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When Tethys closes her eyes at night, she sees herself dancing for a dragon amidst piles and piles of unmoving bodies. That dragon has watched her since that first night, all those years ago, when she attempted a trembling twirl, and somewhere deep inside of Tethys, it feels like she’s never stopped spinning.
She dances in a small beam of light, subtle as puppet strings, and the glow illuminates the dragon’s attentive red eyes, its hulking teeth and claws. Tethys thinks the darkness must spread ad infinitum beyond the dragon, but she can’t see past its bulk and she doesn’t dare leave the spotlight where, at least, the movement of her dance captivates the dragon and keeps it from coming closer.
It is either solace or curse that Tethys doesn’t recognize any of the bodies, can’t see their faces. They are the body of this dragon’s hoard, and she alone the crown jewel.
Tethys dances, and the dragon watches, and the darkness never moves.
...
It takes King Joshua all of a month to gently suggest Tethys leave Jehanna. She spends that month waiting on Gerik and Marisa. Both of them have been wayfarers for as long as Tethys has known them, bound to no king or cause, and yet Gerik has found new life as the king’s right hand man. Here, he looks younger, not just his smile but also in comportment. There is purpose in his step, and it makes him kinder.
Marisa falls in with the hoards of sellswords who flock to the city to find work in its reconstruction, some of them men twice as burly and three times as old. At first they find her silence intimidating and challenging all at once, but Marisa has a way with her sword that inspires people.
Tethys waits those two weeks like a foreigner in her own country, unable to muster the audacity to tear Gerik and Marisa away from happiness, the chance to make their lives better.
It isn’t like she’s alone, not exactly. People ask her to dance, put coin in her hand and ask for the dance she put on for the Demon King. The sandy cobblestone feels dry under Tethys’s heels, and the steps of her dance are the same but they don’t culminate in a rejuvenated cry, in more blood in soil. Her audience claps. It feels like the winding of a toy.
The king flags Tethys over one day, and she instinctively glances over his shoulder expecting Gerik to be there but he isn’t. It’s just Joshua, Joshua alone. Tethys hates him a little bit. He took Gerik away.
Immediately, a voice inside Tethys reminds her that Gerik took himself away, that Gerik chose to stay. That life with Tethys hadn’t been enough for him.
She doesn’t know what face she’s making.
King Joshua takes out a coin, but instead of suggesting Tethys make a bet with him, he begins by saying, “You know, Gerik told me how the both of you met.”
“Oh? I’m sure he recalls it differently from how it happened.” Tethys curls a strand of red hair behind her ear, flashing the king one of her trademark mysterious smiles. She never had told Gerik the worst of it.
“I’m sorry,” Joshua says. “The state of Jehanna is my fault. If I had done better, if Mother and I had done more, we might have been able to ease your burdens.”
Tethys smiles again and shakes her head at the man who had been born with everything Tethys had wanted in her younger years, the man who would get the rest of it too. “No. The only people I blame are my parents.”
“Not the system that failed you?”
If Tethys were being honest, she’d hated the world almost the entire time she’d been on the streets, huddled in alleyways with Ewan shuddering at her side. All those people had walked past them without even looking down. Just another two dead orphans in the big scary world.
Tethys recalls dead bodies on the end of Gerik’s sword too, unfortunate men who had accepted the wrong coin.
“No,” she says. “It’s not like anyone owed me anything. I saved myself… As a mercenary, you understand.”
“Those days as a mercenary were some of the loneliest of my life,” Joshua says.
“I suppose you prefer kinghood, then,” Tethys says, and it’s only after Joshua falls quiet that she realizes how much of her personal feelings must have snuck into her tone.
Joshua looks as if he means to say something - more advice, maybe - but instead he studies Tethys with warm, sad eyes and says, “I know my words don’t mean anything to you, so I guess I’ll just ask you outright. What do you intend to do now? If you’re waiting for Gerik to tire of me and go back to gallivanting around Magvel, he won’t.”
Tethys knows that, of course, knew without needing the king to tell her, and somehow she finds a way to resent him more. It isn’t enough that Joshua’s taken the fragile stability she’s carved for herself, living as a mercenary; he demands she confronts the loss as well.
For a second, out of spite, she envisions that future: one where she stays in Jehanna and dances for the builders and the soldiers in Gerik’s training hall and the curious civilians eager to lay their eyes on some terrible artifact of history. This Tethys would curtsy at the king, keeping her head low, or maybe even take a husband she can’t imagine herself caring for.
Spite, Tethys thinks, is ugly, and besides, it isn’t like she can refuse the king. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you didn’t want me around for some reason,” she says.
Discomfort flashes across the king’s features. “It wasn’t my intention to suggest that,” he says, and his uncertainty manifests in a unkingly pause that Tethys relishes. It wasn’t merit that made Joshua a king. Just luck. “I want to make amends. I...may not be much of a king, but you are part of my people, and I want you to be happy.”
“And you suppose my happiness lies elsewhere?” Tethys says. “How forward of you, Your Majesty, to presume you know me so intimately.”
Joshua offers her a grin she hasn’t seen him wear since the war had finished. “A hard sell, I know. Why don’t we make a wager on it?”
“On what? My happiness?” Tethys doesn’t make a face but it’s a close thing. Instead, she pins him with her dark gaze, squaring her shoulders so that she faces him for the first time. “I doubt you’ll be playing with the same stakes as me.”
“I have a friend in Grado,” Joshua says. If Tethys has deterred him any, he doesn’t show it. “One year. If she hasn’t convinced you that you deserve more than this by then, I’ll give you riches beyond your wildest dreams.”
“You don’t know me nearly as well as you proclaim to, if you think that’s what I want,” Tethys says.
“Anything you want,” the king vows. “You name it.”
In spite of everything, Tethys hasn’t thought him cruel until just this moment, to dangle a person like a prize to be won and challenge Tethys to make herself miserable for him. She doesn’t let herself think of the alternative, that Joshua is so certain he is right (and Tethys wrong) that he doesn’t even consider this a gamble.
Grado holds nothing for Tethys, but neither does Jehanna, and admitting that hurts more than any king or bet could.
...
Grado is a nation devastated, the deaths of its upper echelon apparent in every shadow of the capital city. Here too, the citizens are rebuilding, but morale seems low without the guiding hand of Prince Lyon and even the skies overhead cast the city in somber hues.
Tethys recalls little of the Grado caravan as they bid their farewells to King Ephraim and Princess Eirika, promising to keep in contact, but she wonders if they see their handiwork in every weary face, if they remember that they helped ruin Grado this way.
Here, no one asks to see Tethys’s dances.
She stays in the capital for longer than she cares to. Joshua’s friend lives in the southeastern most outstretch of Grado, far enough it takes almost two weeks for Tethys to find a caravan heading that direction and she still has to take the last two days alone.
Tethys remembers Natasha - blonde and fair as the sand - and she spends a good portion of the trek ruminating on what manner of probation Joshua must have devised to send Tethys to a priestess. She has never been particularly religious, especially in her teenage years. If Joshua intends to show Tethys the grace of the goddess, Tethys is going to leave immediately, bet be damned.
