I.

The first thing Rose Hathaway lost was a stake.

Not lost in the field-experience sense, where losing something meant a lecture from Stan Alto and a demerit that followed you into your graduation file. Lost in the sense that at 6:40 in the morning — which was evening, because St. Vladimir’s kept vampire hours and had long since ruined her relationship with the concept of “morning” — the practice stake simply went out of her hand.

It didn’t fly. It didn’t get knocked loose by a block. Her fingers opened, the way fingers do when you’re done holding something, and the dulled length of wood clattered across the gym mat and rolled to a stop against Dimitri Belikov’s boot.

“Again,” he said.

“I didn’t—” Rose flexed her hand. It felt fine. It felt like a hand. “My grip slipped. There’s chalk dust on everything in here.”

Dimitri picked up the stake, tossed it back to her, and she caught it, because she always caught things. That was the whole point of her. She caught things, she hit things, she put her body between Lissa Dragomir and the world, and she did it faster than anyone in her class, faster than most guardians twice her age.

They went again. He came in high, she read it, she moved — and her left foot went down a half-inch off from where she’d sent it, and the mat came up to meet her hip.

The gym had that particular pre-dawn hush, the fluorescent hum, the smell of old sweat and floor polish. Dimitri crouched beside her, and didn’t offer a hand, because he never insulted her that way.

“You’re tired,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re doing that thing with your fingers again.”

Rose looked down. Her right hand lay on the mat, and the index finger lifted, and the thumb made a small, aimless circle, like she was rolling a coin she didn’t have.

“It’s called being fidgety,” she said. “It’s called sitting through three hours of Alberta’s post-incident protocol review. I’ve got a lot of untapped kinetic energy, Comrade. You should be flattered.”

He watched her hand for a moment longer than she wanted him to.

“Again,” he said.

She counted it afterward, lying in bed with the blackout curtain doing its best against the daylight.

The stake. The stumble. The night, two weeks back, when she’d bitten the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste copper, in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a joke. The tray in the commons that she’d tipped and caught and tipped again, laughing, while Eddie made a crack about her turning into Lissa. The way she’d started missing the last stair, only the last one, and only sometimes.

Eighteen years old. Two molnija marks on the back of her neck, earned in the worst week of her life in a basement in Spokane with Mason’s blood on her hands. Ranked first in her class. She could put a man down without breaking rhythm in a conversation.

Being tired isn’t a symptom, she told herself, and went to sleep and dreamed about Mason standing at the foot of the bed, watching her with those flat, sad, dead eyes, dripping lake water that wasn’t there in the morning.

II.

Dr. Olendzki had the only room in the Academy that smelled like the human world: disinfectant and paper gowns and the ghost of latex.

“Follow my finger with your eyes. Don’t move your head.”

Rose followed the finger. It went left and it went right and her eyes went after it and she had absolutely no idea what was wrong with that, until the doctor did it a second time and said, “Now look at my nose. Now — without moving your head — look at the door. Now back to my nose.”

Rose’s eyes jerked. She felt them jerk, felt the strange lurch of it, felt herself turn her chin to help when her eyes should have gone on their own.

“Huh,” she said. “Is that bad?”

Olendzki didn’t answer. She had Rose touch her nose and then the doctor’s finger, back and forth, faster. She had her tap her thumb to each finger in sequence, which Rose could do brilliantly for about eight seconds before the sequence dissolved into mush and her hand started inventing its own rhythm. She had her walk the length of the exam room heel to toe, and then walk it again with her eyes closed, and then stick out her tongue and hold it out for ten seconds, and Rose made a joke about that which nobody laughed at.

“Sit,” Olendzki said, and sat down across from her on the wheeled stool, hands in her lap.

Moroi doctors were used to fragility. Moroi got sick; Moroi caught everything; a bad flu season at Court was a genuine crisis. Dhampirs did not get sick. Dhampirs were the hardy ones, the half-human engine of the whole system, all that speed and all that healing, and the only things that were supposed to kill them were Strigoi and, occasionally, their own bad decisions.

So when Dr. Olendzki said, “Rose, when did you first notice the movements?” — in that careful, neutral way that doctors say things they have already decided about — Rose felt the floor of her life tilt about two degrees, and stay tilted, permanently.

“What movements?”

“Your hands. Your shoulders. You have been shrugging your left shoulder every eight to twelve seconds since you sat down.”

Rose looked at her left shoulder. Her left shoulder, the traitor, sat still and innocent for perhaps four seconds, and then rolled.

“I can stop it,” she said.

“I believe you. That’s actually part of what I’d like a specialist to look at.” Olendzki’s voice was very gentle and very level, and that was the worst part. “There’s a neurologist at Court. Moroi, discreet, good. I want an MRI and some bloodwork. Probably it’s nothing—”

“You don’t think it’s nothing.”

“I think,” Olendzki said, “that I’ve been the doctor at this school for nineteen years, and that I would rather be wrong in front of you than right behind your back.”

Rose sat on the paper-covered table with her hands pinned under her thighs, holding them still by main force, which turned out to be a thing she had been doing for weeks without knowing it.

“I’m graduating in three months,” she said.

III.

She lied to Lissa about the trip to Court. Which was funny, in the way that nothing was funny, because you cannot lie to a girl who lives in your head — except that the bond went only one way. Rose could fall into Lissa’s mind like falling into warm water: her moods, her thoughts when they ran loud, the whole bright anxious current of her. Lissa got nothing. Lissa got a locked door with Rose’s face painted on it.

“Family stuff,” Rose said, shoving clothes in a bag. “Guardian Petrov’s letting me tag along on the transport run. Two days.”

Lissa sat cross-legged on Rose’s bed in a sweater the color of new leaves, pale even for a Moroi, her jaw a little tight the way it had been since the winter. She had that particular Dragomir stillness, the one that made royals underestimate her.

“Your mother’s on assignment in Nebraska,” Lissa said.

“Family stuff is a broad category.”

Through the bond, Rose felt it: the little flinch, the one Lissa never let reach her face. She’s lying to me. Why is she lying to me?

“Okay,” Lissa said out loud.

And Rose — who had once broken out of this school and run for two years to keep this girl safe, who had a molnija mark for every Strigoi she’d killed with Lissa’s name in her mouth — said, “Okay,” back, and went.

Dr. Tanase’s office at Court had a window with the blinds shut and a plastic model of a brain on the desk, sectioned like a fruit.

The MRI took forty minutes. Rose lay in the tube and listened to it bang and shriek around her skull and thought about the basement in Spokane, because it was the last time she’d been that still that long.

Afterward, Tanase turned her screen so Rose could see, and touched the tip of a pen to two grey commas near the middle of the image.

“These are your caudate nuclei. Part of a structure called the basal ganglia — deep brain, motor control, but also habit, initiation, holding yourself back from doing things. Sequencing. Here is what an eighteen-year-old’s usually look like.” She swiped to another scan. The commas were thick, plump, crowding their little channels.

Rose’s were thin. Her ventricles had widened around them, the way a river widens when the bank erodes.

“I’m not a neurologist,” Rose said, “but that looks like the difference between a steak and a shoelace.”

“Yes,” said Tanase. “I want to run a genetic test. It’s a simple blood draw. It takes three to four weeks, because it goes to a human lab with a human turnaround time, and because we will have it run twice.” She folded her hands. “Before I take the blood, I’m obligated to explain what it is I’m testing for, and to ask whether you want to know. Some people don’t. That is a real choice and not a cowardly one.”

“Tell me.”

“I think you may have Huntington’s disease.”

The name meant nothing. Rose waited for it to mean something.

“It’s a genetic disorder,” Tanase said. “A single gene, on chromosome four. There’s a piece of it that stutters — a sequence called CAG, repeated. Under about twenty-seven repeats, you’re fine forever. Over forty, you will develop the disease, and the more repeats you have, the earlier it starts. It’s dominant, which means one copy does it. Which means a parent.”

“Neither of my parents is—” Rose stopped. “I don’t know my father.”

“Mm,” said Tanase, and wrote something down, and did not look surprised, because she was a Moroi doctor at Court and had presumably heard worse. “There’s something else you should know, because it matters for you. The repeat is unstable when it passes through the father. It tends to grow. A man can carry forty-four repeats and be entirely well at fifty, and pass on fifty-eight to his child, and that child gets sick at nineteen.” She set down the pen. “Your presentation is early. Very early. Early-onset cases — what we used to call juvenile — often look a little different: more stiffness, more slowing, more trouble with mood and thinking, sometimes seizures. And they tend to move faster.”

“Faster,” Rose said. “Move faster. As in.”

“As in the disease progresses more quickly. Yes.”

The blinds were shut. Somewhere out in the Court, past the walls, Rose could hear somebody’s grounds crew running a leaf blower on the Moroi night schedule, and it seemed insane to her that anyone in the world was blowing leaves.

“What happens,” she said. “Long version. Don’t be nice.”

Tanase did not be nice.

“The movements get worse before they get better, and they get better only because eventually the stiffness wins. You’ll lose fine motor control, then gross. Walking becomes unreliable, then impossible. Speech becomes hard to understand. Swallowing becomes dangerous — most people die of pneumonia, from aspirating. Cognitively, it isn’t like Alzheimer’s; you won’t forget who people are. You will lose the ability to plan, to switch tasks, to start things, to stop things. To do two things at once. To read someone’s tone. There is very often depression, irritability, apathy — and the apathy is the cruelest, because it doesn’t feel like anything. It feels like not minding.” She paused. “Some of that may be beginning already. Some of it may already be why you’re here.”

“How long.”

“From first symptoms, the average is fifteen to twenty years. Early onset is often ten to fifteen. I will not give you a number for yourself, because I would be making it up, and you’d carry it around for the rest of your life.”

“And you fix it with—”

“Nothing,” said Tanase. “I’m sorry. There is nothing that stops it. There are medications for the movements, and medications for the mood, and physical therapy, and speech therapy, and a great deal that can be done to make a life good. But no. Nothing stops it.”

