Goodbye

All three of Laura still had hold of him. One had her face pressed into his shirt, one had both arms locked around his neck, and the third had come in behind him and laid her cheek between his shoulder blades, and none of her showed any sign of letting go. Andy didn’t want her to. Around them the Ring had come apart into noise. Erin was laughing somewhere off to his left, high and helpless, and Norah was telling her to breathe. Riley’s hair had loosened from around the lot of them and lay across his shoulders, warm and heavy, as if it had forgotten where it was supposed to go.

Sam stood in front of him with her arms folded on Thrustworthy’s pommel. She was still laughing at her own joke. Every time it began to run down she looked at his face and it started up again.

“A legal argument,” she said, to nobody in particular. “I’m going to be telling people that for the rest of my life.”

“Next time you work something out,” Laura said into his shoulder, from all three of her mouths at once, “you tell me first.”

“Deal,” Andy said.

“I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

She didn’t answer. She held on tighter, all three of her, and he felt her laugh again down the bond, small and wet and worn out, the kind of laugh that comes after crying and is mostly made of it.

It was still happening to him. He had stopped trying to notice where it began. He could hear the Ring breathing, every breath by itself, and he could feel the stone under the ash and the seeds asleep in it, and the ward standing up out of the sea on every side of the island. Now he could feel the women of his harem, too, every one of them, along the bond that ran from him to each of them—Laura and Sam, Myra and Riley, Claire and Erin and Norah, Emi, Liesa, Chloe, Dawn, Marissa, Sumiku, Katherine, Eden, and Emily, who was still asleep. Something was coming up in each of them, slowly, from a long way down. He didn’t push at it. He let it come.

Then his eyes found the one stillness on the Ring.

Arabella stood where she had stood all night, a step in from the rim, at the edge of the ash. Nobody was near her. Her bloodied hand was closed at her side. Her face was turned toward the middle of the Ring, toward Laura around him and the knot of women at Laura’s back, and there was nothing of the Host in it, nothing arranged. She was watching them as someone watches a lit window from a dark street.

He could feel her too, now. He hadn’t known he could until he tried. And there was almost nothing there to feel—a warmth banked so low it barely registered, as if a fire had been left to go down for a long time and nobody had come back to feed it. It hadn’t been like that on the terrace, or on the beach. He knew it hadn’t. He had stood inside her, in the Palace, and felt what she carried.

A few steps from him, Sarah stood in the middle of her sisters. Marie had both arms around her from the side, and Sandra’s new hands were on her shoulders, and Marissa had her chin on Sarah’s shoulder and didn’t seem to know it was there. Sarah’s eyes had been on Laura since the ruling. They hadn’t left her once.

Now they did.

He watched them go past the three of Laura, past him, across the ash to the rim, and stop there. He felt Laura feel it—her attention went after her mother’s, all three of her at once, without a word.

Sarah said something to Marie, low. “It’s okay. Let me go.”

Marie’s arm came down. Sandra’s hands lifted off her shoulders and hung in the air a moment, as though she didn’t trust them yet to let go of anything, and then she let go. Marissa straightened. Sarah stepped out from between them.

She crossed the ash slowly. She had been sitting in a rocking chair for sixteen years, and her legs had only had a few hours to remember what they were for, and she walked as if she weren’t sure yet how far they would take her. Nobody went with her. Andy saw Marie take half a step after her and stop.

Arabella watched her come.

In Greg’s Suite, at the end of that season, standing barefoot just inside the door while Greg shouted, Sarah had held on to her own elbows, and Arabella had not looked at her face once. Andy knew. He had been inside her, behind her eyes, and he had felt her not look, and felt what it cost her to keep not looking, all the way to the end. She looked now. Her chin came up a little, and she held still, and she let Sarah walk all the way to her.

Sarah stopped in front of her. The noise on the Ring had begun to thin. Andy hadn’t seen it start. Erin’s laugh had run out. Sam had stopped laughing, and was looking where everyone else was beginning to look.

For a moment neither woman said anything. Sarah had to tip her head back a little to look up into Arabella’s face, and she did, and she went on looking, as though she were checking it against something she had kept a long time and wasn’t sure she had kept right.

“Arabella,” Sarah said.

“Sarah.” Arabella’s voice was thin, thinner than it had been when she called Ereshkigal by her old name.

“You look the same.” Sarah said it almost wonderingly: the first thing she had found, held up to be sure of it. “You look exactly the same.”

“So do you.”

“I don’t feel the same.” The corner of Sarah’s mouth moved and didn’t get far. “I don’t feel like anything I remember.”

Arabella didn’t answer. Her hands were at her sides, the bloodied one shut. Andy could feel how still she was holding herself—the same counting stillness she had kept at the rim all night, only harder now, as if she had braced for a blow and was waiting to find out where it would land.

“I asked you to watch over her,” Sarah said. Her voice was still rough with disuse, and it shook, and it held. “Before she was born. I was so scared. I didn’t know who else there was to ask, and you were—” She stopped, and started again. “I asked you to keep my baby safe.” She drew a breath. “Thank you for doing it.”

Arabella flinched. It went through her whole body. The words had found somewhere she hadn’t covered. “Don’t.” It came out fast and low. “Sarah, don’t. Don’t thank me for that.” Her voice cracked, and she didn’t stop for it. “I did not keep her safe. I failed you. I was not there at the river. She died. Laura died, and I was not there.” It kept coming, all of it. Something that had been shut a long time had given way. “I ran that season. I watched what he was from the first week, and I let it run, and I called it the game. And at the end I stood in that room with you, and I could not even look at your face.”

Behind Andy, against his back, Laura went still.

“I know,” Sarah said. “I remember.” Her eyes didn’t leave Arabella’s. “I couldn’t look at you, either.”

Arabella’s mouth opened, and nothing came out of it. Sarah took a step closer. It was a small step. It brought her near enough that she could have touched her, and she didn’t, yet.

“Stop,” she said, gently. “Arabella. Stop a minute, and listen to me.”

Arabella stopped.

“I heard what Andy told her.” Sarah tipped her chin, a little, toward Ereshkigal, standing where she had ruled. “That there was nothing left of Laura to follow. That she just—went out a side door, and there wasn’t a mark to find her by. That everything said it couldn’t be done.” Her mouth shook, and she firmed it. “And you brought her back anyway.”

Arabella’s hand opened at her side. The palm was dark with dried blood. It stayed open.

“You gave me my heart back,” Sarah said. “When you did that. I didn’t know it for a long time. I wasn’t—” She stopped, and found it again. “I wasn’t anywhere, for a long time. She came every morning and sat with me, and I thought she was being kind to a woman who’d failed her. And all that time she was alive. She was alive, and grown, and sitting next to me, because of you. You gave it back.”

“Sarah—”

“Do you know what I thought?” Sarah’s voice went up, and cracked, and she brought it back down. “All those years in that chair. I thought I killed her. I thought my Wish put her on that bridge. I was sure of it. I was so sure of it I stopped—” She swallowed. “I stopped being anybody. Even after you took him away, even after you freed us all.” She glanced back across the ash, not at Laura, but at Andy, and her eyes rested on him a moment. “Somebody told me tonight it wasn’t true. That I was the reason she could come back, not the reason she died. I didn’t believe him. Not at first.” She looked up at Arabella again. “So I’m telling you. It’s the same thing. It isn’t true for you, either.”

“It isn’t the same.” Arabella’s voice had gone low. “You were twenty-three. He had you doing everything he said. I was—” She stopped. “I knew better. I was made to know better.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said. “Maybe you were.” She didn’t let go of it. “I don’t blame you. Not for the river. Not for any of it. I wrote that to you once, a long time ago. I don’t know if it ever got to you.” She held Arabella’s eyes. “I don’t blame you, Arabella. I really don’t.”

“You should,” Arabella whispered. “Somebody should.”

“Well, I don’t.” Something came into Sarah’s face that Andy had never seen there. He had seen it shut at a shout from next door, in Arabella’s memory, and he had seen it empty in a rocking chair. He had never seen it set. “She’s my daughter. If anybody gets to decide, it’s me. And I’ve decided.”

The Ring had gone quiet. Not the quiet of fear that had lain on it all night, but something else, something everyone was standing still to keep from breaking.

“And you gave him back to her.” Sarah looked over her shoulder then, across the ash, at Andy with all three of Laura around him, and the look stayed on them a moment. “You gave her a family. She has all these people.” She turned back. “I wrote in her baby book that I’d asked you to watch over her. I wrote that I believed you would.” She swallowed. “I wasn’t wrong.” Her voice broke on the last of it, and she let it. “I’m grateful. That’s all. That’s what I walked over here to say. I’m grateful.”

And Arabella wept.

