looking at her that way. Or from pushing the plate back towards her, with the tip of one finger and a sad, paint-smeared little smile.
“Of course not,” she repeated. “But you still need to eat. And you still deserve to know your kindness isn’t forgotten.”
“I know that,” Lara said. But her voice wouldn’t hold the words steady, and her appetite had started to creep out timidly to the smell of bread.
Tuyana’s smile blossomed warm and full as Lara began to eat. They did so together then, mostly in silence, until it barely seemed strange for the bride to be sitting there half-dressed.
Until the clock tolled and Tuyana announced that a ferryman would be passing who could take her safely home. Only after she had left did Lara notice the circle of dirt smudged onto her own palm, where a secret might have been pressed.
Or a doubt. The idea, idealistic and lovely, of love travelling in a circle.
#
She had felt it in the air and the uneasy clutch of her stomach around the bread. She had heard it in the trembling voice of every guest and sobbing somewhere in the night – more was to come. They hadn’t weathered the worst yet.
Still, the tolling of the town’s bell had felt like opening her door to find a grave-faced man in uniform, his hat held over his heart. Like realizing she had been living in happy times, the best she would ever know again. Taking them for granted, and now they were over.
So much would have to be done. They would need food, bedding, soap, medicine, and there was so little to go around. She shouldn’t have been wasting even that minute alone outside, standing under the tree.
But she had needed to breathe. Just for a minute, staring at the clear, benign, beautiful sky.
Holding herself as if it were a much colder day. It might be the last clear sky any of them saw.
“Are you cold?”
She flinched deeper into the comfort of her own arms. She had heard that voice say so few words, she shouldn’t have known it so instantly.
Tuyana stood in the shade of the tree, as close to naked and far, it seemed, from fear as before. How? The terrible news, the tolling of the bell, must have reached the Kin as well by now. If it really was the Pest, they would all die the same, from brides to housewives. How was it that she still looked as calm as the sky?
“No,” Lara muttered towards the tight lock of her arms. Though it had been days and she had scrubbed her hands, her palm still seemed to burn. “No, I’m fine. Why are you here?”
“To see you,” the bride said, as if it could be so simple. “Are you afraid?”
She hadn’t admitted as much to anyone else. She had just started making lists, sending out those who were willing and not too unmade by their own fear to find what would be needed. There was no time to be afraid.
But she was taking this selfish minute to herself anyways, and Tuyana stared as if she knew the answer already.
So, “Of course,” Lara said again. “They say it’s already spreading. We only survived last time because Isidor was able to stop it before it could. Aren’t you afraid? It won’t see any difference between us when the time comes.”
“It will.” Tuyana said it so simply, like to see you, that it almost slipped past Lara’s disbelief. As simply as the sky is blue, as calmly as the single cloud drifting like a ferry across it. “Have you thought about what I said? About love?”
The word burned in Lara’s palm. She had wandered out from the Shelter without thinking, hadn’t meant to stop where she was standing, in that exact, familiar trough between the tree’s roots.
“The only thing to think about now is where I’m going to find supplies to feed everyone who might be forced from their homes soon.” It wouldn’t be enough. The supplies or the shelter – nothing she could do would save them. But the only thing to think about was how she would try anyways.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, still towards the ground, “I’m very busy.” Moving away from the tree, still holding herself as if against a winter gale. If she looked Tuyana in the eyes, it would all show.
Not just the fear, which was natural. If she looked Tuyana in the eyes, the bride who watched her so closely for some reason would surely see how little she’d been sleeping.
How harried her sleep had been by dreams. She hurried back towards the house, her head bowed, with the future and Tuyana’s stare, which somehow held no fear of it, pressing at her back.
#
The same dream, for the third night in a row.
The chill of wet grass against her knees. Grey shadows flapping in the wind.
The tree’s branches listing and cavorting against each other like a drunken funeral party, casting cracks of blacker shadow across her where she knelt. In that perfect, curved trough between the roots, digging madly at the earth with her hands.
Clawing away black fistfuls of soil. Her hair blew across her mouth, sticking to her lips and cheeks and tears. The bone-clatter chatter of the branches wouldn’t tell her what she was digging for.
She knew only that it was precious and waiting for her. She could think of only one thing, waking or dreaming, that she might dig for so frantically, but always woke before her fingers could bump against the hollow wood of a coffin.
She always woke in her own bed. The first and second times, she had been warm and dry and weary only due to too little sleep.
This time, the wet chill of her nightgown clung to her knees. She ached like bones left out in the rain, and the ridges of her nails were packed full of black earth.
#
It had to be Artemy at the door. She had been waiting for him so long, she had been so sure of it, she swung the door wide before she recognized the ticking-clock rhythm of the knock.
Soft and steady as a sleeping heartbeat. On her doorstep stood Tuyana.
Lara’s heart leapt up from its own uneasy pacing. The fourth time she’d dreamed, she had heard whispering in her ear and woken streaked with dirt to the elbows.
“What is it?” she wouldn’t have asked anyone else as harshly. But how was it this woman always seemed to appear when her doubts were whispering loudest? When she was least ready to pretend she knew what she was doing?
How was it she still looked as if the world wasn’t rotting and burning around them? “You’re waiting for a water barrel, aren’t you?” Tuyana asked. “I came to tell you it won’t be coming.”
The guilt that had tugged tight in Lara’s stomach – what had this woman done to deserve harshness from her, really? – collapsed into sick despair. Her hand fell free from the doorknob, swinging empty and useless to her side.
Nothing left it could offer anyone. “What do you mean? How do you know?”
