Ankle-deep in the river, arms flung wide as he faced the mob, Keiro begged yet again, “Please, don’t do this.” Another rotten fruit flew through the air, hitting his knee this time, bursting with a sick squelch and dripping red into the water. “They’ve done nothing, they’re innocent.” There was uproar at that, shouted denial. A rock—small but still a rock, hard and unyielding as Keiro prayed he could be—hit his shoulder and spun him half around in a stumbling step. “Just give them to me, please!” he cried as the hands reached for him. They dragged him stumbling and sobbing from the river, the same three men who’d spent the days since his arrival watching and glaring and hefting their cudgels. They pulled him away to let the others surge forward, the mob and their sacrifice.
Two of the big men held Keiro’s arms, keeping him from collapsing or running, and the third grabbed a handful of his hair, yanking his head up so he would be sure to see it all. Aya stood there, not far away, in her blue gown, the same color as the sky, streaked with terrible red. She spat toward him, said clearly, coldly, over the chanting and the roaring and the desperate wailing, “This is your fault. You done this.” Venna, who had sat with him in the night and heard his words and said she would follow him, wouldn’t look at him now. She stood with the rest of the crowd, her face a mask.
“Please, no!” Keiro begged, his heart crumbling as the midwives stepped forward, into the river, carrying their burdens like so much trash. “I’ll take them, you’ll never see them again. Please!”
The oldest of the midwives, the heartless one, held the boy upside down by one leg, the babe’s face as red as the swollen fruit that had splattered against Keiro’s knee, his fragile body shaking with the force of his wails and his fear. The youngest midwife held the girl as far away from herself as she could, her face rigidly composed as the tiny fists clutched at air, at anything, at nothing.
The midwives knelt, and the mob roared, and Keiro whispered, “Fratarro forgive me.”
And the babes’ wailing stopped, cut forever from the world, as the midwives plunged them beneath the water.
A jagged cry of grief tore loose from Keiro’s throat, swallowed by the cheers of the mob. Aya watched with stony eyes as they drowned her newborn twins. Keiro, a stranger in this place, was the only one who cried for the innocent ones, the only one who could cry.
After the midwives had risen and walked away, leaving their burdens floating pitifully in the shallow water, the three big men laid into him with their fists and their clubs. Keiro curled into a ball on the unforgiving ground, and through the merciless rain he prayed to his gods, not for salvation or for succor or for love, but for forgiveness, and for them to do what they could for their poor, lost avatars.
It was later, much later, after the sun had gone down and the stars had given their sultry light to the world, after the two bright points of Sororra’s Eyes had cast their red gaze out over the Parents’ earth and driven all god-fearing folk inside, that Keiro pushed himself slowly to his hands and knees. He crawled achingly to the water’s edge, where the two bone-white mounds still floated, caught up by the reeds and weeds. He had tears for them yet, enough tears to last him to the end of his days, all the tears they would never shed. With an aching tenderness he pulled them from the river, from the green ropes that had caught them, and held them close, cradled them to his chest as he whispered the words of love they had never had the chance to hear in their unbearably short lives.
“None of it’s true, is it?”
The words were soft, the voice familiar. They had sat whispering together under the stars, and her quiet voice had swelled with hope. That note of hope was gone, now. Gone as quick as a breath cut off.
“It is, Venna,” Keiro said over his shoulder. He didn’t want to let himself look away from the poor pale babes, whose deaths he would carry with him always, but he made himself look up at her. She stood in the shadow of a tree, barely visible, where none of the townsfolk would see her easily should they come looking. “It’s all more true now than ever.”
“How?”
She was so young, so new to the world that she didn’t yet see the way of things. She had probably never been more than ten miles outside her small village in her whole life. Knowing so little, but so eager to learn. Her eyes had gone wide with all the things she’d never known, and endless questions had poured out of her as she and Keiro had spoken beneath the stars. She’d heard all the answers he’d given to her questions, heard them and taken them into her heart, and begun to believe. Instead of giving her another answer, now, he asked her a question: “What kind of loving god would call for the death of two innocent babes?”