At first she didn’t make a sound. Her face was wet, all at once and then more, and her hands hung at her sides and did not move to wipe any of it. Her throat worked, high and hard, as if it had closed around something and couldn’t get it up or down.

Andy knew that weeping. He had stood inside it. On the open ground at the top of the Irkalla stair, with a man just gone down into the dark, he had felt that throat close and that face go wet, and those hands hang at her sides and not move. It was the same. Seven thousand years, and it was exactly the same.

Sarah reached up and put her hand against Arabella’s wet cheek.

Andy had seen her touch someone like that once before, from behind Arabella’s eyes. A lit step on Twin Yews Road, and a girl of four getting up off it to go in, and Sarah in the doorway saying Laura, softly, and her hand coming down on her daughter’s head as she went past, and staying there a moment. Arabella had watched it from the dark by the hedge, where the light didn’t reach.

She was in the light now.

Arabella’s knees gave. Sarah went down with her. She didn’t try to hold her up; she simply went down too, onto the ash, and got her arms around her as they went, and pulled Arabella’s head in against her shoulder and held it there.

Then the weeping made a sound. Andy had never heard it make one. Not on the beach, not in any memory, not anywhere. It came out of Arabella low and broken and helpless against Sarah’s shoulder, a sound with no words in it at all, and it went on, and Sarah held her through it. She held her as she had held Laura in the nursery, in a memory Andy had stood in, with her mouth against the top of her head. She began, a little, to rock. Sixteen years she had rocked in a chair with no one in her arms. She rocked now.

“Okay,” Sarah said into her hair. “Okay. Okay. I’ve got you.”

And Andy remembered the terrace rail. The eleven islands strung out on the gray water like black beads, and Arabella beside him with her hands on the railing, and her voice lower than he had ever heard it.

I’m not afraid to die, Andy. I’ve been alive long enough to know what that’s like. But I am afraid of dying unforgiven. And after it, with her eyes on the islands: Sarah’s in the Hollow Garden, but she doesn’t even recognize me anymore, and I broke the promise I made her long ago, when I couldn’t be there to save Laura from the river.

He had not had anything to give her then. She had held up her hand before he could try. She hadn’t been asking him to fix it. She had only wanted to say it out loud to one person. But he knew what he was looking at now. It was the one thing she had been missing. The one thing she had stopped believing she would ever be given, and had gone on carrying the want of anyway.

He could feel it leave her. Like the seeds in the ash, or Laura behind him: something in Arabella that had been bent around a weight for so long it had grown into the shape of it, and he felt the weight come off. Under it there was still almost nothing, that thin banked warmth he had felt from across the Ring. But it wasn’t bent anymore. It stood up straight.

Nobody on the Ring moved. Marie had taken one step after her sister and stopped there, with her arms folded hard across herself and her jaw working, and she didn’t take another. Sandra stood behind her with her new hands pressed together in front of her mouth. A few paces from the middle of the ash, Ereshkigal’s eyes had come off Anna. They rested on the two women kneeling in the ash for a long moment, and then they went back to her sister.

Down the bond, Laura was crying. All three of her, quietly, with her faces pressed into him, and he could feel what she was looking at through her own eyes: her mother on her knees in the ash, holding the woman who had brought her back.

After a long time Arabella lifted her head from Sarah’s shoulder. “I didn’t think—” She stopped. Her breath came in short, twice. “Not from you. I never thought I would hear it. Not from you.” Her voice gave out, and came back. “Thirty years, Sarah. I was so sure.”

“I know,” Sarah said. “So was I. About me.”

They got up together. Sarah’s legs nearly didn’t hold her, and it was Arabella who caught her elbow and steadied her, and for a moment they stood in the ash holding on to each other’s arms, and neither of them seemed to want to be the first to let go. Then Sarah took the open hand, the bloodied one, in both of hers. She held it without looking down at the blood. She leaned forward, and kissed Arabella on the cheek, and held her hand a while. Arabella’s eyes brimmed, the Host’s composure gone, leaving behind a woman who had just been handed something she had never dared hope she would be granted.

Then she let it go, and turned, and walked back across the ash the way she had come, slowly, to Marie, who met her halfway and folded her in. Arabella stood where Sarah had left her. She didn’t wipe her face. Her open hand stayed open.

After a while Arabella lifted her head. She didn’t look toward Andy, or toward Sarah. She looked across the ash at Ereshkigal, standing straight-backed where she had ruled, and past Ereshkigal to the place at the far side of the Ring where Anna lay with her head in Chloe’s lap, and stirred, and lay still again.

She looked at them both for a long time.

Andy didn’t know what she was seeing. He only knew that she was seeing it clearly, for the first time in a long while, and that whatever it was, she hadn’t decided yet what to do about it.

Then she decided. Andy saw it happen. Her chin came down, and her shoulders settled, and the open hand at her side closed—not the way it had been shut all night, hard over the old scar, but loosely, as a hand closes around something it means to carry. She didn’t wipe her face. She stepped out from the rim and walked across the Ring.

She went past them. Past Sam, who turned to watch her go, and past Andy with all three of Laura around him, close enough that he could have put out a hand and touched her arm. She didn’t look at him. She walked on to where Ereshkigal stood straight-backed in the middle of the ash, and stopped in front of her, close enough for the cold to reach her face.

“One debt is still owed,” Arabella said. She said it calmly. Her voice was still thin, but it was steady all the way through, and every word of it carried. “Dumuzid is still in Irkalla,” she said. “He is down there alone.”

The last of the laughing on the Ring stopped. Andy’s arms tightened around Laura without his telling them to, and he felt all three of her go still against him.

Ereshkigal held Arabella’s eyes. She didn’t speak. But the regret Andy had seen in her face on that seat was in it again, all of it, as if none of it had gone anywhere in seven thousand years.

Arabella looked at her a moment longer. Then she turned away, toward the far side of the Ring, where Dumuzid’s wife was waking.

Anna was half sitting up now, propped against Chloe, her head on Chloe’s shoulder. Dawn had an arm around her from the other side. Eden knelt close beside them in the ash with her long hair spread out behind her, watching Anna’s face. Anna’s eyes were open, though they didn’t seem to be holding on to anything yet.

Arabella crossed to them and knelt down in the ash.

“Here.” Chloe’s voice came out rough, scraped thin from everything she had spent on it, but it came. She shifted her weight to make room, keeping Anna’s head where it was. “She’s coming back. She’s been trying to.”

Anna’s eyes moved. They went slowly across the ash and found Arabella’s face, and stayed on it.

“Ara,” she said.

Arabella took her hand. She held it in both of hers, close against her own chest, and bent her head over it. “I am so proud of you,” she said. Her voice caught on it, once, hard, and she went on through the catch without stopping. “I love you. I love you so much, Anna. I always have. You're my sister. Since before there was anyone to write it down.”

Anna’s fingers closed on hers.

It was between one breath and the next. Nothing came. Nothing crossed the ash, and nothing moved at the rim, and then, a few paces from where Arabella knelt, the ash held a single shape that hadn’t been there a moment before. The shape stood upright, if it could be said to stand. A faint moonwhite light lay on it that came from nowhere Andy could find, and the light reached nothing but the shape—not the ash under it, not Arabella’s bent head, not the blasted trees behind. On the ash there was no shadow. A cold had come with the shape, different from Ereshkigal’s: not stone and dark water, but the clean, thin cold of a high place.

Andy’s hand was on Caledfwlch’s hilt. He hadn’t decided to put it there. He could feel what was standing on the ash.

The feeling came to him as everything had come tonight, through the same opening, and it was bigger than anything that had come through yet. He could feel Anna, warm and low and stirring, at the far side of the Ring. He could feel Ereshkigal, the cold and the dense, quiet weight of names. He had felt Mildred, earlier tonight, open into what she was in the dark behind her and take Abi-Eshu into it whole, and he had not thought he would ever feel anything larger than that.

What stood on the ash was larger than all of them, other than Mildred, perhaps.

Through the open bond he felt the same weight land in Laura, all three of her, a stillness that went right through her. Then it was in the others. He felt it travel along the bond from him to every one of them, one after another, through the same small new opening that had started in them minutes ago—and around him the women of his harem went quiet and turned toward the shape on the ash. Myra’s blind face came around to it as if she had heard her name. Claire’s ears went flat. Sumiku’s wings drew in close to her back. Sam’s hand shifted on Thrustworthy’s grip and then went still. Erin had been nearest Marissa, and Marissa’s arm had gone around her waist; Andy doubted Marissa knew it was there.

“Andy.” Laura said it low, from all three of her mouths at once. “What is that?”

He didn’t know. He only knew how much the shape on the ash weighed.