“He planned to bring you one.” Tuyana lifted and dropped herself on her toes with the restless, flexing grace of a dancer. “He went to check the barrel you told him about, but the water was muddy with disease. He used his knife to pierce the barrel, so the dangerous water would flow out onto dry, hard-packed earth and die there.”
Solemn, responsible Artemy. She hadn’t wanted to burden him with it at all. Perhaps she shouldn’t have.
Perhaps someone else would have brought the barrel to her brimming with infected water. A prickle raced across her skin at the revelation of how close they all had come to death.
Assuming Tuyana was telling the truth. She stared at Lara as if she wouldn’t know how to do anything else.
“That-” Lara’s throat clotted with words. That was it – the end. They couldn’t clean, couldn’t cook, couldn’t live on in that house without water. She had bet so much on Artemy bringing the barrel.
She had dared to hope. Just for one little thing to go right, one bit of kindness given back to her by the uncaring world. Perhaps Tuyana had been right. Their world was sick, and that was why it was dying.
“Why are you here?” She couldn’t ask it harshly. Somehow, she could never seem to hide her fear from this watchful, bone-hung woman. “Why didn’t he come to tell me?”
Tuyana tilted her head in something like a shrug, one drooping ‘horn’ almost to her shoulder.
“Maybe he didn’t want to see such a sad look on your face,” she said. “Or maybe he was too busy chasing other lives. He’s taken so many on his shoulders. I’m sure it isn’t on purpose that he overlooked you.”
Even though she had sheltered and helped him on that first day. It did feel like a wound sometimes, like pouring all her hope and care into severed veins that could only spill it on the ground.
“So he didn’t ask you to come tell me?”
The bones swayed, slight white dancers themselves, as Tuyana shook her head.
“Then why did you?” Lara pressed. “Why is it you care so much what happens to me?”
Her heart shrank back from the words even as she spoke them. She had given Tuyana a perfect opportunity, after all, to say I don’t.
Why was her heartbeat hanging back as if braced for pain? Why would it hurt if this bride who only seemed to answer her doubts said I don’t?
“Because I think I might have been you, if I’d been born as one of them,” Tuyana said. “My heart is open – it bleeds. If I didn’t have my sisters and mother, if I were alone, I think it would bleed dry. I look at you, and I feel so lucky to be loved as I am.”
“You pity me, then?” Lara asked, almost with hope. That, too, would hurt, but it would be just a familiar pinch of pain. She wasn’t foolish – she knew how some of them looked at her.
“Maybe,” Tuyana said, in a way that somehow brought no pain. “I see you starving for something I’m given more of than I could ever hold. If I had water, I would bring it to you. But all I have is love.”
A way that somehow, always, made what she said seem like a simple matter of fact. Like she hadn’t confessed anything remarkable, anything worth the way Lara gaped.
“I-” Her heart beat in her cheeks. The beautiful woman who wore little more than that look of deep-rooted serenity still stared at her, as if waiting for her answer and seeing it already.
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Lara said, fumbling for the words and doorknob both. “I’m not- thank you for telling me about the barrel. I know it must not have been an easy or safe journey for you. I don’t know what we...we’ll find a way to manage without it. We-”
“You don’t need to. There’s no need for you to suffer alone in this house.”
“I’m not alone.” Lara glanced over her shoulder, just to be sure none of those few seeking shelter with her had wandered into the foyer. Fewer than she’d hoped, but they would find a way together. “I don’t know what it is you want from me, but- I’m not alone. They need me.”
She wasn’t without love. So why was it the bride still, always, looked at her that way?
“But do they love you?” she asked.
Lara pressed her lips tight together. They had thanked her, those few who had taken shelter under her roof. That was enough – it was more than enough.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “All that does is that they survive.”
#
Yet each day that walked through the lonely brick house took more lives with it. Time passed through the walls, and wails of pain, while the brick blistered and burst, bleeding its pale red into the mealy pus of mud and dead grass.
The earth shuddered in no less pain beneath Tuyana’s feet. She paced around the walls that its pain passed through; her belly cramped with sympathy for its suffering, but otherwise, she walked without pain, waiting to know what she should do next.
Waiting, she realized only once it had happened, for the last of the wails to die. Cruel, maybe, but wise.
When she laid her hand on the house’s door, it swung slackly inwards. The silence inside had grown tight to the walls, like a new, winged thing constricted in its shell.
Sadly destined to be stillborn. Bodies still lay on the beds and couches stacked and scattered about the rooms.
Wrapped and waiting to be taken away. Tuyana passed them all by, tracking muddy footsteps to where the silence struggled to be born through a gap.
Another open door. At the back of the house, letting onto the river. It had always fascinated her for having no purpose but that, letting those who lived within those scabbed brick walls wade directly into the water if they so chose. To escape?
Lara Ravel had not escaped. She sat where the water lapped onto stone steps, staring out at mist the colour of blistered brick.
Tuyana crouched beside her. Close enough to feel the heat on her skin and see the river reflected in her eyes, though her lips, cracked and pressed together, were a dam, and no tears flowed past them.
“Will you leave this place now?” Tuyana asked her. “There is nothing left here. It can’t give you what you yearn for.”
Lara’s breath shuddered like a cart wheel on a rutted road. Her hands, clasped in her lap, were as scabbed together as her lips.
Splitting and bleeding as she spoke. “Why must you be so cruel?”
Tuyana tilted her head. She had thought to reach out and touch the lonely woman’s shoulder, but the skin would be terribly dry and tender. She had tried not to be any crueller than necessary.
