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The meeting had concluded seven minutes earlier. The signed supply agreement rested among the documents on his desk, its terms reviewed twice and amended once in the Spina di Rosula’s favor. There was no remaining reason for its president to linger in his office.
Navia lingered anyway.
“And then,” she continued, leaning forward with both hands against his desk, “the entire cart tipped into the canal.”
Neuvillette looked from her to the pale blue box beside her elbow. “The entire cart?”
“Every last crate. You should have seen the men attempting to retrieve them. Half of Poisson smelled like onions for three days.”
“That does not appear in the report.”
“Of course it doesn’t. The onions were unharmed.”
“I see.”
Navia studied his expression. “You don’t.”
“I understand that the shipment arrived without sustaining significant damage.”
“That isn’t the amusing part.”
“Then I appear to have misunderstood.”
She leaned closer across his desk. “Monsieur Neuvillette, half a dozen grown men were waist-deep in the canal, chasing onions while they floated away in every direction. One of them attempted to use his coat as a fishing net.”
Neuvillette considered this.
“Was he successful?”
Navia stared at him.
“Remarkably, yes.”
“Then his solution was effective.”
Her laughter escaped before she could stop it.
The quiet that followed was not uncomfortable, but it seemed to draw her attention to the clock on the wall. Her brows lifted.
“Monsieur Neuvillette, you do realize my official report ended several minutes ago?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you haven’t dismissed me.”
Neuvillette glanced at the completed agreement. “I was unaware that you wished to leave.”
For a moment, she only stared at him.
Then she laughed.
There was nothing restrained about Navia’s laughter. It filled the solemn office without permission, warm and startling against the rain tapping at the windows. He had heard her laugh before, usually with the Traveler and Paimon, sometimes with Melus and Silver close behind. This was the first time, he thought, that the sound had been meant entirely for him.
Something shifted in the room.
Or perhaps only in him.
“Well,” Navia said, straightening, “I suppose I should let the Chief Justice return to matters more important than drowned onions.”
“I did not say they were unimportant.”
“That may be the kindest judgment those onions will ever receive.”
She pushed the pastry box across his desk. “For your trouble.”
“I was under the impression these were intended for the meeting.”
“They were. You neglected to eat any.”
“I was reviewing the agreement.”
“And now you can review the macarons.”
She gave him no opportunity to refuse. With a final wave, she swept from the office, carrying sunlight with her despite the weather outside.
The door closed.
Neuvillette looked down at the box.
The room had been quiet before Navia arrived. It had not troubled him then. He could not determine why the same quiet felt different after she left.
He called it disruption.
It was the closest word he possessed.
Weeks later, Neuvillette stood in Poisson with a list of the dead in his hands.
The paper had softened beneath the rain. Ink gathered at the edges of several names, though not enough to obscure them.
Melus.
Silver.
Around him, members of the Spina di Rosula carried the wounded from the lower levels. Fatui agents moved among them with crates of medicine and clean water. The air was thick with mud, Primordial Seawater, and the particular silence left behind when grief became too large for weeping.
Navia was nowhere in sight.
“She went with the Traveler.”
Neuvillette turned.
Arlecchino stood beneath the shelter of a damaged awning. Her expression revealed nothing, but her eyes moved briefly toward the casualty list in his hand.
“There are ancient ruins nearby,” she continued. “My people discovered them before the flooding. We postponed the investigation to assist with the relief effort.”
“And Miss Navia entered them?”
“She insisted on accompanying the Traveler and Paimon.”
“Were they informed that the ruins may be contaminated?”
“They discovered that themselves.”
The paper tightened beneath Neuvillette’s fingers.
Arlecchino studied him. “You appear concerned, Monsieur Neuvillette.”
“The ruins may contain Water from the Primordial Sea. Any Fontainian who comes into contact with it would be in immediate danger.”
Neuvillette folded the list with deliberate care.
“Which direction?”
Arlecchino told him.
He left before she could say anything more.
As Neuvillette made his way toward the ruins, another rain returned to him.
The last time he and Navia had walked together, it had begun outside the Opera Epiclese, light enough that she stepped into it without concern. Neuvillette opened his umbrella before she had taken three steps.