Something in him rose to meet it—the thing that had come up in him when Laura said always, the thing he had turned on the ward. It came up without being asked and stood level, and he realized he had been wrong. Power for power, he might be able to stand in front of what was on the ash and not be moved. He might. But it had come into him tonight, and he could feel, as plainly as he could feel the ward around the island, that what stood on the ash had had theirs for longer than there had been a word for long. He took his hand off the hilt. Laura’s hand found his and held it.

Arabella had lifted her head. She knelt there with Anna’s hand still held against her chest and looked up at the shape for a long moment, and nothing about her face was surprised.

“Verant,” she said, very softly.

Andy knew the name. He had heard it once, in a long hall with twelve doors in it, from a man in a robe half white and half black. The first of the Producers. The Verant were among them. And when Andy had asked, Horun had only said, That’s hers to tell you, if she wants to, and left it there.

Of everyone on the Ring, only two met them with level faces. Ereshkigal stood where she was and did not bow, and did not look away. And Anna, half sitting against Chloe, looked up at the light with her eyes clear for the first time since she woke, and nothing in her face moved either. Everyone else was staring.

“Arabella,” the Verant said.

It was three voices speaking as one. It didn’t echo, and it didn’t come from anywhere. It came from the shape the way the light did, from no place on it, and it arrived everywhere on the Ring at once, so that Andy heard it as plainly as if it had been said beside his ear.

“We have watched the endgame,” the Verant said. “As one watches the last moves of a long game on a board, when every piece left on it has been bought. It turned more often than We expected. We were pleased by every turn.”

“Oh, good,” Sam said under her breath. “Reviews.”

Nobody laughed. The Verant did not seem to hear it, or else they let it pass.

“All that is left now is the final scoring,” they said, “and the Wish. Then your contract is at its end, and you will have your Zi-Ba-Til. The final balance.”

Arabella didn’t look away from the light. Anna’s hand was still held against her chest. “Can the Zi-Ba-Til bring Dumuzid back?” she asked.

“No,” said the Verant. There was no pause before it. “It is a balance, Arabella. It is not a Wish. It is not so broad.”

On the ground, Anna said something to her. Andy heard it. He heard every syllable of it, as clearly as he could hear Sarah breathing behind him, and he didn’t understand a word. It was old, full of soft stops, a language that had been spoken beside rivers before anyone had thought to write a river down. Arabella’s hand tightened around hers.

“Can it keep our Memory Palace?” Arabella said.

The Verant did not answer. The silence went on. It went on long enough that Andy heard Dawn swallow, and Riley shift her weight behind him, and the wind come over the rim and go out again through the blasted trees. It wasn’t empty. It had weight to it, like the light had weight, as if something far larger than the Ring were turning a question over and finding it larger than it had expected.

“Yes,” the Verant said.

Arabella was silent. She knelt in the ash with Anna’s hand in one of hers. Her free hand had gone to the old scar on her palm. It closed over it, and opened, and closed again. She looked down at Anna, and then across the ash at Ereshkigal, and her jaw set, and loosened, and set again.

Andy held Laura’s hand. He didn’t say anything. Whatever she was weighing, it was hers, and he left it to her.

The Verant waited a few paces off, upright in their own faint light, and threw no shadow on the ash. They didn’t move, or speak, or seem to need to. Arabella didn’t look at them again. She knelt with Anna’s hand held against her chest, and her free hand lay open on her knee with the old scar turned up, and once, while Andy watched, her thumb moved across the scar from one end to the other, slowly, as if she were reading it.

Nobody else on the Ring moved, either. Sam had her hand back on Thrustworthy’s pommel and was not leaning on it. Erin stood with Marissa’s arm still around her waist and her green hands hanging open at her sides. At the rim, a little apart, Mildred stood with her hands folded in front of her, as she had stood before any of tonight began, and her eyes were on Arabella. Andy reached for her, as he had learned to reach for everything tonight, and found her warm and steady and quiet, and turned all the way toward the woman kneeling in the ash. Arabella had bound her on a beach on this island, long ago. Arabella had kept her in a stone body, and then, slowly, over more years than Andy could hold in his head, given her a name and a little room to move. Mildred was looking at her now as if she had never once in all that time seen her kneel.

Andy had stood in the Heart. Twelve tall chairs around a twelve-sided table, and eleven of her brothers and sisters sitting in them, leaning in to hear Reh-Iori sing, with torchlight on their faces and Reh-Iori’s cup turning in her hands. Is-Khar with his head thrown back, laughing. Haet with her chin on her hands. Horun pulling out the first chair and sitting down in it, unhurried, and turning to listen, and not turning back. And among them one chair empty, the third, with nobody in it but Andy, once, for as long as he could bear it. What the Zi-Ba-Til could keep was all that was left of them anywhere, all that was left of her siblings.

And he had stood at the bottom of a stair, in a gray hall full of written clay, and seen one small tablet standing apart on a ledge of its own, with hardly any marks on it, pressed too deep by a hand that had never held a stylus. A man had come down those stairs and written that himself. He was still down there.

Arabella’s jaw had stopped working. Her face had gone still, not the stillness of somebody holding something back, but of somebody who has finished the sum and is looking at the answer.

She lifted her head. She brought Anna’s hand up from her chest, kissed her fingers, then laid it in Dawn’s, carefully, folding Dawn’s fingers around it with her own, and held them there a moment. Dawn looked at her. Her ears had gone flat to her skull. Arabella let go.

Then she got to her feet, slowly, the way someone gets up who has been kneeling a long time and expects to feel it. There was ash on her knees and she didn’t brush it off. She turned to face the light standing on the ash, and inclined her head to it.

“Thank you,” she said, very softly.

The Verant inclined their head in return, or something in the light did, the suggestion of a head moving without any weight behind it. Arabella turned away from them. She walked a few paces out across the ash, toward the middle of the Ring, and stopped, with nothing between her and Ereshkigal but bare stone.

“Alla,” she said.

Ereshkigal looked at her.

“I have one thing left to give.” Arabella’s voice was level. It was quiet, and it didn’t need to be anything else; the whole Ring was holding still to hear it. “Take my life, in exchange for his. Take me, and let Dumuzid go.”

For a moment nobody moved at all.

Andy heard the words go out across the ash and stop. He heard them land. He felt them land, in the bond, in every woman along it at once, and in himself, low and cold and certain. The Verant’s light did not change. Ereshkigal did not change. The wind came over the rim and stirred the ash around Arabella’s feet and went on through the trees, and Arabella stood in it with her hands at her sides and waited, as if she had all the time in the world, and had decided to spend it here.

Anna came up off Chloe’s shoulder all at once, as if something had struck her, and got her hands under her and pushed, and got as far as her elbows before her arms began to shake. Her face had gone white to the lips. “Ara.” It came out of her cracked. “Ara— no. No. Not— don’t—”

Chloe caught her by one shoulder and Dawn by the other, and they held her there between them, half up, shaking. “Easy,” Chloe said. Her voice was still rough, and it scraped on the word. “Easy, Anna, you’ll— you can’t get up yet, you’ll fall—” Anna didn’t hear her. Her eyes were on Arabella and nothing else. Eden knelt beside the three of them without moving, her long hair spread on the ash behind her, and her eyes didn’t leave Anna’s face.

Andy was a step toward Arabella before he knew he had moved. Laura’s hand tightened on his, hard, and stopped him, and he stood there at the end of her arm with his heart going. Laura’s shock came down the bond all at once, from all three of her, so hard and so total that for a second he couldn’t tell it from his own. There was no thought in it. There was only the shape of a woman in a robe the white of morning mist, sitting down across from them in the Suite with her hands folded in her lap and nothing on her face at all, and telling them how Laura had come back.

“Arabella.” Laura said it in one voice, from three mouths. It shook. “You can’t— you brought me back. You don’t get to— not like this. Please.”

Arabella didn’t look around.

Sam had a joke for everything. She had had one ready all night, every time the night let her, and more than once tonight she had made Andy laugh when nothing else on the island could have. There was nothing like one anywhere in her face now. She had let go of Thrustworthy’s pommel, and the sword leaned against her leg, forgotten.

“No,” Sam said. “Hey. No.” Her voice was rough, and it didn’t sound like her. “You told us all on those chairs there’s nothing after. Nothing. You said it. You don’t get to say that and then—” She stopped. Her mouth went on moving a second after the words had stopped coming out of it.

Beside him, Claire had her notebook open against her forearm. She had been writing something—she was always writing something—and her pen had stopped halfway down the page, in the middle of a line, and hadn’t moved since. Through the bond he shared with her, her grief arrived whole. It didn’t build. It was simply there, all of it, all at once, the moment she understood.