“You wouldn’t leave while they were still here,” she reminded Lara. “Now they’re gone. There is no reason for you to-”
“So it was all useless? That’s what you’re saying?” Lara’s voice cracked as well. Tears welled but didn’t fall from the glassy mirror of her eyes. “It was all just poor, pitiful, stupid Lara grasping for what she was never meant to have? You’re just like the rest of them.”
“No – no, that isn’t-”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that I knew it would end this way? I knew this would be my only reward. But even if it’s pointless, we have to tend the sick. We cook and clean and make room for each other because all we can do is try to live for the little time we have. To make it not quite as wretched as it really is. Of course it doesn’t matter now. But it did then.”
Pink tears slid down her cheeks. Her lips were no barrier to them. Perhaps Tuyana had been too much like the rest of them.
Perhaps she had pitied this woman too much, assuming she didn’t understand the great wound in the world, in the way of things, that she was trying to fill with her own blood.
Assuming she didn’t know she was doomed to fail. With just fingertips, just lightly, Tuyana touched her shoulder.
“Go,” Lara said before she could speak. “You shouldn’t be here – it isn’t safe. You’re still healthy, aren’t you? So, go. Maybe those of you who know how to live in the steppe will still have a chance.”
Tuyana drew breath to say everything that was true – that she was safe here. What the rest of them saw as a disease wouldn’t touch her. That she could take it from Lara as well. Take her from this place and leave it behind, take her out to the steppe, to sleep soft and warm and whole in a nest of twyre. If Lara had served her doomed duty to the end, surely no one would begrudge her a new, kind start.
It might have been cruelty or wisdom that stilled her lips. Or cruelty, of the kind she was learning, might have been just wisdom brewed together with patience. Almost like Sahba’s voice in her ear, whispering that Lara would still refuse. She would see this end, too, as her duty.
She would stare out across the river, waiting for it to come to her. She might have to be destroyed a little more in order to be saved. If that was cruel, Tuyana wouldn’t let it be so for a breath longer than necessary.
She let her fingertips trail from Lara’s shoulders. “I’ll return,” she promised her. “I’ll come back to be your last guest. So wait for me until then.”
Lara sat staring in silence for long enough that someone who couldn’t sense the life roiling under her skin might have thought she’d run out of strength already.
“I’ll try,” she said at last.
And so Tuyana stepped away from her, though it had started to feel like tugging a thread taut from her heart to this lonely, immovable woman. This woman who wanted to be doomed, but only because she could imagine no greater act of love.
Tuyana would show it to her. Lara might have seen the wound she was trying to treat with open eyes, but she hadn’t lifted her head to see the living body around it. There was a world of love for her to serve, freely and joyously. And through patience or wisdom or cruelty, Tuyana would bring her into it.
#
Lara had meant to keep that promise – I’ll try. It would have been good, it would have been fitting, to have one last guest.
But she had taken the last of her pills. Soon, what little strength they gave her would fade. Her sight would start to cloud. Her hands would tremble, her arms would grow too weak to lift the gun.
So it had to be now. While she was the most alive she would ever be again; a mask would hide most of the oozing cracks on her face, and it wouldn’t have to for long.
Her hands trembled already as she tucked each bullet into the revolver. There was still one thing left that could matter.
One duty left to do well. To die for love and with all things done well was the best anyone could hope for.
A hand fell on hers and the revolver.
She was too dizzy, too slow to recognize it as not one of her own hands, to flinch. She looked up, and there was Tuyana.
Standing before her, as bare and free and healthy as ever. Staring at her, forever the same way, such peace and sadness at not being able to share it.
She had tried. It was good to think she might survive, at least.
“I’m sorry,” Lara told her. “For speaking so unkindly to you. I hope you can remember me for better than that. I tried...remember that I tried to make the last days good for them.”
Was it too much to ask? More of a reward than she had earned? Tuyana’s fingers curled tighter around the revolver.
Lara shook her head. “You can’t deny me this.”
“I can,” the bride said. “You-”
“Fate must have given me this chance. The one thing I would have had to leave undone otherwise...the man in the town hall, the general – he killed my father. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Tuyana claimed. “It’s all about love. You’re trying to cast yourself into this pit, but that won’t fill it. It will only leave a new one in my heart.”
The sound in Lara’s throat clotted and choked before it could be a sob or scoff.
“You don’t know me,” she said. “You don’t love me. You can’t pretend that-”
“I do. It’s all about love,” Tuyana repeated, insisted. “You see the world and love as so hopeless, yet you’ve given all of yourself to it. How could I not love that courage? How could I not want to drown you in love, until you see how it’s soaked through all things? Until your every touch makes more of it bloom from the seeds already in the earth?”
She said it the same as everything else. As if it were simple truth, and if only it could have been. If only there could have been time and life enough left for Lara to do more than one last worthy thing.
“I’m dying.” It was still terrible to say aloud, though she’d known it for days. “Whether I take this chance or not, I won’t last the day. If you love me, then let me-”
“And if I could save you?” Tuyana’s hands clutched hers, their fingers tangled almost too tightly around the revolver to tell apart. “If I could make it so you didn’t die today, if only you trusted me?”
Her eyes, for once neither serene nor sad, beseeched Lara. Her hands were soft and agonizing against the cracked skin they clung to.
Lara’s heart might have been splitting and bleeding the same way. Trying to rend itself in two, to part ways towards the town hall and this fairy tale future in which everything was watered by and grew to bear love. If such a world existed, she would have loved to see it. But...
“I can’t miss this chance. I’m not as loving as you think – I’ve dreamed for so long of what it would be like to kill him. If the only way is for he and I to die together, I won’t regret it.”
