Page 147

Julen kept his eyes on the path. “I don’t know. He’ll be a day out, maybe less.” He paused. “There’s no knowing until there is.”

She let it go.

Below them, the road to Meridon ran out across the flats, pale in the early light. There were people on it. Not many, enough to see. They were moving the way people move when there is nothing behind them.

Julen looked at it for a long time. “The road held, then.”

The path levelled as they reached the outer roads, the glass giving way to stone beneath their boots. The city’s sounds reached them properly here, voices, movement, the distant clatter of something being rebuilt or cleared away. Life, reasserting itself in the particular stubborn way it always did.

At the first junction, a man stopped and stared at them. Then past them, toward the cliff face above. Toward where the Fracture had been.

“It’s quieter,” he said. Half to himself.

“Yes,” Maia said.

He looked at her properly then, taking in the state of her, the torn sleeves, the dried blood on her hands, the glass dust caught in her hair. His expression moved through several things before settling on something she couldn’t quite name.

“What happened up there?” he asked.

She looked back toward the cliff, toward the line in the world that was still there, still visible, still catching the light differently from everything around it.

“Something ended,” she said. “And something was set free.”

She walked on before he could ask anything else.

The streets grew more populated as they descended into the city proper. People stood in doorways, in small clusters at junctions, their faces carrying the particular expression of people who had slept through something enormous and were trying to understand it from the outside. The tension she had felt in Eryssan for months, the watchful quality of it, the held breath, was gone. In its place something she didn’t immediately have a word for. Not peace. Something rawer than peace. The first breath after a long time underwater.

The Umbralyn were gone.

She felt their absence the way she had learned to feel their presence. Not through sight or sound but through something more fundamental. The quality of the air. The way the shadows lay. The particular pressure she had come to associate with their nearness, which had been part of Eryssan for so long it had become unremarkable, like the sound of the sea.

Gone.

All of them. Not just the faction. Not just the unchained ones. All of them, drawn back to the Fracture as it closed, the tether finally, permanently cut.

A woman sat on her doorstep with her hands folded in her lap, looking at nothing in particular. As Maia passed, she said quietly, without looking up, “The one who used to stand at the end of our street. He came in once, when my daughter was sick. I don’t know why. He just stood in the doorway for a moment and then left. She was better the next morning.” She paused. “I never thanked him.”

Maia stopped. She looked at the woman for a moment.

“I think he knew,” she said. “They always knew more than they showed.”

The woman nodded, still looking at nothing. “I suppose they did.”

Maia walked on. Julen said nothing, which told her he had heard it and was filing it away in the particular careful way he filed things that mattered.

“I’m going to ride out and meet him,” he said eventually. “Tomorrow. If there’s a horse left in this city.”

Maia nodded.

“I don’t know what I’ll say,” he said, after a moment. “He’ll want to know what happened. And everywhere I could start is something I spent months telling you was stupid.”

“Then you’ll be a while.”

He huffed, almost a laugh, and looked to the road to Meridon. “It’s a long road, that one. I’ll think of something.”

As they approached more buildings, the square was fuller than she expected. People had gathered at its edges, not in the panicked clusters of the banquet night but in the quieter, harder way of people who have decided something and are watching it be carried through.

At the centre, Master Orell.