Instead of a church, however, Tethys winds up in front of a small wooden hut that looks like it might have been a shed once. Moss creeps between the gaps in the wall planks, and the windows are perpetually cloudy. When Tethys knocks on the door, taking extra care not to break it, the Natasha who opens it might as well have been a completely new person.
She wears her blonde hair in a bun and has discarded the white veil and dress that had become her signature during the war in favor of brown trousers and a beige shirt Tethys suspects she plucked off of a scarecrow. It clearly took a moment for Natasha to recognize Tethys, blue eyes studying Tethys’s face before dropping to take in her warm travelling coat. Gerik had purchased it for her when he’d learned she was heading south for the winter, and the careful craftsmanship stood out starkly against the backdrop of rural Grado.
“Is something wrong?” is the first thing Natasha says, and it’s a strange enough greeting that Tethys thinks she must be expecting bad news.
“King Joshua sent me here,” Tethys responds after a pause.
The confusion in Natasha’s face clears up. “Ah! To help?” Tethys shifts uncomfortably as it occurs to her that Joshua hasn’t informed Natasha of the wager at all. There are implications there, about his confidence but also about what he thinks she needs, and Tethys would rather not think about them at all. Natasha misreads her discomfort. “Oh! Please come in! You must be tired.”
The inside of Natasha’s house is cozy, if still chilly from the winter. There is only one room: Natasha’s bedroll is shoved in the corner nearest the stove, while the opposite wall is covered in shelves filled with supplies. Tethys guesses that most of them would be medical and is surprised to see a few hammers and spools of rope.
“I’m glad you came before I left since I was just about to step out,” Natasha says. “One of the villagers is due any day now, and the midwife caught a fever.”
“You’re going...to birth a baby?” Tethys repeats for confirmation, and she only just manages to stop herself from asking Why?
Natasha’s eyebrows knit together. “I suppose you don’t have to come, but I don’t have any food here since I didn’t know how long I’d be away… You will come, won’t you?”
“It seems I don’t have a choice,” says Tethys. What else is new in her life?
Natasha beams. It’s the kind of smile Tethys has only seen a few times in her life. Ewan has never been much of a smiler, not as a child, small and lost, and not into his teen years when his hunger to become something more eclipsed his desire for camaraderie or leisure. Gerik’s smiles have always been personal, almost private, and Tethys has always had to pry Marisa’s smiles out of her.
Natasha smiles, and it is overwhelming and disarming at once. There is no deeper meaning to it; she gives the smile for free and turns away before Tethys needs to reciprocate. It prickles the skin on Tethys’s arms.
How peculiar, to be a creature who believes the best in people. Tethys cannot imagine it, and yet, when Natasha brushes past Tethys and holds the door open for her, Tethys follows.
...
It only ends up taking three days for the baby to be born, even though the expecting mother had greeted them looking so close to bursting, Tethys feared she would go into labor immediately.
Childbirth is not something Tethys has experience with, but Natasha brews some herbal remedy to ease the mother’s pain and quicken the process. She coaxes the baby girl out while Tethys washes and rewashes towels.
Only later, when the baby is asleep against the mother’s chest and both Natasha and Tethys step outside of the room to let them rest does Natasha confess she has never birthed a child before either.
“I couldn’t tell,” Tethys says honestly. Natasha’s hands had been steady as she checked the baby’s airways, cleaned her of blood, and presented her to her mother.
“I knew how it worked, but I read all the midwife’s books and notes too.” Natasha laughs. She holds out her hands to show Tethys how they’re trembling. “I’m so glad it turned out well.”
“Why would you do all this?” Tethys asks finally. “Surely someone else could have…”
“Probably,” Natasha agrees. “It’s a small village, so someone else probably has a bit of experience but… I came here to help. I’ll do anything.”
“So you’re just helping anyone at all?” Tethys’s mind returns to Joshua and how he sent her here. How Natasha was meant to help Tethys, and how that has turned into Tethys helping Natasha help people.
Natasha looks surprised too. “Everyone in need,” she says. “Did… Did Joshua not tell you? Why I’m here?”
“No,” Tethys says, and while she doesn’t regret rebuffing the king’s explanations, she feels a spike of irritation that he’s still managing to inconvenience her. “He thinks I’m unhappy in Jehanna and that I’d be better off here.”
“Oh,” says Natasha. The confusion only resurfaces for an instant before it melts into something far more thoughtful. “ Are you unhappy there?”
Tethys doesn’t know whether to answer truthfully and settles for a neutral, “Not more so than I’d be anywhere else.”
Even as the words leave her mouth, Tethys thinks she would have outright lied to Joshua, and even to Gerik. Something about them, their complete satisfaction with where they’ve ended up, brings out a competitiveness in Tethys she’s never noticed before, and maybe she and Ewan are more alike than either of them have previously thought. As much as Tethys hadn’t wanted to stay in Jehanna, she wanted less to admit that to anyone.
But that urge subsides when it comes to Natasha. Tethys wonders if maybe Natasha isn’t happy either - not in the manner of loss or grief, but a primal desire to help others… There’s hunger there too.
“In five years,” Natasha says, “these people will probably die.” She speaks with such certainty that Tethys doesn’t doubt her word for a moment. Life has given Tethys no reason to believe in its mercy.
“Do you know how?” she asks.
“An earthquake will destroy the southern part of Grado… Those who don’t die immediately will starve. Villages - no, cities will fall, and… I won’t be able to stop it, but I’ll do whatever I can to prepare for it.” Natasha drops her gaze from Tethys’s face to the floor. “I wish Joshua had told you. This isn’t - it’s dangerous here and you deserved to know that before you came.”
Tethys almost tells her that she doesn’t intend to stick around for more than a year, that the bet will expire before the earthquake hits, but instead she says, “King Joshua knows and the only person he’s sent to help is me?”
“I - it isn’t his fault,” Natasha says, though her frown isn’t directed at Tethys. “Of course...we considered evacuating everyone, but Lord Duessel said the capital hasn’t consolidated enough manpower to reach everyone in Grado yet.”
She sends Tethys a furtive glance, but her gaze lingers on Tethys’s jewelry, her Jehannan attire, and Tethys knows. Evacuation has never been on the table, not after Prince Lyon’s war. Renais and the other countries are rebuilding, and even if Natasha could gather all of her people, they’d have nowhere to go.
Tethys knows a little about apathy, about how a person could see another in need and feel no obligation to help.
“Grado killed Jehanna’s queen,” she says. The villagers here played no part in the war, and yet, their graves will be built upon those sins.
Natasha leans against the door. Her work clothes don’t suit her, making her look more human than holy. If Tethys didn’t know better, she wouldn’t have pegged Natasha for a cleric at all.
“I think it sounds bleaker than it is,” Natasha says. “We know it’s coming, so we’ll be ready. We can start fortifying the cities and building new houses in the north. That way, we can move more people to safety… Even in villages like this one, we can start reinforcing the buildings and storing food.”