Navia looked up when its shadow fell over her.
“I’m not made of sugar, you know.”
“No. However, you have considerably farther to travel.”
“Only after we reach the station. Until then, our journey is exactly the same.”
There was no flaw in her reasoning.
Nevertheless, she remained beneath the umbrella.
They walked in silence for a time. The rain strengthened, drumming against the fabric above them. Neuvillette adjusted his grip so that more of the umbrella covered her.
Navia noticed.
“You’ll ruin your coat.”
“It will dry.”
“So will I.”
She reached for the handle. Her gloved fingers brushed his.
The contact lasted no longer than a breath.
Neuvillette loosened his hold, assuming she meant to take the umbrella. Instead, Navia shifted it until they stood equally sheltered. The movement brought her closer to him. Her shoulder nearly touched his arm.
He became acutely aware of the narrow space between them.
By the time they boarded the aquabus, the rain was falling hard enough to blur the Opera Epiclese behind them. Few passengers had chosen to travel in the weather. Navia took a seat beside the window while Neuvillette remained standing.
She looked up at him.
“Monsieur Neuvillette, are you planning to loom over me for the entire journey?”
“I was not aware that I was looming.”
“Sit down and I may reconsider the accusation.”
He sat beside her, leaving what he judged to be an appropriate distance between them.
The aquabus rounded a curve. Navia’s shoulder knocked against his arm.
She did not immediately move away.
“You can stop doing that,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me as though you’re waiting for me to become angry again.”
“I would understand if you did.”
“I know,” she said. “But you keep waiting for anger I’ve already let go.”
He could still see her across the courtroom, grief sharpened into fury as she accused him of standing above humanity and watching its tragedies from a place too distant to feel them. She had not been entirely wrong.
Her father had entered the dueling ring beneath Neuvillette’s judgment.
Her father had not left it alive.
“I failed to understand Mr. Callas,” he said. “Your forgiveness does not alter that.”
“No, it doesn’t. But forgiving you was my decision. You don’t get to refuse it because you haven’t forgiven yourself.”
The aquabus moved steadily through the rain. Neuvillette had delivered judgments that altered the course of human lives, yet he found himself unable to answer the woman seated beside him.
Navia turned toward the window.
“Anger isn’t a sentence I have to serve forever.”
A sentence.
He understood sentences. Their limits were set by law. Their conclusions were recorded. When a person had paid what justice demanded, the matter ended.
Human emotion offered no such clarity.
“Then what remains?” he asked.
Navia regarded him for a long moment.
“That depends,” she said, “on what we choose to put there.”
Before he could ask what she meant, the aquabus slowed at the Court of Fontaine.
Neuvillette rose. Navia caught his sleeve before he could step away.
The gesture startled him into stillness.
She smoothed a damp fold at his cuff, though it required no such attention.
“There,” she said. “The Chief Justice is presentable again.”
“Was I not presentable before?”
Her smile returned. “Not entirely.”
He stepped onto the platform. When the aquabus departed, he remained there longer than necessary, watching until she disappeared into the rain.
He had not allowed himself to consider what might remain between them.
Wanting an answer felt too much like wanting something from her.
After Callas, he believed he had forfeited that right.
The entrance to the ruins stood open.
Neuvillette passed through it without slowing.
Water ran along the fractured floors, gathering in luminous pools beneath the ancient stone. The concentration was unmistakable. Primordial Seawater carried a memory older than Fontaine’s courts, older than its laws, older even than the human forms its people wore.
Somewhere ahead, stone cracked.
Then came Paimon’s scream.
“Navia!”
Neuvillette moved.
The corridor opened onto a ruined bridge just as its center gave way. The Traveler lay against one broken edge, one hand outstretched toward empty air.
Below them, Navia fell.
Her hat had been torn away. Golden hair streamed above her as she dropped toward the water, one arm still reaching for the hand that had failed to catch her.
There was no time to measure the distance.
No time to summon the authority expected of the Iudex of Fontaine.
No time to remember Callas.
Neuvillette reached the edge.