He felt it in the others, too. Along the harem bond, through the opening that had started in them tonight and was still widening, he felt each of them feel her: the thin, banked warmth he had felt from across the Ring, almost nothing left in it. A little while ago they couldn’t have felt it. Now they could, every one of them, and they knew what it meant as well as he did. Myra’s blind eyes had filled. Riley’s hair had come up off her back and wound around Myra’s wrist, and Riley didn’t look down at it. Emi, kneeling by Emily with Katherine, had put four of her hands over her mouth. Katherine was crying without a sound. Norah had sat down in the ash where she stood, as if her legs had decided it for her, and Liesa stood behind her with both hands on her shoulders and her lips pressed white. Erin’s hand had gone out, low, toward the ground, as it went when she wanted something to grow, and stopped there, open over the ash, because there was nothing on this Ring she could grow that would help.

Sumiku went down on her knees in the ash, quietly and with complete control, her wings folding in tight against her back as she knelt. She folded her four hands in front of her, two over two. Then she bowed her head toward the woman standing on the bare stone, the woman she had called Amaterasu-no-Ōkami the day she was freed, and her lips began to move without a sound.

Andy knew what she was doing. Prayer was one of the few things she had kept.

At the edge of the ash, Sarah stood in Marie’s arms with both hands pressed over her mouth. A few minutes ago she had knelt in the ash at the rim of this Ring and held her while she wept. Now she stood with both hands over her mouth and watched what Arabella had done with it.

Ereshkigal had not moved. She stood still, straight-backed, with the bone-white crown level on her black hair. Her black eyes had been on Arabella. Now they left her. They went across the ash to Anna, half up on her elbows between Chloe and Dawn, white to the lips, shaking—and they stayed there. It was in her face again now, all of it. It wasn’t anger. It was regret, plain and old and unmoved by anything that had happened since, and she was looking at her sister through it.

Arabella turned her back on Ereshkigal and looked across the ash at Anna, held up on her elbows between Chloe and Dawn, and her face, still wet from Sarah, was entirely calm. “This is my last season,” she said softly, the streaks left by her tears still visible on her cheeks. “You know that, Anna. You’ve known it longer than anyone. My contract ends with it.” She let a breath go by. “Whatever I do tonight, I will be finished soon. That was always going to happen.”

Her hand had come up to her chest, the open one, and rested there, flat. “So this way the ending is mine,” Arabella said. “I get to choose it. I have never once chosen how anything ended. I’d like to choose this one.”

Anna shook her head. “No, Ara. The Palace—”

“I’m choosing to give it. All of them, Anna. Everything that’s left of them. Horun, and Reh-Iori, and Aru-Thes, and the rest.” Her voice dropped on that, and held. “It means nothing, Anna. My siblings and I, our time is over. My life, and the Palace, are a small price to pay for Dun. For you.”

She stopped. When she went on, it was quieter.

“And I can give it now. A little while ago I couldn’t have.” Her eyes went, for one moment, to Sarah in Marie’s arms at the edge of the ash, and came back. “It would have been paid in the wrong coin. I’d have been paying for something. For the river, for that whole season, for everything I let happen. Alla would have known the moment it touched her hand.” She shook her head, barely. “It isn’t that now. I’m not paying for anything. I love you. That’s all this is.”

“Ara.” Anna’s face was wet. Her fingers had closed around Dawn’s forearm so hard the knuckles stood out. “Ara, I don’t— I don’t want him back like this. Not for— not with you. I can’t— both of you, I can’t have you gone, I can’t—” Her breath caught and broke, and she couldn’t get the rest of it out, and she didn’t stop trying.

Arabella didn’t go to her. She stood where she was and let Anna look at her, and the calm in her face didn’t move.

Andy wanted to say something. He wanted it so badly that his mouth had opened for it, and nothing was there to say. There was no argument he could make that she hadn’t already made to herself and answered, kneeling in the ash with her thumb on that scar. And there was no one on this Ring who could talk anyone out of anything tonight. He had watched Laura try, and Sam, and Anna. He shut his mouth.

He could stop it. He knew that as plainly as he knew where Laura was standing. The thing in him was still there, quiet, under everything. He could walk out onto that stone and stand in front of her. He didn’t know what Ereshkigal would do then, or the Verant. He didn’t know if it would even work.

But he didn’t move. It was hers. For as long as she had existed, everything that happened to her had been decided somewhere else, by a contract or a Law or a Producer, and she had stood on this island and built circumstances around it and watched other people choose. She was choosing now. He was not going to be one more thing that decided for her.

Behind her, Ereshkigal had not spoken.

Andy felt her answer before she gave it. The weight she carried with her—the cold, dense press of names he had felt across the ash before he knew what it was—stirred, and something in it turned toward Arabella and rested on her. It didn’t go down into the rows, as it had when Ereshkigal searched for Laura. This was not a search, but something slower. It only rested there, on the woman standing on the stone, steady and almost still, as if it were weighing a coin in an open palm and listening for the ring of it.

Then it settled. “The Law accepts a life for a life,” Ereshkigal said. Her voice was level. It did not rise on any of it. Her eyes had come back from Anna to Arabella to say it, and when it was said they went back to Anna and stayed there, and the regret in her face did not change at all.

“Arabella,” said the Verant. She turned to them. “If you give your life before the Wish,” the Verant said, “you will not receive the Zi-Ba-Til.”

“I know,” Arabella said. “I accept it.”

The light on the ash rippled like light through water, and when the Verant spoke again it was in a voice Andy hadn’t heard from them yet. It was still three voices. But one of the three had come a little ahead of the other two, and it was softer, and newer, and the other two were a half beat behind it, as if they were catching up to something it had already said.

“We did not know,” the Verant said, “when We first wrote you into being, that you would come to this.”

Arabella looked at the light for a long moment. Something moved at the corner of her mouth that was nearly a smile.

“No,” she said. “Neither did I.”

Her voice was level when she said it. It had been level the whole time, through every word to Alla and every word to Anna, and Andy listened to it and heard the other voice under it, the one it used to be.

The last time he had heard that voice ask Ereshkigal for Dumuzid, it had come up through the chest he stood in, at the bottom of the Irkalla stair, young and plain and careful. It had caught once. And Ereshkigal had told her that his name was written and he was hers to keep, and the body Andy was in had gone heavy, all of it at once, from the chest down into the dust, and had climbed the stair carrying it.

Horun, in the corridor, walking beside him: She knew. She ruled anyway. The Law was hers to keep. And then, not to Andy: It cost her her sister. Seven thousand years, and not a word between them.

The beach. Arabella sitting in the wet sand with two pebbles in front of her, one for each of the regrets whose damage was still running. Greg’s season. And the first season she ever ran, with Dumuzid still down there in the dark. Every time a sacrifice is made thinking it will fix the math… that’s the echo of this season, still playing. Nobody’s ever closed it. And then she had looked at him and smiled, small and real. But if you wanted, you could close it. Or at least, close your own. And maybe that would be enough.

He had closed his own. Tonight, a few minutes ago, when Ereshkigal ruled that no debt was owed for Laura.

And a green room behind black gauze, a body sitting so still it was cold, and a voice coming up through it, even, each word laid on the one before it like stone on stone. He had heard it first in a vision, and thought it was meant for him. A soul that gives itself to escape its own guilt has not paid the ledger. It has only tried to. Guilt is a coin that rings false no matter how sincerely it is spent. The door has never opened for it.

And Sarah, crossing the ash on legs that had forgotten how. I don’t blame you, Arabella. I really don’t.

Arabella looked at Anna, held up between Chloe and Dawn. Then she looked at Ereshkigal, whose eyes had not left Anna once. Andy understood why she was doing it. He didn’t put it into words. He couldn’t have, even if he had wanted to. It was all there in front of him, every piece of it, and he could see where each one fit.

Laura opened her hand. He felt her decide to, a moment before she did it. Down the bond her grief was so large it felt like weather.

Go, she sent. She shouldn’t be by herself. Go to her.

He took one step toward Arabella. Then he stopped, and turned around. Come with me.

The other two of Laura had already left his back. He could feel them going toward the edge of the ash, toward her mother, and he felt them stop. Me? It came back uncertain. Andy, she— It’s you she’s waiting for. You’re the one who went down there. A pause, and something small and bewildered under it. I don’t even know her. Not like you do.

There wasn’t time to tell her, and there were no words that would hold it, and he didn’t go looking for any. He gave her everything.

He felt it go. It went down the bond whole, and he didn’t decide any of it: the willows on the far bank, and brown water in August, and the cold coming in over one shoe, through the canvas, through the sock. A radiator ticking, too hot, and paper snowflakes taped to a window, and a small damp head under a palm. Cold concrete in the dark, and a right hand lifting an inch toward a small bare foot, and going back down. A long hall carpet under the sconces, and a man a head taller with whiskey on his breath, and a plain white card held out to him between two fingers with an address on it she had known all her life, and one short, exact press out of the middle of a chest into the man reading it. Rough bark against one shoulder blade, a lit window across the street, two small hands finding each other over a yellow blanket, and the porch lights of Twin Yews Road going out one at a time until the last of them was gone.