Rose looked at the plastic brain on the desk. The little grey commas, sliced in half.

“I’m a novice,” she said. “I graduate in June. I’m getting assigned to Vasilisa Dragomir. I’ve been assigned, basically, everyone knows it, she’s the last Dragomir and I’m the best in my class and—”

She heard her own voice go up and she stopped it.

Dr. Tanase said, “Roll up your sleeve, please.”

IV.

The four weeks of waiting were, Rose would later think, the last four weeks in which she got to be a person who might be fine.

She spent them being magnificent. She ran her field-experience shifts flawlessly; she caught Christian Ozera sneaking out through the elementary campus and blackmailed him about it for a week; she put Eddie Castile on his back twice in one session and let him put her down once so it looked fair. She flirted with Adrian Ivashkov, who had come up from Court with the royal contingent and had taken up smoking on the chapel steps like it was a career.

She did not sleep. That was the part she hid best, because she was already known as the girl who didn’t sleep, the girl who saw Mason at the foot of the bed, the girl everyone had decided had come back from Spokane with a hairline crack in her. Now she lay awake till three in the afternoon, doing math. Fifty-eight repeats. Ten to fifteen years. I’ll be twenty-eight. I’ll be thirty-three. Lissa will be a queen with a crown and a girl in a wheelchair in a back room somewhere.

And she watched herself. That was the true, obscene thing about it: the surveillance. Every dropped fork became evidence. Every time she couldn’t find a word, every time she snapped at Eddie, every time she stood up from a chair and forgot why — file it, log it, is that the disease, was that always me, was I always like this, who was I ever.

She started noticing the shrug. Once you notice it you cannot un-notice it. It sat in her shoulder like a small animal that lived there, and she could keep it still by thinking about it, and the moment she thought about anything else — Lissa, Strigoi, dinner — it rolled.

Twice she woke with Mason standing in the corner and thought, very calmly: maybe you were never real either, and that was worse than the ghost.

Lissa, meanwhile, was four floors away in the Moroi dorm, glowing with the high-strung brightness of a girl whose own head was a dangerous neighborhood, and through the bond Rose got all of it: Lissa’s fear that Rose was sneaking off to see Dimitri. Lissa’s fear that Rose was using. Lissa lying in the dark composing sentences she never said. Something’s wrong with her and she won’t let me in and I’m going to lose her the way I lose everyone.

Once, at three in the morning, Rose felt Lissa pick up the little silver ring Christian had given her, and put it in a drawer, and shut the drawer, and sit there for a long time feeling nothing much at all about it. That should have mattered more to Rose than it did. It mattered later.

V.

The number was fifty-eight.

Tanase told her over the phone in Dr. Olendzki’s office, with Olendzki sitting there because apparently that was policy. Rose held the receiver and said “Yeah” three times and “Okay” twice, and then hung up and sat very still and said, “Well. That’s that.”

Then she went and ran eleven miles around the interior perimeter of the wards until she threw up in the grass by the eastern fence, which fixed absolutely nothing but at least put her in a body that was hurting for a reason she’d chosen.

Kirova’s office. Alberta in the corner with her arms folded, gray at the temples, twenty-something years of Strigoi lightning inked down her neck.

“You can’t take the trials,” Kirova said. She had a folder open. She had, Rose realized, read about it. She had done reading, this woman Rose had spent three years being a disaster in front of. “Even if you could pass them physically today — and Guardian Belikov believes you could — I can’t put my signature on a certification that says you are fit to be responsible for a Moroi life. Not with a documented progressive movement disorder. Rose, you know that. If you were sitting where I am, you’d say the same thing, and you’d be right.”

Rose said, “They come first.”

The motto came out of her mouth like something she was throwing.

“I’ve said that to myself since I was five years old. They come first. I’ve been for something since I was five years old. So you’re telling me I get taken out of the thing I’m for, and I don’t even get to die doing it. I get to go sit in a chair somewhere and be a Moroi’s inspirational story.”

Kirova’s mouth went tight. Not with offense — Rose knew that expression, she’d built a career out of causing that expression, and this wasn’t it.

“I am telling you,” Kirova said, “that you have a place at this school as long as I run it, and that you will graduate, and that there is a very great deal of work in this world that isn’t standing in a hallway with a stake.”

“Name one thing a dhampir who can’t fight is worth.”

Alberta spoke from the corner. She didn’t raise her voice.

“That’s not a question about your hands,” she said. “That’s the oldest lie our people tell, and I’ve watched it eat better novices than you. Careful, Hathaway. It’s not true when they say it about the women in the communes and it’s not true when you say it about yourself.”

Rose walked out, and got to the stairwell, and hit the concrete wall with the heel of her hand hard enough that it split, and stood there bleeding and shaking with her forehead against the cold, and the shoulder — the shoulder rolled, patiently, on its own schedule, eight to twelve seconds, forever.

Dimitri found out from Alberta and came to her that evening in the gym, and they stood on opposite sides of the mat like two people who had been about to have an entirely different conversation for two years, and now weren’t.

“I should have seen it,” he said. “In October. You mistimed the same block four sessions running, and I made you run laps.”

“Yeah, well. I hid it.” Rose sat down on the mat and pulled her knees up. “I’m very good at hiding things from you. It’s basically my only marketable skill and now it’s the only one I’m keeping.”

Dimitri sat down too, which he never did. He sat down across from her, forearms on his knees, big hands loose, and said nothing for about a minute.

“When I was seventeen,” he said, “my mentor told me the hardest thing a guardian ever learns is that the job is not the point. The Moroi are the point. He was dying of liver disease at the time, and he was still right.”

“Is this the part where you tell me God has a plan?”

“No,” he said. “This is the part where I tell you that I have known exactly one person in my life who I would follow into a burning building, and that you have not stopped being her.”

Rose put her face on her knees and cried, hard, once — thirty seconds, maybe — and then it stopped as abruptly as it had started, which was a thing her moods did now, and she looked up dry-eyed and furious and said, “See, that. Was that me or was that my basal ganglia?”

“Does it matter?” said Dimitri.

“Yes,” said Rose. “It’s going to matter for the rest of my life.”

Her mother came for one day.

Janine Hathaway stood in the guest suite with her feet apart and her hands behind her back, five feet nothing of hard muscle and red hair, and said, “I didn’t know. I want that established. I knew his mother died in a hospital in Istanbul. I was told it was a nervous condition. I was twenty-three. I didn’t ask.”

“You didn’t ask,” Rose said.

“No.”

“You didn’t ask, and now I’ve got fifty-eight repeats of a stutter from a man whose name I’ve never been told.”

“Ibrahim Mazur,” said Janine.

Rose blinked.

“There. Now you’ve been told.” Janine’s jaw worked. “He was informed three days ago. He has already retained a specialist in Zurich, sent a letter, and offered to put money in a trust. He has not offered to come, and I told him not to bother, and I may have been wrong to do that. You can decide.”

“Is he sick?”

“He has forty-four repeats and no symptoms,” Janine said. “So. Yes. Eventually.”

They stood there, the two of them, and Rose felt the thing that had been stacking up in her for seventeen years tilt toward the edge — you left me here, you sent me here, you visited eleven times, you made me out of a body you didn’t check — and her mother, who had never once in her life said the correct thing, looked at Rose’s hand where it lay twitching on the arm of the chair and said, in an absolutely wrecked voice:

“I’d have had you anyway.”

Which was, as it turned out, the correct thing.

VI.

Here is how Rose Hathaway told Lissa Dragomir:

Badly.

She’d meant to be careful. She’d rehearsed it. And then Lissa cornered her outside the chapel on a Sunday, ten minutes into a fight about nothing, and said, “You’ve been lying to me for two months, do you think I’m stupid—” and Rose said, “I have Huntington’s disease, I’m not going to be your guardian, I’m going to lose my ability to walk and talk and probably to care about you, so congratulations, mystery solved, you can stop asking.”

Lissa’s face did nothing. Through the bond, Rose felt it go through her like a spear: a white nothing, then a plunge, then a scramble — what is that, what is that, what does she mean, no, no, she’s eighteen, dhampirs don’t get sick, she’s —

And then, with a terrible steadiness, Lissa said: “Sit down and tell me all of it.”

They sat on the chapel steps in the cold with the stars doing their Montana thing overhead and Adrian’s cigarette butts by the railing, and Rose told her all of it. The commas on the MRI. Paternal expansion. The pneumonia at the end. Ten to fifteen years, maybe, nobody would say.

When she was done, Lissa took Rose’s shaking right hand in both of hers, and held it, and said, “Okay. Then I’m going to fix it.”

“Liss—”

“I brought you back from the dead,” Lissa said. “You died in a car on a highway and I put my hands on you and you came back. Don’t tell me about nothing can be done.”

VII.

It is important to be accurate about what happened next, because the version everyone believed later was a lie, and Rose let them believe it.

Lissa healed her.

They did it in the attic over the chapel, in the dusty little space where they’d once dug out St. Vladimir’s books and Anna’s journals, where the air smelled like old paper and mouse. Lissa put her hands on either side of Rose’s head, and Rose felt spirit go into her like sunlight through a window in February — thin and pale and unbelievably warm — and something in her deep brain unclenched.

The shoulder went still. Her fingers went still. She stood up and shut her eyes and looked at the door without moving her head, and her eyes went there like an arrow.

Rose laughed out loud and spun Lissa around in the dust, and Lissa laughed too and then sat down hard on a crate and was sick into an empty flowerpot, and that was the first thing they should have paid attention to and didn’t.

She had five weeks.

Five weeks of being herself. She ran the perimeter in her old times. She beat Eddie, she beat Shane, she beat two of the actual guardians in a two-on-one drill and heard Stan Alto say “good” out loud, in air, in front of people. She went to Kirova and asked to be re-evaluated and Kirova, who had also read about the genetics, said, very quietly, “Rose, the gene doesn’t leave,” and Rose said, “Watch me.”

And in week six she was in the cafeteria with a tray, laughing at something Christian said, and her left hand opened and the tray went down, and she stood there in the wreckage of a plate of eggs with every novice in the room looking at her.

