Archive of Our Own

The first thing she noticed, when she was conscious enough to notice anything, was that the air smelled wrong.

It smelled like cut grass, which was not in itself wrong. It smelled like wet stone and something faintly metallic, like a coin held too long in a palm. It smelled, underneath all of that, of a flower she could not name, which was wrong because Marlena Glenn had memorized the scent of every flower she had ever been close to, on the simple operational principle that a thing she had named was a thing she could find again.

She opened her eyes.

The capsule's canopy was cracked diagonally. She could see the sky through the crack.

The sky was the wrong color, which she filed under concussion, probably, and then she looked again and amended the filing.

The sky was a thin, washed gold. There were two suns in it, hung at a distance from each other that did not match any binary system her astronomy briefings had described. There was a moon as well, low and pale, the wrong moon, by which she meant simply that it was not the one she had grown up with.

"Right," said Marlena, to the inside of her own helmet. "All right."

She did the things one did. She ran her hands over her ribs and found them sore but intact. She tested her ankles and her knees. She blinked slowly to confirm her vision was tracking. She popped the seal on the helmet and felt the air come in, and it was breathable, which, according to her training, was unlikely enough that she chose, for the moment, simply to be grateful.

She unstrapped. She climbed out through the cracked canopy onto the hull of the capsule. The capsule lay on its side in a field of long, pale grass. The field was bordered by trees she did not recognize, with bark the color of old bronze and leaves that moved when there was no wind.

She sat down on the hull and laughed. It was not a kind laugh. It was the laugh of a person who had calculated her chances of survival at six per cent and now found herself, in violation of the arithmetic, alive on a hillside under two suns.

"All right, Glenn," she said. "Inventory."

She inventoried.

She had: one flight suit, intact. One helmet, scuffed. The capsule's emergency kit, which she had drilled with for so many years that she could open it with her eyes closed, and frequently had. A sidearm, which Mission Control had given her under protest and which she had given herself permission to use only in the most boring of circumstances. A locator beacon, which was, on consideration, the least useful object in her possession, because it was beaconing for a frequency that nothing in this sky was listening to. 

Three days of rations.

She did not have: any clear sense of where she was. Any plausible mechanism for getting home. Any reason to believe that the field of pale grass would resolve into a town if she walked in any specific direction?

She also did not have: time to be afraid yet. Fear, she had been taught, was a resource one budgeted. She would budget it later, when she had more information.

She climbed down off the hull. She walked, with great care, to the edge of the field. She had been at the edge of the field for perhaps an hour, watching the wrong moon climb, when she heard the horses.

She turned.

There were four of them, coming up the rise at an unhurried pace that suggested both authority and a polite interest in not startling whatever was in the field. The riders were dressed in a fashion she did not have a vocabulary for, but the lead rider was unarmoured and wearing a color she had seen on the inside of a coronation hat once at a museum in London. 

A deep, deliberate violet. The kind of violet that, in any culture she had studied, meant do not approach without a reason.

The lead rider stopped his horse ten yards from her and lifted both hands palm out.

She lifted both hands, palm out.

"I do not," he said, in a careful, oddly accented English that she could not place but understood perfectly, "wish to alarm you."

She blinked twice. Mostly to confirm the audio.

"I am also," she said, "not currently wishing to alarm anyone."

He smiled. The smile reached only the corner of his mouth, but it reached.

"Where did you come from?"

She thought about the question. She thought about her training. She thought about the field, and the wrong moon, and the man on the horse who had not yet drawn a weapon, though he had several.

"That field," she said.

"Before that."

"A long way up, sir."

He turned in his saddle and said something quiet to the rider behind him. The rider turned the horse and rode back the way they had come, at a much greater pace.

"My name," said the lead rider, dismounting now, in a slow and unthreatening sequence, "is Randor. I am the heir to the throne of Eternos. We are perhaps a three-hour ride from my city. May I approach?"

"You may approach."

He approached. He stopped at what she judged to be the polite distance for a man speaking with an armed and visibly disoriented woman. He had a beard that had been trimmed by someone who cared about it. He had dark eyes that were doing the same quiet inventory of her that she was doing of him.

"What is your name?"

"Marlena Glenn. United States Air Force. Captain."

"Marlena," he repeated, as if testing the weight of the word. "Glenn. I do not know either of these words."

