Ayae walked through the streets of Neela, the wake for Elan Wagan spilling out around her, a city alive with people, with the smells of cooked meats, potatoes, vegetables and breads, drinks in bottles and casks, and fires lighting the night sky.
She held a half-drunk bottle of beer in her hand. It had been pressed on her by a large black woman who promised that it was the best beer Ayae had ever tasted. She wasn’t sure about that, but it wasn’t bad, and it was a bottle she could raise when another vendor tried to press their wares upon her. There was nothing special about the offers to her: the beer and wine, like the food, was free tonight. Rumour had it that Sinae Al’tor had paid for everything. It was not just to honour Elan Wagan, but to honour all the dead, all of the men, women and children who had died since the War of the Gods. It was a wake for all the dead who were now free. A celebration of life and death. When she heard about it, Ayae had been doubtful, but it was hard to argue with the goodwill she saw around her, the pleasure in people’s faces.
Depending on who you asked, the freedom that the dead had was either a gift of the gods, of Se’Saera in particular, or of those who had fought at Ranan. She heard the name Qian mentioned in conversation more than once. Aelyn Meah, Eidan, Captain Heast, and even herself: Ayae had heard enough tales about Ranan that she did not know where to begin unravelling the story for anyone who asked. She hoped the shamans who had come down from the Plateau found it easier – she passed one on the street near her, a bowl of cooked spiced potatoes in his hands, a captive audience around him – but Ayae had seen brown-robed members of Se’Saera’s Faithful in Neela and heard self-appointed prophets who told stories about nothing that had happened in Ranan. It would be a long time before the truth began to emerge clearly, she knew.
Yet, despite that, Ayae felt good. Since Ranan, she had felt strangely at peace, as if a balance had found her. Part of it, she knew, was simply survival. She had survived not just Ranan, but Aela Ren. There were still mornings when she woke up sweating, the image of his sword, the sword she carried, coming towards her, his scarred face emerging from the darkness behind it. In fuller dreams, dreams that had narrative, she was on the cathedral, the wind whipping around her. Aela Ren stood before her. But she could live with the dreams. She could see there would be a point in her future where they would fade. She could even live with the moments when sadness weighed her down – when she thought of Faise, of Zineer and of Samuel Orlan. It helped that Zaifyr was back, that his strength was returning. She was surprised that it helped, but it did. For his part, he appeared to be mostly bemused by her plans to rebuild Mireea, but he supported her, as did the rest of his family. Perhaps, she admitted, lifting up her bottle to wave away another offer of free beer, it was her family as well. She was not quite comfortable with that, not yet. But her sense of peace was independent of these factors. It came from inside her, from the balance she had found from the four elements, from the parts of Ger that nestled in her being.
‘A room is no longer warm when you’re in it,’ Muriel Wagan said to her, earlier. The two of them stood beneath the afternoon’s sun in the small backyard of the Lady of the Ghosts’ home. Potted plants spread around them, a collection of green, purple, red, brown and yellow. ‘It was the first thing I noticed when you came in. You’re different in other ways, of course. You are more reserved. More confident. The war has changed you, but it has changed everyone, I think.’ It had left Wagan thinner and older. ‘But for you, I think it has left you with a better understanding of what is inside you.’
‘I hope I would have found that without the war,’ she said.
‘Perhaps.’ The other woman picked up a watering can, carried it to a barrel of rain water. ‘In another fate, you might have stayed in Mireea as Samuel Orlan’s apprentice, might have continued your relationship with Illaan Alahn, and I would have done my best to help you.’ She lifted the full can out and offered her half a smile. ‘I might have even been able to.’
‘Maybe.’ She hesitated. ‘I came here to talk about Mireea, actually.’
‘I know. You came to ask if you could have it.’
‘Yes.’
Muriel Wagan began to water the first of her plants. ‘But you’re not really asking,’ she said mildly. ‘You came to tell me that you took it.’
From the day she left the Mountains of Ger, Ayae had thought about this exact moment, had run it through her head. Tinh Tu, perhaps sensing that before she left, had offered to come with her, but Ayae had waved her off. It’ll be fine, she had said. It shouldn’t be a problem. Her confidence had not lasted. In Neela, people gave her space, treated her with a mixture of fear and respect, and fell silent when she entered rooms. Now standing here, watching the Lady of the Ghosts water her garden, Ayae admitted that it might be a problem. ‘Yes,’ she said, a breath of nervousness escaping her. ‘I have taken it.’
‘Because you can.’
‘Because I can,’ she admitted. ‘But I’d rather have your blessing.’
‘That is not the nature of power,’ Muriel Wagan told her, shifting her can to new plants. ‘If you will, take that as a small piece of advice, Ayae. The moment you seek the permission of another, you cede your authority to them. You give your power to them. The great trick of governance is to keep that truth an illusion, to let people think that they have power, when they have none.’
Ayae did not reply. Did not know how to reply.
With a wave of her hand, the Lady of the Ghosts took her can back to the water barrel. ‘You are more than welcome to the land Mireea was on,’ she said. ‘I could do nothing with it. No one but you and your kin could, in its current state. If you plan to make it safe and liveable, then we will all benefit from that.’