It wouldn’t have been a lie when she’d been loading the gun. Before Tuyana had brought her that last warm touch and the idea of a loving world. Speaking of it as if it were not only possible, but already real, and looking at her with such earnest hope.
How cruel, to bring her regrets there at the end. To make her wish for something other than that last duty well done.
“Yet even so, it’s about love, isn’t it?” Tuyana insisted. “Love for a father. Love for the world, that you want to save it from a man who might cause it more pain. You are more loving than you could imagine. Don’t let this be the end of that love. Don’t destroy all it could be, if given another day. Show mercy to the part of you that’s been so generous and true. Let it live.”
How cruel. As if she were dragging her own heart to its death – as if it wasn’t, wouldn’t be, just her and Alexander Block falling righteously together.
As if she were torn, imagining that loving world. One where mercy wasn’t just something to be crushed, where kindness wasn’t just tidying gravestones and watching as they multiplied. Where all natural laws worked towards compassion and gratitude.
A world that didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist, except as a glittering afterlife or another utopic daydream. Which meant she could never reach it, never be a part of it, not as she was now. If she did finally slough off that burning, weeping, rotting flesh, maybe whatever bright slip of soul was left would find it.
Or maybe...
How cruel, how horrible to seed doubt in her there, at the end. But maybe...
What if the only anchor holding her back from mercy, from that world, really was what she held in her hands? What if the rest of her was only rotten, dying, by proximity? It couldn’t be true, but she couldn’t die now without knowing. This woman had done that to her.
Tuyana had done that to her, taking away the certain peace she could have found in death. Giving her something else to do, by force. Cruel, cruel, yet, if it could possibly exist, if there was even the slightest chance it did and she could reach it...
Her fingers slipped from the revolver. It was that easy, in the end.
That simple and terrible. To stand there staring at the one instrument of change she’d still been certain of wielding, given up to another’s hands. It had been so heavy, and without it, she was nothing.
Nearly evaporated by fever, she was nothing, yet somehow, there were still tears to spill down her cheeks. Nearly weightless, yet somehow still warm and solid enough to collapse forward and be caught by warm arms.
And weep there, for the pain of being held and of her own empty hands. Perhaps that perfect world didn’t exist. Perhaps she had given up the only worthwhile thing she’d had left for a dream. But standing there in Tuyana’s arms, with Tuyana’s hand stroking her hair, it almost felt as if she had arrived already.
#
Lara didn’t complain about the pain of Tuyana’s hand tight around hers. It was too much of a relief, a mercy, just to be clung to, with her thick, sluggish blood breaking through the skin as if of her own will, to clot their palms together.
She let Tuyana lead her. There was nothing left of her, after all. She had given up the last of it, and Tuyana had left it on the desk. They stepped out of the Shelter together, and of course Tuyana led her towards the tree.
To where her dreams had clawed desperately for consolation, for meaning. That broad, curved shallow between the roots was not as empty of them as Lara remembered – more curled and grasped from under the ground, winding tight around the tree’s thicker roots and seeming almost to groan with the effort of doing so.
Tuyana turned to her with a look of elated purpose. Before Lara could wonder what about her was possibly worthy of it, the bride’s fingers were on her blouse, darting nimbly down the buttons that had closed it to her throat.
Lara grasped to stop her. Her hands left bracelets of blood around Tuyana’s wrists; she glanced towards the street in wordless question, wordless fear of who might be watching them from there.
No one was. But someone could happen by at any moment, and anyways, what purpose could there be in this?
“It’s all right,” Tuyana soothed her, turning her hands to stroke Lara’s. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t belong to them anymore. You’re apart from them – what they see when they look at you doesn’t matter.”
It was another thing that didn’t sound, didn’t feel as if it could be true. If she chose to trust in it anyways, too, her skin still burned under what little clothing she’d been able to bear putting on. And it still had to matter what Tuyana saw when she looked at her, didn’t it? That ruin of burning, oozing skin...
Tuyana might have read that shame in her eyes. Or on the rough flush of her cheeks; she leaned in to graze her lips against one of them, fearless and so tender that it nearly didn’t hurt.
“It’s all right,” she repeated. “You trust me, don’t you?”
It was strange, wasn’t it? That yes felt like something else that could have cracked through her skin. Something too powerful, something she was too frail now, to contain. She knew so little about this woman looking her levelly in the eye.
But she knew that Tuyana had come back for her when everyone else had left. She knew she had said harsh, ugly, frightened things, and Tuyana hadn’t abandoned her for them.
She knew that Tuyana saw her already. Clearly, steadily, truly, and was just waiting for her to accept it with grace.
She let her hands fall from Tuyana’s wrists. Still the bride’s pale eyes held her as tightly, for a few seconds more.
To be sure of her, maybe. Lara stood unresisting, waiting, until a smile finally stretched Tuyana’s painted lips and those hands returned to their work.
Undressing her as gently as such a thing could be done. Every touch was cruelty now, but Lara bore it, and mourned the town where it would have been impossible to do something this scandalous outdoors without being seen. Was there anyone left to even see them?
She caught a hiss between her teeth as Tuyana lifted her chemise. She hadn’t been able to bear wearing even the most loosely-laced corset – her skin was fire on sand, only a little too cool, it felt like, to turn to glass. Raw and cracked in patches, where the blood clotted black instead of flowing. Next to Tuyana’s whole, firm, smooth body, she looked like just the starved, diseased thing she was.
But Tuyana smiled at her still. Still, somehow, guiding her by fingertips back towards the tree.
Bidding her, “Lie down,” and Lara did. As carefully as she could, but the press of bare earth against her back still felt like being laid on a skillet. Had there been claw marks in the mud? She hadn’t looked.
