WHAT THE GODS OWE THE DEAD

Improvise

My father looks at me and something in his face does a complicated thing, like he had a word prepared and it turned out to be the wrong word and now he's standing there holding it. He says "Aera" like he's checking whether it still fits. It doesn't, particularly, but I don't say that.

I haven't gone by Aera since I was seven. Riven, the Scholar called me, the first week. Riven, like something split open, like the past tense of a word that means to tear. I used to think it was pedagogical — a reminder to cut away what wasn't useful. Later I thought it was affection, which is how the Scholar expressed most things: sideways, in functional language, with plausible deniability. Now I'm standing in the doorway of this house and I can't decide what I think. I can't decide much of anything. I've been walking for three days and the town I walked toward was on fire.

"Hello," I say.

He steps back. I walk in.

The entry hall is identical to the version I carry in memory, which I wasn't expecting. Same tile, same c***k near the door, same three coat hooks at the same height. There's a coat on the middle hook that belongs to someone I've never met — my brother Cael, who was two when I left and is apparently now a person with his own coat and his own height and my father's hands. He's standing at the top of the stairs doing the thing I apparently also do when I'm assessing something: going very still.

My mother appears from the kitchen. She sees me. Her face does the thing it did when I was small and had done something she didn't know how to respond to.... too large for one expression, cycling through several quickly. Then she covers her mouth with both hands.

"You're alive," she says, muffled.

"Yes."

"We stopped receiving reports. Three months ago, the updates stopped coming and we didn't know, we thought...."

"I'm fine," I say. And then, because that second thing she said is pressing on something: "What reports."

Silence.

My mother looks at my father. My father is looking at the floor with the practiced steadiness of a man who has been looking at the floor about a specific topic for a very long time.

"What reports," I say again, and I keep my voice exactly even because the Scholar taught me that the voice is the first thing you lose and the most expensive.

"Quarterly," my father says. "Through the Celestial Court administrative office. A summary of your training progress." He pauses. "They stopped coming in early spring."

Early spring. Right before my mentors went silent.

Cael comes down the stairs. He's taller than I realized from the top landing, seventeen and already carrying his height like he's been arguing with people over it. He looks at me with the cataloguing eyes I recognize as a version of my own and says: "You stopped the Maws."

"Yes."

"All seven."

"Yes."

"How."

"Training," I say, which is the most honest and least useful answer I have, and he looks at me like he knows it, which I respect.

My father makes tea. My mother holds my hand at the kitchen table and doesn't speak, which is the right choice. I drink the tea and watch Cael watch me and think about the collar. The cipher. Two lines in my mentors' hand around the neck of a Maw that was walking toward my father's study.

Run. Not home.

But here I am. The message told me not to come here and I misread the direction, or the message was wrong, or third option, the one I keep turning over, someone knew I'd come anyway. Someone wrote that message knowing that when Riven Solé finally walks out of the Ashwild after fifteen years of silence, she will go home first. She will go home before she goes anywhere else, regardless of what she's told, because there is a wound in that direction and wounds have gravity.

That night, when the house goes quiet, I take the lamp from the hall and go to my father's study.

The Hunter taught me to search a room in a specific order. Drawers in sequence, false backs of drawers, underside of surfaces, lining of drawer bottoms. I work through it systematically and I find what I'm looking for behind the false back of the bottom left drawer, inside a folio with a Celestial Court seal pressed into the wax.

My name in the registration field: Aera Solenne, minor, Hollow classification, suppressed pending review.

I read the main document first. Standard suppression language, nothing unusual except that the bureaucratic decision to erase a classification from the official record requires two signatures and I can only find one. The second signature line is blank. Someone approved this suppression without the co-signature the form requires. Either the second party refused or the form was filed incorrectly or someone with enough standing didn't need the second signature because nobody checks.

Then the addendum. Different handwriting. The ink color is slightly different too, applied later, months or years after the original contract.

The child carries a pre-system frequency. Do not allow external testing. Do not allow Craft-tier contact. Maintain containment of documentation indefinitely. —V.

I turn the page.

At the bottom, in the margin, barely fitting in the available space, in handwriting that I would recognize written in blood on a cave wall from fifty paces:

run. not home.

My hands are perfectly still. The lamp doesn't waver. I am very, very good at keeping my body calm while my mind does something catastrophic, and my mind is currently doing something catastrophic.

The Scholar wrote in this document. Before I came home. Before tonight, before the fire, before any of it, the Scholar was inside the Celestial Court's filing system, found my suppression contract, and left me a message in the margin. Left the same message they put on the collar. Two copies of the same warning, one in an official document, one around the neck of a scout-class Maw, both aimed at me.

They knew I was coming.

They knew the Veilwright was moving.

And they tried to redirect me and I came home anyway, which means either I've walked into exactly what they were trying to prevent or I've stumbled into something else entirely. The message assumed I'd run. I didn't run. Which means everything from this point on is improvised.

Good. I've always been better at improvising.

I sit in my father's chair for the rest of the night with the folio in my lap and the collar inscription burning in my memory and outside, gradually, the birds start.