Her shoulder rolled.

Tanase explained it later, kindly, in the terms available to a Moroi neurologist who had made a hobby of the impossible. Spirit healing repaired tissue. It could not edit a gene. Every cell in Rose’s body still held its stuttering instruction, still churned out its misfolded protein, and the protein still gathered and still poisoned the neurons that Lissa had so beautifully regrown. She had bought time. She had bought five weeks, at a cost that Rose did not understand until Jesse Zeklos made a joke in the commons about girls with shaky hands being good at some things, and Rose broke his nose and his cheekbone and had him on the floor with her thumb on his windpipe before Eddie and Dimitri pulled her off.

Because that was the other thing spirit did, and they both knew it. It had eaten Ms. Karp alive, chewed her down until she walked out into the night and let the Strigoi have her rather than keep it. It came out of Lissa as darkness — rage and despair and a black static in the back of the skull — and the bond drew it out of her and into Rose like a wick draws oil.

Rose had been swallowing Lissa’s darkness for years. But now she had a disease that came with its own rage, its own snapped tempers, its own long grey Sunday-afternoon apathy, and there was no test in the world that could tell her which one she was feeling.

“I can’t tell what’s me anymore,” she said. She was sitting on the floor of Lissa’s room with her back against the bed. “That’s the part I can’t— Liss, I don’t know if I’m angry or if I’m sick or if I’m holding your spirit for you. There’s no me left to check against.”

Lissa sat down on the floor beside her.

“Then I’ll stop,” she said.

“You can’t just—”

“I can. I will.” Lissa’s voice cracked and she let it. “Because you’re right. You were right and I’ve been doing it anyway. I heal you, you get five weeks, and I hand you a poison to carry for it, and the disease is still there underneath the whole time. That’s not saving you. That’s me refusing to be here for this.”

They cried, then, both of them, for a long time, and it was a real cry and not a neurological one, and Rose knew the difference and cherished it.

Adrian, who turned out to be worth something, figured out sometime that spring that he could pull darkness out of Rose — could sit down across from her, take her hands, and take some of it into himself, where it sank into whatever he was already drowning in and made no noticeable difference, he claimed.

“Why,” Rose said.

Adrian shrugged and lit another cigarette. “Because it’s the only useful thing anybody’s ever discovered about me,” he said. “And because you were nice to me when nobody else was, little dhampir, and I have a pathological need to be liked.”

He did it maybe a dozen times that spring. It helped some. Nothing cured anything. She wants that on the record.

VIII.

The bad part came in April, and it did not come with drama.

It came as flatness.

Rose woke up one afternoon and did not get out of bed, and this was not despair, and this was not sulking. It was that getting out of bed required a sequence of decisions, and the machinery that starts sequences had thinned out like a riverbank, and so she lay there for five hours looking at the ceiling with no particular feeling about it at all. The thought I should be upset about this arrived from very far away and went out again like a train that doesn’t stop at your station.

She missed a shift. She missed two. Stan came looking for her and she told him to go to hell, and then twenty minutes later couldn’t remember why she’d cared enough to say it.

It was the apathy, she learned later, that frightened the doctors more than the movements; and it was the apathy that Lissa recognized fastest, because Lissa knew what depression looked like from the inside and knew that this was its cousin and not its twin.

And underneath the flatness, in a room of her mind she visited at four in the afternoon when the daylight was loudest through the curtain, there was a thought that came so reasonably and so often that it stopped feeling like an intrusion and started feeling like a plan: there’s a clean version of this. A dhampir who goes out past the wards alone, hunting, and doesn’t come back. Two molnija marks become six. You die on your feet with your stake in something’s heart, doing the thing you were for, and nobody has to feed you or turn you or hear you try and fail to say a sentence in fifteen years, and Lissa Dragomir gets to remember you as fast.

She turned that thought over for eleven days. It got smoother every time, like a stone in a pocket.

On the twelfth day she went to Lissa’s room at seven in the morning, sat down on the end of the bed, and said, “I need you to take my stake and give it to Alberta, and I need you to walk me to Dr. Olendzki’s right now, because I’ve been planning how to die for a week and a half and I’ve started to like it.”

Lissa’s face went white to the lips.

Then she got up, and pulled on her shoes, and took the stake, and walked her there. She held Rose’s hand the whole way across the quad in the horrible sunrise-that-was-sunset, and she did not cry until afterward, and in the bond Rose could feel her doing the arithmetic of terror and choosing, over and over, second by second, to stay calm on the outside. It was the bravest thing Rose had ever watched anyone do, and she had watched Dimitri Belikov fight four Strigoi in a parking garage.

What followed was not cinematic. It was paperwork and phone calls and appointments.

There was a suicide risk assessment, which Rose answered honestly, mostly. There was a safety plan written on a form, with names and numbers on it, and Lissa’s name was first. There was sertraline, which did nothing for three weeks and then did something — not happiness; more like the volume on the four-o’clock room being turned down two notches, enough that she could leave it. There was a Moroi counselor named Pavel who came up from Court twice a month and who did not once say everything happens for a reason, and who told Rose that grief for a life you were supposed to have is real grief and gets to be grieved, and who made her say out loud the thing she’d never said: I was made to be a body for someone else, and now I’m just a body.

Tanase offered tetrabenazine for the chorea and then talked her out of starting it that spring, because it can deepen depression, and Rose was eight weeks out from planning her own death. Later. They’d revisit it later. It was the first time anyone had used the word “later” about her as though it were a place they expected to arrive.

There was physical therapy, twice a week, which was the single most humiliating hour of Rose Hathaway’s life, and which she went to, every time, because Dimitri drove her, and sat in the corner reading a western with a cracked spine, and said nothing about any of it, ever.

There were bad nights. There would always be bad nights. That’s what accurate means.

IX.

In May, the guardian assignments went up on the board outside the gym, and Rose Hathaway’s name was not on the list, and Vasilisa Dragomir was given Eddie Castile and a forty-one-year-old woman named Yelena Ozera, and Rose stood in front of that board for a long time with Eddie beside her not knowing what to say.

“You’d better be good,” Rose said finally.

“I’m going to be so good,” Eddie said, and his voice did something, and neither of them looked at the other.

Graduation was on a Saturday at midnight. The novices got their promise marks in the chapel, one by one, the tattooist’s needle going in at the base of the skull, Father Andrew’s voice doing the words over each of them.

Rose sat in the third row in a black dress, and clapped for every single one, and cried for Eddie, and went up afterward to have her photograph taken with her class because she had earned that, and did not have a promise mark, and knew she never would.

Afterward she climbed up to the attic over the chapel, which was where she went now, and sat by the little round window with her knees up and watched the Montana dark.

Lissa came up the ladder twenty minutes later, hauling herself over the lip of the floor in a graduation dress, which took some doing.

She sat down next to Rose. She took Rose’s right hand in both of hers, the way she did now, automatically, the way you’d steady a cup on a train.

“Come to Court,” Lissa said.

“To do what?”

“To be with me.”

“That’s not a job, Liss.”

“No,” said Lissa. “It’s better than a job. Rose. Listen. I’m the last Dragomir. I am going to spend the next forty years in rooms full of people who want something from me, and every single one of them is going to smile at me while they do it. I need one person in the building who tells me the truth. You have been reading my mind since I was fourteen years old; I have never once been able to lie to you and I have never once wanted to. There is nobody else on this earth who can do that.”

“I’m going to get worse.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to stop being able to walk across your beautiful floors. I’m going to sit in a chair in a meeting and my hands are going to go, and everyone will look at me, and then they’ll look at you, and that’s a political cost, and don’t tell me it isn’t, I’ve been in your head, I know how that place works.”

“Then it costs,” said Lissa.

“You’re going to hate me. Some of it, you’re going to hate me. Pavel says people do and it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Probably.” Lissa’s thumb moved over Rose’s knuckles. “You hated me for two years for running away with you and you never once left.”

Rose laughed — a real one, cracked open. Below them the last of the graduation crowd was moving off across the quad, Moroi in bright colors and guardians in black and white, and somewhere in it Dimitri Belikov was walking Eddie through his first assignment paperwork, and somewhere further off Adrian was smoking on a step.

“There’s a thing I have to say,” Rose said, “and I need you to not talk for a minute.”

Lissa didn’t talk.

“In March, when the flat part came. When I couldn’t—” Rose worked her jaw. Words came slower now, at night, when she was tired; she’d learned to let them arrive instead of chasing them. “There was nothing. I want you to understand that I’m not being dramatic. I didn’t care about my mother, or about being a guardian, or about Mason, or about dying. I stood in the sun for twenty minutes because I forgot there was a reason to go inside. Everything I thought was me just — went out. Like a room going dark.”

“Rose—”

“One thing was left.” Rose turned her head and looked at her: Lissa Dragomir, jade-eyed and fine-boned and stubborn as bedrock, eighteen years old, the girl she’d been put on this earth to stand in front of. “One thing. I wanted you in the room. That’s all there was in the whole building. Not because you’d fix it. Just — if you were in the room, I could be in the room.”

Lissa’s eyes filled.

“And I’ve spent months,” Rose said, “being afraid that what I feel about you isn’t mine. Because I live in your head, Liss. I catch your feelings like a cold. I’ve got a disease in the part of my brain that’s supposed to do wanting. How am I supposed to know what’s me?”

“Because the bond only goes one way,” Lissa said.

Rose stopped.

“I can’t feel you,” Lissa said. “I never could. I’ve never gotten a single thing from you that you didn’t decide to give me. So whatever I feel — and Rose, I have felt it since I was fifteen, and I put Christian’s ring in a drawer in February and never told you, and I have been a coward about it for three years — nothing put it there but you.” She caught Rose’s face in her hands, both of them, the way she did when she healed, except this time there was no magic in it at all, just warm hands. “And as for you — the thing that was left when everything else went dark isn’t the fake part, Rose. That’s the part that was underneath the whole time.”