All the memories. The breath that wouldn’t come until a girl came up in the middle of the river with a sketchbook held over her head. The warmth that came up slow under a breastbone when a boy with a split lip said She’s nice, and the slow care of looking for something inside that boy, and the breath let go when it was found. The sting held open on a five-year-old who frowned and said she wasn’t small. And the not going any closer, all night, under the maple, and what it cost.

He felt it land in her. All three of her stopped where she stood. Then the nearest of her lifted a hand and laid it flat on top of her own head, on her hair, and kept it there.

It came back to him down the bond in pieces, faster than he could follow. She had heard her own voice at five, from outside herself, telling a stranger on her step that she wasn’t small. She had heard Don’t let anyone make you small in the dark, in a voice that wasn’t her mother’s, thirteen years before the book was meant to reach her. She had stood in a nurse’s office she barely remembered, under a hand she had never once thought about since, and felt from the other side of it what the hand was holding back. She had watched Greg, younger than she had ever seen him, pat a card flat into his shirt pocket, and felt what the card was for: a house next door to a baby boy only a few weeks old. And under every one of them she had felt what he had felt the whole time he stood inside Arabella: a mother’s love, for a child who wasn’t hers to hold, and nowhere to put it.

Andy. It came up the bond shaking. That was— Was that her?

What I saw of her, he sent. In her Palace. And then, because he had only just found it out himself: I didn’t know it could do that.

Neither did I. She was crying. He could feel it in all three of her, and hear it, a few steps off, from the two of her who had stopped beside her mother. Sarah was looking at the two faces at her side. She looked at her daughter, and then across the ash at Arabella standing by herself on the bare stone, and then at the one of Laura still beside Andy.

“Go,” Sarah said. “Go on.”

The two of Laura with her stayed, and took her hands. The one beside Andy found his hand and held on.

They went together. Nobody stopped them. Sam looked at them as they passed and didn’t say anything, which was the most frightening thing she had done all night. They went past Claire with her pen still stopped in the middle of its line. They went past Sumiku on her knees with her four hands folded and her lips moving, and her wings stirred as they went by her and settled again. The ash was soft and gray under his shoes.

It was not far. It felt far. The Verant’s light was off to his left, lighting nothing, and Ereshkigal was ahead of him and to the right, straight-backed, her eyes on Anna, and between them, on the bare stone where the ash had been scuffed thin, Arabella stood by herself and waited for whatever came next.

She turned her head as they came. Her face was calm.

He had seen it a hundred ways since the morning he woke up on this island—arranged for a camera, teasing, cold, tired past anything he had words for, wet and unguarded on a beach with her hands knotted in her lap. He had never seen it like this. It was not the Host’s composure, but whatever had been underneath it all along, that he had never once been shown. There was nothing being held up in it. Whatever had been holding it up for longer than he could imagine had been set down a little while ago, at the edge of the ash, when Sarah took her hand.

Her eyes went past him to Laura at his side, and on to the two of her with Sarah, and stayed there a moment. A small line had come between her brows. Then her eyes came back to him.

Andy and Laura stopped in front of her, close enough to touch.

There was ash on her knees from kneeling by Anna, and ash on the hem of her dress, and the palm of her right hand was dark with dried blood where she had opened it for the drop that had summoned him. Up close he could see how tired she was. It was in the skin under her eyes, and in the two or three gray hairs at her temple that he had first noticed in his parents’ kitchen in Warrenville and had not seen since. He could feel it, too. This near, the warmth in her was so thin he had to hold still to find it at all.

Behind him the household had gone quiet. It was a different quiet from the one that had lain over the Ring all night, the quiet of people pinned and listening for the next blow. This was the kind of quiet that settles on people who have stopped being afraid of anything that can happen to them, and have only one thing left to watch. He could hear all of it. Sarah’s breath, catching. Dawn’s, through her teeth. Anna’s, ragged and fast, where she had sunk back onto her knees between Chloe and Dawn, and they had her by both arms and weren’t letting go.

Ereshkigal stood a few paces off and didn’t look at any of them.

“Andy,” Arabella said.

“Hey.”

Her eyes went to Laura beside him. “Laura.”

“Hi,” Laura said. It came from all three of her at once, from beside him and from the edge of the ash, and it came out small.

“You came, too,” Arabella said.

“Andy asked me to.” Laura’s hand tightened in his. “And I wanted to.”

The small line came back between Arabella’s brows. She looked at Laura a moment longer, and didn’t ask, and turned back to him.

“Before you go,” he said, and had to stop, because that was the first time he had said it out loud, and it went all the way in. He breathed. “Before you go, there are things you need to hear. From both of us. I’m not— I don’t want you to go without them.”

“Then tell me,” Arabella said. “I would like to hear them. I have always liked hearing what you have to say, Andy. You never once said what I expected.”

He nodded. He had thought he would know how to start. He had carried all of it up out of the Liminal and through everything since, and now he was standing in front of her with no idea where the beginning was. He found it anyway. “I’ve been through your Memory Palace,” he said. “All the way down to the Heart.”

She went still. It wasn’t the stillness he had seen on her all night, the held, counting stillness of somebody keeping her hands from shaking. Her whole body simply stopped, as if something in it had been unplugged. The color went out of her face and came slowly back. He felt it, too, with the new sense, as he had felt her from across the Ring: the thin banked warmth in her drew in on itself, sharply, and then let go again.

“You saw them,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I saw them,” Andy said. She didn’t ask which. For a moment she wasn’t looking at him at all; she was looking at something a long way down, at a twelve-sided table in torchlight. Her face tightened. He knew what she would say before she said it.

“Then you saw the rest of it, too,” she said. “On the way down.” Her voice stayed level, but only just. “Greg’s season. Katherine. Hecate.” At Greg’s name her eyes had gone to Laura, and come away again. “What I was, Andy, before I was any of the things you know.”

“Some of it,” he said. “A lot of it.”

“I am sorry. I would never have chosen for you to—”

“I’m not,” Andy said.

She looked at him.

“I’m not sorry,” he said. “I mean it. I’d go down there again.” He had to stop and get his breath back, and he did. “I wouldn’t have known you, otherwise. Not really. I’d have known the Host, and some mornings on a beach. I wouldn’t have known you.”

Arabella didn’t answer that. But the hand that had come up toward her chest, as if to cover something, went back down to her side.

“You told us about his season,” Laura said. “In your office. Remember? You told us all of it.”

Arabella looked at her. “Not all of it.”

“I know,” Laura said, gently. The line between Arabella’s brows deepened. Before she could ask, Andy went on.

“Do you remember the beach?” he said. “The morning you told me about your name. You asked me if I thought you had a soul.”

“I remember.”

“I told you yes.” He swallowed. “I don’t think it anymore. I know it.”

Her eyes stayed on his face.

“You had a heart, and a soul, a long time before Anna gave you the understanding of them,” he said. “You always talked about it as if she made you. As if you were—clay, until she touched you, and then you could feel things. That isn’t what happened. What she gave you didn’t put anything in you. It only let you see what was already yours.”

Arabella’s lips parted. For a while she didn’t say anything. When she did, her voice had gone so thin it barely carried the three feet between them. “How can you know that?”

“Because I was there.” He held her eyes. “I stood in you. In your body, inside the memory, the day Anna came back up out of Irkalla. On the open ground at the top of the stair. You were looking at the hole Dumuzid had gone down, and it was already there. In your throat first. Your throat was so tight you couldn’t get a breath past it, and your face was wet, and your hands just hung there, and you didn’t wipe any of it off.” His own throat had begun to close on it, and he let it. “That was before she got to you. Before she came up the stairs. Before she ever put her forehead on yours.”

He could see it. He would always be able to see it: the dust to Anna’s knees, the thing held flat against her chest, her warm hands landing on Ama-Bila’s shoulders.

“And when she did,” he said, “I waited. I waited for it to come across from her into you, like you always told it. And nothing came. Nothing new. It was the same ache. It didn’t get any bigger. It was already there, and it was already yours.”

Arabella didn’t move. Neither did Laura. He felt her listening down the bond, all three of her, and her surprise, slow and aching. She had never heard any of this.

He could feel it in her now. He hadn’t known he would be able to, and then he could, as everything had come tonight. The same ache. He had felt it from the inside on that open ground, and now he felt it from the outside, standing in front of her on the stone, and it was exactly the same. Seven thousand years, every season and every name, and it hadn’t changed shape at all. It was the oldest thing in her he could find. It had been there before Anna, before Geshtinanna, before any face she had ever worn, and it had never once been anybody’s but hers.