"No, sir. You wouldn't."

"You are from the moon?"

"Further."

He looked at her for a long time. He looked at the capsule behind her, and at the field, and at the suns going lower in their slow joint progress toward the horizon. He looked back at her.

"I think," he said, "that you had better come with me. We will discuss further later. Are you injured?"

"Bruised. Not bad."

"Good. Then we will ride at the pace of a woman who is bruised but not bad. Will you eat something?"

He reached into a saddlebag and produced an apple. The apple was a perfect ordinary red apple, the kind that grew on trees in Pennsylvania, and Marlena Glenn, who had not cried inside her helmet through the worst of the descent, took the apple from his hand and cried then, just a little, with her face turned toward the wrong moon.

He did not comment on it. He turned, instead, and busied himself with the saddle, as if there were a small and important task there that required all of his attention for exactly the length of time she needed.

She would remember this, later, as the moment she stopped being afraid of him.

It is hard to say, in any honest accounting, exactly when she fell in love with Randor of Eternos. She had several candidates. None of them was the apple, though the apple was the only one she ever told him about, because it was the easiest and most poetic and most likely to make him laugh on demand.

The harder candidates were these:

The third week, when she sat across from him in a small library that smelled of cedar oil and dust and tried to explain, with diagrams she drew on the back of a court ledger, what a satellite was. He had listened. He had not nodded politely; he had asked questions. The questions had been good. 

By the end of the hour, she had understood that he was not pretending to be interested in the diagrams, and that she was not pretending to be interested in his city, and that they had been doing two parallel and equal kinds of work for an hour and had arrived in the middle.

The second month, when she was permitted to walk in the gardens unescorted for the first time, she rounded a hedge and found him sitting on a bench reading. He had been so absorbed that he had not heard her. She had stood at the corner of the hedge for thirty seconds and watched him turn a page, and watched the way his face changed at whatever was on the next page, and watched a small, ordinary, unguarded smile arrive at the corner of his mouth and stay there. 

She had thought: that is the face of him. She had thought, "I would like to know what is in that book." And then she had walked deliberately into the gravel, so that he would hear her and the unguarded smile would have somewhere kind to land.

The sixth month, when the council had argued for a long evening about what to do with her, and a faction had suggested politely that she be returned to a sealed chamber until her purpose on Eternia could be ascertained, and Randor had stood up halfway through the third hour and said only, quite calmly, "She is my guest, and you may revisit this in your dreams." 

He had then sat down. 

The faction had revisited it in their dreams. 

Marlena had heard the story from the steward, secondhand, and had spent the rest of the evening on the balcony of her chambers learning a new kind of dizziness.

She did not tell Randor, then or ever, that she had heard the story. She made him tell her, over the long count of years, in his own time. He told her, in the end, in their second autumn. He had been embarrassed about it. She had been delighted that he had been embarrassed.

They married in the third year. The wedding was, by Eternian standards, restrained; by Marlena's reckoning, it was a circus. She wore a bridal gown the color of cream and a wreath of small white flowers that one of the gardeners had bred specifically for the occasion and had refused payment for. 

Her father, who could not be present and would not learn of the wedding for another twenty years, was represented by a small portrait she had drawn from memory and pinned to the inside of her sleeve. 

Randor's mother, who was present and could not stop weeping, walked the length of the great hall and embraced Marlena, quite publicly, before the ceremony had begun, and said into her ear, in the very poor English she had been practicing in secret for a year: "Thank you for landing."

Marlena would think about that sentence, in years to come, when she needed a thing to hold onto.

They lived. She learned the kingdom. She made friends with a young engineer named Duncan who had been promoted to the position of armorer at twenty-two and had no idea what to do with the job; she helped him organize a workshop and gave him three useful ideas about the metallurgy of joining plates, and Duncan, in return, taught her to ride properly and never told anyone she had not known how. 

She established, with the help of an extremely skeptical court astronomer, the first observatory on the south tower. She wrote a long letter once a year to her father, sealed it, and placed it in a box at the bottom of her cabinet, on the theory that she might one day find a way to send it and would feel foolish if she had not been writing.

She bore twins.

She had not expected, with the grim arithmetic of her life up to that point, to live long enough to bear a son. She had not expected, when the midwife told her in the fifth month that she was carrying two, to be able to say anything in response. 