It isn’t too far off from what King Joshua is doing in the north, and Tethys supposes that makes sense. Prince Ephraim - King, now - had led his campaign straight through Grado to the capital. “I’m not sure I’ll be much help when it comes to construction,” Tethys says.
“That’s fine! There’s always things to do. How are you with sewing?” Natasha asks, undeterred. “The winter after the earthquake will be particularly hard, so we’ll need to distribute clothes to people who’ve lost their homes and possessions.”
Tethys had sewn Ewan’s first winter coat herself, crooked stitches, uneven hems, and all. “I can - “
“And there will be people who are frightened or angry, especially now, who just need a listening ear,” Natasha continues. “I’ll do my best to offer church services, and your dances can raise their spirits.”
“What does your goddess think about this?” Tethys cuts in. It’s cruel, but the last thing she wants to do for these people is dance. “I’m sure to some people, this is just penance.”
“...yes, perhaps there are people who think that,” Natasha says softly. A curl of hair has slipped free of her bun, and she tucks it behind her ear. “But I don’t believe the goddess is so merciless. Somehow we’ve deviated from her light and we must find our way back, as best as we can.”
If sin begets further hardship, Tethys doesn’t know what she and Ewan must have done to deserve their lot in life. But that kind of helplessness is not something other people understand, so instead Tethys says, “Is that really what you believe?”
Natasha smiles again, but this one is crooked. “I used to. At least, I think that’s what my mentor would have said, but...I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what the goddess is planning. I just know that whatever it is, we have to get through it and we have to do everything we can to help others get through it too.”
There’s no way for an army to defeat an earthquake, but...as far as punishments go, Tethys thinks helping Natasha isn’t so bad.
...
Natasha only has one bedroll, which she offers to Tethys without hesitation.
“And you intend to sleep where? On the table? The floor?” Tethys inquires. “Despite all appearances, I don’t bite. We can just share.”
Besides, the stove only does so much to stave off the winter chill, and if Natasha actually minds Tethys’s warmth pressed against her side, she doesn’t mention it.
A day after they get back to the shed, Natasha returns from the village and presents Tethys with a new outfit, almost identical to Natasha’s, comprising of a burlap shirt and pants, both comically large for either of them. “You have a good coat already, but I thought you’d be more comfortable in these,” Natasha explains.
Tethys has difficulty articulating how much more uncomfortable burlap is than her sleek top and maneuverable pants, not when Tethys doubts these villagers have ever seen the materials used to make her dancing outfit before. Besides, Natasha looks at Tethys hopefully and Tethys can’t refuse.
Natasha wakes up before the sun and spends the first hour of the day praying. She slips out of bed so silently that Tethys doesn’t discover this until she wakes up one morning, just as the first rays of light are peeking over the horizon, to an empty bedroll. When Tethys sits up, thinking Natasha must have gone to use the privy, she finds her kneeling before the window.
Natasha leaves her hair down when she’s in the shed, and the image of her with her head bowed, blonde hair falling over her shoulders like a veil, reminds Tethys of a beggar. Despite the pain she must be in from kneeling, Natasha doesn’t move. The air in the shed stills all around her, almost portrait-like, and Tethys doesn’t dare disturb it.
The sun is above the treeline when Natasha finally opens her eyes and notices Tethys watching her, still half under the covers.
“Oh,” she says, “you didn’t have to wait for me like that.”
“I didn’t mind,” says Tethys.
Natasha peers at her curiously, the corners of her mouth curled upwards in an opaque smile. “Would you like to join me tomorrow morning?”
Something in the atmosphere compels Tethys to actually consider the question rather than dismiss it out of hand. “No. Thank you, I - “ She thinks she wouldn’t know what to pray for, thinks if she prayed for something, she’d be frightened to receive it. “I’m not really religious.”
As she stands, Natasha stretches her legs to alleviate the tension. They’ve fallen into a routine in the mornings, Natasha drawing the water for Tethys to prepare breakfast. Tethys insisted on doing all the cooking after witnessing Natasha boil potatoes and eat them plain.
Natasha waits for Tethys’s vegetable broth to start boiling before asking, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Tethys has already pushed their earlier conversation out of her mind, like she’s done for every religious encounter she’s had in her life, and it takes a second to recall what Natasha is talking about. “With you?”
“Well, it won’t hurt, will it?” Natasha says. She always watches when Tethys cooks for no reason Tethys can discern other than the proximity of the stove’s warmth. “I don’t know what Joshua said to you, but he must have his reasons for sending you to me.”
“To find happiness,” Tethys tells her, “but if he thinks any goddess can give that to me, he’s very mistaken.”
Natasha pours two cups of herb-brewed tea, adding some sugar to her own. “Why do you think that?”
Tethys knows the story will mean more to herself than it will to anyone she tells it to. It’s the reason she hasn’t recounted it to anyone other than Gerik, and even then she’d brushed it off.
So she shrugs. “I was born poor, and it wasn’t with the goddess’s grace that I clawed my way out of it. I did that myself. I’m alive because I kept myself that way.”
Natasha’s face twists into some show of sympathy, and Tethys looks away. She’s seen it all. But instead of offering condolences, Natasha asks, “Do you resent the goddess? For making you feel like you had to do everything alone?”
Tethys stirs the broth mechanically, like she might accidentally say something she regrets if she doesn’t occupy her mind by doing something physical. “I don’t know if I believe in the goddess. Maybe nothing controls where we start, and I just got...unlucky.”
“Maybe,” Natasha agrees. She’s quiet for another moment as Tethys adds rice to the broth. “I think I’d be frightened of a goddess, if I’d been poor too. I would have thought she was punishing me for some reason I didn’t understand.”
“It’s good that you weren’t, then,” Tethys says.
“Yeah.” Natasha doesn’t speak for the rest of the meal, just watching Tethys with those blue eyes, observing without seeking anything more. It unsettles Tethys, and she clears her bowl of soup without tasting it.
...
The evening of the first snowfall, Natasha gazes out the window and says, “When the roads clear, I’m heading west.”
Tethys pauses on her hands and knees atop the tarp she’s stitching from animal hide to protect the wood stores from the oncoming snow. “Aren’t you still mentoring the seamstress’s girl?”
“She’s getting the hang of it quickly, and I think she’ll be ready by herself in the spring,” Natasha says. “Besides, I need to start working faster if we want to spread the word within five years. I’m meeting with a colleague to exchange information.”
Tethys had suspected Natasha was working under the direction of the capital rather than the church, but the easy admission still seems out of character for Natasha. “If you’re sure,” she says.
Natasha looks back at the thick meteorology text in her lap, but her eyes focus on a dog-eared corner instead of resuming reading. “Will you come with me?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Tethys asks. Natasha’s lips quirk up into a small, surprised smile, but Tethys doesn’t understand why Natasha even needs to ask. “It’s not like there’s anything here for me in this place.”
“Guess not,” Natasha says. “I thought maybe...you might be bored of sewing tarps and babysitting. You could go back to Jehanna.”
Tethys could. It isn’t like the bet means much to her. “And here I thought you were the one babysitting me.”
Natasha closes her book. “I don’t think Joshua intended to keep you here longer than you want to be either,” she says.