She didn’t put herself through the pain of turning to look. She clung to the roots instead, holding herself against the urge to squirm in shame or anguish as Tuyana disrobed her below.
Leaving nothing between her and the earth. It kissed her thighs almost coolly, almost tenderly, but still, she kept her eyes squeezed shut. The haze of yellow sunlight where September’s clear blue should have been hurt her head not quite as much as it did her heart.
Warm, smooth, whole fingers pried her left hand tenderly from the roots. Pain pinched deep into her palm.
She opened her eyes. Blood was pushing up black and sparse in her left palm, from a cut Tuyana had opened with a tiny crescent sliver of a knife.
Lara squirmed her way up in alarm, almost to sit before her shoulder met Tuyana’s other hand. Not a cruel grasp, but pressure enough, any pressure was enough, to hold her down.
“It’s all right,” the bride repeated. “Look me in the eyes. Do you think I would ever hurt you?”
No shouldn’t have welled up as easily as yes had before. Her palm was filled with evidence to the contrary. But those eyes made the sunlight sweet, shining with nothing but kindness.
And there was nothing left for Lara to do but trust. She had given up the only other thing. She let herself sink back to the earth, turning her head to watch as Tuyana made the same thin sort of cut on one of the roots.
The sap that flowed from it looked far more like blood than Lara’s own. The richest, darkest red; Tuyana took hold of her hand again, guiding its fingers around the root, curling them tight so the two cuts aligned.
Then reached for Lara’s right hand, and this one, Lara gave to her freely. She watched in dreamy fascination as Tuyana broke that taboo across the lines of her palm, as the black blood barely flowed, then as the root welled red.
She held tight where her hand was placed. Warmth pulsed against it; she watched the same passive way, weary and weightless beyond caring whether this was life or death, as Tuyana opened and matched identical cuts on her left and right sides just below the ribs, on the outside of her thighs, and, lastly, on the soles of her feet, bracing them both against the same curve of root.
All the pain fled those cuts as the roots pressed against them. Only the warmth remained, nudging at, into, her skin like a nursing tongue. Should she have been frightened?
Perhaps. But it was the first touch in days that hadn’t made her want to weep, and Tuyana had put the knife away somewhere, bracing her hands light as butterfly wings on Lara’s bare skin. Leaning in to whisper almost against it, a flutter of breath above Lara’s stomach, words she couldn’t hear but knew for their tenderness.
Should she have been ashamed? This was something private and scandalous and strange that she was allowing to happen in full view of the street. But the softest mattress would have been agony, and the roots felt like a cradle. Though she lay still, a strange motion seemed to sway through them and her, swift and liquidly hypnotic as lying on the bank of a river.
Calm and dizzy with it, she let go of the root for a better look at her left hand. At the palm, which throbbed with nursing heat and...
...and poured out far more black blood than it had before, coating her arm to the elbow in a second. Tuyana’s hand was there that quickly, pressing hers back to the root and holding it there in a fist.
“Don’t,” Tuyana admonished her, soft as breath on her skin. “Hold tight, my love. Just hold on tight.”
The words, those two particular words, were as distantly fascinating to Lara as the sight of her own blood. She could feel it now, now that she knew it was happening. The flow of blood from her hands and sides and feet and thighs, swift as the river, enough to buzz and eddy under her skin. It should have killed her in seconds to lose blood so quickly.
But she could feel, too, the warmth passing it the other way. Pushing into her veins before they could be vacant, filling her before she could grow cold. She could feel her heart choking on swallows of the diseased slurry her blood had become, and the moment a sip of fresh, molten red first reached it.
A startled twitch in her heart, as if it had been touched suddenly by a tender hand, and in her belly as Tuyana grazed kisses down its raw skin. She braced her feet more firmly on the root that bled into them, steadying herself against the urge to squirm and the sense that her world was not quite as still as it had been a second ago.
Turning more swiftly or rocking suddenly under her. A sense of motion as certain and impossible as knowing her heart had seized that new blood like a thread, like a spindle, pulling it eagerly in and through. Pushing the diseased blood out on a surge of it, beating the way a water wheel would spin in a flood.
A warm touch graced slyly between her legs. She lifted herself towards it before she could think, as far as she could without cutting the threads between her and the roots.
Her and the earth. Oh, god, she could feel it. The roots running as veins through black and ruddy soil, coursing with what was now coursing in her. The earth’s red threads binding themselves through her veins, binding her, not as a captive, but like a tiny swatch of fabric in the folds of a great quilt.
She was so small, tucked into a tiny seam of its roots. She could see herself there, as if she were watching from the branches of the tree above. Lying with her throat bared to them, her eyes closed, yet she could see the breath blowing straggling strands of hair from her lips even as she felt it rushing from her chest.
She could see how she had pressed her thighs to the roots to make more room for Tuyana between them. A head of black hair that covered her, should have offered her some modesty from her high vantage point, but she could still feel the hot, clever turn of a tongue against her, the lips suckling at her as if she were sweet and not sick unto death.
She could taste herself on that tongue. She could feel the prickle of sweat on her back, sweet as sap, and the last of her own old, spent blood dispersing into the roots like gravel in a stream.
And for one second, feeling it, she was utterly afraid. The roots were vast, and they were one. Far below where any human eye or touch could trace their tributaries – they sang to the grass and the sleeping clay, the tree and deeper places that beat like her own heart. She was lying in a seam of something enormous, far larger than the town that had been her whole life, and she had just fed herself to it.