She had not, in the event, said anything; she had only laughed, in the same astonished way she had laughed on the hillside under the wrong moon, with the apple in her hand.

A boy and a girl. The boy came first, by seven minutes, loud enough to make the gulls over the harbor take exception. The girl came quietly. She did not cry. 

She opened her eyes once, looked at her mother, decided the room was sufficient, and went back to sleep. The midwife had hung over her for a long anxious moment before pronouncing her well, and Marlena, who had been holding her breath without knowing it, exhaled into the new arrangement of her life.

Adam Glenn of Eternia. Adora Glenn of Eternia. The privilege of her family name and his father's insistence, given twice, in the same morning, with the same care.

Randor held them in shifts.

He carried the boy first, because the boy was the louder problem. He returned, after a quarter-hour of touring the great hall with the boy, and took the girl from her cradle, and walked her in a slow figure of eight along the southern aisle, and the girl, who had not cried, had still not cried, only looked at her father's face from very close up with the small frowning attention of a being conducting an inspection. Marlena, watching from the side of the hall in a chair she had been bullied into by the midwife, leaned her head back against the wood and thought, with great clarity and no fear at all: this is the country I have.

The country she had that morning was not large. It was a man, two babies, a midwife, and a stooped gardener who had grown her wedding flowers. 

It was, in the way of things, all the country she would ever need.

She held it, in her mind, the way one held warm bread.

She held it for three weeks, in the event.

The villain Hordak came on a warm night in the third week, through a window in the nursery on the third storey that had been thought sufficient and was not. The wards had been lifted for a feeding. The watch had been short by one person on the kind of routine miscount that ordinarily did not signify. 

The breach was from a direction the kingdom had not been defending against. The reports would later absolve everyone. The reports would not, later, bring Adora back.

Marlena would remember, for the rest of her life, the small, precise sound of her daughter's breathing in the cot two paces from her bed, on the count of every breath, until the count was suddenly without the second voice in it.

She had not screamed. She had got up. She had walked to the cot. 

She had stood at the empty cot for the time it took Randor to wake to the change in the air, and then she had said one word, Adora, and Randor had been on his feet, and the guard had been called, and the kingdom had been turned upside down for a fortnight, and then for a year, and then for the rest of their marriage, and Adora had not been found.

They eventually learned that the breach had been Hordak's. 

They learned, by such reports as could be assembled from the edges of the trade routes Hordak's people moved through, that Adora had been taken off-world to a place called Etheria. They sent every ship, every embassy, and every coin they could spare.

None of it brought her back. After a long while, it became understood, in the unspoken way these things become understood, that the search would not stop, but the search would not, also, succeed.

Marlena learned, in those years, the second great grief of her life. The first had been the loss of her own world. The second, smaller in the way only a daughter is smaller than a planet, made the first one easier to live with, because the first one no longer had the room.

They kept Adam.

They did not tell him.

It would seem, in later years, the cruelest part of the early decision: that they had elected to raise their son without telling him he had been one of two. 

They had made the decision on a long autumn evening in the second month after the kidnapping, sitting together at the foot of the wall in the orchard garden, and they had not revisited it. They had told themselves they would tell him when he was old enough.

The age at which a child became old enough kept moving; in their private accounting, the age at which a search would be permitted to end kept moving.

He had been ten when the kingdom fell.

He had still not been told.

The morning the kingdom fell, Adam was ten.

She thought about this, later, on a daily basis. The neatness of the number. The way the universe sometimes did its damage on a round figure, as if to make it easier to refer to.

He had been ten for nine days. He was small for his age and quick for it, and he had spent the morning of his tenth birthday running with a wooden sword along the south corridor and being a terror to the staff. 

He had a friend, a little dark-haired girl named Teela who was the Man-at-Arms's foster-daughter, and the two of them had been inseparable since the spring; on the morning the kingdom fell, Teela was at her father's house in the lower city, which Marlena would, every day for fifteen years, count as a small and ferocious mercy.

Skeletor had come faster than they had thought possible.

She would not, in later years, remember the precise sequence. She remembered Randor's face when the rider came in from the eastern gate. She remembered her own voice, far away from her own body, telling Duncan to take Adam. 