Rose leaned her forehead against Lissa’s. Her shoulder rolled; her hand shook where it lay in her lap; neither of them commented, because they were going to be doing this for years and you can’t remark on the weather every day.

“They come first,” Rose said, hoarse. “That’s the whole — that’s all I ever had. That’s the entire shape of me.”

“I know.”

“So what do I do now?”

Lissa kissed her. It was not a long kiss, and it was not smooth; Rose’s mouth was unsteady and Lissa was crying and their noses got in the way, and it was, by a very great distance, the best thing that had ever happened in the attic over St. Vladimir’s chapel, which had housed the private papers of a saint.

“Now,” Lissa said, against her mouth, “we do the other one.”

“There isn’t another one.”

“There is. I made it up. It’s brand new; nobody’s ever used it.” She was smiling and it was terrible and it was beautiful. “You come first.”

They stayed up there until the sky in the little round window went grey with dawn, which for them was the middle of the night, and the school below them slept through the daylight the way it always had.

Fifteen years later, when the Queen of the Moroi would not go into a session of the Council without stopping first at a room on the east side of the royal residence, where a woman in a chair could no longer stand and could not reliably speak and still, every single time, found a way to make one crooked syllable that meant go get 'em — the guards on that hallway would think it was a piece of pageantry. Sentiment. A queen honoring an old wound.

It wasn’t. It was a debriefing, and it was a promise being kept, and it was the only marriage either of them ever needed.

But that’s later.

That night, there was just the attic, and the dust, and two girls holding hands, and the shoulder going up, patiently, every eight to twelve seconds, forever — and one of them saying, in the dark, so what do we do about the ghosts, because I still see Mason, and I need you to believe me, and the other one saying, without a heartbeat’s hesitation:

I believe you.

Part Two: The Long Fall

Content notes: late-stage neurodegenerative disease depicted in unflinching clinical and bodily detail; caregiving; end-of-life decision-making and advance directives; death; suicidal ideation (past, referenced); depression; disability-based prejudice; brief non-graphic reference to sexuality between adults.

X.

The Queen of the Moroi had a Council session at nine, a delegation from the Alchemists at eleven, and a conversation with a dying woman at eight-fifteen, and it was the last one she’d have cancelled the others for.

Lissa Dragomir came down the east corridor of the royal residence with her folio under her arm and her shoes in her hand, because the hall was marble and Rose’s mornings were fragile. Two guardians stood at the door. They had stood there, in rotation, for eleven years. They had opinions. She had long ago stopped trying to find out what they were.

Inside, the room smelled of warm cotton and unscented lotion and the faint, sweetish chemical of the thickener they stirred into her fluids. Under that, if you knew to look for it: the smell of a body that no longer sweated the way a body should.

“Morning,” said Marisol, who was pulling the sling out from under Rose’s hips with the efficiency of fourteen years in the work. Marisol Badica was dhampir, forty-eight, from a commune outside Missoula; she had four children and no molnija marks and had been told her whole girlhood that she was a waste of good blood. Rose had recruited her personally, in year four, in a letter typed one key at a time with the side of her fist.

“How was the night?”

“Bad at three. Chest sounded wet, so I sat her up and gave the glycopyrrolate and suctioned twice.” Marisol’s voice stayed level, a nurse’s level. “Better by five. She’s got a spot coming up on the sacrum again, stage one, I’ve got her off it. And she was reaching for the foot of the bed.”

Lissa set down the folio.

“Mason?”

“She reaches at the same place,” Marisol said. “Same corner. Eleven years.”

Rose Hathaway was in the chair by the window, propped and strapped and tilted, forty kilos of her, wrists bound in soft splints because otherwise her fingers curled in on themselves and the tendons shortened and there was no getting them back. Her hair — that ridiculous, glorious dark hair, the one thing nobody had ever managed to make behave — was brushed and braided down one shoulder, because Marisol did it every morning and did it well.

Her head was turned toward the light. Her jaw worked, slowly, on nothing. Her right foot had gone into its inward twist, and her left hand jerked up and out every so often in the old way, the way it had for fifteen years, except that these days the movements were fewer and heavier, and what took their place was the rigidity: the awful patient clenching of a body that had forgotten how to let go of itself.

Lissa crouched down in front of her, knees on the floor, and put both hands around Rose’s right hand, warming it.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s me.”

Rose’s eyes came over. That was the thing nobody outside this room understood. They came over. Slowly, in that broken-glass way, with the head helping because the eyes couldn’t do it alone anymore — but they came, and they found her, and the muscles at the corner of Rose Hathaway’s mouth did something that was not a smile and was unmistakably a smile.

“Okay,” Lissa said, and her voice was perfectly steady, because she had had thirteen years of practice at making her voice do what she needed. “Agenda. Conta’s bringing the guardian allocation amendment back for the fourth time. He’s got Zeklos and two of the Drozdovs. He wants to roll back the non-combat service credit.”

Rose’s breathing hitched. Her eyes stayed on Lissa’s face.

“I know,” said Lissa. “Yes. Your credit. Your law.” She rubbed her thumb over the knuckles, which were large now, in the way that hands get when everything around the bone has gone. “He’s going to say it’s a drain on the order during a shortage. I’m going to say the shortage is eight percent smaller than it was when we passed it, because we stopped throwing people away. Jill’s going to say it better than me, because she’s better at him than I am. And then we’ll go to vote, and we’ll win by two, and Rufus Tarus will vote with us and then apologize to Conta about it in the hall.”

Rose’s chest moved. Her mouth opened, and her tongue pushed forward, and out of her came a sound.

“Guh.”

It was one syllable, wet and cracked and produced by a mechanism that had no business producing anything. It had, for four years now, been the sum total of Rose Hathaway’s spoken language.

Go get 'em.

Lissa pressed the hand to her own cheek and held it there and shut her eyes for four seconds, which was all she could afford.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll go get 'em.”

The guardians on the door thought it was pageantry. She’d heard the word, once, through a half-shut door: the Queen and her ritual, the Queen and her devotions, thirteen years of a woman kneeling every morning by a chair. There were people at Court who found it touching and people who found it grotesque and nobody, not one of them, who thought it was a briefing.

And there were mornings — she would never say this out loud, not to Marisol, not to Christian, not to anyone — when Lissa knelt on that floor and looked at her wife and did not know whether that syllable was a word or a spasm. Whether there was anybody left at the window to look out of it.

She had stopped asking. Asking was a door you couldn’t shut again.

XI.

It had taken fifteen years and it had come in stages, the way the woman in Zurich said it would, and each stage had been a country you were deported to without being told the language.

Years one to four. Rose Hathaway at Court at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one: a shaking, furious, magnificent nuisance.

She could still walk then, mostly, and she walked everywhere, and she fell — in the commons, at a reception, once down half a flight of stairs in front of Lord Szelsky and his entire entourage. She got up every time with her chin out and dared anyone to help her. She stopped drinking, because alcohol and chorea and sertraline made a mess of her, and she made that into a personality: the only sober person at Court, taking notes.

And she worked. God, she worked.

Nobody had asked her to. Lissa had brought her to Court to be loved, and Rose had looked at the machinery of guardian assignment for six months and then said, over dinner, with her fork rattling against the plate, “Do you know that the order has no category for a dhampir who can still work but can’t fight? Not one. You’re active or you’re nothing. That’s why the communes are full. That’s why my — that’s why women with my body go and get bitten for money, because we built a system with one door in it.”

She was twenty-two when she testified to the Council. It is in the record. She sat — they let her sit, that was Lissa’s one intervention — and she read for eleven minutes in a voice that was already slurring at the edges, with her left arm jumping so that she had to hold the paper down with her elbow, and she told twelve royal families that their guardian shortage was a filing error they had turned into a moral system.

Jesse Zeklos, twenty-three and already on his family’s delegation with his nose slightly crooked, asked her whether the Council should really be taking strategic advice from someone in her “condition.”

Rose looked at him for a long moment.

“I’m the only person in this room,” she said, “who’s ever been declared useless. You want to know what your policy looks like from the inside, or you want to know what it looks like on paper? Because I’ve read the paper. It’s very pretty.”

They passed the non-combat service credit four years later, watered down twice, by a margin of one. It was called the Hathaway Amendment by everybody except the people who had to vote for it, who called it the Dragomir reforms, and Rose thought that was hilarious until the year she stopped being able to explain why.

Years five to eight. The cane, then the chair. The weight.

Nobody warns you about the weight. Chorea burns; a body in constant motion runs an engine it can’t fuel, and Rose ate four, five thousand calories a day — Marisol made her milkshakes with cream and protein powder and she called them her horrible drinks — and still she went from a hundred and thirty-five pounds of muscle to a hundred and ten and then below.

And the temper.

This is the part nobody puts in the pamphlets. Huntington’s does not simply take away; for a while it adds. It added a Rose who would fixate — one week it was the guardian rotation board and she made Marisol read it out twice a day; one month it was a song she wanted played and she would ask for it and ask for it and ask for it, twenty times an hour, unable to let the loop close. It added a Rose who could not hold her own reactions back, because the structures that do that were exactly the structures rotting, and so everything came out at the volume it arrived at.

She threw a cup at a guardian’s head in year six for touching her chair without asking. She told Adrian Ivashkov he was a drunk who had never in his life been useful, at a dinner, in front of nine people.

And in year seven, in the middle of a fight about a physiotherapist, she looked at Lissa across the room and said, clearly, without a slur in it:

“You should have let me stay dead in that car. Then at least you’d have kept the good one.”

She said it three more times over the next eight months. Perseveration, the doctors called it; the phrase gets caught in the groove and the needle keeps dropping into it. Lissa understood the neurology perfectly. She could have written a paper on the neurology.

It did not help even a little.

Years nine to twelve. The speech went in a particular order, which the speech therapist had warned them about and which was still obscene to live through: fine articulation first, then rate, then volume, then everything.

At nine, Rose could be understood by people who knew her. At ten, only by Lissa, Marisol, and Dimitri. At eleven, she used a laminated letter board with her right index finger and a strap on her wrist, and it was slow, and it was hers, and she used it to be extremely rude, and everybody was grateful.

