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The pain doesn't leave Edmund, standing in the yard, hearing the guitar, but he bears it differently, refreshed in some slight way, like a burden shifted to another shoulder.
Ethan brings him back inside, fluttering around the place with easy familiarity, gathering things out of cabinets. Edmund, seated at the table in the kitchen, squints at his brother.
"How long have you been here?" Ethan couldn't have had more than half a day's headstart from Marielda.
"Oh, three or four days now. This place, it just, it feels like home already, you know?"
"I've been here before," Edmund says distantly. "In dreams."
Ethan stops mid-bustle, arms full, and sets down the things he's carrying on the table, one by one. There's a jar of something dark purple, bread, an empty cup.
The air between them feels still, inert. Ethan turns away, opens a drawer.
Edmund struggles for words, his throat aching. "It was a long trip. Especially alone. We... I haven't been alone that long since..." He trails off. Since ever.
Ethan fills the cup from a pitcher, sets down a bread knife and a smaller knife, fetches a plate from yet another cabinet, then sides into a chair opposite his brother.
"I've been thinking about it, Edmund, and I think, I think I've been alone since you left for Memorium College."
Edmond is starving but also nauseous, and doesn't move for the bread. He drinks instead, and the water is so cold, it hurts his teeth.
"I couldn't tell you," he says softly. "If you'd seen what I've seen..."
Ethan's mouth is a hard line. "Was it worse than this? How it all ended up?"
Edmund looks up, and it's Ethan that flinches from the unguarded truth in his eyes. "Yes."
Ethan's composure returns fast. "You know that none of this works if we hide things from each other," he repeats, and Edmond flinches this time.
"I saw the end of the world." His voice is flat, refusing argument. "And I did what I had to to stop it."
"Did it work?"
Edmund thinks about, he really does, and doesn't have an answer. He doesn't even remember what was real or delusion out of the images in his head. It was three days out of Marielda before the last of the fever broke, before he came back to himself, like a ghost inside his own skin.
"I'm tired," he says after the longest pause.
The beds here are soft, and he doesn't dream, not at all.
**
The bandages around Edmund's neck are sweaty and dirty, gummed to the scabbed up wound so it's a slow, painful affair to cut them away.
It must have been only through Aubrey's deft work that the wound didn't get infected. Maybe a miracle even, but the gods didn't seem to have many of those to spare these days.
It's painfully obvious that it's going to leave a nasty scar, and Ethan surveys the damage with a rueful smile. "Looks like the jig is up."
There's a thin white line of scar tissue on his cheek that mirrors the one on Edmund's, carefully cut there to mimic the damage of an errant cut in a duel. They'd been lucky, otherwise, the rest of their battle scars were hidden by clothes, and most of the people who'd seen them both without weren't the types to notice. Or were already clued into the game, as it were, but those exploits were generally before their time in Marielda.
They aren't identical anymore. Edmund laughs, for the first time in a long time. It's bitter but it's real, too. There's no one left to fool now, not even themselves.
And anyway, they did it, despite everything. They pulled off the long con.
***
Ethan pulls the whole story out of Edmund, in dribs and drabs, in the exhausted calm after a practice dance or duel, in the peaceful vacuum of winter evenings. It takes a long time.
That doesn't matter, though. They have the rest of a lifetime.