Page 167 of Daughter of No Worlds

“The weather is very different.”

“Nothing the right spell couldn’t fix.”

My eyes slid down the hill, falling on the distant tents and sleeping figures sprawled around smoldering fires. One hundred and fifty people with no homes. Some had asked to return to their own townsteads, or what was left of them. But many had chosen to travel back to Ara under the official protection of the Orders. Ara, a country where they could be free — but a country that was so wildly different from their homes, where they had no property, no friends, no money, and no language.

If only it would be as easy to help them take root.

“Wherever they go will be better than where they would be right now, if you had not helped them,” Max said, following my gaze.

I thought of that shrouded body and his mother’s wails.Not all of them.

“The last thing I remember,” I said, softly, “is my hand on the door, and your face. Nothing else. Only…pictures here and there.” Flashes of blood, rot, red butterflies. Frames of my fight with Max. My eyes fell to Max’s side and ran up, reliving a memory I barely grasped of my sword snaking along his ribs. “I know you’re hurt, even though you did not tell me.”

He looked away. “I’m fine.”

“But what if you weren’t? What iftheyweren’t? What if—” I shut my eyes and in that moment of darkness, I relived Reshaye’s frenzied, all-consuming hunger. “It was like it wasdrunk.It felt every death, and it…”

“It thrives on it,” Max finished.

“It would not have stopped.” My throat tightened.“And I had no control. I was so far from control that I don’t evenremember. What if that happens again?”

“We won’t let it.”

Was that enough?

The things that I could have done… the thought of it strangled me with petrifying fear. My eyes burned, blurred. And then I said something that I had never, ever said aloud before. “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I’m strong enough.”

Silence. I traced the abstracted shapes of the grass and gravel, mostly because it seemed like a much more manageable alternative to looking at Max’s face.

“I want to tell you a story,” he said, at last. “After the war ended, after… everything… I was a mess for a long time. Years full of cheap alcohol and Seveseed dens and aimless wandering and not much else. And one night, I started a typical miserable fight and a typical miserable pub and got my typical miserable ass kicked out on the cobblestones. It was a frigid winter that year, so I was wandering around the streets of the Capital shivering like a drowned rat.”

I’d drawn my legs up to my chest, rested my cheek on my knees to look at him. His gaze slid to me, and I was a little startled by that fact that he looked almost shy, embarrassed. “And, as we all know, I’m not made for that.”

I chuckled.

“So,” he went on, “I stumbled into the next open door I could find. It was this— this little bakery that had been set up for the night to show off these paintings…”

His gaze drifted farther away, sliding into the memory. I wondered if he knew how much his expression reflected his thoughts when he spoke. Or how much I loved that about him. “They were nothing special, to be honest. The artist mostly painted his wife lounging around in a garden, and let’s just say it was easy to tell that he was an amateur painter. But there was just something sogenuineabout them. I could justpicturehim slaving over every little blobby line.” He gave an awkward chuckle. “I wasverydrunk.”

I let my eyes close, and I was there with him.

“But what really did me in was when I was looking at this one enormous painting. A real labor of love. And the date written on it….” He cleared his throat, a little, strangled noise. “It was the same day as Sarlazai. While I was off in the mountains, doing… well,that… Somewhere, miles away, this man was just sitting in his garden, painting his plain wife with the reverence fitting a fucking goddess. And that just…hitme. It hit me so hard that I wept like a heartbroken fourteen-year-old girl. Because I had forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” I whispered.

“I had forgotten that people could be that way. I had forgotten that someone, somewhere, was painting terrible pictures of their wife in a garden. I was so far gone that I didn’t even remember that that kind of mundane contentment actually existed, least of all in the same moments as such terrible things.”

My heart clenched. I nodded.

“I didn’t exactly have a wife I could ask to flop around on benches for me, and I can’t paint for shit. But after I cried myself to depletion and sobered up, I thought to myself…” His shoulders rose in a tiny shrug as his gaze slipped back to me. “I thought, ‘Well. I can make a garden.’”

Planted every flower. It was obsessive,Sammerin had told me, once. An understanding clicked into place. I closed my eyes as my fingers found the necklace around my throat, my thumb pressing against the third Stratagram at the back. The one that would take me back there. “It was a very nice garden.”

“The best damn garden in Ara.”

Gods, I hadn’t known how much I would miss it.

There was a long silence. And then Max’s voice was more solemn, most hesitant, as he said, “You gave me that same feeling, Tisaanah.”

---