At twelve, she lost the finger.

There was a tablet after that, an eye-tracker, and it worked for seven months, and then her gaze stopped being able to hold still long enough to select, and one afternoon she looked at it and then looked at Lissa and shut her eyes and did not open them again for an hour, and that was the last time anybody suggested it.

What went last, what always goes last, was yes and no. A finger flicker. Then a blink. Then a look.

And here is the thing that Lissa had to learn and could never quite make anyone else believe: comprehension outlasts expression. For years — for years — Rose understood everything said in that room. Everything. Every nurse who spoke about her over her head in the third person. Every courtier who told the Queen, three feet from the chair, how sad it was, how she’d been so vital, how it must be a relief that she probably didn’t know much anymore.

She knew. She lay there and she knew, and she couldn’t say a word, and the only way she could tell anyone was by crying, which they wrote in the chart as emotional lability.

And the bond.

That was the private catastrophe, and only two people in the world knew what it meant.

The bond went one way. It had always gone one way: Rose in Lissa’s head, Lissa alone in her own. For nineteen years Rose had been able to fall into her like falling into water — her moods, her arguments with the Council rehearsed at three in the morning, her fear, her love. It was how they had talked, at the end, when talking stopped. Lissa would sit in the chair and think at her, deliberately, loudly, in sentences, and Rose would blink.

It began to fail in year eleven.

Not all at once. It went the way everything else went: intermittently, then mostly, then on good days only, then not. Whatever the shadow-kissed bond was made of, it was made of tissue, and the tissue was going.

Lissa kept thinking at her for four more years. There was no way to know if it landed. There was no test. She did it anyway, every morning, kneeling on a marble floor in her stocking feet: I’m here. It’s me. You come first.

XII.

The fallout was not a single event. Fallout never is. It was a weather system that sat over the Court for thirteen years.

It started with the marriage.

They had it in the attic over the chapel at St. Vladimir’s, in year six, in the dust, with the round window open and snow coming in. Father Andrew wouldn’t, so Eddie Castile read something out of a book and Christian Ozera said words over them that were mostly jokes until they suddenly weren’t, and Janine Hathaway stood with her hands behind her back and cried without moving her face, and Dimitri carried Rose up the ladder in his arms because she couldn’t do the rungs anymore and put her down on her own feet so that she could stand for the part where you stand.

There was no legal instrument in the world that recognized it. A Moroi queen and a dhampir woman: there was no form. So Rose, who was twenty-four and still had most of her hands, typed a document over two days that was the closest thing available — a durable power of attorney, a health care directive, and a letter — and they had it witnessed by three guardians and filed with the royal archive, and that piece of paper turned out to be the most consequential thing either of them ever signed.

It leaked in year eight.

The Moroi Monitor ran it under a headline about the Queen’s private arrangements, and for eleven weeks Lissa Dragomir could not walk into a room without a certain quality of silence. The objections came from everywhere, and they contradicted each other, and that never slowed anyone down for a second.

From the conservative bloc: that the last Dragomir had bound herself to a dhampir and would leave the line to end with her. That she had refused four perfectly reasonable marriages. That the Council had a quorum problem solved only by a girl from Michigan named Jillian Mastrano Dragomir, half-sister, found at fifteen, and did the Queen understand what she was doing to her own family’s future?

From the Church, obliquely, in a homily about the natural order.

And from the dhampirs — this was the one that gutted Rose — from her own people. Because there was a word for a dhampir woman who lived in a Moroi’s house, took a Moroi’s money, bore no children and held no post. Everybody knew the word. It had been thrown at Dimitri’s mother and sisters in Baia their whole lives. It got scrawled on the door of Rose’s room, in year nine, in marker, by somebody who was never identified and who Lissa would have happily had removed from the Court by the hair.

Rose was twenty-seven. She could still read. She read it.

She laughed, actually — a terrible, honking, uncontrolled laugh that went on too long, the way her laughing did then — and said, thick-tongued, “Well, they got me. I haven’t even got the fun part.”

And then the photograph.

Year ten. Somebody — never proven; the money trail went into a Conta holding company and died there — paid a temporary night aide four thousand dollars for a picture taken on a phone at two in the morning, of Rose Hathaway being changed. On her side. Splints on. Face slack. Everything visible.

It ran in two places before Lissa’s people killed it, and it was seen by enough of the Court that it might as well have run in all of them, and the caption made a point about the Queen’s judgment.

Lissa did three things that week.

She had the aide prosecuted under a Court statute nobody had used in sixty years, and she sat in the room for the sentencing, and she looked at the woman until the woman looked away.

She went into a Council session and read the caption out loud, in her own voice, to their faces, and then said: “Every one of you will be old. Some of you will be sick. This is what my house does with a person who cannot defend herself. Ask yourselves what yours will do.” Nine of them had the decency to be unable to meet her eyes; Rufus Tarus cried; Jesse Zeklos studied the table.

And then she went home and shut the door and pulled every mirror out of Rose’s room with her own hands, because Rose had stopped letting anyone turn her toward one, and Lissa had been pretending for four months not to have noticed.

That was the fallout. And here is the unsanitized part, the part that is not about politics at all:

Some nights Lissa Dragomir stood in the hall outside that door for ten minutes and could not make her hand touch it.

Three times in fifteen years she went a week without going in, and told herself it was the Council, the Alchemists, the Tarus dispute, and it was not.

Once, in year nine, in the middle of the third night of an eight-night stretch of screaming — Rose had a chest infection and a delirium on top of the disease and did not know where she was and made a sound for six hours that Lissa heard for a decade afterward — Lissa stood in the doorway and thought, with total clarity: I want this to be over. I want her to die. I want my life.

And in the morning she brushed her wife’s hair and told her about the Alchemist delegation, and the guilt of that thought moved into her and took a room and never left, and she has never once said it aloud to anybody except Adrian Ivashkov, who said, “Yeah,” and lit a cigarette, and did not look at her, which was the kindest available response.

XIII.

Then, in year fifteen, in March, Rose aspirated for the fourth time.

The fourth is the one they tell you about. Each pneumonia takes a stair you never get back: after the first she lost the last of her swallow reflex on the left; after the second, sitting tolerance; after the third, the finger-flicker yes. The lungs do not forgive a body that inhales its own saliva eight times a night.

Dr. Tanase had retired. The royal physician was a Moroi named Lucian Voda, forty, meticulous, and he stood at the end of the bed with a chart he did not need to read and said what he was ethically required to say.

“With a gastrostomy tube, we take oral intake out of the equation. We eliminate the largest aspiration risk, we correct the malnutrition, we can deliver medication reliably. Your Majesty, she’s at seventy-eight pounds. Without it, I would expect weeks. Perhaps two or three months.”

“And with it?” said Janine Hathaway, from the chair in the corner. She was sixty-one. She had retired from the field at fifty-five, which nobody had expected her to survive doing, and she had spent four of the last six years in a set of rooms three doors down this hallway.

“Longer,” Voda said. “A year. Possibly more.”

“Doing what?”

Voda was a decent man. He did not pretend not to understand the question.

“This,” he said. “Doing this.”

There was a long silence. Somebody in the courtyard below was running a leaf blower on the Moroi night schedule, and Lissa thought, insanely, that there had been one of those the day a doctor first said the word Huntington’s out loud.

“She filed a directive,” said Lissa.

“I know. I’ve read it.”

“Read it out loud.”

Voda hesitated, and then took out the copy, because queens get to be obeyed about small terrible things.

“‘If I can no longer swallow safely, I decline the placement of a feeding tube. I decline mechanical ventilation. I decline resuscitation. If I get pneumonia and I am past the point of communicating, I want comfort care only. I want to be kept out of pain and I want to be kept clean and I want somebody to tell me what’s happening even if they think I can’t hear it, because I promise you I can.’” He paused. “It goes on. There’s a paragraph addressed to you, Your Majesty. Shall I—”

“No.”

Lissa knew the paragraph. She had known it for eleven years.

You are going to want to save me. You are going to have a hundred reasons and they will all be good, and I am writing this now, while I can still spell, so that you can’t ask me later when I can’t. The answer is no. I’ve thought about it every day since I was eighteen. It’s mine. It’s the only part that’s still mine. Don’t take it.

Abe Mazur spoke from the window. He had arrived four days ago from Istanbul with two men and a physician of his own, and he had not slept, and he was sixty-three years old and had forty-four CAG repeats and had begun, eighteen months ago, to drop things.

His right hand was in his coat pocket. It had been in his coat pocket for most of four days.

“She was twenty-four when she wrote that,” he said. “People change their minds.”

“Not about this,” said a voice from the door.

Dimitri Belikov was fifty-one. He was captain of the Queen’s guard and he had spent fifteen years carrying Rose Hathaway up ladders and out of chairs and into cars, and he had never once, in all of it, offered her a hand she hadn’t asked for.

“She talked about it,” he said. “With me. Years ago, in the gym at St. Vladimir’s, when she could still stand. She said the disease was going to take everything it could reach, and she wanted to keep one thing out of its reach, and this was the one.” He looked at Abe. “You weren’t there. I’m not saying that to hurt you. I’m saying you weren’t there and I was.”

Abe Mazur, who had bought half the eastern bloc and terrified two monarchs, put his hand over his eyes and did not answer.

“She can’t consent now,” said Lissa. Her own voice sounded to her like it was coming from another room. “That’s what you’re going to say next, Lucian. That she has no capacity, and the person with authority is me. So it’s mine. It’s my decision, not hers.”

“Yes,” Voda said. “Legally, that is the position.”

“And if I say put the tube in, you put it in.”

“Yes.”

Lissa sat down on the edge of the bed. Rose’s breathing was fast and shallow and there was a sound in it now, on the in-breath, a fine wet crackle down low.

“And she would never know I overruled her,” she said.

“No,” said Voda. “Probably not.”

The room waited.

“Get out,” said Lissa. “All of you. Not Marisol. Everyone else.”

XIV.

She went to Adrian at two in the morning, which is when you go to Adrian.

