"You already know how it ended," Vesalia said. "I told you that part — or the shape of it, at least — and I know you carried that shape to Ilyrisse, because I've heard, in the small ways these things travel through a harem this size, that she knows my name now, knows something of what happened to me. I won't make you sit through all of it twice. But I want to tell you what I understand now, about why it happened the way it did, because I don't think I understood it myself, not fully, until I started saying all of this out loud tonight, for the first time."
"Tell me."
"The gods had already decided, by then, that I'd become inconvenient. My rise had served their purpose, and my purpose, in their accounting, had run its course. They found their instrument — a rival, blessed and set against me, in a confrontation I now understand was never a fair contest to begin with, only ever a formality dressed up as one. I've told you that part. What I never told anyone, what I'm only understanding fully now, is that I went into that confrontation already weakened in a way that had nothing to do with power."
"The guilt."
"Yes." She said it simply, without flinching from it. "I had spent years by then holding two secrets no one else alive knew — what Kaelen had done to me, and what I had done to Kaelen in return — while simultaneously failing, every single day, to give my daughter the one thing she actually needed from me. I had armored myself, over and over, against every external threat anyone could throw at me. I had no armor left for the one thing I could never forgive myself for. When the moment came — when it truly mattered, when everything depended on whatever reserve of strength I had left — I found that reserve was not where I'd left it. Some of it, I believe now, had quietly bled out of me for years, spent on a guilt I never let myself examine long enough to heal."
"I remember the exact texture of the air that day," she said, before I could ask anything further. "Strange, the things memory chooses to keep whole when it lets everything else blur. It was humid, unseasonably so, the kind of heaviness that makes a person feel slow before anything has even happened yet. I remember thinking, in some absurd corner of my mind that had no business thinking about weather at a moment like that, that I should have worn something lighter. I remember the rival the gods had set against me — I won't waste breath describing him, he barely deserves the memory space he already occupies — moving with a confidence that should have told me everything I needed to know about how this had been arranged long before either of us arrived on that field."
"You said you went in already weakened."
"I did. I want you to understand that I don't say this as an excuse for losing. I say it because I've only recently understood it as true. I remember standing there, in that final stretch before it began, running through everything I thought I needed to protect — my position, my power, the small, precarious peace I'd built out of Doran's steadiness and everything I'd survived to get there — and not once, not even once, in that final accounting, did I consciously think of my daughter. She was simply there, an assumed constant, the way a person assumes the ground will hold without ever consciously deciding to trust it. It wasn't until the very last moment, when there was nothing left to spend on anything else, that she rose to the surface of everything I actually cared about, and by then there was only enough of me left for one true thing."
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"And the man. The one you loved."
Her voice went very flat here, the particular flatness reserved for the part of the story that had cost her, once, everything.
"He stood aside," she said. "I've turned that moment over more times than I can count, trying to understand it as something other than what it plainly was. He watched. And when it was over, when I was already fatally struck and had nothing left to spend except the very last of myself, I used what remained to shield her — our daughter, the one I'd spent years failing to love the way she deserved — rather than save what was left of me. That was the last thing I did, Eremos. Not out of some sudden, cinematic redemption. Simply because in the one moment that actually mattered, love turned out to still be there, underneath everything, waiting for permission to matter more than my own survival. I only wish I'd found it sooner. I only wish it hadn't taken dying to prove it to myself."
"What happened to her? After?"
"I don't know." The words came out raw, almost torn. "That's the cruelty at the center of all of it. I gave everything I had left to protect her in that final moment, and I have no memory, no knowledge, no thread to follow of what happened to her after the dust settled. Whether she lived. Whether she died alongside me and simply arrived in the Between separately, the way silhouettes sometimes do, scattered by whatever cosmic accounting decides these things. Whether she grew old somewhere in some other current of the living world and never once thought of the mother who'd never managed to love her properly while she had the chance. I don't know. I have spent the entire span of my existence here not knowing, and it is, without question, the single worst uncertainty I have ever had to carry."
"I've imagined every version of what might have happened to her," she said, into the quiet that followed, her voice gone thin with the specific exhaustion of a question asked too many times to itself, in too many empty hours, to ever fully stop asking it. "I've imagined her growing old somewhere kind, surrounded by people who managed to give her what I couldn't. I've imagined her dying young, frightened, without anyone beside her, and that version visits me more often than I'd like to admit, especially on the turns when the searching yields nothing at all. I've imagined her here, in the Between, somewhere close, close enough that I've walked past her a hundred times without either of us knowing it, two silhouettes crossing paths in a crowd neither of us had any reason to examine closely. I don't know which version is true. I've made my peace, as much as anyone can, with the possibility that I may never know. What I haven't made peace with is what any of those versions would mean about whether she ever, even once, felt loved."
"You don't have to make peace with all of it tonight."
"No," she agreed, and something in her voice had gone very tired, the particular tiredness of a person who has just set down a burden they've carried so long their arms have forgotten what it feels like to be empty. "I suppose I don't."
I held her closer, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have cheapened what she'd just handed me.