Work Text:
Yagaan
The Menkhu gave her the keys.
He insisted that, if anyone should have them now, it was her. He said so with the saddest expression Yagaan had ever seen.
She was sure he had forgotten her. Not even that, but that he never realised she existed. After all, he had been too occupied with his business with Grief.
And Grief himself had forgotten her. When Boddho rejected him, it was as if he had forgotten everything that tied him to this place.
As if he had forgotten her. The only one who remained faithful to him even when Barley threatened her.
(He was clever enough to stop when he had to, though. No one threatens a Herb Bride and lives to tell the story.)
She still holds the keys in her hand. She’s not sure of what she's going to do. What would even be the purpose of the warehouses in this new world?
This world did not want what the Town created. This world rejected its denizens and will reclaim what they built. Because it is does not please Boddho. Sahba says so. She insists so.
Yagaan wonders how things would have been if Grief had stayed. If that Inquisitor had not shaken him to his very core.
If Boddho had wanted him.
But Yagaan isn’t even sure that Boddho wants her anymore. She spent a lot of time within the Town, at first on Sahba’s orders, but later she would lie if she did not admit that she liked this. That she liked being with Grief, even if he was a disaster of a man.
He was her little disaster, after all.
Not to mention the man who saved her from certain death.
But he left.
He left even before Boddho rejected him. Perhaps he did not want this anymore.
Maybe he did not want her.
Maybe she should not continue with this.
And yet, she opens the door.
There’s the smell of blood, impregnating everything that surrounds her.
And the unmistakable sound of the Ashen Swish.
------------
Saraina
Many would have called her a coward.
But what Saraina did was to survive. Every single step of the way.
When she pretty much offered herself to Andrey Stamatin and he chose her to dance in the Broken Heart and called her exquisite, that was her own doing.
And so was the fact that she disappeared before things got worse and took Dima, the Barkeep, with her.
She might not have given him the chance to have a say on this. But she knew that he was the only one he could save. En-Andrey and his brother, Peter, had done enough that it would never matter how much she tried to save them. Boddho would reject them, Boddho would harm them.
Perhaps it is better for them that they are making their way through the Steppe right now. Even if she knows she will find them among the swevery one day.
And that it will hurt.
Dimusha doesn’t react, he is still too deep in his grief and the fact that he has lost Andrey and Peter, who Saraina knows that he knew for a long while.
She does not blame him. It hurts for her, too, even if it should not. They were not a part of the body, Sahba says so. They were a tumour, an illness, and Boddho will be better without them.
The Khatanghe will be better without them.
But Saraina visits the Mistress of the Dead from time to time, to see if she has news on any of them.
“Nothing.” She says with that soft voice of hers all the times until now.
In one of those visits, Saraina discovers that Peter adopted the Mistress a few days before the Menkhu made his decision.
She knows that she cannot be a mother to someone like a Mistress. That would be like proclaiming herself a Mother to Boddho.
But the visits become more frequent, not just to ask, but to care for her. Dima comes with her too, and even if the world will never be as it was, they find a little place for them in there.
-----------
Samar and Osor
Samar has forbidden him to visit the dilapidated shack.
She knows too well that Osor pays no attention to that. Even if it has been a while since his friend, Boos Vlad’s son, left, she knows that the wound is still quite open.
It is still open for her too.
Much as she had hated Vlad for what he did with the Termitary. Much as she still does (she lost her brother there), Samar had to agree with Osor when he said that Vlad was a sign of hope, a sign that things could change.
Vlad was clay, still shapeless, but with good guidance, allied with the Menkhu and with everyone in the Khatanghe who wanted to change things… He could have done so much…
They might have, even, been happy. That night Osor and her spent with him had been a taste of what could have been.
And yet here they are.
She is working hard, but not to change things, just to make sure that Osor is welcomed back into the Khatanghe. That they still survive and are part of this world.
That it doesn’t reject them just as it rejected Vlad.
They are children of Boddho, after all.
That is what Sahba says, looking at her in a way that speaks more than what words can say. Looking at her as if she knew that Samar cannot do a thing and seemed all too pleased about it. As if she won, despite Samar’s attempts to the contrary.
She has won, indeed.
After all, her plan to have them all infiltrate the Town worked. It is back to whom it should be.
But, as Samar watches Osor look at the horizon, as if waiting for someone who will not return, she understands that they were little more than sacrifices to her.
Pawns in a war that took Sahba five years to win and that they now will have to live with the consequences of her triumph.
Samar takes Osor’s hand.
They will go to the dilapidated shack tonight.
------------
Tuyana
There’s a strange horror in seeing the person you love the most so defeated.
For Tuyana, this should have been a common occurrence. She does not remember Oyun, even in his kindest moments with her, ever being truly happy.
That yoke he carries weighs heavily on him, even when she removes it and kisses the marks it leaves.
She’s never asked, it is not her right to pry information out of him as if it were a twyre flower out of the earth with her dance.
But she sometimes wishes he could tell her.
She wishes she could ease that pain that seems to crush his heart every time he crosses paths with the Menkhu. As if there was something heavy, something that only he thought he was able to carry.
Or that he wanted no one else to know.
Not even her.
In fact, when the Menkhu himself asked her about it, Tuyana found herself at a loss for words.
She did not know what to say to the Menkhu, who seemed genuinely worried about Oyun himself. After all, he had been like a father to him when his own father did not seem… Up to the task, so to say.
So, the Menkhu cared for Oyun. And for Tuyana herself, too.
Probably because he remembered her, being there for Narana’s sacrifice.
Tuyana does not want to think about it. Samar and Yumzhan were there too, and they do not talk about it.
(Neither do Saraina and Yagaan, even if they were not there. None of them ever talk about it.)
One night, when they are alone, far away from the rest of the Kin and lying on the grass, with the silence of Boddho as their only witness, Tuyana and Oyun hold each other and cry.
Over the secrets that they will never be able to share.
Over the wounds they will never be able to heal.
But, at the very least, they have each other, for as long as Boddho wills so.
------------
Yumzhan
Sometimes, Yumzhan sneaks into the deep of that Town that displeased Boddho so.
Beyond the Cathedral, beyond all those buildings that they thought would keep them safe.
Most of the time, she lies by the side of that tree where she taught the Menkhu that the sacrifice of blood is necessary to bring herbs from the depths.
She sits, and she looks at the windows of the derelict building, almost in the hope that the owner would be there.
That she would be there, looking at her with a barely disguised anger, but also a barely disguised curiosity.
Sahba hated her, and that was why she sent Yumzhan to her. To play with her thoughts and make her believe she was seeing things. But Yumzhan was intrigued by this woman who would voluntarily seclude herself in this prison.
She knows she is not there anymore, but Yumzhan likes to imagine that she is.
She still likes to imagine that she is furious, and the fury is enough to sustain her and make her come down and out of her home.
The woman yells at her, angry as a wild bull.
But Yumzhan kisses her and she tastes of apples, and she blushes as prettily as the blood twyre.
And she takes her inside that cage and it feels less like a cage because they are together.
It is stupid to dream of that now.
Yumzhan knows she’d do better searching for her among the twyre, because she will never return alive to this place that does not want her.
She didn’t even know her name.
Lara. The wind whispers. My name is Lara.