*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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It's raining. It can't be seen in this flat, starless nighttime, but Iaves can feel it, pitter-pattering on his hood, seeping through to his shoulders. It's an icy touch, like the hands of a corpse, weighing down on him.
"You told me you would come back."
She's sitting, swathed in darkness and just out of eyesight, nothing but an outlined shadow, but Iaves knows what she is. Who she is.
"You abandoned me," she murmurs. "You went to 'cut off at the pass' someone who never came. She held her own instead. She swung hard. She—"
The bones in his knuckles crack, hands trembling, and the pounding sound of the rain swallows the figment up.
Iaves passes a hand over his face, savoring the warm press of his hand on his forehead for a moment before letting it drop. He might be going mad.
Another, he thinks for the hundredth time, fractures with it. Another.
All his life, through the turbulence, the tautness, the trepidation, Iaves has been steady. Waves rocked, crashed over the tipping side, wind whipped and howled through, skies spat hail and forked lightning, but through all this he stayed grounded, steady. Maybe not certain, but measured. Careful. Methodical.
Ben had the big ideas, Ben had the charisma, the dynamism, the drive. Meg... Meg had the fire, the sharpness, the aggression. Iaves brought the reality. Iaves grounded himself in reality, in his stable net, fastened on three sides. Ben, Meg, Rex.
He did not know he could feel such a crashing, endless chasm of pain until he lost Rex. They had been in danger before—he knew, understood—but he didn't comprehend what it meant to feel the unbearable weight of grief until he first felt the phantom fangs of that damned cat push deep, gushingly, into Rex's neck. He didn't understand there could be agony outside of physical pain until he heard her cry.
Before her death, his brain was halved; one part comfortably his, one part comfortably hers. Half spoke in complex language, thought, reasoned, rationalized; the other spoke in instinct, drive, intuition. Skilling to Rex was simply tapping into another part of himself, and he became half a man when she died. Ben did too after that day, but in a different way, for a different reason. It's a wonder Meg could stand it all—
His breath catches, jerks painfully in his lungs. Another.
"Quiet, tonight."
It's not her voice this time—it's a real one, a gruff one. Iaves turns to watch the man strike a cigarette with his finger in the dark, a tiny flicker of flame burning just above his nail. He's one of the men who came up after Urilong won Solveigard. One of the men who told Iaves.
"No news?" Iaves asks, even if he already knows the answer. All the birds know his touch now; he's already listening when they speak to their callers. He can't afford to wait to be told any longer.