“You lifted your hand,” he said. “After. You touched your own face, where it was wet. Like you didn’t know what it was.”

Arabella’s hand came up. She didn’t seem to know she was doing it. It came up slowly, the scarred one, and touched her own cheek, where it was still wet from Sarah, and stayed there. And Andy stood in front of her and watched her do the same thing he had watched her do seven thousand years ago, from inside, and this time he could see her face while she did it.

She looked past him.

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to. He knew where Anna was, on her knees in the ash between Chloe and Dawn, held up by both arms, her face wet and white and turned toward them. She had heard every word of it. He had felt her hear it. At the words nothing came, something had gone through her that he could feel from where he stood, sharp and bewildered, as if a floor she had stood on for seven thousand years had tipped a little under her—and then, under that, slower, a kind of wonder that hurt. Her lips were moving. He didn’t think she knew they were. He felt Arabella look at her for a long time.

A few paces off, Ereshkigal waited. She hadn’t moved, and she didn’t move now. She stood with her hands at her sides and her eyes on her sister, and the Law she carried lay quiet in her, and she let them have it, all of it, as long as it took. Andy didn’t know if anyone had ever asked her for time before. He didn’t know if she had ever given it.

“I always thought she made me,” Arabella said at last. She said it to Anna, though it was too quiet to reach her. “I thought I was nothing at all until she touched me. I built everything I am on top of that. Every name.” Her hand came down from her face. “All this time.”

She was quiet a moment more. “Then she was the first one who ever stood close enough,” she said. “Wasn’t she. That’s all it was.”

“That’s all it was,” Andy said.

Arabella’s eyes came back to him. They were wet, and steady, and something in them had loosened that he had never seen loose before—something that had been wound tight around a story she had told herself for longer than there had been stories, and had just been told she didn’t need.

“I didn’t know I was waiting for anyone to tell me that,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “I think I was. I think I have been for a long time.”

“There’s more,” Andy said. “I’m not done.” Arabella waited. “Horun knew it too.”

Her breath stopped. Her eyes were on his. They didn’t move. “Horun,” she said.

It was barely a word. It was the way you say a name you haven’t heard out loud in so long that you aren’t sure, anymore, how it sounds in somebody else’s mouth.

“He was there,” Andy said. “In your Palace. He walked it with me, the whole way down. He walked in front.” He swallowed. “He wore somebody else’s face, at first. Then he told me his name.”

“Horun was there.” She said it as if she were setting it down somewhere careful, where it wouldn’t break. “He was there. In me.”

“The whole time.”

Beside him, Laura’s hand tightened on his. Arabella’s mouth moved, and nothing came out of it. He went on, because he had promised. “After the memory—after the stair, after Anna—I told him what I’d felt. That it was already in you. That you didn’t know.” Andy could see Horun’s face as he said it, the strange eyes, dark at the rims and silver at the center, turned away down the corridor toward a small square of daylight. “And he said, ’My sister never knew it. Not in all the time I knew her.’”

Arabella made a sound. It was small, barely a sound at all.

“And then he said you wouldn’t hear it from him.”

She laughed. It was not any laugh she had ever used in front of a camera, but an older one, from somewhere he had never been let into, and it came out of her wet and broken and real all the way through, and she put the back of her wrist against her mouth to stop it and it didn’t stop. “That is him,” she said behind her wrist. “That is exactly him. He would sit on a thing for a thousand years sooner than say it to my face.” Her eyes had filled. “He never once in his life said anything he didn’t have to.”

“He said one more thing,” Andy said. She lowered her wrist. “At the end. At the Heart. Before he sat down.” Andy’s voice had begun to go, and he didn’t try to stop it. He had stood in front of Horun at the threshold of that hall with his throat shut, and got it open somehow, and said I will. I’ll tell her. Every word. It had come out cracked down the middle. He had every word. He was not going to lose one of them now. “He said, ’Send my sister my love. Tell her we’ll all be waiting for her.’”

Arabella’s eyes filled the rest of the way and ran over. She didn’t do anything about it. She stood on the stone with her hands at her sides and let them run, and looked at Andy as though he had handed her something she had been told all her life was lost, and she was afraid to close her fingers on it in case it wasn’t real.

“Was he—” She stopped and started again. “Did he sit down? At the table?”

“In the first chair,” Andy said. “Between Haet and Reh-Iori. They were all there. Reh-Iori was singing.”

Arabella shut her eyes. “She always sang,” she said. “Every time. Whether anyone asked her to or not.” She kept her eyes shut. “Tell me. Tell me what they were doing.”

So he told her. “Reh-Iori had a cup in her hands. She kept turning it while she sang.” He could see it as he said it, the torchlight on the table, the ten faces around it. “Is-Khar was laughing. Throwing his head back. Horun said they were bad jokes, mostly his own. Haet had her chin on her hands, listening to Aende, and Aende was half out of her chair, pointing at something on the far side of the room. Hien was holding his hands out to Anor with something in them. Es-Kam’s eyes kept going around the table, face to face, as if he were studying who was there.” He stopped. The next part was harder. “And Tir-Eph was counting. With his finger. around the whole table, everybody. And when he got to your chair, the empty one, his finger stopped there. Just for a breath. Then it went on.”

Arabella’s eyes were still shut. Her lips had begun to move, a little. Andy realized she was saying their names.

He let it go down the bond as he spoke, on purpose this time: the torchlight, the table, each face as he named it. He felt it reach Laura. Beside him her lips were moving on the names after him, a half-beat behind Arabella’s.

“Reh-Iori turned to it once,” he said. “Your chair. Quick, like you turn to tell somebody something you know they’ll like. And she stopped with her mouth open, and then she turned back and kept singing. And Aru-Thes had his arm on the back of his chair. He took it down and leaned toward yours. Like he was about to make room for you.”

A sound came out of her then, low. It wasn’t a word. “He was made first,” she said, when she could. Her eyes were still closed. “Horun. He named every one of us, as we were made, and he was there when each of us went. Every one. He was the last of them to go, and he waited for every one of us.” She drew a breath that shook all the way in. “Of course he’s waiting.”

Andy didn’t know where they would wait now. He didn’t know what would happen to the Heart, or the table, or the twelve chairs, when the one who kept them was gone, and without the Zi-Ba-Til there was nothing anyone on this Ring could tell him. She had known that when she gave it up. She had weighed it with her thumb on the scar and given it up anyway. He didn’t say any of it. He let her stand there with her eyes shut and her brother’s message in her hands.

After a while she opened them.

“One more thing,” Andy said. “The last thing. Then I’m done.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I mean it this time.”

“He does,” Laura said. “I can feel it.”

The corner of Arabella’s mouth moved again. He took a breath. “I know you watched over Laura,” he said. “As much as you could. From the first time she and I ever met.”

Arabella went still again, differently this time.

“So do I,” Laura said. It came from all three of her mouths at once, in one voice, from beside him and from her mother’s side, and it shook. Arabella’s eyes went to her and stopped. “I felt it,” Laura said. “Just now. Andy— He showed me. Everything he saw in there. From where you were standing.” Her breath caught. “We didn’t know the bond could do that.”

Arabella took half a step back on the stone. Her hand had come up to her chest again, and this time it stayed there.

“You were on the other bank,” Laura said. “At the river. When the raft went down. You had your foot in the water when I went in to rescue Emi’s book.”

Arabella’s lips parted.

“You were the nurse.” Laura’s voice wavered, and she let it. “The day he got beat up at the fence. I— I remember a nurse. That’s all. I was so worried about him I hardly looked at you.” The one of her beside him touched her own hair again. “You fixed his face. You told me I didn’t have to earn his love. You put your hand on my head.”

“You weren’t meant to remember,” Arabella said. It was hardly a voice at all. “That was the whole of it, Laura. You were not meant to.”

At the edge of the ash Sarah had gone still between the two of Laura. Andy could hear her breathing, short and high, through her mouth.

“And you went into him.” Laura’s voice came steadier on it. “With your hands on his face. You were looking for something.” Her breath caught. “You were checking it was there. The bond.”

The corner of Arabella’s mouth moved. It went up, and stayed up, wet as her face was. “No,” she said, gently. “I knew the bond was there. I had known since the blanket.” Her eyes went to Andy, and rested on him a moment, fondly, and went back to Laura. “I was looking at him. Whether he had a good heart. Whether he loved you. He had come into my office bleeding for your mother, and I wanted to be sure.”

“And?” Laura said.

“And I never had to worry about him again.” She smiled.

“You sat on my step.” Laura didn’t stop. Her voice had begun to break, and she went on through the breaks. “In the dark. In my pajamas. You told me what my name meant. You told me my mom loved me more than anything in the world.” She drew a breath that shook all three of her. “And you told me not to let anyone make me small. That’s hers. That’s out of her book. She wrote it to me, and you— You came and sat on my step and said it to me. When she couldn’t.”