She didn’t answer, not right away. “The priests would say they’re not innocent. That they’ve the taint of the Twins. Born for evil.”
“The priests would say that,” Keiro agreed tiredly. “What would you say, Venna? Did these children deserve the death they were given?”
“No one deserves death . . .”
“Some people do. People who commit such wrongs in the world that they cannot be allowed to walk its surface.”
“Like people who kill babies?”
A soft sigh escaped Keiro. Truly, he was too tired for this, too tired to guide this poor girl when he still had the babes to tend to. He was a Preacher of the Long Night, sworn in ice and blood, but he was so very tired.
“I don’t know how you can do it,” Venna said finally, and Keiro could hear the tears behind the words. He hadn’t been the only one crying that night, though the thought hurt more than it comforted. He wanted to reach out to her, to offer some comfort, but his arms were full of the babes.
“It’s not easy. But I know the world can be made better. That people can be better than this.” She wouldn’t look at him, her hands twining in her skirt. “I can bear this because I know, one day, it will not be this way.”
“Once the Twins are freed.”
“Yes, Venna. They will set the world to rights, and no more children will die needlessly.”
She slipped into her silence again, until finally she looked up to meet his eyes. They had gone hard, older than her fifteen years. “They say Aya would’ve had just one babe if it wasn’t for you,” she said, her voice raw. “They say you brought poison here. That it’s your fault this happened.”
“That’s not true, Venna.” He couldn’t bear the accusation in her eyes, and so he looked back down to his arms. “These children were meant for this world, regardless of me or you or Aya or any gods. They were given life, same as the rest of us. And that gift was stolen from them.”
It was quiet for a time, waves lapping gently at the shore, wind flicking leaves lightly against each other. A breeze ruffled the baby girl’s hair, plastered to her brow in sticky curls. Keiro shifted the babes awkwardly in his arms so that he could brush the girl’s hair back from her pale, sad face, so the starlight could see her as she was. It was part honor, part recrimination. This, all of this, was a thing that should not have been.
“Abomination,” Venna said, just loud enough for Keiro to hear, and her steps moved away from him forever.
Three lost this day. The number grew so quickly, far faster than the number of those he had saved.
Sororra’s Eyes watched him as he got slowly, painfully to his feet, cradling the cold, limp bodies in one arm. He found his walking stick at the edge of the river, where he’d dropped it chasing the mob. He carried the twins upriver, away from the town and into the shelter of the trees. Turning from the water, away from that which had taken them too early to the gods, Keiro walked deeper into the forest, not knowing where the heartache ended and the physical pain began. He walked until he stumbled and fell, walking stick slipping from his fingers, catching himself against the ground with one arm and keeping the other tightly about the babes. Above, Sororra’s Eyes watched still, dim and distant through the forest canopy. It was a good spot, as good a spot as he could give them. Gently, so gently, he laid them down on the ground, and he began to dig.
With his hands bruised and his body weak, it was slow going, but it was the least he could do for them. The last he could do for them. The ground didn’t give way easily, and his nails shattered against the dirt, his hands scraped raw and bloody. Sororra’s Eyes watched him work, and as the shallow hole grew slowly deeper, he almost heard a voice, as if on the edge of consciousness, the edge of reality. Just a breath of sound, not even a whisper, nothing so substantial as that. But as his bloody hands scraped away the earth, he heard it sigh, Find me, and when he glanced over at the poor dead babes, he noticed for the first time that the boy’s eyes were open and staring sightlessly into the night sky.
Keiro laid them to rest in that small open space beneath the sky, under the watch of Sororra’s Eyes. He cried for them again as he scooped the dirt over their pale flesh, and he stayed kneeling next to that saddest little grave until the stars and the Eyes faded from the sky and the sun touched his cheek. Only then did he move again, pulling his cowl up to hide his face from the sun that had watched the babes die and done nothing. He rose, and could not bring himself to say farewell to the babes he hadn’t saved. “I’m sorry,” he told them instead, and would tell them until the end of his days. With his back to the sun, he began to walk. And he left them, the poor babes he had never and would never know, alone as they could always only ever be.