The last drops of her. But it had fed her in turn. It had cradled her and gifted her with its own blood. It was beating in her chest just as it did in the vast places underground, bucking her hips with vigour. Resonating between her and Tuyana like a clapper striking both sides of a bell, echoing the moan on her own lips and the smile on the bride’s, and that was it, wasn’t it? That was just it. The roots flowed through her until there was no gift, no giving or taking, only the healthy circulation of a single living thing. Tuyana moaned into her, clutched at her hips until they flushed with that new blood, because there was nowhere love could fall in silence.
Nowhere it wouldn’t echo. They were beats of the same heart. Blood of the same veins. Their nerves glimmered with dew deep in the earth and sang in the same key no matter what skin they nested in. There was no kindness they could do that wouldn’t flow back to them.
As naturally as rain and rivers fed one another. As she cried out in rapture, the earth echoed her in welcome.
She might have been lost in its echoes for a while. In the roots, wandering. They stretched so much farther than she would ever have imagined, and held more secrets. The twyre sang with them. The tree had watched her all her life.
When she blinked- it all might have been in the space of a blink- she was staring up at its branches. Its roots cradled her and Tuyana, who had nestled in at her side, pillowed unabashedly on her breast.
Lara’s breathing didn’t labour under her. The press of her cheek caused no pain. Everywhere Lara could see, everywhere she could feel with probing fingers, her flesh was whole and soft, smooth and healthy and nearly hot to the touch.
Even the cuts on her hands had healed without a trace. Tuyana turned her head to smile up at Lara with drowsy, catlike satisfaction.
How had she ever seemed strange? Ever inscrutable, ever other? Their skin shared the same warmth. They fit so well together in the cupped palm of the earth, on a softness Lara only noticed as it rustled under Tuyana’s movement.
Where the mud had been bare and wet, they lay together now on a bed of twyre. Tuyana reached up to tug at a stem of it caught in Lara’s hair-
But no. The tug of that stem was deeper, twined into her scalp. Tuyana pulled it only firmly enough to prove it so, then let it fall back to its natural rest, whispering against Lara’s ear.
She should have been frightened, yes. She knew it from a distance – that she would have been, not so long ago.
But she had been frightened of so many things then. She had hidden herself away within the Shelter’s walls, even as they had suffocated her. As she had ached, deeply in secret, for just this.
For connection. The roots twined into her scalp were no different from her fingers winding around Tuyana’s.
“Do you understand now?” Tuyana asked her. “I’m a mirror of your love. Just as you’re a mirror of mine. You’ll never be without it now. You’ll never be alone again.”
The Lara of just an hour ago would have longed and ached, hearing that. But she would have scoffed, too – to try to shelter herself from that ache, she would have said it was impossible.
She could no more have scoffed now, no more have disbelieved it, than she could have denied that she had ten fingers wound around Tuyana’s and many more below. She wrapped them tighter, pulling herself closer against the woman who had saved her.
She didn’t say yes. But only because she knew that Tuyana knew it already.
#
She wandered alone and naked through the rooms of the Shelter, for the last time. She had thought she might still have something there to say goodbye to.
But if an oak could have revisited the cracked shell of its acorn, it might have felt the way she did walking there. A still, sweet, melancholic love, for something that had meant so much to her but would have killed her if she’d stayed.
She trailed her hand along the walls. Vines would tumble from them in the days to come, she knew. Shoots would nuzzle their way through the floorboards where her bare feet fell. A shelter of a different sort, for something equally living.
A shadow shifted beneath the stairs. She paused, her fingers trailing in the air, though she did not turn towards it.
She knew its uneasy, unsettled shape in the corner of her eye. She knew the sigh of its voice, which had visited her sometimes when the dreams had woken her before dawn.
“Lara, oh, Lara,” it said with a sadness that had never blown through it before, “What have you done? I needed your blood the way it was, you know. Now the miracle won’t be able to happen.”
She stared, instead, at the floor just inside the front door. Where she had trod first, and where a tiny sprig of twyre was already standing in the gloom. A slow smile spread across her face.
“It already has,” she said.
#
She did not dream of digging desperately for something precious that night. And the next morning, a grey, chill, wet morning, Tuyana led her from the streets out to the grass bowing and springing with brief, fitful rains.
Out towards the station, and the great cannon that stood sovereign over it. It had filled her stomach with such a leaden weight of dread before, staring at that iron colossus and seeing it for what it was, for all the army was – the last decisive argument against all she had tried to build. Against all shelter and kindness and comfort in the world. No good she could do, she had known, would survive one shout of its voice.
It should have been guarded. Perhaps it had been – strange, small hillocks lay in the grass around it, rustling with new and hungry twyre.
She stared up at it, the stark black line of it against the grey sky. Pointed like an accusatory finger at the town, her town, demanding its destruction. She had been frightened of so many things, once.
“You know what you need to do?” Tuyana asked her.
She lowered her head in a slow, silent nod, never taking her eyes from the cannon. This great foe, this rebuke of everything dear to her. Yes – she knew exactly what needed to be done about it.
Tuyana squeezed her hand, warm as they both were despite the chill mist now roving the rails, and stepped away.
“You won’t be alone,” she reminded Lara as she did. As the mist embraced and clothed her and began to take her from sight. “You’re never alone.”
And though she didn’t have to, because it was still a new and sweet thing to be so sure of, Lara said, “I know.”
And, with a nod of her own, Tuyana vanished into the mist.
Knowing she could have felt cold and forsaken, naked nearly in the steppe, didn’t let Lara reach those feelings wherever the roots had dispersed them. It was like thinking of what she might have grasped with a third hand – those feelings simply weren’t a part of her. She could imagine how they might move, what they might cling to, but that was all.
