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Their torchlight sparkles off the water as Andromeda flies lower, skimming just above the surface. Outside their small sphere, all is black: too deep, here, for the molten light to reach them. They alight on the moss of the far bank and Mareth dismounts, fumbling for a moment with his crutch, reaching up a hand to help Hazard. He hardly needs it, but accepts nevertheless—moved, perhaps, by the same impulse as Mareth, who feels almost as if Hazard is once again the boy he was when first they met: small, frightened, and nearly entirely alone.
He does not look like a child, though, as he lands lightly on the moss with a small smile of thanks and walks away, his steps unusually hesitant, his own torch held high. Mareth watches him go, his hand resting on Andromeda’s fur. When she presses closer, he says, “Any flier could have carried us. You need not torment yourself.”
“Where you go, I go,” she purrs. “I could not let you come alone.”
Mareth hears the note of worry in her voice and strokes her fur. “I fear more for him,” he tells her, his eyes on Hazard’s light. “It surprised me that he wanted to come here.”
“He is trying to understand,” she says, “as you tried before.” She nudges him in the shoulder. “Go to him.”
“He may want to be alone,” Mareth says, uncertain.
Andromeda shoves him again, more forcefully. “Would you?”
In truth, Mareth thinks as he limps forward, he does not know what he would want, were he in Hazard’s shoes. He does not even know how Hazard found out about the Garden, or how much of the story he has been told. By the set of his face and his silence as they flew, Mareth guesses Hamnet never spoke of it to him.
“This place isn’t on any maps,” Hazard says when they are standing side by side, the silent water before them. “I found old ones in the library, though. It belonged to the gnawers—before?”
Mareth nods. “What do the scrolls say of it?”
“Almost nothing,” Hazard tells him. “It’s usually just the name. I found a list, though. Of the dead, I think. Bats and humans—but no rats.” He frowns. “On the list, there was a flier... Astria?”
The name strikes dully in Mareth’s chest. How many years has it been since anyone spoke of her? “Your father’s bond,” he says.
“He’d wake up calling for her,” Hazard says, “in the jungle.” He looks over at Mareth, his brow still furrowed. “I thought there would be something here, at least. To remember what happened.”
He sounds frustrated. There is that streak in him, Mareth is both pleased and pained to see, the same as there was in Hamnet: an insistence that the world be kinder and better than it is. That hope was lost to Hamnet after the Garden, or perhaps already after his imprisonment—but in Hazard it survives, somehow.
“No one wanted to write of it,” Mareth tells him. “It was—a great failure. And a great shame.” He looks around at the shore, bare but for the moss, and the still water. “Some began to say the place was cursed. None come here now, and few will speak of it.”
“But you will,” Hazard says. His green eyes shine in the torchlight. “You were there. You saved my father’s life.”
“I—” Mareth falters. Yes, he was there; yes, he pulled Hamnet from the water. But he is not sure how to tell Hazard, this boy who wants so badly to learn, the truth of it. How to give him knowledge that will devastate him as surely as the water ravaged those golden trees. He aches to ask Hamnet: What am I to say? What would you have wanted?
But Hamnet is not here to answer. There is only Andromeda, watching from afar, the bones lying wherever they have settled, and before him, Hazard.
Mareth swallows hard. “The Garden of the Hesperides,” he says, “was beautiful.”
He tells what, he supposes, Hazard has read: that the garden and its golden apples were gifted to the rats in a time of peace. He tells how the peace dissolved, how the attack was planned. He tells what Hazard could not know: how he and Hamnet fought together, on land and in the air, back to back. How they began to lose the battle, how the rats fought to protect their pups. How Hamnet opened the gates, and the dike collapsed, and river rushed in to sweep the orchard, drown the trees, fill the caves—
Hazard listens with wide eyes, unmoving, unspeaking, as Mareth explains. But he falters then, his throat closing of its own accord. The cavern is black and utterly still, but Mareth imagines he can hear the cries echoing off the water, the stone.
“My father would have tried to save them,” Hazard says when the minutes drag on.
“He did try,” Mareth agrees. “He and Astria—and myself, and Andromeda—but there were too many. The water was too deep.” Hazard’s cheeks, Mareth sees, are wet as he stares out at the water. “He did try,” Mareth repeats, urgent. “I had to pull him out of the water or he would have drowned as well.”
He remembers Hamnet’s screams, wrenching even amid the din, how he had fought as Andromeda flew up from the water. He had struck out at Mareth, battering him, straining against his arms to dive back in—Where are you going, he had screamed, can’t you hear them?—sobbing and struggling until Mareth had hit him on the head with the pommel of his sword and knocked him into oblivion.
In the days that followed, as Hamnet had gone from hysteria to an impenetrable silence, Mareth had wondered if he resented Mareth for saving him. He never had a chance to ask, for Hamnet did not come out of his silence but vanished in the night, to reappear ten years later not as himself, but as a ghost in the eyes of his son.
“He spoke of you,” Hazard says. His voice is tremulous, the voice of a child. “Not by name. But he said there was one—only one killer he would trust again.” Mareth flinches from the word, but Hazard says it innocently, unthinking. “I thought he meant his father. Or Luxa, maybe, when I met her. But it was you, wasn’t it?”
Mareth shakes his head. He is grateful for his crutch, suddenly sure that without it he would fall. “I do not know, Hazard. Only he could say. But he spoke truly—I am as much a killer as all the rest.” He feels a strange smile come to his face, unbidden. “More than your father ever was.”
“He killed, too.”
“And then he stopped, when he saw the horror in it.”
“Not soon enough,” Hazard says, and sinks to his knees. He is slight, not yet a man, and when he kneels he looks even smaller. Mareth watches as he reaches out a hand and, pausing for a long moment, draws his fingers through the water.
With some effort, Mareth sits beside him, his leg folded before him, his crutch lying on the moss. “He did not mean to keep it from you,” he says. “Perhaps he would have told you when you were older. But he—” Mareth searches for the words that will explain what he suddenly knows with a swift rush of certainty. “He was burdened by it. He did not want you to share that pain. And I believe he was afraid.”
Hazard’s hand stills. “Afraid of what?”
“That you would hate him,” Mareth says, “if you knew.”
“I wouldn’t,” Hazard says. He pulls his hand back and the water drips noiselessly to the moss. “I don’t. I only miss him.”
“As do I,” Mareth says. He hesitates, then reaches out to put his hand on Hazard’s shoulder, squeezing softly. Hazard bows his head.
They stay a moment like that, until there is a sudden breeze and they both look up. The surface of the water ripples as Andromeda flies overhead, the mere suggestion of a shape in the darkness. When she has passed, it stills again, the wake fading to the tiniest of swells that lap at the shore.