She remembered the case she packed without packing, the heel of bread she had pressed into the child's hand, the small silver locket she had unclipped from her own throat and put around his, because the locket contained a portrait of her father and she had nothing else of Earth to give him.

She remembered telling Adam, very quickly, very steadily, that he was going on an adventure and that she would see him soon.

She remembered the lie of soon.

Skeletor had wanted them alive.

She had understood, in the moment of his entrance, that alive in his lexicon was a position of extraordinary inventiveness. She had understood that he wanted them alive because dead they would have been a story, and a story would have closed; alive, they were a chamber he could revisit. 

She had understood, watching him watch them, that he was a man who had been alone for a very long time and had decided that the cure for his loneliness was to make a kingdom of his isolation.

He put them in a cell. It was deep in the mountain he had taken for his own, which had been a mountain before he had taken it and had only become Snake Mountain afterward, by the grim grammar of his own naming. 

The cell was not a dungeon. It had a window. The window was small and high and barred and looked out onto a sky.

She thanked, on the count of every day for fifteen years, whichever clerk of Skeletor’s administration had chosen to give them a window. She did not know whether the clerk had done it as mercy or as a refinement of cruelty. She did not care after the first year.

They had each other.

This was the thing she had not allowed herself to hope for. She had expected to be separated in the first week. She had expected the cell to be split, moved, or for Randor to be taken to a different mountain entirely. 

Skeletor was, she would learn, a man of small theatrical contradictions; he had decided, perhaps because he could think of no better punishment, that the king and queen of Eternos would keep each other.

He had thought, perhaps, that they would learn to hate each other over time. He had thought, perhaps, that fifteen years in a single room would scrape the love out of a marriage like rust off a horseshoe. He had been wrong about this on the level of the specific because he had never been married, and he had been wrong about it on the level of the general because he had never been loved.

They counted the days on the inside of the western wall. Randor used a small splinter of stone he had worked loose from the floor in the third week. He scratched a line in for every dawn. By the end of the first year, the lines reached his hip; by the third, they had passed Marlena's shoulder; by the eighth, they had begun a second column.

They learned the cell. They learned the angle of the morning light through the window and the hour at which it touched the foot of the bed. They learned the rotation of the guards and the schedule of the meals; they learned which of the guards would speak and which would not, and which would carry messages and which would only nod, and which would, on a feast day, slip them a small piece of fruit and pretend it had not happened.

They invented things to keep their minds. Randor taught her a game his grandfather had taught him, which was played with twenty-seven pebbles and was, as far as Marlena could tell, mathematically equivalent to a game her own grandfather had taught her, which was played with sixteen matchsticks. The equivalence delighted them both.

They played it most evenings for nine years. Marlena won more often than Randor, because Marlena had the patience of a woman who had once spent six months training for a six-minute reentry; Randor lost more gracefully than anyone Marlena had ever known.

They learned the sound of each other's breathing in sleep, its specific cadence, and developed the small, unconscious habit of breathing in time. By the fifth year, when one of them had a bad dream, the other woke before the dream had fully taken hold, simply from the change in rhythm.

They talked about Adam.

Not every day. They could not have borne every day. They picked specific days. The first day of every month, they sat with their backs to the western wall, where the lines were, and they talked about him. They told each other what they thought he was doing.

They invented him, year by year, into a young man they had never met. They were wrong about most of the details and right about the heart of him, which was the thing they had given him before he left.

From the second year onward, Randor was certain that the boy was alive. He could not say how he knew. He said only, on the days she could not bear it, "He is alive. I would feel it. I would feel it the way I feel the cold in my knee when the weather turns. He is alive."

Marlena, who did not believe in the cold in the knee, believed in the way Randor said it.

They talked about Adora differently.

They had been talking about Adora, in the unfinished way of parents whose grief had been the length of their marriage, since before they had had names for the kind of talking. They did not pick a day for her. 

They picked, instead, a corner of the cell: the small triangle of stone where the eastern wall met the floor, the place where the morning light first arrived. They sat at the corner whenever one of them needed to. They did not announce it. 

The other one would look up and see, and would let the sitting be private, or would join, depending on the small unspoken signal of how the head was held.

Adora was twenty-five now, too. They had not had her since she was three weeks old. They did not know what she looked like. They did not know what she sounded like. 