Two shapes rose from the Primordial Sea.
They were small beside the vastness beneath them, little more than blue light given form. Oceanids curled around Navia’s falling body, catching her for one impossible heartbeat before the water could claim her.
Neuvillette knew them.
Not by their shapes. Not even by their power.
He knew them by the way they held her.
One braced beneath her shoulders. The other guarded her head from the stone. Even stripped of voice, body, and name, Melus and Silver placed themselves between Navia and death.
The moment they gave him was less than a second.
It was enough.
Water answered Neuvillette’s command. It rose around Navia without touching her, bearing her upward as the two Oceanids dissolved into its light.
He caught her against him.
“Miss Navia.”
Her body was warm. Her pulse fluttered beneath his fingers, faint but present.
Her eyes did not open.
The Primordial Sea surged below.
Countless voices moved within it. Their grief pressed against his consciousness, pulling at Navia, calling her back toward the whole from which Fontaine’s people had once been shaped.
They had not taken her body.
They were taking everything else.
Neuvillette closed his eyes and followed.
The Opera Epiclese had never been so full.
Every seat was occupied, yet no person sat among the audience. Oceanids crowded the galleries in pale, translucent shapes. Their voices moved together, indistinguishable from the water surrounding them.
At the center of the courtroom stood Navia.
Melus and Silver flanked her as they had in life.
“The accused has been found guilty,” declared the Oceanid presiding over the court. “She will join us.”
The audience answered as one.
“Join us.”
Navia stared at them. Her expression held no fear now, only an exhaustion so profound that Neuvillette felt it like pressure beneath his ribs.
She had lost her mother before she was old enough to properly remember her.
Then her father.
Now Melus and Silver.
The dead had built a courtroom from her grief and offered her the one verdict she was too tired to resist.
No more goodbyes.
No more graves without bodies.
No more surviving everyone she loved.
The collective reached for her.
Neuvillette stepped onto the floor of the court.
“That is enough.”
The voices faltered.
Water trembled along the walls as every face turned toward him.
He took his place where the Chief Justice’s seat should have been, though he did not sit.
“This trial is dismissed.”
“You have no authority here,” the presiding Oceanid said.
Perhaps he did not.
The Primordial Sea predated Fontaine’s laws. Its victims had been denied justice in life and reduced to witnesses of one another in death.
But Navia looked at him.
Recognition crossed her face, followed by something he could not read.
“You,” she whispered.
He descended the steps.
The Oceanids recoiled from him, but Melus and Silver remained beside her.
“You are the one passing judgment again,” Navia said.
There was no accusation in her voice.
That was worse.
Neuvillette stopped before her. He remembered another courtroom and another judgment, a man who had chosen death while the Iudex watched from above and mistook sacrifice for guilt.
“No,” he said. “This time, the judgment is yours.”
The audience stirred.
Navia looked around her. “They want me to stay.”
“They want you to become part of them.”
“They’re frightened.”
“Yes.”
“They’re alone.”
“They are no longer capable of being alone.”
Her gaze shifted to Melus and Silver. They stood close enough that she could reach either of them.
Perhaps that was the cruelty of it. The Primordial Sea had returned them to her exactly as she remembered, preserving every familiar detail so that leaving would feel like losing them a second time.
Neuvillette extended his hand.
“Come back, Miss Navia.”
She did not move.
“Fontaine still needs you.”
Her gaze remained on Melus and Silver.
Neuvillette’s outstretched hand trembled.
“I need you.”
The words escaped him before judgment could silence them.
Navia looked at him, but she did not move.
The distance between them was no more than a single step.
It felt wider than the sea.
Neuvillette had known that whatever fragile peace existed between them did not erase the past. He had known that her forgiveness could not transform him into someone she would willingly follow.
Yet some unguarded part of him had believed she might reach for him.
Callas stood between them even here.
His hand remained outstretched.
“You need not trust me,” he said.
Navia’s brows drew together.
“You need not forgive me. But please…”
His voice failed him.
He had delivered verdicts before gods and nations. He had condemned the guilty and released the innocent. He had spoken through riots, storms, and the grief of those who found justice too late.