“He couldn’t if he wanted to,” Tethys says. It should have been scary, going from traipsing over Magvel freely to this, a dimly firelit shed in the middle of a snowy village that doesn’t even have a name, but the walls aren’t stifling at all.
“Will you tell me why you don’t like him?” Natasha asks.
“It’s not that I don’t like him. He just - “ Resenting Joshua for being the one Gerik chose would be disrespectful to Gerik; resenting him for everything he has would be admitting inferiority, and yet - “He thinks he has some responsibility to make me happy and he doesn’t.”
The candlelight casts a dewy orange glow over Natasha, one that makes even her oversized shirt look domestic and cozy. “Do you think you don’t deserve happiness?”
“What if happiness isn’t something anyone deserves?” Tethys returns.
Natasha shakes her head. “One day I’ll get a straight answer out of you, one you really mean.”
Tethys smiles, all red lips and teeth. “Best of luck.”
The winter slows Natasha’s efforts to ensure all the buildings are bolted to their foundations, and the delay fills her with restless energy. Natasha devours the books on her shelf, even though she’s already confided in Tethys that she’s read them all.
She rolls the corners of the pages as she reads, mouthing the words to commit them to memory, or else she’ll while away the hours constructing wooden storage boxes for the villagers.
One night, after Tethys finishes her evening routine to find Natasha hunched over her cramped workbench, she exclaims in exasperation, “No one will fault you for taking a break every once in a while.”
“I know.” Natasha’s face is obscured by her hair as she furiously erases a set of dotted lines on the blueprint she’s working on. Tethys peers at it and only barely makes out a diagram of a roof under all of Natasha’s notes. Her handwriting is precise, yet the characters overlap from the sheer density of them. “It’s just, there’s so much to do before we leave and I want to do everything I can.”
“It’s not like the people here will be helpless without you,” Tethys says, tactfully refraining from voicing her doubts that their small efforts would amount to much in the face of an earthquake.
“I just…” Natasha finally looks up. She has a streak of graphite across her cheek, right below her eye to her ear, and her bottom lip is pink and swollen from worrying it. “Do you ever think about it - how we could just...walk away from all this, at any point, but the people here can’t? They don’t have the means, or anywhere to go, or anyone else to look after them. Their whole lives are going to be destroyed, and I don’t have an answer when they ask why it’s them and not someone else. They haven’t done anything, Tethys!”
“They haven’t,” Tethys agrees. She hasn’t thought about any of that, and even as Natasha speaks, Tethys knows she doesn’t really care about these people, their misfortune. It probably makes her a bad person. Worse than Natasha, for sure. It would probably also just make Natasha feel worse to say that. “Have you ever felt trapped?”
Natasha’s eyes are imploringly large, her lips quivering. “No…”
“Ever been through anything so terrible you couldn’t do anything but ask, ‘Why me?’ Ever felt so thoroughly against the world that you thought maybe the reason no one would look your way was because you deserved it?” Tethys continues.
“No, never,” Natasha repeats.
“...it’s obvious, in everything you do,” Tethys says, gently now. “You’ve never need help like these people have, or you’d know how much your help means to them. Even just your attention, your concern, feels... monumental.”
Natasha reaches out and places a hand on Tethys’s forearm, and her fingers are cold but Tethys feels stripped naked before her.
“You’re right. That’s not something I understand,” Natasha says, letting go of her pencil as she gets to her feet. Tethys is only a little taller than her, barely noticeable at all when they’re standing face-to-face like this. “I’m glad you came. I needed to hear that.”
Then Natasha pads over to the bedroll, and after she slips under it, she looks back at Tethys, who hasn’t moved a step.
“Let’s go to bed.”
There’s something beginning here, Tethys thinks, something small and fragile being protected by these thin wooden walls that barely even keep the wind out. It can’t last, but...if time could stand still for a year, if this home they’ve built could survive the looming spring, if Natasha could keep looking at Tethys like she’s a butterfly instead of a caterpillar that has become one -
Tethys thinks it could be enough.
...
Just as Natasha promised, they set out as soon as the snows melt and the birds return. Apparently, their humble abode had previously been used to communal storage, the various furniture and appliances donated by different villagers, and the shed reverts back to its origins upon their departure.
Tethys knows these villagers by name now, has spent dinners with most of them, but it isn’t until the roofs and chimneys of their huts disappear beneath the horizon that it sinks in how much they’ve become a part of her, and she’ll never see them again.
There are no horses in the village, no stable nearby to keep them and not enough food anyway, so they walk, camping beneath trees that have yet to regrow their leaves. Natasha knows how to start a fire, learned on the run from Grado’s forces, and the warmth from their campfires isn’t unlike the warmth from a stove.
After two weeks of travel, they finally reach the marshland village where Natasha’s contact is supposed to be waiting for them. Tethys has been thinking of him for so long as someone Natasha knows that she’s genuinely astonished to recognize the pale figure of Prince Lyon’s pet shaman.
“You are...Tethys, was it?” Knoll asks, sounding just as surprised. He looks uncharacteristically civilian in pants, but the fine make of his clothes still mark him as a palace denizen rather than a layman.
“Tethys is helping,” Natasha says, and just like that, Knoll nods and gestures for for them to follow him into the inn.
Knoll pays for three rooms without consulting either of them, a decision Natasha doesn’t protest. Tethys has enough money to pay for her own inn room, but she’s never quite managed to eradicate the frugal part of her that never passes up an opportunity to save gold, even if the arrangement feels strangely off-kilter.
“I mentioned this in my last letter, but I’ve been consulting laborers who’ve mentioned some oversights in our texts about earthquake damage,” Knoll begins without preamble as soon as they’ve crowded into his single. “We’ve been accounting for the lateral damage but some workers have reported that even ductile houses have collapsed under certain kinds of pressure.”
“Is there nothing we can do, then?” Natasha says.
“...unfortunately we don’t have the proficiency to discern the frequencies we’re dealing with yet.” Knoll procures a book from his pack and opens it on top of the bed, revealing a detailed map of Grado. Like most of the maps Natasha had torn apart in the shed, this one is cluttered with scribbled notes and inkblots of varying sizes. “They spoke of a different method of construction, one that controls damage instead of trying to prevent it. We can design weaknesses into buildings to control the manner in which they fall and create safe interior spaces that way.”
Natasha shows him a weak smile. “I see… It will be hard to accept losing one’s home like that, but if it will save more lives, we should try it.”
“I thought you’d say that. We’re working to test these ‘planned failures’ and once we get a reliable model, we’ll start implementing them in cities.” Eyeing the map with a frown, Knoll slides his finger across the southern coastline. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to get people to places with lower populations in time, not with our current manpower or resources.”
“I’ll go to those villages and work something out,” Natasha volunteers, but Knoll shakes his head.
“We need you in the marshes. The clay content is high here, and we’ve uncovered multiple texts that cite instances where moisture in the soil damages building foundations,” Knoll says. “Actually, we need a lot more people here than we have available - to check all the buildings and figure out a workaround.This is the area we predict the most casualties - “
“And we’re playing a numbers game,” Tethys cuts in.