He had a set of rooms on the west side that smelled like clove smoke and turpentine; he painted now, badly and constantly, and he had been sober for six years and four months except for a bad November three years ago that they both agreed not to discuss. His hands shook, a little. His had shaken for twenty years, and not from any gene.

“You’re going to ask me about healing her,” he said, before she got the door shut.

“Yes.”

“Sit down.” He moved a canvas off a chair. “Okay. Say I let you. Say I stand there and hold your hand and take the darkness off as fast as it comes. Cousin, look at me — I’m the mop. I’ve been the mop for you two since we were eighteen. What do you think happens?”

“Spirit regrows tissue. I’ve done it. I did it when I was eighteen and I gave her five weeks.”

“You gave her five weeks when the damage was the size of a dime,” Adrian said. “Her caudate’s gone. Not thin. Gone. Her cortex is gone. Her brainstem’s forgotten how to run a swallow. You’d be rebuilding a house from a photograph — and the gene is still in every cell, and it starts poisoning the new tissue the second you make it, and the protein’s already stacked up in there like silt. You’d get, what, a week? Two? Of a person who’s been fifteen years in that bed waking up all the way inside it?”

“She’d know me,” Lissa said. “She’d be able to talk, Adrian. Two weeks. I could have two weeks of—”

“You could have two weeks,” he said. “Yeah. And so could she. And then she’d go back down, all the way down, with the memory of having been up.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “And she told you not to.”

“She’s not competent to tell me anything.”

“Right,” said Adrian. “So the only question on the table is whether you’re going to do something to Rose Hathaway’s body that Rose Hathaway said no to, because you can’t stand it.”

Lissa put her hands over her face.

“And there’s the other thing,” he said, quieter. “Which you know. You’ve got no bond left to dump the darkness into. It used to go out of you and into her — fifteen years of it, Liss, she carried your spirit for you and she never once billed you. That channel’s dead. So it goes into me, and into you, and I’m not what I was at twenty-two, and you are the Queen of the Moroi with a Council that would eat you alive if you had one bad week in public.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know you don’t,” Adrian said. “That’s why you came to me instead of just doing it.”

She did it anyway.

She wants that on the record; she has never once lied about it.

She sat with Rose at four in the morning, when the residence was silent and Marisol had gone to sleep in the next room with the door open, and she put her hands on either side of her wife’s head the way she had in an attic when they were eighteen years old, and she reached in.

She did not try to heal her. She had the sense, at the last second, not to try.

She sent warmth. A thread of it — no more than what she used to close a paper cut. Just enough spirit to put light in the window.

And the bond opened.

It was the last time, and it lasted perhaps ninety seconds, and here is what Rose Hathaway got, at the end of a fifteen-year silence: the inside of Lissa’s head, entire, the way it had been when they were girls. The noise of it. The Council arithmetic and the fear and the smell-memory of the chapel attic and I’m here, I’m here, it’s me, I’m here —

— and one sentence underneath all of it, worn smooth as a stone in a pocket from thirteen years of being turned over: don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, you come first, you come first, you come first.

Lissa felt nothing come back. She never had. The bond went one way; it had always gone one way; she had spent nineteen years loving someone who could read her like a book she wasn’t allowed to see the cover of.

But she was looking at her face.

And Rose’s eyes came over — slowly, with the head helping, the way they did — and found her. And her mouth opened.

“Guh.”

XV.

It’s her.

It’s her it’s her it’s her — the room is very loud with her, loud like the old days, like the dorm at St. Vladimir’s with the daylight through the curtain, and there is a hand on my face and it is cold and small and I know it, I know that hand, I have known that hand since I was five years old on a playground with a girl with a dead rabbit in her lap—

Say it. Say her name. Say —

There’s a shape where the word goes and I can’t get in it. It’s like reaching for a stake on a mat. My hand opens.

Guh.

It’s not the word. It was never the word. I know it isn’t. I’ve known for four years. It’s the only sound left in the building and I aim it at her and she takes it and she calls it a word, and every morning she kneels down on that floor in her stocking feet and lies to herself about me, and I would give anything, anything, to be able to tell her that she isn’t lying.

Liss.

She’s saying you come first. She’s saying it over and over like the song I used to make Marisol play. Perseveration. Oh, sweetheart. Look at us. Look at what we caught off each other.

I understood the Council thing this morning. Conta. The amendment. It’s my law. Tell them it’s my law—

It’s going quiet. She’s taking her hands away. Don’t—

Mason is at the foot of the bed.

He’s been there fifteen years, in the same corner, dripping lake water, seventeen years old forever. They wrote it in my chart in year one: psychiatric prodrome, visual hallucination secondary to neurodegeneration. They stopped writing it down when I stopped being able to report it. They think he went away.

He didn’t go away. He’s been so patient.

He’s got his hand out.

Not yet. Liss is still in the room. Not while she’s in the room.

Guh.

XVI.

She didn’t get weeks. She got nine days.

That is the part that would have made Rose laugh, the horrible honking laugh: that after all that, after the directives and the Council and a decade of argument, the disease did not wait for anybody’s decision. It never had.

The infection went down into both lungs on the fourth day. Voda offered antibiotics; the directive declined them past the point of communicating; Lissa read the paragraph one more time and then said no, and then went into the bathroom and was sick, and then came out and said no again in front of witnesses so that it was on the record as hers.

They did it in the room. No hospital. Morphine in small doses under the tongue for the air-hunger, glycopyrrolate for the secretions, her lips kept wet with a sponge, repositioned every two hours by Marisol and whoever else was there, which was usually Dimitri, because he was the only one strong enough to do it without jostling her, and because he would not go and sleep and nobody was going to make him.

It was not peaceful. Lissa will correct anybody who says it was peaceful.

There was the breathing, which went from fast and wet to slow and wrong, with long stops in it that made everyone in the room count. There was the rattle, which is exactly as bad as they tell you and which the medication only half-touches. There was the smell. There was the mottling, purple, that came up her feet and her knees on the eighth night like a tide coming in. There was a two-hour stretch where her jaw clenched and Lissa could not tell whether it was pain or dystonia and neither could the doctor, and they gave more morphine, and Lissa has spent years since wondering whether that dose was mercy or cowardice, and there is no way to ever find out.

And there was, all the way through, the thing the directive had asked for in plain language: somebody to tell me what’s happening even if they think I can’t hear it, because I promise you I can.

So they told her.

Lissa told her when it was day and when it was night. Janine Hathaway — who could not touch her daughter for the first two days, who stood by the wall like a woman at a post, and who on the third day got into the bed and held her, sixty-one years old, five feet nothing, and said I’d have had you anyway about forty times — Janine told her the weather. Abe read to her, in Turkish, with his right hand shaking in his lap, and did not explain what it was.

Eddie Castile flew in from the Szelsky assignment and sat on the floor by the bed for six hours and said almost nothing, which was the right call. Christian Ozera came with Mia and made two jokes that were in appalling taste, and Marisol laughed, and Lissa put her forehead on Christian’s shoulder for a long minute while Rose breathed.

Adrian sat on the other side and held Rose’s other hand and pulled, quietly, everything he could reach out of the two of them, and paid for it later in a way that is not this story.

And Dimitri Belikov, at four in the morning of the last night, leaned over the bed and said something to her in Russian, very low, and then stood up and walked out into the hall and put his fist against the marble and left it there, and a twenty-four-year-old guardian on the door watched the captain of the Queen’s guard shake and had the sense to look at the floor.

Lissa was in the bed when it happened. She’d been in the bed for most of two days, on her side, with Rose’s head against her collarbone, one hand flat on her wife’s sternum so she’d feel it stop before she heard it.

Around five in the morning, with the daylight coming up on a Court that was going to sleep, Rose Hathaway lifted her right hand off the blanket.

She had not had voluntary movement in that arm in eleven months.

She lifted it — six inches, maybe eight, trembling — and reached toward the foot of the bed.

“Go on,” Lissa said, into her hair. “It’s okay. He’s been waiting a really long time.”

Three breaths, spaced far apart. Then one more.

Then the room got very quiet, and stayed that way, and the terrible thing — the thing Lissa has never been able to say to anyone but Adrian — was that the first thing she felt was not grief.

It was relief. Enormous, obscene, physical relief, like coming up out of deep water.

The grief came about forty seconds later and has never entirely left.

XVII.

The politics resumed in four days, because that is what politics does.

Conta brought the allocation amendment back, on schedule, with Zeklos and two Drozdovs, and argued that the Hathaway credit was a sentimental drain on a depleted order and that perhaps now, in this period of transition, the Council might consider —

Lissa Dragomir let him finish. She had learned that from Tatiana Ivashkov, whom she had hated, and it remained the single most useful thing she ever learned from anyone.

Then she stood up, which queens did not do at Council, and she reached behind her neck and undid the collar of her dress and turned around.

At the base of her skull, still shiny, still swollen at the edges from three days of healing, was a tattoo. Not a molnija. Not a battle mark; she hadn’t the gall for that. It was the promise mark — the plain twist of the guardian’s promise, the one every novice gets at graduation and Rose Hathaway had never been permitted to receive.

The room made a noise. Somebody, a Badica, said “Your Majesty” in a voice like breaking china.

“She wasn’t allowed one,” Lissa said, with her back to twelve royal families. “She couldn’t pass the trials. She was sick at eighteen and she was never going to stand in a hallway for anyone, and this Council spent eleven years deciding whether a dhampir who can’t fight is worth feeding. She wrote your answer for you. You passed it by one vote and you renamed it after my family because you couldn’t stand to say her name.”

She turned back around and did up her collar.

“I know what this is,” she said, touching the back of her neck. “I know it isn’t mine. I know exactly what the papers are going to do with it and I know what the Church will say and I know there are dhampirs at this Court who will find it offensive, and some of them will be right. I’m going to wear it anyway, for the rest of my life, because she guarded me for twenty-eight years and only three of them counted, and I am done with the arithmetic.”

Then she sat down and said, “Lord Conta. You were making a motion.”

The amendment failed by four.