What she felt in their place was the sort of certainty that had only ever come with hopelessness before. Never this warm glow in her chest, of knowing precisely what needed to be done and that it would be for the best.
All she had to do for now was wait. Standing by that icon of destruction, staring out into the mist, for the figure that would step through it next.
He came limping. With a stoop in his great stature, of weariness and pain. His steps were heavy on the earth, one hand clutched to his side, another around the cold weight of a revolver, twin to the one she had traded for new life.
His face was nearly as grey as the sky, but still set with resolve. Until he saw her.
Until he looked up from almost tripping over one of those low-lying hillocks that might not have been there before, and then the grim duty to place one foot in front of the other fell from his face. It was why she had to be the one, of course.
The one he found standing there at the end of a nightmare. There must have been others with him, who hadn’t been able to limp so far. The mist would have risen to confound him, the twyre to tangle his boots. He would have watched so many of his men fall to feed it with their blood.
And now, where he might have hoped to find reinforcements, he found her. The daughter of the man whose death still haunted him, standing naked and unafraid beside his great weapon.
Alexander Block walked towards her in the daze of realizing that, awake or not, he was within a dream. He stopped only close enough that he could easily have shot her, but he would not.
“It’s you,” he said instead, with the hopeless certainty she knew so well. “He carried a photograph of you. When I saw it, I knew that someday...”
...he would be called to account for what he had done. She had truly hated him.
“Are you here for revenge, then?” he asked.
Or had she hated the cannon? He looked at it almost the same way she did. As if he hated the argument it made against all life, against all but the most devastating and final solution for life’s ills.
She shook her head. That stem of tasselled red twyre bobbed gently against her ear.
“I’m not here for death,” she said. “I’m here for life. What would you do if there was a way to end this without another shot fired? Without destroying anything?”
He looked to the cannon again, and she knew he had dragged it there, up the rails, like a chain and iron weight around his neck. She knew, by the blue fire in his eyes and the thinning of his lips, that he hated what it made of him.
“There is nothing I want more than that,” he said.
Then they had an understanding, if only one. She opened a hand to him, beckoning him towards her and the base of the cannon.
And he came, as he wouldn’t have for any of the others. It had to be her.
Because he had always seen her as the end he was walking towards. The face of his reckoning. It had always needed to be the two of them there. She laid her open hand on the cannon, watching him patiently until he did the same.
Touching it the way he might have a terrible animal that was haltered only for the moment. He seemed to have forgotten the wound in his side, the blood dyeing his coat to deeper red.
“I won’t make excuses to you,” he said. “You deserve better than that. Your father was-”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, with another shake of her head. “I’ve found what I was looking for. All that time...I was so terribly lonely. I thought you had taken away the only person who would ever love me implicitly. Wholeheartedly. But I was suffocating in rich, bountiful air. All I had to do was open myself to it. Do you feel it?”
He frowned, as if he might be trying. So tired – he must have been trying for so long. He took in a deep breath, as if he might find love that easily in the air, and the knit of his brows pulled tighter.
She didn’t have to look down to see why, but she did. Now that he had stopped, the twyre had bound itself tight around his boots. Smelling blood, murmuring with purpose, it was starting, now, to climb his legs.
Winding over and beneath the thick weave of his trousers. Binding itself to the warmth of his skin and seeking the blood underneath.
He didn’t try to kick free of it. He looked to her, and she laid her hand on his shoulder.
As if to bring him and the cannon together in peace. Yes.
Yes. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t need to destroy anything here. We’re still alive. There’s still so much life here – you can save us.”
He must have been waiting so long to hear those words. His face sank into resolve again. The twyre had twisted its way up past his waist, down his sleeves. It branched out from his fingers and across the metal flank of the cannon.
He turned from her to it. The tendrils of twyre, new, hungry roots spread faster, higher, like a web of cracks across the one thing there that did deserve to be destroyed.
They drank his blood for strength and gave nothing in return. They would not save him in turn. But the fire had caught again in his eyes – he might have refused it if they’d tried. He poured all his strength into them, craning his gaze towards the sky and the cannon’s barrel as if to urge them on faster, higher.
Ordering them as he would have his last troops. To seize the mechanisms of the cannon, seize within them, to curl around its barrel and clench. To climb inside and choke its throat so deeply that no one would be able to cut them free.
Blood slipped, with a first sprig of twyre, from his lips. But his eyes blazed with triumph, a last victory, as the cannon’s barrel, wound thick as a spool of thread, buckled and groaned within the roots’ grasp.
No more killing. No more ash. They had sent him here to die, but he could turn like this, at the end, and spit in their eye. He could deny them the destruction they had demanded from him, leaving instead a rich, untameable garden to bloom beyond their reach.
The cannon’s crushed barrel swayed and hummed with new flowers, every one the same rich shade of red. The breath that bled from his lips was soft with wonder and relief, and then he was still.
Bound to the iron beast he had unmade. The twyre had grown to crown and hood him, but his eyes, unmoving, still stared up at it. Had he understood, in the end, how little of a nightmare or an end this was?
Would she hear him when summer came again, in the hum of twyre-flies? The roots had drunk him whole, after all. Would she see him in a wheeling hawk or the wise eyes of a bull?
If so, she wouldn’t begrudge him that new, ongoing life. Nothing ever ended, after all. What rose from the earth rained back to it. What was given in kindness was returned in love.
She touched her hand to his cheek, already more chill than it had been. “Thank you,” she whispered, and meant it to the bottom of every heart she had.
#
When Artemy emerged from the thinning mist, it was at even more of a limp. Not wounded, but hunched and winded, worn down to a pale shade of even the man who had slept on her couch ten days before.