They did not know the country or realm that had her, beyond its name, and the name was insufficient. They had, between them, a sum total of nineteen days of memory of her, which they had spent so many years going over that they had worn the days the way a path is worn by the feet of pilgrims to a place no one was certain still existed.

They did not give up the search, even in the cell. They could not act on it. But they did not give it up. They held it the way one held a thing that did not require holding, only the refusal to set it down.

There were bad years. The seventh year was bad; she had a fever that lasted nine days, and the guards would not bring a physician. Randor sat awake for all nine nights and bathed her forehead with the corner of his sleeve, dipped in the water bowl. 

On the worst of the nine, the fourth, she had begun to speak in long unbroken sentences in a Spanish she had learned at fourteen from her grandmother and had not, in waking life, spoken in twenty years. 

Randor, who did not know a word of the language, had simply held her hand and listened, and had said back to her, at intervals, the few words he had picked up from her own private murmurings to herself over their years together. Mi vida. Aquí estoy. He had said them in the wrong accent and at the wrong moments. They had worked anyway.

She would, in later years, ask him to say them again, in his terrible Eternian Spanish, on nights when she could not sleep, and he would, and she would.

The eleventh was worse; news came down through the kitchens that the resistance had collapsed in the western provinces, and they understood that for some interval of months they had been the only people in the kingdom still expecting to be rescued. 

In the worst week of the eleventh, one of the guards, a young man who had not spoken to them in three years, paused at the slot through which their meals were passed and said, in the voice of a man delivering both a kindness and a confession, "Your son is alive. I do not know where. I know that he is in it." 

Then he had gone, and they had never seen him again, and they had spent two days arguing, without quite arguing, about whether the guard had told them the truth or had been ordered to tell them a lie that would break them more thoroughly than silence. They had decided, by the end of the second day, that they did not care which. The sentence was theirs now. They kept it.

In the twelfth year, they learned a song. It came up through the floor; some prisoner two levels below them, in a cell they could not see and would never identify, sang the same long, slow ballad every evening at the going down of the suns. Randor knew the song. 

It was a harvest song from his grandfather's province, the kind sung at the threshing in the long dusks of late autumn, and he had not heard it sung properly in forty years. He hummed it under his breath the first time and then, on the third evening, he sang along, very quietly, in his own cell. The voice below paused. Then it began the song again from the top, slower, so that he could keep up. 

They sang it together every evening for eleven months, the unknown voice and the king of Eternos, and then one evening the voice below was gone, and Randor did not sing the song again for three years.

The thirteenth was the worst of all; she did not, in later years, ever speak about the thirteenth, because the thirteenth was the year she had decided, privately and very calmly, that she would not survive another, and Randor had known it without being told, and had spent four months talking her gently back from the edge of it without ever once acknowledging the edge. 

He had, in the worst of those months, begun to invent for her a long, elaborate story about a country she had never been to, on a continent of Eternia she had never seen. He told her a chapter of it every night. He told it badly. The story had no plot to speak of, a great many characters whose names he forgot and later reused for others, and the geography contradicted itself within the first week. 

She had loved the story. 

She had loved it because it required her, at the end of each evening, to ask him to continue the next, and the asking was the small contract she made with herself to be there for the answering. She would, in later years, ask him for a chapter of the country he had invented for her, on nights when neither of them could sleep, and he would invent another, and they would laugh, very quietly, in the dark.

They survived the thirteenth, by some grace they did not name.

The fourteenth was, by comparison, a quiet year.

The fifteenth began the way every year had begun: a line on the western wall, a meal of grey bread and the broth of a vegetable Marlena had stopped trying to name, a long morning of light moving slowly across the floor. They played the pebble game. 

Randor won, which was unusual and pleased him out of all proportion; she had let him win, which she did sometimes, when his hands were unsteady, but on this morning she had not let him, and she suspected he had cheated, and she let him have it because the cheating was, in its way, a sign of life.

Then a great noise began in the mountain.

She lifted her head. Randor lifted his. The noise was not the noise of any morning they had heard for fifteen years. It was, for a moment, simply a noise, and then it resolved into a series of noises, and the series included shouts, and then shouts in the corridor outside, and then a sound she had not heard in fifteen years, which was the sound of a guard running away from his post.

They stood. They held each other's hands. They had not held each other's hands like that in the cell, the way one held hands at the doors of an unknown room, in years; they had passed beyond the holding of hands and into a quieter form of attachment some time around the fourth year, and they had not had cause to go back to it. They went back to it now. 

