What the Living Carry Out (Natsume)

Natsume

Magus-Sergeant Krista Bastler’s reading crystal went past every mark Natsume had ever seen it hold, and then, all at once, past every mark that meant anything. Natsume did not need the reading to tell her what her skin had already told her: the throne room’s air had gone from a pressure she’d stopped consciously noticing to its sudden, total absence, the way a held note stops being heard the instant it stops being played.

Across the room, High Priestess Mizuki’s prayer, which had been climbing for the better part of a minute toward something closer to a scream than a liturgy, broke off mid-line. Not because she had finished it. Because there was nothing left in the air for it to be aimed at.

Krista stared at a needle that had stopped moving entirely rather than merely settling.

“It’s clear.” She said it twice, the second time louder. “It’s actually clear. All of it, I think. I don’t know how far that goes.”

Nobody cheered. Natsume had half-expected someone to, and the silence that came instead told her more about the room than any reading crystal could have.

Without remembering choosing to, she found herself sitting on the stone, the cold of it working its way up through her skirts, some distant, still-functioning part of her filing the fact away as coolly as she’d have filed any reading. For one breath she let herself believe the obvious, foolish thing: that the clearing meant Tomohiro had done it, that he would walk back out from wherever the passage had taken him and this would already be over. The next breath told her otherwise, in the plain, ordinary fact of the room continuing not to produce him.

She did not track what happened after that. Voices moved around her, urgent and then only tired, and none of them reached the part of her still waiting on a door that had not opened.

Lieutenant Viktor Grau’s voice was the one that finally found her, some unmeasured while later, giving an order rather than asking anything of her directly, the way command fell to him and not Sturm whenever Falkenrath was out of reach, the expedition being the Ravens’ and Sturm’s Hammers only its escort. “We’ve tried the passage, and we’ll try the ridge road. If that fails too, we wait a reasonable interval. Then we lead the column back out under our own authority, and we do not go on looking for a valley that’s already taken one of its own without asking permission first.”

Nobody argued with him. Natsume registered only that he still hadn’t come back, and that the column was leaving without him anyway.

***

Reika Mizuki did not walk out with the rest of them. She stopped at the shrine terrace’s outer edge, where the column’s route to the gate ran closest to it, and stood there long enough that Captain Elara Sturm finally slowed to see what had stopped her.

“I am staying.” She said it the way she had said every doctrinal thing Natsume had ever heard her say, plainly, without asking anyone’s leave to mean it. “This is where my order belongs, and where it has always belonged. Someone should be here to keep whatever this place is becoming from becoming something worse.”

Sturm looked at her a long moment, a soldier’s stillness, weighing whether an order applied to a situation nobody had written the order for. “Oberst-Researcher Falkenrath isn’t here to say otherwise.” She said it to Grau, not to Reika, deferring to him without quite admitting that was what she was doing.

Grau looked between the two of them, and his easy, unbothered manner settled into something closer to thought than Natsume had seen from him all week. “No. He isn’t.” He didn’t try again.

Nobody in that column, Natsume understood watching it happen, had the standing to tell a High Priestess she couldn’t stay at her shrine, not with the one man who might have carried that authority sealed behind a wall of mist that answered to no rank anyone present held.

She had already started to turn away when she stopped, and looked at Natsume instead of the column. “Two people answered for what I did who should not have. The courier, and the man whose hand they claimed to see in the letter. If they are living, find them, and tell them the regret is real and that I know it mends nothing. It is owed, and I cannot bring it to them myself.”

Natsume said she would.

Reika turned back toward the terrace without waiting to see whether anyone meant to argue further, already kneeling by the time the column’s rear guard passed her.

Natsume watched her go and found she envied her, a little, uselessly. Reika at least had somewhere to put the not-knowing.

Natsume did find them both, in the end. Alive, the two of them, let out in the confusion the night the mist came and folded since into the amnesty Katsumori had handed down on terms he stated plainly to anyone who would listen: not mercy, but a chance to be useful now that everyone was needed, and no second one for a man who wasted it. She gave them Reika’s message. Neither had an answer to it, and she did not press for one.

***

The march back compressed itself in Natsume’s memory into a handful of fixed points rather than a road: the first true daylight the valley had shown any of them in a year, thin and pale and without menace, and Sturm’s voice counting a march-order she didn’t strictly need to count out loud anymore, and her hands, which she noticed only once, wrapped tight enough around a strap that the leather had left a mark.

Kiriguchi met them the way a village meets the end of a year it had stopped believing would ever end, loud and disorganized and without ceremony. Old women came out of doorways they had watched the column pass through going the other direction. A boy ran the column’s length twice before a soldier waved him off, laughing this time, not annoyed.

That joy did not reach everyone the column brought back equally.

Lord Kisaragi found Natsume near the edge of it, before she’d had time to decide where she was supposed to stand.

“Doctor Natsume.” He said her title with the careful courtesy he gave everything, though his usual ease had gone thin at the edges, worn through in a way three years of watching him work a room had never shown her before. “I owe you a better goodbye than I’m about to have time to give you.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” She meant it, and the look on his face suggested he hadn’t expected her to.

“I know what the room found out about you. I was there. I also watched you send what little your own house could still spare toward feeding refugees who’d never once have known who paid for it.”

He didn’t argue the point, and left it as plain as he’d found it, which she trusted more than she trusted most of what he’d ever said to her before.