Natasha flinches, stricken, and Knoll whips around, his eyes catching Tethys’s like he’s sighted a specter, but he neither lashes back nor retreats.
“When the dust settles, will you go to those ruined villages and explain to their corpses that their sacrifices allowed you to save more people?” Tethys asks, and she thinks Knoll would make the same expression if she’d stabbed him.
She also thinks that she would have never said something like this to Gerik, never considered explaining herself to the corpses they slew for coin.
“Of course you’re right, there’s...no justification for what I’m doing,” Knoll says. He sighs and it’s a broken sound. “The more time passes, the more I think maybe there really is something divine separating nobility from us commoners. Maybe there’s something in their brains that makes this easier, or right, for them. And then I think I can’t...really blame Prince Lyon for going to the lengths that he did.”
His eyes are the same as Natasha’s - transparent and melancholy, without even a hint of condemnation in their depths. Tethys knows they are guiltless, knows that saving everyone is impossible and it would be easy to step away and let the disaster run its course, and yet some wretched monster has settled in her core and she wants them to feel it in theirs.
“Excuse me,” she says, “I’m not feeling very well.”
The door doesn’t open for her on its own. Tethys turns the doorknob herself and etches the sensation of it clicking behind her into her memory.
...
The inn room is probably only a little bigger than the first room Tethys rented for herself and Ewan, with the money she’d earned with her dances. Even for one person, it’s not much space, but the walls keep out the draft and she can turn out the lights at her leisure without worrying about an extra person who wants to stay up reading.
It’s better than camping for sure, but when Tethys closes her eyes, she sees a spotlight and gleaming teeth. The sheets are cold with just one body in bed, no obstacles to stop her from sprawling her limbs all over the mattress. Even the silence, interspersed with one set of breaths, ceases to exist.
Slowly, Tethys slips out of bed and opens the door. She’s always been good with numbers and recalls the third room the innkeeper had given them. While Tethys has never slept undressed, not with Ewan and not in Gerik’s company when night ambushes were always a possibility, she feels distinctly naked on Natasha’s doorstep.
That feeling amplifies when a sleepy Natasha opens the door wide for Tethys. “Did you have a nightmare?” she asks without condemnation. Tethys doesn’t deserve any of it.
“What does your religion say about dragons?” she says.
“Dragons?” Natasha repeats. “Like...Lady Myrrh?”
“Like monsters,” Tethys says, stepping into Natasha’s room. “Like beasts who kill humans, who lack the grace of your goddess and the empathy to regret it. Does your church strive to help them too?”
Natasha seems to sense that this is about something more than speculation, approaching Tethys like she might a wounded animal. She draws the thin blanket off the bed and drapes it over Tethys’s shoulders. “Even - beasts have reasons for doing what they do,” Natasha says. “We may not understand them, and we may have to defend ourselves, but...they are not irredeemable.”
“Then it’s just in their nature to hurt others?” Tethys asks. She allows Natasha to sit her on the bed.
“Tethys...you are kinder than you realize,” she says. “I pray that one day, you’ll see yourself as others do.”
With Natasha’s heat still lingering on the inside of the blanket, Tethys can’t help but lean into it. “King Joshua’s killed people.”
After a battle, Gerik kneels in the dirt and wipes the blood off his sword to keep it from rusting. Ewan doesn’t even take a second glance at the charred carcasses in the aftermath of his spells, frowning at ripped pages in his tome from the frequency he reads them.
“King Joshua’s murdered people, even before the war, killed them for his personal gain and he didn’t have to ,” Tethys continues. There’s a smudge of dirt on Natasha’s sleeve, one that stands out against the light grain of her shirt. “Is your goddess O.K. with that?”
Natasha’s gaze is keener than Tethys is comfortable with, and she studies Tethys with an intensity that renders Tethys breathless. “I don’t want to pass judgment in her place.”
“Do you think your hands are cleaner than his, that you did not strike people down yourself?” Tethys asks. “You healed them so that they could keep on fighting. I - “
Her voice breaks before she can put the words into the world, but even so, Natasha doesn’t need to hear them to understand. “I think...even if it’s hard to imagine, that we are all equals in what we can do, so we should strive to do good. No matter the past.”
“How little solace,” Tethys says as Natasha takes her hands into her own. Natasha’s fingers are cold, always, Tethys thinks. They rub circles into the bumps of Tethys’s knuckles, no longer quite as smooth as the hands of a sheltered priestess.
“I know,” Natasha whispers. “I know.”
Tethys falls asleep there, and when she wakes up in the morning, Natasha is already praying. Tethys doesn’t know whether she slept alongside Tethys, in the same bed, or if she kept watch. For what, Tethys doesn’t know - she doesn’t know so much about having someone care for her. She’s never had that before.
So she stays quiet and watches Natasha pray. Like this, pliant and waiting, Tethys could be a different person from the woman she’d been a few months ago. She can imagine herself returning to Jehanna, telling Joshua he was right all along and she’d really just needed some peace and a listening ear. She might even be able to smile as she said it.
It’s a fantasy of the cruelest kind, that monsters might not be evil and a goddess could forgive her in place of the people she’s hurt, but…
In the end, heroes kill the dragon, and Tethys doesn’t believe in a goddess.
...
Tethys doesn’t realize how quickly she’s accepted the idea of an earthquake destroying Grado until after Knoll leaves to meet with his other charges, when Natasha informs the villagers of the imminent danger. There’s disbelief at first, and then an anger more intense than Tethys has ever experienced.
She barely even hears the curses aimed at Natasha - “The castle knows about this and they just send a cleric to help us?” - “General Duessel isn’t a king!” - “You soldiers have brought the goddess’s wrath upon us!” - just, out of the corner of Tethys’s eye, she sees a hurled stone, and she isn’t thinking when she steps in its path.
Ewan threw a rock at Tethys once, when he was eight or nine and trying to run away. Those were dark days for them both. Tethys would dance from sunrise to hours after it had set, until there wasn’t a soul on the streets anymore, and Ewan was somehow both a burden and her reason for living.
She never could pry out of him the reason he’d run, whether he’d thought he was holding her back or the other way around, but when Tethys gave chase, he threw a single sharp rock at her that struck Tethys right under her collarbone. Both of them had stopped immediately, and even years after, Ewan paled whenever he saw her blood again.
Compared to that pain, this wound is nothing, not even when Natasha rushes to Tethys and cups her face in her hands to examine the cut next to her nose. “Hold on, let me heal you,” she says in a rush, but she lingers beside Tethys instead of retrieving her staff.
“If we let it scar, I could become your bodyguard and scare everyone away,” Tethys says.
Natasha doesn’t quite laugh, though her lips twist into something resembling fondness. When she pulls away, she does so with a reluctance Tethys has never seen in her before.
“I know all of you are scared,” Natasha calls out to the crowd. The blood on her fingers does nothing to temper her voice with malice. “But to pull through this, we’re going to need everyone’s cooperation. It’s no longer the time to point fingers.”