Stooped under the weight of so many lives. Did he stare in more shock at her or the cannon?
“Lara?” He stumbled three more steps towards them both. “What are you doing here? What...?”
Was it such a shock for him to see her naked? Yes, it would be, wouldn’t it? It was strange to think of so many things that had seemed important, forbidden, secret. Tuyana had promised her a dress to dance in, but even that wouldn’t be to cover her.
Only to reveal more, drawing the lines of how she moved across her body. There was nothing left to hide.
“It’s over,” she said, so he could understand that. “You don’t need to worry anymore.”
He stared up at the cannon not at all as Block had. His face so thin and stricken, he looked almost like the boy she had known, who had been outgrowing himself, bones and dreams, trying so desperately to keep pace.
He had been trying. For all of them, trying so hard to carry all those lives on his shoulders. Trying, too, to hide how he’d been buckling under the weight.
“What have you done?” he marvelled more than asked. “This was the only way to stop the outbreak. Without it...”
Was that still how he saw it? No, not entirely. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in the strain of his throat, of saying the words. The outbreak, naming it that way.
He was so close. He would find his way – he would have to now, and he wouldn’t do so alone.
Never alone. “You don’t have to fight anymore,” she said. “There’s nothing left to be frightened of.”
But he had been fighting for so long. He couldn’t unclench his fists that easily. “It was meant to be my choice. You took it from me.”
She tilted her head, the buzz of twyre closer to her ear. “Did you really think it was your choice alone?” she asked. “It’s all of our lives. All of us, together.”
And he would have carried them all. He would have been crushed under the weight before he ever admitted that his strength was failing. His eyes, the strain in his throat, the weight on his heart, so close, told her what a colossal guilt he had been ready to take on his shoulders.
“Oh, Cub.” She stepped away from the cannon, towards him. He stood with his arms hanging at his sides, nothing left to do with his hands.
“It’s all right now,” she told him. “It’s going to be all right. All those lives, our lives...they’ll be so much easier to carry in balance. You can feel it, too, can’t you? All you have to do is open yourself to it.”
He would. He would have to. But for now, he still looked like that lost boy and that man almost broken. How had it seemed so complicated before?
How had it seemed so impossible to do what she did now and simply put her arms around him? He was hurting and she had comfort to give. Love to spare. Everything that had made it seem harder than that was worry, pride, barbed wire around a beating heart.
She pressed hers as close as she could to his. He didn’t embrace her in turn.
That, too, was all right. He would, in time. He was tired, and needed time to mourn his burdens. She stepped away from him, and he wouldn’t look at her.
He would, in time. They had so much time now, to mourn and to heal. Once he had finished staring at the cannon, he would find nothing to do but begin.
As for her, she was already well on her way. On swift, bare feet, through the singing twyre, to find and once again embrace her bride.
#
The bulls stood taller than thunderclouds against the burnished orange sky. Lara watched them stamp and low beyond Tuyana’s stained fingers, which daubed paint precisely, proudly on her face and chest.
Down to the deep neckline of her new dress. It held her tightly, but thinly, clinging like tissue to her breasts and hips.
It would tear quickly, surely, once she began to dance. She toyed with the twyre’s sweet song in her hair, just as she did with the tiny seed of fear still in her heart.
That she wouldn’t know the steps after all. That it wouldn’t come as naturally as Tuyana had told her it would. She had spent so long hiding herself away from connection. Now that she had admitted to craving it, now that she reached for it with her whole heart, what if it pulled away from her?
It wouldn’t, of course. When she watched those proud aurochs grazing dusk’s purple clouds, her mind felt almost as thin and fragile as her dress. She couldn’t have looked at them at all, couldn’t have stood there, if she hadn’t belonged.
Tuyana leaned back to study her work. Then, smiling, satisfied, she leaned in to press her lips to Lara’s.
The earth might have shivered all the way to the bulls’ hooves with that kiss. She wouldn’t have been able to feel it if she hadn’t been a true part of it.
They parted slowly, only by the small degree of being able to look into each other’s eyes. Tuyana’s were bright with dusk and excitement; the bones in her hair shone like shed drops of the setting sun.
Had Lara ever seen a woman so beautiful? It didn’t seem possible at that moment. She saw Tuyana as she would the flowers tucking themselves in to sleep under shadow, as the earth saw them both. It glowed with the sunset and pride.
“Will it always be like this?” Lara had to ask her. From that tiny seed in her heart – nothing good had ever lasted for her before. A happiness this tremendous felt as if it would have to collapse under its own weight even faster. “All of this, and...us?”
Tuyana twined her fingers tight with Lara’s in answer. That way, wound together like the roots beneath their feet, it felt as if they might forget how to ever separate. So many small, intertwined fingers held the weight of the earth.
“When we’re buried someday and grow into twyre,” Tuyana promised her, “I’ll twine my roots around yours. And when we’re born again as brides, I’ll hold your hand for our next first dance.” Her thumb, still wet with paint, traced a familiar circle into Lara’s palm. “You understand now, don’t you? It all comes back around. Life, love...there’s nowhere love can be shed where it won’t feed something nourishing in return. And loving you isn’t an onerous promise to keep – it’s just nature.”
Lara looked down at their fingers intertwined. That circle burned warm in her palm, like a kiss, or a secret she didn’t need to keep anymore.
One she would share from the bottom of her heart to the ends of the earth. “Just nature,” she echoed, burying the words where that last tiny seed of doubt had been.
Then she let herself be led by the eager tug of Tuyana’s hand, to where the long shadows of the other brides were already dancing.