“A man can hedge every bet he’s ever placed and still mean it, once, about the people he actually loves.” He said it quietly, not performing it for anyone else in earshot. “I have people depending on me who need a roof standing over their heads regardless of what the Wodensreich eventually decides my name is worth. That’s the whole of my accounting now. I’d ask you to think well of me, but I don’t imagine that’s mine to ask for anymore.”

He left before she could answer that, walking toward the small, quiet house at the town’s edge, meaning, Natsume understood, to stay behind its walls for a good while yet. She did not see him at any window as she watched him go.

***

Kurogane’s goodbye took less of her time, which she suspected was exactly how he intended it.

“Doctor.” He said it already half turned toward the road, ledger under one arm, the same one he’d been carrying since before any of them had reason to think they’d walk out of that valley again. “No time to make this a longer conversation than it needs to be. Refugees start moving the moment word of a cleared valley reaches the camps, and someone needs a storefront standing and stocked before the first wave gets here wanting things they can’t yet pay for.”

“That’s all you have to say.” She hadn’t quite meant it as a question, and he answered it as though it wasn’t one. “It’s what there’s time for.”

He was already three steps gone by the time he added the rest of it, thrown back over one shoulder without slowing. “Ask me again once I’m not busy keeping a whole valley’s worth of returning people from starving over a season while everyone else argues about who’s allowed to be sorry first.”

She watched him go the way she’d watched Kisaragi go. The two departures sat in her chest differently, though she couldn’t yet have said why.

***

Tenno found her last, or she found him. She was no longer certain which by the time it happened.

He had already moved his few things into the garrison barracks, in with Grau’s soldiers rather than the merchant quarter’s better rooms, a king who had run out of houses that were still his to ask for.

“You’ll have heard, I expect.” He said it without preamble, watching the drilling line, not her. “My brother rides for Kiriguchi the moment word reaches him. It always was going to end with Katsumori standing where I’m standing. I have had a year to make my peace with that, and I find I still haven’t managed it.”

Natsume said nothing, since anything she offered would have sounded like an apology she wasn’t certain she owed him.

He looked at her then, briefly, long enough that she read the answer in it without needing him to say it: he had not forgiven her for the order she had let Tomohiro break, and likely never would.

He didn’t wait for her to answer that either, and Natsume let him go without trying to make him.

***

Sturm had her soldiers drilling in the garrison yard within the hour, formation work nobody had ordered and nobody questioned. Natsume found Grau watching them from the yard’s edge, and stood beside him a while before either of them said anything.

“She hasn’t stopped believing he’s walking back out of that valley.” Grau said it without looking away from the drill line, in the flat, unbothered register he used for nearly everything, though something underneath it this time read closer to genuine than his usual ease allowed. “Told me twice today already. Following his last order to the letter, she says, same as always. Doesn’t mean she isn’t also just waiting for him to come back and countermand it.”

“Do you believe he will?” Grau considered the question longer than Natsume expected him to, watching Sturm call a correction down her line. “I believe he’s the single most stubborn man I’ve ever served under, and stubbornness has gotten a great many people killed and an almost equal number very inconveniently not killed. I try not to bet against him either way.”

Natsume did not tell him that she understood Sturm precisely. That she had spent the whole road back doing the same arithmetic against a different name. The boy had walked out of that valley once before, marked and given up for dead, Natsume’s own grief among the loudest of the mourning. That grief had been wrong. She could not persuade herself, standing in the yard now, that a second one on the same evidence, a passage that had not given him back yet, would come out any truer.

***

Krista was already at the Nebelschieber’s housing when Natsume found her, checking a reading that no longer needed checking, a habit either of them reached for when their hands wanted something to do that their minds weren’t ready to be idle for.

Natsume sat on the crate beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, the ease of two people who had built something together for so long that silence between them no longer needed filling.

“What happens to it, do you think? Now that the valley’s clear and somebody has to decide what an Okiri land under a Wodensreich crown actually gets to be?”

Krista was quiet a moment, which was rare enough for her that Natsume turned to look. “The Conclave’s going to want a proper survey of what this valley can produce, now that it’s safe to walk again. Better it goes through someone who already knows the ground.”

Natsume let the word sit before she answered, and found she did not have the strength left tonight to ask what her own people would have called the same work, or whether either of them would like the other’s word for it any better.

“I will do my best to prove that there can be a bridge between the two.”

Krista said nothing back to that, for once, and only gave her a small, tired half smile in return.

***

She found Chiyo at the edge of the yard’s returning crowd sometime after, standing apart from the noise in the same unclaimed space Natsume was keeping to herself, neither one quite able to join a celebration that belonged, honestly, to everyone in Kiriguchi but the two of them.

Neither said his name.

In the hours since the throne room went quiet, Natsume had refused to believe the mist had taken what it appeared to have taken, then hated a passage that answered to nothing and no one, then caught herself, once, bargaining with a god she didn’t believe in: if he only walked back out whole, she would never ask him for anything again.

She had not reached whatever came after that. She did not think she wanted to, not yet, not standing in a yard full of people cheering for a valley that had healed and handed itself back and still not produced the one person she and Chiyo were both waiting on.

Chiyo’s hand found hers first, work-rough and certain, the same hand Natsume imagined had steadied a boy who reached for a weapon that wasn’t there and never once asked him why.

Neither of them said anything that would have made it smaller.

Natsume let herself fold into it anyway, a stranger’s shoulder taking a weight she had spent a year learning to carry alone, in a crowded yard neither of them could quite bring themselves to join.