‘I plan to make it a sanctuary,’ she said, trying to hide the relief she felt, relief that later, when she left Lady Wagan’s house, she would laugh ruefully at. Who had the power there? she would ask herself. ‘A place for people without homes, and people like me, who have some divinity in them. A place where people can learn about themselves, if they want. Or just be treated well. Not everyone is well treated by that power. I want to make Mireea a place that will help people, again. A place where they can learn who they are, and learn about the world.’
‘You are going to make it a school?’ She rested the watering can on the edge of the barrel and looked at Ayae keenly. ‘Is that right?’
‘No, not really. It’ll have part of that, but.’ She glanced up at the broken sun. ‘Se’Saera kept telling us that she could repair our world. That she could fix what the gods broke in their war.’
‘It was one of her best arguments, I thought.’
‘Exactly. She would look at what we all saw, what we all lived with, and she would promise to fix it, because she was a god. We only had to be faithful. We only had to believe that she would do it. But there are no gods. No one who can fix what was done with our world. If we want the sun whole, or the ocean to be free of poison, then we have to do that. We have to take responsibility for it.’
‘So, not a school, but rather a place of research?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
Muriel Wagan lifted her can off the barrel. ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said.
They talked for a while longer, until the Lady of the Ghosts finished watering her garden, but Ayae’s plans were not far along enough for in-depth discussion. She told Lady Wagan that Aelyn would help her build upon the research. Tinh Tu would guide the kind of books they needed and the researchers with whom they should be in touch. Eidan would build Mireea. He had already said it would take years to complete, simply because of the instability of the mountains. Ayae suspected that he would also be returning to Yeflam, to finish his work rebuilding the Floating Cities, but she did not say that in case it was not true. Jae’le had already begun to talk of travel, of searching for those with divinity in them, and she half expected him to be gone by the time she returned. She did not yet know what Zaifyr would do, but his world had changed so much in the last three weeks that the only thing she expected from him was for him to take time to reconnect with it.
‘That’s a nice sword you have there.’ Caeli’s voice broke through her thoughts. ‘You know what they say about it?’
‘That I found it in battle?’ Ayae said, turning to her. ‘That it came from no one of any real importance?’
‘That’s what I tell people, but they refuse to believe. They say the girl who has it killed the monster that owned it.’
She hugged the blonde guard, felt the other woman’s arms around her hard, and for the first time since she had ridden into Neela, felt that she had found a part of her home again.
‘I’m sorry about today,’ Caeli said, letting her go. ‘I had the duty. Did your conversation go well?’
‘Yeah,’ Ayae said. ‘You got a beer?’
‘Finest beer in Neela.’ She held up a brown bottle with a yellow and green label. ‘What about yours?’
She showed her black label with a white boar. ‘Competing for the title.’
Caeli laughed and the two of them continued to walk through the streets. Ahead, the soldiers from Refuge spilled out of The Collapsed City. A handful of them had set up a band, a flute, a pair of guitars, a harmonica and a drummer. They had gathered quite the audience around them, people holding bowls of meat and potato, with bottles and mugs in their hands. A pair of children ran with a kite past them, along the well-lit street. At the end of it, Captain Heast and Bueralan Le were leading two horses towards the inn. The two women gave a short greeting before they turned down a street filled with people.
‘I like his tattoos,’ Caeli said, after a swig from her bottle. ‘You know him well?’
‘No,’ Ayae said. ‘Just a few conversations here and there. I heard that the group he was part of are all dead.’
‘A lot of us are dead.’
She thought of Faise and Zineer and Samuel Orlan. She thought even of Illaan. ‘How’re you holding up?’
‘About Xrie?’ Caeli gave half a shrug. ‘I wasn’t surprised. He was always going to die with a sword in his hand. But it hurt to hear. I didn’t love him or anything, but he deserved better.’
They all did. It was one of the reasons why so many people had embraced Sinae’s wake, Ayae knew. ‘Did Lady Wagan tell you what we plan to do in Mireea?’
‘Yeah.’ She glanced out the corner of her eye. ‘You know she plans to open schools here in Neela, right?’
‘I’m not surprised.’
Caeli grinned and took a swig from her bottle. Ahead, Kal Essa was showing children how to throw dice against a wall. He appeared, Ayae thought, quite drunk.
‘You got other plans?’ her friend asked, after they had passed him. ‘You’re not just going to stay on the Mountains of Ger, are you?’
‘No.’ She hesitated. She hadn’t told anyone this, yet, wasn’t sure of herself. ‘I was thinking of going to Sooia.’
‘I could go to Sooia.’ It was said casually. ‘If you’d like the company.’
‘I would.’ In silence, the two of them continued down the street, towards the men and women offering brown bottles of beer, towards the centre of the grand wake that had taken hold of a whole city. ‘I would never have imagined this,’ Ayae said, emptying the last of her bottle. ‘I couldn’t have ever thought of this a year ago. I couldn’t have thought of it a week ago, but – well, that’s kind of the way it is, now.’ Behind the wake, behind the fires, the people, the food, behind it all, the strange shape of the Mountains of Ger beckoned to her. Within those mountains, five people waited for her. Five ancient men and women who had once believed they were the children of the gods. ‘We’re orphans,’ Ayae said. ‘We have to guide ourselves. We have to make our own choices. We have to decide what kind of world we live in. What words mean. What actions define.’ She paused. ‘We’re orphans,’ she repeated, and smiled.