Slowly, the villagers still, fixing Natasha and Tethys with steely glares, but the aggression is gone. Tethys knows well, how difficult it is to lash out against someone who will forgive you regardless. Sensing a breakthrough, Natasha begins to relay the information Knoll had told them about the marshland - giving enough details for Tethys to presume they’d discussed it at length after her departure.
Tethys sees the change happen gradually. Natasha’s first probes for builders goes unanswered, stocky men averting their gaze, but one woman recalls out loud that so-and-so’s son had apprenticed under a carpenter for three seasons. Her neighbor questions whether someone who had quit under the workload could be trusted, and someone else mentions that one of the men who had built their house still lives in the village, and maybe he could oversee the whole thing even if he’s too old to do it himself.
She sees people’s expressions open up, little by little. Natasha asks for farmers and seamstresses, and the volunteers are housewives and teenagers who have lost their spouses and parents in the war. She asks people to open their houses to care for the poor and the sick, that these could be working bodies, and she asks after the elderly, if they might help with inventory or lend their knowledge to the youth.
A man in the front finally lifts his gaze to meet Natasha’s. Tethys wonders if he can feel himself changing. Beside Gerik, she had always been the center of attention, but now…
Natasha speaks, and Tethys can’t help but listen.
...
There’s a boy here who hates Tethys, and it does more to convince Tethys that there must be some divine power in another realm than any of Natasha’s praying. That a cosmic deity takes delight in Tethys’s suffering seems a lot more likely than Natasha playing some kind of prank on her.
Traipsing around Grado like this, Tethys was bound to run into children whose parents had fought against Princess Eirika’s army, maybe even children whose parents she had personally seen slain. Knowing that is different from asking him for the next bucket of water and being brusquely ignored.
Tethys fetches the water herself, but her mind drifts from the task at hand - pouring water over ashes to make lye water - and she finds herself studying his profile. He’s probably in his mid-teens, closer to Ewan’s age than hers, but the way they carry themselves couldn’t be more different.
“Ivan?” Natasha says when Tethys asks her about the boy she’s assigned to help Tethys. “He’s giving you trouble?”
She gives Tethys an unequivocally fond look, one that puts Tethys on edge. “He doesn’t talk to me.” Tethys doesn’t think he doesn’t strike many conversations up with any of the other women Natasha has helping make soap either, though that doesn’t seem to stem from malice. She hasn’t seen him outright ignore a request from anyone either. “He’s got some muscle. Isn’t there something else you could have him do?”
“I thought...maybe you could be friends,” Natasha ventures. “He won’t talk to me. Um, I told him how we met. That we helped Renais.”
“He’s an orphan,” Tethys says. Then, “I misjudged you.”
“Oh?”
“You’re a schemer.” The words themselves are almost as comical as the expression Natasha makes in response. “You set this up.”
“I thought you could help him.” I thought he could help you. Natasha doesn’t say it, but it shines through in her smile, in the gleam of her eyes Tethys has learned means Natasha’s thinking of her. The weight of Natasha’s care is just as disarming as the first time Natasha had turned her attention on Tethys.
Distantly, she thinks that she probably never stood a chance.
“I’ll see what I can do, but he won’t talk to me either,” Tethys says.
“His parents died when he was young. It was his older brother he lost in the war. A soldier for Grado. Since then, he’s been taking odd jobs to pay for himself.” Under Tethys’s heavy scrutiny, Natasha admits, “Villages talk a lot. And...it isn’t an uncommon story.”
There are others who help with the soapmaking, women who stir the oils into the lye water and boil the mixture into thickness. Tethys singles Ivan out, tasks him with straining the lye water as Tethys heats up the well water.
He doesn’t have a pretty face, and Tethys absentmindedly thinks it’s a shame. His life would probably be easier if he smiled more freely, if his eyes didn’t peer at other people with steely suspicion. At the very least, he seems to be a hard worker, focusing a hundred percent of his attention on the job at hand. Part of that might be the resoluteness with which he refuses to acknowledge Tethys, but his arms don’t tremble lifting the cauldron of hot water and he takes care not to spill any water over the edge of the wicker sieve.
Tethys doesn’t know how to approach him. There had been a time before, when Ewan was younger, Tethys had faced a similar dilemma. It was right before she’d signed on with Gerik; Tethys was looking into better ways to make money than street performance, jobs that might take her away from Jehanna, and she and Ewan were only just coming to terms with parting.
He would stay up deep into the night reading books he’d skipped meals to save up for. They’d fought over that. He’d taken to accosting travelers who looked a certain way with prying questions, and they’d fought over that too. They didn’t talk much, besides the arguing, and for a length of time before Tethys left, it felt like they had nothing to say to each other at all.
Maybe, during those long nights where Ewan had kept himself up by candlelight, long after Tethys retired, he’d looked like Ivan does now - stubbornly forging on with nothing to guide him, tenacious with the knowledge that if he didn’t fight for himself, no one would.
“We’re almost out of firewood,” Tethys says. “Go gather some more.”
She waits patiently as Ivan ignores her, inspecting the lye water accumulating in the pot under the sieve. After dawdling for as long as he can bear it, Ivan turns to survey the stock of firewood himself. If he were cuter, Tethys might even be a little charmed at how transparent his thought process is, that he thinks there’s a difference if he fetches the firewood of his own volition rather than hers.
When he finally goes outside, she follows him.
Contrary to her appearance, Tethys is no stranger to the outdoors, was not afforded that luxury as a mercenary. Ivan tenses up when he realizes she's keeping up with him, despite having the advantage of his home turf. Tethys watches his shoulders rise higher and considers just aggravating Ivan until he breaks. It's probably not a tactic Natasha approves of though.
“Did you hurt your wrist recently?” she asks instead. “You should have told Natasha when she assigned you here.”
Ivan startles like an animal, shooting a hunted look over his shoulder at Tethys. It’s like he expects there to be a little goblin whispering his secrets into her ear, but it’s the first time he’s looked at her in the eye. “It’s fine,” he says.
He hadn’t appeared to have trouble with the heavy lifting anyway, despite his tendency to favor his left hand despite being right-handed. Tethys only really noticed when Ivan thought no one was watching, when he flexed his wrist like clockwork every time another lye batch was finished.
“Or was it not recent? If it keeps bothering you, Natasha can help with that too.”
“It’s fine!” Ivan repeats more forcefully. Ewan was never so uncute as to yell at a woman, preferring even when he was just learning to read to outmaneuver his opponents with words. Words, Tethys thinks, probably never helped Ivan defeat any villains. He’s probably been blundering forward, trying to knock down obstacles by force without anywhere to direct that anger.
“Hey,” Tethys says. “Hey, Ivan. What was your brother’s name?”
“Stop following me.”
“I’m just asking ‘cuz he was part of the army that fought Renais, wasn’t he? I might have known him,” Tethys says.
Ivan’s face clouds over, but it’s not new anger. He slams a fist into a trunk of a tree and doesn’t even wince as the bark digs into his knuckles. “You don’t have the right to ask about him.”
“You aren’t curious at all about his final moments?” Tethys sees Ivan clench his fist - the right one - right before he takes a swing at her. By then, Tethys has already dropped into a back walkover and she follows the momentum back to her feet in one fluid flip.