“Somebody had to say it to you,” Arabella said, softly. “She would have, if she could have come out.”

Sarah made a sound across the ash, small and broken off. The two of Laura with her held on.

“And the house.” Laura’s voice dropped. “You gave him the house. You made him want it. So I’d be next door to Andy.”

Arabella didn’t look away from her. “I knew who was next door,” she said. “Your mother asked that the two of you have every chance there was. That was one.” Her voice softened. “The rest you did yourselves. Both of you.”

“And the blanket, the day we met, him and I.” Laura’s voice went nearly to nothing. “You stood out there all night.”

Arabella looked at her for a long moment. “I couldn’t go any closer,” she said, in a small voice. “So I stayed where I could see the window.”

At the edge of the ash, Sarah had both hands over her mouth. Andy knew why. Nobody had come back across the lawn for Laura that night. Sarah had been inside 286 with the door shut. And across the street, the whole time, until the last light went out, somebody had been standing guard over her baby in the dark.

Sarah lowered her hands. “You stayed,” she said. It carried across the ash, thin and clear. It wasn’t a question.

Arabella looked at her, past Laura. She didn’t look away from Sarah’s face this time, either. “I stayed,” she said.

Sarah’s face crumpled. The two of Laura with her closed in on either side, and Marie closed around all of them, and Sandra stood at Marie’s back with her new hands open at her sides as if she had forgotten what they were for.

“Thank you,” Laura said. She said it plainly. All three of her said it, and this time it didn’t shake. “For all of it. For watching me. For the river, and the step, and the window, and the house next door, and all the other times I don’t know about, but you were there. For telling me she loved me, when she couldn’t.” Her voice caught, and came back. “I never thanked you. I didn’t know there was anything to thank you for.”

“I did not want—”

“I know. I felt that too. You never wanted anything back.” She swallowed. “And you only ever came close in somebody else’s face.”

So Laura came closer. The one of her beside him let go of Andy’s hand and stepped in across the last of the bare stone and put her arms around Arabella and held on. At the edge of the ash, the other two of her held on to her mother. Arabella’s arms stayed at her sides. Then they came up, slowly, and stopped short, and closed.

Laura turned her face and kissed her cheek, where Sarah’s hand had been. Arabella’s breath stopped. Her right hand, the scarred one, came up and came down on Laura’s head, on her black hair, and stayed there.

Andy had felt that hand come down once before, from the inside, on a small damp head in a room that smelled of floor wax. Laura didn’t duck away from it now any more than she had then. She turned her face up a little, and let it stay.

“You let me,” Arabella whispered. Her eyes had closed. “That day in the office. You looked up at me, and you let me.” Her hand moved once on Laura’s hair. “I have kept that.”

“Keep this one too,” Laura said. After a while the hand lifted. Laura let go of her slowly and came back to Andy’s side, and found his hand again. Arabella’s eyes stayed on her a moment longer. Then they came back to Andy, and she didn’t say anything, and neither did he.

Off to the side the Verant’s light stood on the ash, lighting nothing. They hadn’t made a sound through any of it. He could feel their attention on her, the whole vast weight of it, and it hadn’t moved from her once.

Then the new sense caught something far below the Ring.

It came to him unasked, as everything had come to him tonight: a point of warmth a long way down the slope, at the bottom of the lantern path, where the Hollow Garden lay in the dark. It was coming up. It was coming up the path faster than anyone could have run it, and he had never once been able to feel it before, and he knew it anyway. He knew it before he had a name for it. Then he had the name.

He had left Herman at Sarah’s gate earlier tonight, with his free hand on the top rail and the lantern at his side, waiting where nobody had asked him to wait.

Arabella didn’t feel him coming. There was too little left in her now to feel anything that far off; Andy could tell that from the warmth in her, thinner than it had been when he crossed the ash to her. Her eyes were still on Andy’s face.

The point came up off the end of the path and in among the blasted trees at the rim. Then Herman stepped out of them onto the stone.

He was dressed as he had been at the Gate: the night-colored chiton, the thin gold circlet, the caduceus in the crook of his arm, the lantern in his hand. The small wings at his heels were still beating when he stopped, so fast they blurred. Then they slowed, and folded, and were still.

He didn’t look at the Verant, or at the Queen, or at any of the women on their knees. He looked across the Ring until he found Arabella, and after that he didn’t look anywhere else.

Mildred stood a few paces from him at the rim. Her eyes came off Arabella for exactly as long as it took to meet his, and went back.

Across the ash, Sam’s head came around. Andy heard her say his name, under her breath, and nothing after it.

Arabella turned to see what Andy was looking at.

She saw him, and Andy watched her see him. Something went out of her face that he hadn’t known was still in it: the last of the Host, the last thin piece of anything she had been keeping up for anyone. He had thought it was all gone by now. It wasn’t, quite. It went, and she didn’t try to keep it.

“Herm,” she said.

Herman came across the ash. He came straight to her, and he didn’t hurry now. On the way he passed close by Anna, where she knelt between Chloe and Dawn, and his free hand went out and rested on her hair a moment, and went on. Anna didn’t look around, although some of her paleness faded. Her eyes never left Arabella.

He stopped in front of her. Andy stepped back to give him room, a pace and no more, and Laura stepped back with him.

Neither of them said anything at first. Andy could see Herman’s face, and it was doing nothing at all. There was no grin starting at the corner of it, and nothing dry getting ready behind it. Andy had known him as the maintenance man who labeled every wire, and as the man who had led them down into the dark under the Hotel, and once, at the foot of the Gate, as something plainer than either. He had never seen him with nothing to say.

He could feel him now, too, up close. Herman was old, older than Andy had any way to measure, and under all of it he was grieving, plainly, like anyone else on the Ring.

“You didn’t call,” Herman said.

“There wasn’t time.” Arabella’s voice was faint. “And you had a gate to mind.”

“I said I’d come running.” He looked down, once, at the folded wings at his heels. “So I ran.”

The corner of her mouth moved.

“How did you know?” she said. “Who—”

“Ara.” He said it as if it answered everything. “It’s me.”

Herman looked past her then, for the first time, at the rest of it: the bare stone, the Queen standing where she had ruled, the Verant’s light, the women on their knees. When his eyes came back to her, they had gone careful.

“All of it?” he said quietly. “Your Palace. All of them?”

“All of them.”

Herman didn’t say anything for a long time. Andy watched him take it in, what it was and what it had held and what she was putting down, and he thought that apart from himself and the Verant, Herman might be the only one on the Ring who knew what it weighed.

“You never did know when to quit,” Herman said at last.

“No,” Arabella said. “I never did.”

“The day I met you, you were already telling everybody where to stand.”

“Somebody had to.”

“Somebody always has to, with you.” He let his breath out. “Ara—”

He stopped. Andy waited for the rest. It didn’t come. Herman stood there with her name in his mouth and nothing after it, and his hand tightened on the lantern until the handle creaked, and still nothing came. Then, all of a sudden, he reached out, dropping the caduceus and the lantern, holding Arabella tightly in a hug.

“I know, Herm,” Arabella said gently, putting her arms around him. “I know.”

“I’m saying it anyway.” His voice had gone rough. “I love you. I’ll miss you. Every day there is. There’s going to be a lot of them, and I— I’ll miss you on every one.”

Her eyes filled again. She let them.

“Look after Anna,” she said.

“You know I will.”

“You’re a good friend, Herm.”

Something went across Herman’s face. Andy didn’t know what it was. It was older than he was, and it was almost a smile.

“I hoped for a little more than that,” Herman teased her.

Arabella looked at him through all of it, out of a face that had almost nothing left in it, and for one breath there was something in her eyes that Andy had never seen there in all the time he had known her: quick, and bright, and wicked. It was the youngest he had ever seen her look.

Herman laughed. It came out of him once, and broke.

“Fine,” he said. “You win.”

He leaned in and kissed her forehead. He stayed there with his eyes shut, and she shut hers, and neither of them moved. Then he straightened.

“Safe travels, Ara.”

He stepped back to where Andy stood, at his shoulder, and stopped there with the lantern hanging at his side.

Arabella’s eyes went to Ereshkigal. The Queen still stood a few paces off, where she had stood through all of it. She had not moved. Her eyes were on Anna.

Andy knew what it meant. He stepped forward and took Arabella’s hand anyway—the right one, the bloodied one, with the old scar under the blood—and held it. It was warm, barely. Her fingers closed on his. Laura stepped forward, and took Arabella’s left.

“On the beach,” he said. “You asked me to remember you.” He had to stop. He made himself go on. “When you were gone. Not just as the Host. As yourself.”

“I remember.”