The Moroi Monitor ran a photograph of the back of the Queen’s neck for nine weeks. The dhampir communes were split down the middle and argued about it for a decade; Marisol Badica was in favor, which mattered more to Lissa than the rest of it combined. Dimitri Belikov never said a word about it in her hearing, but he cried at the funeral, in public, in uniform, which was its own kind of statement and was understood as one.

Janine Hathaway asked, six months later, with tremendous awkwardness, whether she could see it, and looked at it for a while, and said, “Hm,” and then, “She’d have made fun of you for a year.”

“Two years,” Lissa said.

“Two years,” Janine agreed.

XVIII.

Abe Mazur went into the clinic in Zurich four years later and died in Istanbul at seventy-one, rigid, silent, in a chair by a window, with a nurse who read to him in Turkish. He left the whole of it — the trust, the shipping company, the things nobody asked about — to a foundation for dhampir care with a long boring name, on one condition, which was that no piece of literature it ever printed would use the word hopeless.

Lissa Dragomir reigned for another thirty-one years and it is generally agreed that she was the best monarch the Moroi had in two centuries, and she never married anybody, and the Dragomir line went on through Jill’s daughter and Jill’s daughter’s sons.

She kept the room.

That was the part that people found strange enough to still be gossiping about it when she was seventy. The room on the east side of the royal residence, cleared of the hoist and the suction machine and the splints, kept warm, kept aired, a chair by the window facing the light. Not a shrine — there were no photographs in it, because Rose had been vain to the last and had hated every picture taken of her after year six and had said so on a letter board with great specificity.

Lissa went in every morning before Council. Eight-fifteen. Shoes in her hand, out of habit, on marble that no longer needed to be quiet.

She knelt down in front of the empty chair, which at forty was easy and at sixty-eight was not, and she said the agenda out loud. Who was bringing what motion. Who was lying. Who was frightened. What she was going to do about it.

There was nobody in the chair. She was extremely clear about that; her mind stayed sharp to the very end of it and she never once pretended otherwise. The bond had died before Rose did, and whatever had been in Rose’s skull was in the ground at St. Vladimir’s under a stone with two molnija marks and a promise mark carved into it by a tattooist who had to be talked into the job.

The guardians on the door thought it was pageantry. Thirteen years, then thirty-one: the Queen and her devotions.

It wasn’t. It was a debriefing.

Lissa knelt on the floor in her stocking feet and told a chair by a window what the day was going to cost, the way you tell the only person who ever told you the truth, and then she got up, and did up her collar over the mark that wasn’t hers, and went and got 'em.

Part Two (Alternate): Should’ve, Could’ve, Won’t

Content notes: death of a spouse; prolonged/complicated grief depicted in unflinching detail; depression; passive suicidal ideation (non-graphic, not acted on); disordered eating and self-neglect; grief hallucinations; social withdrawal and estrangement. This version is melancholic and does not resolve.

XVI.

The first thing she felt was relief.

She has never been able to unfeel it. She has tried; you cannot go back and re-run a moment with a better response, that isn’t how any of it works, and so it is fixed there forever at the front of the record: at 5:04 in the morning on the ninth of April, with the daylight coming up over a Court that was going to sleep, Rose Hathaway stopped breathing against Lissa Dragomir’s collarbone, and Lissa’s entire body flooded with relief, like coming up out of deep water, like putting down a weight she had been carrying so long she’d forgotten it was a weight and had started to think it was her posture.

It lasted about forty seconds.

Afterward she would think of those forty seconds the way you think of the last normal minute before a car accident. That was the last one. That was the last minute of the thirty-three years in which Rose was somewhere.

Then it came.

She doesn’t remember the sound she made. Marisol remembers it. Dimitri remembers it; he was in the hallway with his fist on the marble and he said later — years later, in the only conversation they ever had about that night — that he had been in the field since he was eighteen and had heard men die badly, and that he had never heard anything like it before or since, and that the twenty-four-year-old guardian on the door had turned white and started to come in and Dimitri had put an arm across the doorway and said no.

They let her stay in the bed for two hours. Voda came in at six, and confirmed it, and said the time out loud, and Lissa heard herself say “thank you” in a perfectly normal voice, which is the sort of thing bodies do.

And then the practical obscenity began, which nobody warns you about either.

Because a body has to be washed, and a body has to be dressed, and there are forms; there are always forms. Because the equipment belongs to the Court and the Court has an inventory. Because at some point on the second day two men in coveralls came with a trolley and took away the hoist, and the suction machine, and the pressure-relieving mattress, and the oxygen concentrator that had never been used because the directive said not to, and the hospital bed itself, disassembled, out through the door in four pieces.

And then it was a room with a chair in it.

Lissa stood in the doorway in a dressing gown at four in the afternoon and looked at the carpet, where there were four flattened rectangles where the bed’s feet had been for eleven years, and the fibers were crushed pale and grey and would never come back up, and that was the moment. Not the dying. Not the breath that didn’t follow the one before it.

Four marks in a carpet.

She went down. Not gracefully; she went down like a dropped coat, and she stayed on that floor for a very long time making a noise that had nothing in it at all, and Marisol Badica — who had four children and fourteen years in the work and had seen more deaths than anyone else in that residence — sat down on the carpet beside her and did not touch her and did not speak, for two and a half hours, until it stopped.

XVII.

Here is the thing that nobody had told her, and that she would have refused to believe anyway:

Fifteen years of anticipatory grief prepares you for nothing.

She had known since she was eighteen. She had known the word Huntington’s since before she knew how to legally sign her own name. She had grieved in stages, dutifully, like a person paying down a debt in instalments — grieved the guardian Rose would never be, grieved the walking, grieved the hands, grieved the letter board, grieved the voice, grieved the finger, grieved the yes-and-no. She had sat with a counselor twice a month for a decade. She had read everything. She had a whole vocabulary for it.

She had believed — she had genuinely, stupidly believed — that she had been paying in advance.

She had not been paying in advance. She had been paying for the privilege of watching, and the bill for the ending came due in full on the ninth of April like nothing had ever been paid at all.

What she had actually built, over fifteen years, without noticing, was a life whose entire architecture was Rose.

Eight-fifteen: the briefing. Eleven: back between the Alchemists and lunch, four minutes, hand on the hand. Two-thirty: the turn, if Marisol needed a second pair of hands. Six: dinner in the room, one of them eating. Ten: the night check. Three a.m.: awake, always, the internal clock that had been set eleven years ago to the two-hourly repositioning schedule and could not be unset.

She woke at three for eleven months. Her body went on keeping the appointment long after the reason for it was in the ground at St. Vladimir’s, and she would surface out of sleep with her heart going and her feet already on the floor, going to turn her, and get four steps toward a door before the front of her brain caught up with the back of it.

Four steps. Every night, for eleven months. That’s the part she’d tell you about, if she told anyone anything, which she stopped doing.

And there were the sounds. The suction machine ran at a particular pitch and she heard it in the pipes, in the hot water, in the wind on the east side. Twice she heard, quite distinctly, the wet click of the humidifier and got up to check the water level in a room where there was no humidifier and no bed and no wife.

The hospice nurse, on the follow-up visit she attended once and never again, called it searching behavior, and said it was normal, and said it passed.

Some of it passed.

XVIII.

Should’ve.

It arrived about three weeks in, and it never left, and it had a rhythm, and the rhythm was the worst part: it came in at night in a particular order, like a liturgy, like something she was being made to recite.

Should’ve made her get tested at sixteen. She dropped things all that autumn and I laughed at her and made a joke about grace.

Should’ve healed her every five weeks for the rest of her life. Adrian would’ve mopped. I could’ve carried the darkness myself. So what if I went mad — I’d have been mad with her in the room instead of sane with her in the ground.

Should’ve said no to the attic. She could still stand that day. I made her climb into a dusty room for a ceremony that wasn’t legal anywhere so I could feel married, and she was tired for three days after, and I took three days off the end of her for a candle and a joke from Christian.

Should’ve gone in. Year nine, the week of the Tarus dispute, I didn’t go in for six days and I told her it was the Council and she blinked yes like she believed me and she could still read faces then, she could read me better than anyone alive, she knew exactly what I was doing.

Should’ve put the tube in.

That one came last, every night, and it was the one that took the top of her head off.

Because she could do the arithmetic. Seventy-eight pounds, fourth aspiration, weeks to months without it — and a year, possibly more, with. Voda had said it out loud in that room with three witnesses. A year. Possibly more.

Three hundred and sixty-five mornings at eight-fifteen. Three hundred and sixty-five times guh. She would have taken it. God forgive her, she would have taken it in the state Rose was in, she would have taken any of it, she would have taken a year of that bed and that rattle and that nothing if she could have knelt on the floor at the end of it and had one more—

She told you not to.

Yes.

She wrote it at twenty-four while she could still spell. She said: don’t take it. She said it’s the only part that’s still mine.

Yes.

And you honoured it.

Yes. And it turns out you can do the right thing — the correct thing, the loving thing, the thing that she asked for in writing and that Dimitri backed and that the law upheld — and then spend the rest of your life at three in the morning being told by your own voice that you killed her.

Could’ve.

That one was shorter and it was worse.

Could’ve had two weeks.

Adrian had laid it out on a table in a room that smelled of clove smoke: rebuild from a photograph, a week, maybe two, of a person waking up all the way inside that body. He’d said it like a warning. And in the second year she started turning it over like a coin, and it stopped being a warning and became an inventory of things she had refused.

Two weeks. Fourteen mornings. Rose able to say a sentence. Rose able to say her name. Twenty-eight years of knowing each other and the last four of it had been one syllable, and she had stood in Adrian Ivashkov’s rooms at two in the morning and been talked out of fourteen days.

You’d have violated her.

Yes.

She’d have hated you.

She’d have been there to hate me.

Won’t.

That was the last one, and it wasn’t an argument, it had no counter-move, and it got her every time, and it is the one she still says out loud sometimes at seventy.

Won’t ever hear it again.