The ease with which she dodges his punch only infuriates Ivan further. “You wanna know how he felt as he died? Stop running and fight me, and I’ll show you right now.”
Tethys steps back again, just in case he tries another swing. “Are you sure?” she asks. “You may regret that later.”
Ivan snarls, charging forward. Tethys is not a soldier - thinks guiltily that she’ll never have that excuse to hide behind, for what she’s done. Still, the little she’s picked up on her travels is more than enough to handle one teenage boy who hasn’t grown into his body yet. One day, he might be as big around as Gerik, but now he only resembles a particularly graceless bull. Slipping around another tree, she jumps up to grab an overhead branch, shaking a cloud of small flower petals onto Ivan’s head before leaping away.
The movements are familiar, if no longer second nature. It’s been almost a year since Tethys stopped dancing, and while her limbs still move where she directs them, she feels the strain of exertion more strongly than she had since she’d become an adult. Gerik would tease her, if he saw her like this, but Ivan is already breathing hard and red-faced.
“If your brother had outclassed us by this much, he probably wouldn’t have died,” Tethys says and knows instantly that she’s overstepped.
The noise Ivan makes is no longer rage or hatred, but candid, naked grief.
“Ivan,” Tethys starts, reaching out for him. She doesn’t get much farther when he shoves her to the ground with the brunt of his forearm. For all the he doesn’t know how to harness his strength, Ivan is still larger than her, and she chokes a little at his weight on her chest, right under her collarbone.
Something wet falls onto her cheek, heavier than a raindrop. Tethys has barely registered the sensation when Ivan punches her across the face and her mind goes white.
It’s going to bruise. When she was younger, Tethys went to great lengths to protect her face, even as she abused her feet until they bled. Her beauty was her last weapon against the world, lure and strings both to manipulate her audience into feeling when she danced. Fitting then, that one of the victims of her dancing would be the one to take it away from her.
“Grado should have won,” Ivan whispered. “We were stronger than you. Our army was larger and better trained, and we should have won.”
He doesn’t punch her again, instead digging his thumb into Tethys’s throat. She doesn’t even have the breath to choke.
Ivan looks different from this vantage point, she thinks. There’s probably something wrong with her that she can’t help but think of him as a child right now, but... his eyes look alive, wet with tears and fear. The roundness of his face almost reminds her of Ewan, but of course Ewan would never lay his hands on a person like this, not directly. Tethys doesn’t think he’d make Ivan’s expression either.
She probably would have died to keep his wonder and curiosity alive.
“I’ll never forgive you. I’ll never forgive you.” Ivan’s voice takes on a chantlike quality as Tethys floats away, eyelashes fluttering. She has the remote thought that Natasha might weep for her, but that seems like a concern for a different person.
She’s had a good life. Somehow she’d managed to claw her way out of hell...even if in the end, she hadn’t deserved to. Ewan is happy. Gerik is happy. And Natasha… Natasha will continue bringing light to the people of Grado, just as she had before Tethys had come.
Ivan’s warmth almost feels like an embrace, now, and then Tethys knows nothing of light or war or dragons.
...
Tethys isn’t an expert, but she’s pretty sure death doesn’t involve throbbing sore throats. Even as she opens her eyes though, she thinks it would be a pretty good punishment for sinners. An eternity feeling like she’s swallowed all of hell’s flames whole.
The stars aren’t overhead, and it takes a second for Tethys to orient herself and recognize what a ceiling looks like. She’s indoors, but it isn’t the extra room in the village chieftain’s house in which she and Natasha had made their temporary residence. There’s an empty bed in front of her, though Tethys had woken on the floor.
“Ivan,” she recalls, but the name is unrecognizable in her throat. The warped noise, however, still draws the attention of the boy huddled in the corner - the boy who’d assaulted her in the woods, the boy who’d carried her to his house instead of killing her.
Ivan’s eyes glance over her as if he’s surveying any old piece of furniture, and when Tethys doesn’t make any further attempt to move, he returns to staring at his hands.
“...do you feel better?” Tethys rasps.
It’s a question that doesn’t really need to be asked, but Ivan’s shoulders slump. “You didn’t kill Beckett,” he says, toneless.
“No, I didn’t,” Tethys confirms. Speaking makes her throat hurt worse, but she thinks she owes him this much.
“That priestess put you up to this,” Ivan guesses, “after I blew her off.”
“Yes...Natasha just wants to help. It doesn’t matter who. If she sees someone who needs it, she’ll do whatever it takes,” Tethys says.
Ivan laughs, hoarse and bitter. Tethys wonders if she’s imagining that it sounds a little wistful too. “I don’t want help from her. Or you. I hate both of you.”
“Yeah,” Tethys says. Then, a little less certainly, she asks, “Do you resent Beckett too, even just a little for leaving you behind?”
With a soft exhale, Ivan leans his head back against the wall and the small thud it makes is the loudest noise in the room for a long time.
“I have a brother, you know, around your age. He’s not really anything like you,” Tethys says. “When he was younger...he was terrified of me leaving. I never learned why. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t love him anymore or that I was leaving him just like our parents. Maybe he knew that I needed to leave to protect him and maybe that knowledge tore him up inside.”
“Maybe you should go back to your priestess and get your voice healed,” Ivan says.
“...yeah,” Tethys agrees, a little louder than a breath.
...
Natasha cries actual tears when she sees Tethys’s face and apologizes profusely for endangering Tethys’s life. Before she actually gets dressed to march to Ivan’s house herself though, Tethys wrestles her back to the bed. Maybe Ivan’s worked attacking Tethys out of his system, but she doesn’t trust him not to hurt Natasha too.
She allows Natasha to heal her throat but waves the staff away when Natasha tries to heal the burgeoning fist-sized bruise across her cheek right under her eye.
“Save your energy for the village,” Tethys says.
Natasha frowns, still worried, but she allows Tethys to open her newest book on local soil composition in her lap. Tethys can’t resist patting Natasha on the head before she goes and changes into her dancing outfit.
There’s a stitched-up slit in the side where Gerik had once deflected a hand axe and it had nearly cut Tethys, and one portion of her left armband is a little more singed than the rest of it from when Ewan had eagerly showed Tethys a recitation of his newest text. She’d loved this outfit, every one of these stitches emblematic of the things she had done to escape the circumstances of her childhood.
It feels a little like moving backwards, putting it back on again. The cloth smells like Jehannan sun and aromatic oils, a scent that once evoked imagery of freedom and luxury. Somehow her perception of it has changed since Tethys has come to Grado and she can’t quite put her finger on how.
Dancing comes naturally, once she takes that first step, and all her old routines flood back to her as soon as she allows herself to remember them. She discards all of them, though, holding out her arms to begin stitching a new one together.
Tethys dances and she allows herself to misstep. She doesn’t even notice when Natasha closes the book or when the moon sinks into the horizon and the sky starts to orange. All she knows is the angle of her ankle when she spins, and that Natasha is inexplicably crying again.
“The clay dilemma can’t be that depressing,” Tethys jokes.