“I will.” His voice cracked straight across, and he went on through it. “I’ll remember you. All of it. Every word you ever said to me. Every— I remember everything. You know I do.”

“I know you do.” Her thumb moved once across his knuckles. “It was the one thing about you I never had to worry about.”

“I love you,” Andy said. It came out of him before he had decided to say it, and once it was out he didn’t want it back. “You’re family. You’ve been family the whole— I didn’t know what to call it. I do now. You’re family, and I never knew just how much, or for how long.” He breathed. It caught, and he breathed again. “And I’m proud. I’m so proud I got to know you. I’m proud I got to know you at all.”

Her hand tightened on his. Hard. Harder than he would have thought she had left in her. “Thank you, Andy,” Arabella said.

“Thank you.” He could barely get it out. “For her. For Laura. For all of it.”

Arabella turned her head to Laura.

“I love you, too,” Laura said. It broke in the middle, and she let it. “And I’m grateful. I’m so—” She stopped, and found it again. “I just wish I’d known. When I was little. That I had somebody else. Another mother, watching out for me from across the street.” Her mouth shook. “I’d have waved.”

Arabella’s breath caught. Through the new sense Andy felt the word go into her, and go deep, deeper than he could follow—past Laura, past the maple and the step, down to a place in her he had never been shown, not in all the rooms of her Palace he had walked. For a moment her eyes left Laura’s face and went out past the rim, to the dark sea with nothing on it, as if she had heard someone call her from a long way off. Then they came back.

“Mother,” she said, very quietly. “Do you know, I—” She stopped, and didn’t finish it. Her hand tightened on Laura’s. “It is a good word,” she said. “Thank you for giving it to me.” She smiled. “And I would have waved back.”

She looked at the two of them a moment longer. Then she let go of their hands.

She didn’t turn to Ereshkigal at once. She looked past them first, across the ash, to where Anna knelt between Chloe and Dawn with her face white and wet and her arms held, and she looked at her for a long time. Andy could hear Anna breathing. Short, fast, through her mouth. He could hear that she was trying to say something and that nothing would come.

“I’m glad it was you,” Arabella said to her.

It was quiet. It reached Anna anyway. Andy felt it reach her—felt something in her break open and stay open.

Then Arabella turned away from all of them and faced Ereshkigal.

Ereshkigal’s eyes came off Anna, slowly, and found her. For a moment the two of them only looked at each other across the bare stone, the Queen of the Great Below and the woman who had once stood in front of her seat and been told no. Then Ereshkigal inclined her head.

“Ara!” Anna cried.

It tore out of her. She wrenched her arms out of Chloe’s hands and Dawn’s, and came up off her knees, and fell, and got up again. She came across the ash toward Arabella on legs that wouldn’t hold her, reaching.

She was too late. Before Anna could reach her, Arabella began to come apart.

It started at her edges. Gray ash lifted away from her—from the ends of her hair first, and her fingertips, and the hem of her dress—and drifted down onto the stone. There was no wind. It simply let go of her and fell, gently, a little at a time, and then more. It moved inward. There was no sound at all.

Nobody on the Ring made one, either. For the space of a breath, every one of them stood or knelt exactly where they were and watched it, and Andy could hear the breath they were all holding, and none of them let it out.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look down at herself. She stood with her shoulders straight and let it happen, as if it were something she had been waiting for a long time and had decided to meet standing up.

She looked back over her shoulder at Andy, and at Laura beside him.

She smiled at them. It wasn’t the Host’s smile. It was something sad and true, and he had seen it before. She held out her hands, one to each of them. Andy took the right one, the scarred one. Laura took the other.

His knees gave. He didn’t decide it; they simply went, and he was kneeling on the bare stone in front of her with her hand in both of his, looking up at her face. Laura went down beside him onto the stone, still holding on.

It was already going. He could see the stone through her fingers. They had gone pale, then paler, almost clear, and the ash was lifting from them even as he closed his hand around them.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was almost nothing, and it was everywhere. “For understanding that this was always the ending.”

There was one thing left to give her. He had been carrying it since the morning on the sand, when she leaned over and whispered it in his ear and asked him for nothing, and he had promised her anyway.

He lifted his face toward hers and whispered it, where only she could hear.

“Ama-Bila.”

The name of her baseline. The one Horun had given her when she was made, the third of them, before there was anything to call her by. Nobody alive remembered it.

Somebody did now.

The lines around her eyes softened. It helps, she had said on the beach, when he promised. She didn’t say it now. Her eyes went to Laura, last, and stayed there.

Around him, the women of his harem were weeping, as the women in the vision had wept.

He heard all of them. Sam had gone down on her knees in the ash beside Thrustworthy, both hands over her face. Claire’s notebook had fallen shut at her feet, and her grief came down their bond so hard it doubled his. Myra stood with her blind eyes wide and streaming, turned toward Arabella, as if she were watching a light go out that nobody else could see. Riley had her arms around Myra from behind. Emi was crying into Katherine’s shoulder with four of her arms around her, and Katherine held on and wept without a sound. Norah, Liesa, Erin. Chloe and Dawn, on their knees where Anna had torn loose from them. Eden, still, with tears on her face. Sumiku knelt with her four hands folded and her lips still moving, and the tears ran straight down off her chin into the ash.

Beside him Laura was weeping. Her grief came to him through the bond as sharp as his own, from all three of her at once, and under it, holding it up, the thing that had been under everything since the blanket, and he and she were in it together, on their knees on the same stone. She had Arabella’s left hand in both of hers, held against her own wet face. The other two of her were around her mother. Sarah had one hand out toward Arabella, reaching for her across the ash, and her daughter’s arms were around her, and she was crying into the nearer of them. Marie had a hand pressed over her mouth. Andy had heard what Marie used to say about Arabella, back when Laura first came home. She wasn’t saying any of it now. Behind them Sandra stood with her new hands open at her sides, looking at the woman who had stood in front of her thirty years ago and carried out what Greg had asked for, while all of them watched. Her face was wet.

Marissa had reached Anna. Anna had gone down a step short, on her knees in the ash, both arms still out, and Marissa’s arms had come around her from behind and held her there.

At the rim Mildred stood with her hands no longer folded. They hung open at her sides. Arabella had bound her, and kept her, and in the end given her a name, and Andy didn’t think anyone in all that time had ever asked Mildred what she thought of her. In the dark at her back, eyes opened, a great many of them, and every one of them was turned on Arabella. They stayed open. They didn’t blink. Andy reached for her with the new sense and found her warm all the way through, and grieving, and not at all sure what to do with it.

Behind Andy, Herman hadn’t moved. He stood with the lantern hanging from his hand and watched her go, and he didn’t look away from any of it. Andy didn’t know how many people Herman had watched go, in all the time he had been doing what he did. He watched her as if she were the first. His lips were moving, barely. With the hearing that caught everything now, Andy could hear what he was saying, and it was only her name, over and over, under his breath.

The Verant’s light rippled, and went on rippling. The cold that had come with them thinned. Andy felt their attention on her, all of it, held perfectly still. Then the light inclined, the suggestion of a head bowing, and stayed bowed.

Ereshkigal had not moved. She watched Arabella go. Her voice had never risen once tonight, and the regret in her face had not changed since Arabella spoke Dumuzid’s name. It changed now. Her eyes were wet, and this time something ran over and down her pale face and she let it. Then her eyes went to Anna, on her knees in Marissa’s arms.

Anna looked up.

For a moment the two of them looked at each other across the ash. Seven thousand years of silence, and the woman going to ash on the stone between them was the one who had come down the stair to ask. Neither spoke.

Andy felt Arabella go.

He felt it in his hand and in the new sense both. The thin warmth in her, the last of it, went thinner. Her breath went shallow, and shallower. He felt her heart under it, slow, and slower. He held on.

Her hand was ash in his.

His fingers closed on it, and it went through them, and fell. Beside him, Laura’s hands closed on nothing.

The last of her came down onto the stone where she had stood, gray and soft and light. It settled. Nothing moved in it.

The last of the twelve was gone.

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Author's Note

VOTING IS OPEN FOR THE SIXTH CHALLENGE! Vote the girls according to how well they did their job during the Challenge. You score them individually here: https://forms.gle/UnPp1EGAx9fyh2jT9

Voting is open until Sunday, November 15 at 11,59am CET.

Unfortunately neither Strawpoll nor the poll function in CHYOA allows to create a poll where you score each character individually without rankings, so I had to use Google Forms for this, and in order to ensure people don't vote repeatedly, Google requires to log in before submitting votes. To be clear, NO EMAILS ARE COLLECTED. However, if you feel uncomfortable, you can cast your vote via DM here or on CHYOA.

Thank you!

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AMAs for both yours truly and the cast, post-season finale, are accepting submissions, here:

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