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The dawn was coming. She could feel it in the quality of the light, the way the dark was thinning at the horizon. Somewhere below them, Eryssan was still standing. Somewhere along the coast, her father was waking to a morning he did not know had been saved for him.

She looked at the place where Caelith had been.

She thought of a memory stone, hidden in a wall, holding what words could not. She thought of a man who had spent centuries building toward destruction and been undone by a girl with a satchel full of books and too many questions. She thought of his brother, who had believed before Caelith was ready to, and had been right.

She pressed her hand flat against her chest, over the place where his words lived now, the ones she would carry exactly as he had intended.

Then she turned away from the Fracture and walked back to Julen.

There was still a world behind her, and it needed attending to. And she would be waiting for him.

53

The Return to Eryssan

The path down from the Fracture felt far longer than the path up.

Maia walked it with Julen beside her, his weight shifting slightly with each step, his hand occasionally finding her arm when the glass ground cracked beneath them or the path narrowed toward the cliff’s edge. She let him lean on her. She needed something to hold onto as much as he did.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

The dawn had broken fully by the time they reached the lower paths, the sky pale gold above the sea, the kind of morning that had no business being beautiful. Eryssan appeared below them in stages. First the broken spire’s scaffolding catching the early light, then the harbour, then the streets, the dome of the Archive still standing, smaller than it had seemed when she arrived.

She had arrived in this city believing she was stepping into something larger than herself. She had been right. She had simply not understood how large.

“Julen,” she said, when the path widened enough to walk beside him properly.

He looked at her. Really looked, the way he rarely did in public, the careful social performance of him set aside entirely.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Simply and completely. “I’m so sorry, Maia.”

She nodded. She couldn’t say anything yet. He seemed to understand that.

“He did it though,” Julen said, after a moment. “He actually did it.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I wasn’t sure, at the end. Whether he would.”

“I was,” she said quietly. “I always was.”

Julen was quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s the difference between you and me, I suppose.”

They walked in silence for another stretch. Below them, the city was waking. Slowly, uncertainly, the way a city wakes when it has not yet understood what the night has changed.

“He’s really gone,” Julen said eventually.

“Yes.”

“I wonder what he’s doing right now.”

Maia paused. “I don’t know. He seemed to think he’d be able to come back.” She looked at the horizon, at the line where the sea met the sky, pale and clear and very far away. “He was rarely wrong about things that mattered.”

Julen absorbed that. “That’s something,” he said.

They walked a while longer before she tried to change her thoughts to something else.

“Do you think Meridon will be all right?”