He could not command these four words to remain steady.
“Please, take my hand.”
Navia stared at him.
“You still don’t understand.”
The words entered him like cold water.
Of course he did not.
For all his years among humanity, he had misunderstood Callas when understanding mattered most. He had mistaken Navia’s laughter for disruption, her presence for an alteration in the atmosphere, his own longing to hear her speak for professional courtesy.
Whatever existed within him had no proper name.
Guilt, perhaps.
Responsibility.
Regret distorted by time into something more selfish.
Navia turned away from him.
“It isn’t you I don’t want to go with,” she said.
She looked at Melus and Silver.
“It’s them I don’t want to leave.”
Melus bowed his head.
Silver smiled, though his eyes shone.
The truth of her hesitation struck Neuvillette with such force that for a moment he could not speak.
She had not refused him.
She was saying goodbye.
Again.
“Young Miss,” Melus said gently, “you have kept us waiting long enough.”
Navia let out a broken laugh. “That sounds like something I should be saying to you.”
“Then you must return and continue saying it,” Silver replied.
The Oceanids in the gallery began to rise. Their voices sharpened.
“She belongs with us.”
Melus and Silver moved in front of Navia.
“No,” Melus said.
“She still has a life that belongs only to her,” Silver continued.
The court shook.
Neuvillette stepped closer, his hand still waiting between them.
Navia looked at it.
Then at him.
“You came for me,” she said.
There were too many answers.
Duty required it.
Arlecchino told me where you had gone.
The danger demanded immediate intervention.
All of them were true.
None of them explained the terror that had emptied his mind when he saw her falling.
“Yes,” he said.
Navia placed her hand in his.
The courtroom shattered.
Neuvillette returned to himself with Navia’s body held against his chest and her hand locked around his.
The Oceanids vanished beneath them.
For one terrible instant, she remained still.
Then Navia gasped.
Her fingers tightened around his.
“Melus. Silver.”
“I know.”
Her eyes opened. Confusion passed through them before recognition settled.
“Monsieur Neuvillette?”
He had never heard his name spoken with such relief.
The force of it loosened something carefully restrained within him. His arm tightened around her back. He held her closer than necessity required, as though the Primordial Sea might still reach up and take her if any space remained between them.
Navia did not pull away.
Only when the Traveler called her name did Neuvillette become aware of what he was doing.
He released her at once.
Water carried them to the intact edge of the bridge. The Traveler helped Navia to her feet while Paimon circled her, crying and asking several questions without waiting for an answer.
Neuvillette stepped back.
His right hand was trembling.
He closed it before anyone could notice.
Navia told them about the trial. About the people of Poisson. About Melus and Silver realizing the truth and defending her one last time.
When she finished, she looked toward the water below.
“They protected me even after…”
Her voice broke.
Neuvillette turned to the Traveler and Paimon. “We should give Miss Navia a moment.”
They withdrew several paces.
He intended to join them.
Navia caught his sleeve.
The gesture stopped him more effectively than any command.
“You saved me,” she said.
“The two Oceanids slowed your fall. Without their intervention, I would not have reached you in time.”
“That wasn’t what I said.”
Neuvillette looked at her hand upon his sleeve.
He thought of an umbrella shifted until it sheltered them equally. A pastry box left on his desk. An office that had learned the shape of her absence.
He thought of Callas.
“I happened to arrive in time,” he said.
Navia studied him with reddened eyes.
Perhaps she heard the evasion. Perhaps she was simply too tired to challenge it.
Her fingers loosened, but before she released him, they slid down and briefly touched his hand.
“Then I’m glad it was you.”
She turned toward the others.
Neuvillette remained where she left him.
He had believed that what he felt was something he had no right to name, much less act upon. He had believed distance could serve as penance, that wanting nothing from Navia was the closest he could come to making amends.
But when she fell, he had reached for her.
There had been no judgment in it.
No duty.
No guilt.
Only the certainty that a world without her would be altered beyond repair.
Neuvillette still did not know what to call that certainty.
He knew only that when the sea had tried to take her, the truth had escaped him before judgment could silence it.
I need you.