“Where...did you learn to dance like that?” Natasha sniffles, drying her face on her sleeves to little effect, since her eyes are still shiny.
Tethys had taught herself to dance, watching other street performers and mimicking them, but that probably isn’t the answer Natasha is looking for. Hundreds of people see those performers, maybe even thousands had seen Tethys perform but… Just seeing isn’t enough to make that connection.
“No one taught me,” Tethys says. “I was scared of dying, and so I danced.”
“It’s...different from the one you did on the battlefield.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll ever dance like that again,” Tethys admits. Natasha gets that look on her face again, fond and discerning and terrifyingly transparent. Tethys doesn’t know what to do on the other end of that look. “I don’t want him to forgive me. I just want… I want him to live.”
“I’m sure he’ll understand...if you dance like that,” Natasha says.
“He might not.” A rush of relief washes over Tethys just admitting that. She hadn’t realized how terrified she was, how much power Ivan held over her. She didn’t want anything from him, nor he from her, and yet… “He might not get anything out of it at all, but maybe - seeing me will show him it isn’t just heroes who survive.”
...
Tethys dances for Ivan alone. She doesn’t tell Natasha when she goes. She doesn’t want to turn this, their grief, into a spectacle.
Ivan doesn’t cry. Tethys hadn’t really expected him to - hadn’t really expected anything after the dance’s conclusion.
His eyes remain on her long after she finishes, statue-still as she works to catch her breath. In the red glow of the early summer evening, Ivan casts a long shadow against the ground. Tethys watches it instead of his face.
“Why did you show me that?” Ivan asks. His tone is unreadable and Tethys doesn’t know whether that’s good or bad.
“Because in the end, that’s the best way I can explain myself to you,” Tethys says. “It’s not much, but it’s better than my words.”
“I don’t need anything from you.” Ivan walks forward, forcing Tethys to look up at him.
“I know. I needed to do it.”
Tethys lifts her chin. Her cheek is still discolored, and she’s been waving off questions about it all week. The pain is grounding. It directs her forward. That’s always been her motivation.
“It figures that you’d put yourself first,” Ivan says, and the derision is there and yet off-kilter. For the first time, he’s looking at Tethys without scowling. His eyebrows are a little furrowed, but Tethys is beginning to think that’s just how his face looks.
“I’ve always thought that if I didn’t, no one would,” Tethys replies with a small smile. Her bruise twinges.
Ivan swallows, and then he shakes his head and walks back into his house. Right as he crosses the threshold though, he pauses. Tethys thinks she might see him trembling, just a little, before he shuts the door with one last parting glance at her.
“Good night,” Tethys says, as if he’s standing right on the other side of the door listening to her. She exhales.
He’s really not cute at all.
...
“I think,” Natasha says, “it’s time for you to forgive your parents.”
“I’m not mad at them,” Tethys says.
Natasha takes Tethys’s hands into hers and leads her over to the bed, which she climbs atop of and sits cross-legged. She pats the space on the sheets in front of her, all the while peering up at Tethys with expectant eyes.
Tethys sits.
“Not just your parents,” Natasha continues. She’s still holding Tethys’s hands. “I think you should forgive all the people who saw you in need and didn’t help you. And everyone who saw two children huddled in the dirt and pretended they didn’t.”
“You know I won’t refuse you,” Tethys says. “I don’t understand who you’re trying to help though. Those people, they don’t feel guilty. They probably wouldn’t even remember little girls with no shoes and empty stomachs. A lot of them probably died in the invasion against Jehanna.”
“Maybe,” Natasha allows, “but...not every grievance is a result of malice.”
“Those people don’t deserve my forgiveness,” Tethys says. “They don’t deserve your sympathy.”
“You really don’t know who I want to help?” Natasha asks. All this time, from the first day Tethys had showed up on her doorstep, she’s always looked straight at Tethys. “It’s you, Tethys. It’s always you.”
“I - “ Hearing her name like that, curled on Natasha’s lips, holding hands in a bed in a damned village in a destroyed country, feels like no adrenaline rush Tethys has ever had before. She licks her lips.
“The reason you stopped dancing… I never wanted to ask, but it’s because of the war, isn’t it?” Natasha says.
Tethys smiles, small and sad. “It’s a terribly selfish thing, isn’t it? Becoming a mercenary. I wanted to live, but...who am I, to pay for my food with someone else’s life?”
“Yes… it does seem that the goddess has seen fit to bestow us with this burden. That we mortals have been allowed to judge the worth of lives and throw them away. I can’t help but think it must be the greatest sin,” Natasha agrees. “Lord Knoll...and Prince Lyon… They learned of the coming earthquake by using forbidden dark magic, the kind that ruins lives. The kind that leads monarchs to war and countries to ruin.”
Tethys shifts her hands so that she can wrap them around Natasha’s. Natasha’s nails are bitten short, something she does subconsciously when she’s worried. Tethys runs her thumb over the ragged edges. It’s a human emotion, worry.
“It was the first time I thought that maybe, people could care too much about each other. They could want to help someone so badly that they hurt others. They could...decide the value of human lives, decide which lives mattered more.” Natasha squeezes one of Tethys’s hands in hers. “And every time I come to a village like this to help them, I can’t help but think… the lives we lost in the war, were they worth it to save these people?”
Ivan flashes in Tethys’s mind, that he might have died in the earthquake while his brother lived. Natasha tilts her face down, her hair falling forward.
“You must have thought so too, whether your life was worth overlooking the lives of others,” Natasha whispers.
“Yes.” Admitting it out loud doesn’t lift the burden from Tethys’s shoulders.
“I think...at some point, in my privileged life, I probably walked past some urchin who needed my help without noticing them, or I thought that I had something more important to do at the time, or that they could get what they needed from someone else.” Natasha makes a conscious effort to straighten again, looks back into Tethys’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Tethys whispers.
Natasha smiles, that fond, lingering smile. “It’s okay,” she repeats.
If the goddess really exists, she must be something like Natasha, bright-eyed and innocent, to shine her light on as wretched of beasts as humans. And then Tethys thinks, if a goddess does not exist, how awesome it is that Natasha continues to shine her light anyway.
During her darkest nights, Tethys had prayed for the release of heaven - hesitated only for Ewan at her side. Now she knows: heaven is on earth, and it is people like Natasha who make it.
...
Tethys spins, and the dragon watches, as transfixed by her dancing as ever. The darkness is just as black, and the light just as cramped and small, but there, in the middle of the spotlight, Tethys makes a final pirouette and follows the momentum into a kneeling position where she stills to catch her breath.
Above her head, the dragon shifts, taking one terrible claw off the other and placing it on the ground. It slowly stands, reaching a height that would dwarf trees and buildings alike, and looks down at her with its red, red eyes. Then, it spreads its wings and takes off. Within seconds, the dragon disappears into the darkness, leaving only gales of wind that send Tethys’s sashes aflutter.
When the dust settles, not that much has changed. The edge of the spotlight hasn’t moved, for better or for worse. Tethys is still alone, but...she can take a step forward. She can walk outside of the light. She’s free, and -
Maybe the dragon is too.