She was sitting in the corner where the eastern wall met the floor when the guards came for Randor.

They had not come for Randor in twelve years. He had been their cellmate, hers, the body in the bed beside her own, the thing they walked past on the morning rotation. No guard, in all that time, had ever come and asked for one of them and left the other. The cell had been theirs.

The guard who unlocked the door that morning was a young man whose name she had never been told. He was unaccompanied, which was the second wrong thing. He looked at Randor. He did not look at her.

"Sire," he said. "I am to bring you to my lord."

Randor was at the wall. He had been counting that morning's line. He set the splinter of stone down on the small ledge they had worn into the wall by stacking and unstacking it for fifteen years. He took the time to set it down carefully, with the small, considered attention of a man who had always set down the things he was about to leave.

"Why?"

"I am not to say."

"You may say."

The guard hesitated. He was young. Marlena, on her corner, watched him decide that what he had been told to keep was not worth the keeping.

"Your son is in the mountain, Sire," he said quietly. "He has come."

Randor's face did a thing.

It was a thing she had not seen on his face in fifteen years, and not often enough before that. It was the face of a man who had spent every morning of fifteen years believing a thing without proof, and had, in the small space of a single sentence, been given the proof. 

It was a face she would carry, in the years that followed, in the small private chamber of her memory where she kept the things that had cost her the most to be given, and she would carry it precisely, in every line and every degree, because that face was the last gift the universe was going to give her from Randor's company, and she had decided, in the moment of seeing it, that she would not let any part of it go.

He did not speak.

He went to her instead and knelt. He put both her hands in both of his. He looked at her, very directly, in the way he had looked at her on the morning of the wrong moon when he had said I do not wish to alarm you, in the way he had looked at her on the morning of the wedding under the wreath of small white flowers the gardener had bred, in the way he had looked at her on the long bad nights of the seventh year when he had bathed her forehead with the corner of his sleeve.

"Marlena."

"Yes?"

"I will come back."

"You will."

"I am very old."

"You are not."

He laughed. The laugh was small. The laugh was the laugh of a man who had been called not old by his wife on the morning she could see, in his face, the count of every line he had scratched onto the western wall.

"Wait for me," he said.

"I will."

He kissed her once, on the mouth. He kissed both her hands, in turn, on the back where the cuff did not reach. He stood. He turned to the guard, and he said, with the small dry dignity of a man who had not, technically, ruled in fifteen years and had not, internally, ever stopped, "I am ready."

The guard took him.

The door shut.

She did not move from the corner for a long time.

She did not know, in the time that followed, how to count it. She had been counting in days for so long that the smaller unit had gone out of her. She knew only that the morning bell had gone past, and that the noon meal did not come, and that some interval after the noon meal would have been there had there been a sound deep in the mountain that was not any sound the mountain had made in fifteen years.

The sound was the sound of a thing breaking.

She had heard mountains break, once, on the long terrain reports she had memorized at Mission Control. It had been a desert mountain on a different planet entirely, and the breaking had been a different kind of breaking. She recognized the kind anyway. It was the sound of a structure deciding it no longer agreed with itself.

There was shouting in the corridor.

There was shouting in a corridor below, and then nearer, and then she heard a lock surrender that was not her lock, and a door open that was not her door, and a series of running footfalls, and then, after some interval she did not measure, her own lock turned.

The door opened.

A woman stood in it. She was wearing the leather of a rider and the dust of a battle, and she had a sword on her hip that had not, by the look of it, been put down in some time. She looked at Marlena. She lowered the sword.

"My lady."

Marlena said, "Who are you?"

"Captain Ileia of the Eastern Reach. We have taken this floor. The mountain is breaking. The king is . . ." The woman stopped. She started again. "We have taken the floor, my lady. The cells beside yours have been opened. We are bringing those who can be moved into yours, because it is the strongest. We are bringing them now. May we come in?"

"You may come in."

They came in.

They came in slowly at first, and then in greater numbers as the corridor cleared. They were the Rebellion. They were the Rebellion, as Marlena had not seen the Rebellion in fifteen years, since before the fall: dust-streaked, mostly young, mostly leaner than they should have been, with the small economical motions of people who had been hungry for a long time and had grown competent inside the hunger. 

They were brought in by other Rebellion. The wounded came first. They were laid out on the floor of the cell that had been Marlena's home, on bedrolls dragged in from the corridor, and the Rebellion's own medic, a small grey-haired man who had been a court physician three regimes ago and had recognized her on sight without showing it, knelt down with his bag and went to work.

Captain Ileia stayed with Marlena. She stood at the wall with her sword at her hip. She did not press. She had the manners, Marlena noticed in some far quiet corner of her own thinking, of a person who had been raised at a court before she had been raised by a war.

"Captain."

"My lady."

"My husband."

Captain Ileia did not speak.

"Captain."

"My lady, I do not know. They took him out before we breached the upper levels. We have not yet reached the throne room. The mountain is unsafe. We are working as fast as we can."

"And my son."

"He is the reason the mountain is unsafe, my lady."

Marlena absorbed this. She had a son. The world had returned to her the existence of him, and had done it twice on the same morning, once at the door by a young guard who had not been authorized to do it, and once now by a captain who had. It was already a great deal to absorb. She absorbed it.

"I will wait," she said. "Thank you, Captain. I will wait here. You may carry on."

"My lady."

The captain went back to her work.

Marlena sat down on the bed she had shared with Randor for fifteen years. She put her hands on her knees. She watched the small grey-haired physician work on a young woman with a wound in her shoulder, and she watched the cell that had been her marriage become, in the space of an hour, a triage room. The wounded came in. 

The dying came in. One of them, an old soldier whose face she did not know, recognized her from the bed and tried, with the strange formal politeness of a person who knew he was about to leave the room, to lift his hand to his forehead in salute. She got up from the bed, went to him, put her hand on his wrist, and held it there until he stopped trying, and then for some time after that.

She did not weep.

She had not been told yet. She had decided, sitting beside the dying old soldier whose name she had not been given the chance to learn, that she would not weep until she had been told. The decision was an exercise of the will, and the will was the only thing of hers that had not been broken in fifteen years, and she chose to use it.

It was nearly two hours before Adam came.

He came in alone.

He came in slowly, with the small, careful step of a person who had been told what he was about to do and had not, in the long walk down the stairs, yet found a way to do it well. He was very tall. 

He was in armor she did not recognize, and there was blood on the breastplate that was not his, and the Power Sword was sheathed, and his face, when she looked up at it from where she sat by the dying old soldier whose hand she was still holding, was the face of the small boy who had been ten years old on the morning the kingdom fell.

He was twenty-five now.

He was weeping.

He had not stopped, by the look of him, in some time.

"Mom."

She rose. She let the old soldier's hand down, gently, on the floor.

She walked the small distance between the soldier and the door. The cell, which had been full of working bodies, became, by some quiet collective instinct of the wounded and the rebels and the small grey-haired medic, very quiet around the center of itself. 

They had all of them, in their varying ways, understood what the boy in the doorway had come to say.

"Adam."

He could not speak. He shook his head. He shook his head again.

"Tell me."

"Mom, I am so sorry."

"Tell me."

"He came down through the throne room. Skeletor had him at the center. The ceiling. I was. I was fighting Skeletor when. The ceiling came down. I could not get to him. I could not. I tried. Mom, I am so sorry. I am so."

She put her hand up. He stopped.

She walked the last small distance, and she put her arms around her son.

He was very tall. She had to reach up to do it. She put her hand on the back of his head, on his hair, on the place a mother puts her hand to tell a child that the child did not, in this moment, have to do any of the work of being upright. 

He bent into it. 

He bent all the way down, the way a tree bends when the wind has decided. He put his face in her shoulder, and he wept, and she held him, and she did not weep yet, because she was holding him, and the holding was the only thing she had not been doing for fifteen years and she had remembered, immediately, on the count of one second, how it was done.

He wept for a long time.

The cell did not move. The wounded did not move. The captain at the wall did not move. The small grey-haired medic, who had paused his work because he had been very gently steered to pause it by the woman with the wound in her shoulder he had been treating, did not move.

"Adam."

"Mom."

"Show me where, when it is safe."

"Mom."

"Adam. Show me where. I will walk on him. I will not have him in the rubble alone."

"Yes, Mom."

She held him for some time longer. She held him until his weeping had quieted, and then until his breathing had evened, and then for some time longer still, because she could, and because she had been promised, at the door of this same cell that morning, that she would wait, and because she had been waiting, and because she had decided that the part of the waiting which involved being a mother to the boy who had survived would begin now, and would not stop.

She did not weep.

She would, that night.

They had given her a room in the surviving wing of the palace, which Captain Ileia and a half-dozen of the Rebellion had cleared and secured in the late afternoon. 

The room was a small one. It had belonged to the queen mother in her last decade and had since been used by no one, because the regime's staff had not been permitted in that part of the building and had left it under linen. The linen had been pulled off. The bed had been made. A fire had been lit in the grate. 

Adam had refused to be persuaded to lie down. He sat in the chair beside her bed, in clean clothes found for him from a chest, his head tipped back against the wall, his eyes closed, his hand on the arm of the chair where Marlena could reach it.

She wept for an hour, in the small, silent way of a woman who had been promised something at the door of a cell and had not, in the event, been given it.

The weeping had, at its bottom, a sound she did not at first recognize, until she did, and the sound was the sound of an old soldier trying to lift his hand to his forehead in salute, and then giving up, and being held.

She let it out. She let all of it out. She had been holding it, by her own internal accounting, for the entire fifteen years of the cell, because she had not been able to afford to put it down for any of them, and the privilege of putting it down had arrived in the shape of a small grey-haired medic and a captain and a boy who had become a man, and she used the privilege now, in the small private posture of a person who had earned the using of it.

Adam did not move. He did not try to comfort her. He had understood, the way a son understood, that what she was doing was not work he could help her with. He kept his hand on the arm of the chair. He kept his eyes closed. He kept the room from being empty by being there.

When she had finished, she said, "Adam."

"Mom."

"I have to tell you something tonight. I had thought I would wait a week. I have decided I will not."

"All right."

"Open your eyes."

He opened his eyes.

She told him about his sister.

She told him with the small, steady voice she had practiced in the cell against the day she might be allowed to use it. She had practiced many versions. In the event that she did not need any of them. She said only:

You were two. The other was your sister. Her name was Adora. She was taken from us when you were three weeks old, by a man called Hordak, off-world, to a place called Etheria. We have never stopped looking for her. We have never found her. We are going to find her. Your father did not live to see her come home. I am going to.

Adam, when she had finished, did not put down a cup, because he had no cup left in his hand. He looked at his own hand resting on the arm of the chair, as if he had not seen the hand before in this configuration, as if the hand had been someone else's hand on the road up.

He said, eventually, the only word that fitted the shape of what she had told him, which was yes.

He said it the way one signed onto a hard piece of work.

The search would resume in the morning.

It would take, in the event, some years.

She did not know, sitting beside her son's chair in the small, slow hours of the night of the morning she had become a widow, that she would live to see her daughter come up the steps of the palace with her hair tied back in the way Marlena's own mother had used to tie hers. 

She did not know that the meeting would happen on a Threeday morning in the early summer of a year still on the count, in the meadow where the sun-rims came up in their week, with the sea wind off the harbour and her son tall beside her and her daughter, finally, walking the long stride of a woman who had been called home.

She did not know, then, any of it.

She knew only, in the third hour, that she had a son. She knew she had a daughter somewhere. 

She knew that she had been promised, on the morning she had been a girl on a hillside under the wrong moon, that the universe would never give her anything for free. The universe had not. 

The universe had given her a country and a king and two children, and had taken back the king and one of the children, and was holding the second child somewhere it could not be reached from where she now sat, and was offering Marlena Glenn of Houston and of Eternia the chance to go and get her.

She accepted.

She accepted, sitting at the foot of her son's chair with her hands open on her knees in the small private posture of a person making a vow, in the hour before the dawn of her first day as a widow, in a room that had not been used since the queen mother's last decade.

"I will wait," she said, aloud, to nobody, or to Randor, or to Adora, or to herself.

"I will be strong," she said. "I will be here. She will come."

The fire ate its small meal.

She had counted, in the cell, for fifteen years.

She would count again. She would count differently. The count had a different shape now, and she would learn the shape, the way she had learned every other shape the universe had presented her with, by the patient daily work of standing inside it.

She had been an astronaut.

She knew, better than most, how to live in a small space and wait for a horizon.