Not the guh. She had the guh. She had eight hundred recordings of the guh if she wanted them, on a phone, in a drawer.

The other voice. The one from before.

Because that is what fifteen years does, and this is the specific cruelty that nobody puts in the pamphlets: the dysarthria came in so slowly, degrading over so many thousands of days, that it overwrote the original. Lissa Dragomir could remember what Rose Hathaway said at eighteen years old on the chapel steps at St. Vladimir’s with the stars doing their Montana thing. She could recite it.

She could not hear it.

She’d lost the sound. Somewhere between year six and year nine it had been slowly replaced in her head by the thickened one, and then by the slurred one, and then by the wet one, and she noticed the theft at two in the morning in the second year and got out of bed and went through the archives like a burglar looking for a recording made before the disease, and there wasn’t one. Eleven minutes of Council testimony at twenty-two, already slurring at the edges. That was the earliest audio of Rose Hathaway’s voice in existence.

Nobody records a healthy eighteen-year-old. Why would they. There’s going to be so much time.

She listened to the eleven minutes maybe four thousand times. She can still do it from memory, all of it, including the place at minute six where Rose’s arm jumped and the paper rattled and she said sorry and then, immediately, no, actually, not sorry, you can wait.

It isn’t the voice. It’s a photograph of the voice.

Won’t. Won’t. Won’t.

XIX.

She got the promise mark three days after, at four in the morning, from a tattooist in the lower Court who was woken up by two guardians and told to open his shop and ask no questions.

There was no Council scene. There was no speech about arithmetic. She did not turn around in front of twelve royal families and make them look at it; she never made anybody look at it. She had it done at the base of her skull where Rose’s would have gone and then she put her collar up over it and wore high collars for the next thirty years, and the only people who ever saw it were her physician, two hairdressers, and eventually Janine Hathaway, who asked, and looked, and said nothing at all.

It wasn’t a statement. It was a bandage she could never take off.

XX.

She started with the housekeeping.

It was month two. She had left the room exactly as it was after the trolley came — the chair by the window, the blanket over the arm of it, the pillow. Especially the pillow. Nobody had been told this explicitly, because it was insane and she knew it was insane; she had simply put a hand on the door of that room in a certain way for eight weeks and everyone in the residence had understood.

And then a girl on the housekeeping staff, nineteen, three days into the job, no idea, did the sensible thing and stripped the bedding in the east suite and laundered it.

Lissa found the pillow that evening, clean.

She has apologised for this in writing, twice, years apart, and sent money, and it does not matter and she knows it does not matter. She screamed at a nineteen-year-old girl until the girl was crying and shaking against the corridor wall, and then she had her dismissed, and stood there while it was done, and it is the single worst thing the Queen of the Moroi ever did to a person who could not answer back.

Then she sat on the floor of the laundry with a clean pillowcase pressed to her face for forty minutes, breathing in detergent, trying to find anything, and there was nothing, because that’s what detergent is for.

That was the beginning of the clearing-out.

Christian went in month five.

He was trying. That’s the thing she’d want on the record: he was trying, and he had loved Rose in his own arm’s-length appalling way for eighteen years, and he had held Lissa’s head on his shoulder in that room on the seventh night while Rose was dying.

He said: “Liss. She’d want you to be—”

And Lissa said, in a voice she did not recognise, “Don’t you ever tell me what she’d want. You don’t know what she’d want. I’m the only person on this earth who knows what she’d want and I’ve been up every night for five months disagreeing with her about it.”

He said her name once, and she said get out, and he got out, and Mia wrote her a letter three weeks later that Lissa did not open for four years and then wept over for an hour.

Jill went in month eight, and Jill was the one that came with an abdication attached.

She’d come with paperwork. Of course she had; she was twenty-nine and serious and terrified and the Council had sent her because they’d run out of people the Queen would still see. She stood there in the receiving room with a folio and said the thing that had to be said by somebody: that Lissa had cancelled nine consecutive sessions; that there were decisions stacked up that only a monarch could make; that people were starting to say things.

“Let them say things.”

“Lissa, the allocation amendment is coming back. Her amendment. Conta’s got the votes if you’re not in the room.”

And Lissa Dragomir, who had fought for eleven years to get that law passed, who had knelt on a marble floor every morning of her reign and told a dying woman the state of the count — Lissa looked at her sister and felt precisely nothing.

That was the discovery of that year. Not that she was sad. That she was empty of everything else. Fifteen years of statecraft and thirteen of a crown, and the whole apparatus turned out to have been a delivery mechanism; she had been doing all of it so that she would have something to bring back to the room at eight-fifteen. The Council had never been the point. The Council had been material.

“Then it fails,” she said.

Jill stared at her. “You don’t mean that.”

“I’m going to say something to you now,” Lissa said, “and I want you to hear it properly, because I’m only going to be able to say it once. I don’t care. Not a little — not at all. I have looked, Jillian. I have gone looking for the part of me that cares whether dhampirs with disabilities have a legal category, and it isn’t there, it’s been taken out, and I’m not going to sit in a chair and perform it for you.”

She abdicated fourteen months after Rose died. The instrument of abdication is eleven lines long and cites ill health. It was the shortest and least contested transfer of power in the modern history of the Moroi and the Council, to its eternal discredit, was mostly relieved.

Jill Dragomir turned out to be a very good queen. Lissa knows this the way you know a fact about a country you’ve never visited.

Adrian went at fourteen months, and he went hardest, because he wouldn’t.

He came four times after she told him not to. The fourth time he brought a doctor and stood in the doorway of the east suite — Lissa was in the chair by the window, in a dressing gown, at two in the afternoon, having not eaten in two days and not seen her feeder in nine — and he said:

“Cousin. Look at your hands.”

“Go away.”

“You’re grey. Your gums are grey. You haven’t fed since — when? Liss, you’re Moroi, you can’t just decide not to, you’re not built for it, it doesn’t work like a hunger strike, it works like organ failure—”

“Adrian.”

“She’d be appalled,” he said, and he was crying, which she had seen him do exactly twice in twenty years. “She spent fifteen years making everybody in this building feed you and turn her and keep going, she was the most stubborn animal who ever lived, and you’re going to sit in her chair and let yourself—”

“I said don’t tell me what she’d—”

“I’m not telling you what she’d want, I’m telling you what I want, I’m telling you I’ve got nothing left, Lissa, I buried her too, I held her hand for six hours and pulled darkness out of her for twenty years and I have nobody—”

She had him escorted out.

He drank, after that. Six years and four months of sobriety, and he went into the west rooms and closed the door and drank for nine days, and Marisol Badica found him, and he survived it and got clean again eighteen months later in a facility in Oregon, and they did not speak for eleven years.

She has thought about those nine days almost as often as she has thought about the feeding tube.

Eddie didn’t have to be sent away. Eddie simply stopped being written back to, and after the sixth unanswered letter he understood, because he was a guardian and understood being surplus.

Marisol left on her own, at twenty months, kindly and without drama. She had stayed long past any function; there was nobody to nurse. She came and stood in front of the chair and said, “Your Majesty. I can’t sit in this room and watch a second one.” And Lissa said, “No. You can’t,” and they held onto each other for a while, and that was the last human contact Lissa Dragomir had for about four years.

Marisol went back to Missoula and ran the foundation that Abe Mazur’s money built. Her name is on a building. Rose would have laughed until she choked.

Janine was the ugliest, and it happened at the two-year memorial, and it should never have happened at all.

They were standing at the grave at St. Vladimir’s in the snow, and Janine Hathaway — sixty-three, retired, rigid as a fence post, who had cried without moving her face at an attic wedding and had climbed into a deathbed and said I’d have had you anyway forty times — said, with enormous awkwardness:

“You should eat something. She’d—”

And Lissa turned on her and said, “You weren’t there. You visited her eleven times in eighteen years and you were on assignment in Nebraska when she was diagnosed and you didn’t ask about his family, you didn’t ask, you had her and you didn’t check—”

Janine Hathaway stood in the snow and took it, all of it, every word, the way she had taken hits her entire professional life: feet planted, chin down, absorbing.

And when Lissa ran out, Janine said, quite steadily:

“That’s right. And she forgave me for it when she was twenty-two, in a letter, which I carry. So the only person still holding it against me is you, and you’re doing it because it’s easier than holding it against yourself.”

Then she nodded, once, like the end of a briefing, and walked to her car.

They did not speak again for nine years. When they did, at Abe’s funeral in Istanbul, Janine said hello, Vasilisa and Lissa said hello, Janine and they sat side by side for two hours and that was the whole of it, and it was, in its way, completely sufficient.

Dimitri was last, and Dimitri was the worst, because Dimitri did not argue.

He stayed three years. Long past the abdication, long past the point where there was a Queen to guard. He simply kept turning up: the perimeter of the east suite at seven, the corridor at eight-fifteen, the door at ten. He brought food she didn’t eat. He read his westerns in the chair in the hall.

And at three years and two months she came out of the room at two in the afternoon and found him there, with the cracked paperback, fifty-four years old and grey at the temples now, and something in her broke sideways, because she could not stand to be guarded any more. Being guarded was Rose. Being guarded was a girl on a playground with a dead rabbit in her lap saying I’ll look after you. Every time she saw him in that chair her whole body said wrong one.

“Go home,” she said. “To Baia. To your sisters. You have a family, you’ve had a family the whole time, and you’ve spent thirty-six years standing outside doors for the Dragomirs and I’m releasing you. Go.”

Dimitri Belikov closed the book.

He looked at her for a long moment and she waited for the argument — she wanted the argument, she wanted somebody to fight her, she had been starving for somebody to fight her — and he said:

“All right.”

And stood up, and said, “She was the best of us,” and went.

That was it. That was the whole conversation. He wrote at Christmas every year for twenty-six years, one page, in careful English, about his sisters and his nieces and the weather in Siberia, and she read every one and answered none, and when he died at seventy-nine his daughter sent a note, and Lissa Dragomir sat down on the floor of an attic with it in her hand.

XXI.

So there was nobody left, and that had been the point, and here is what it was actually like.

It was not dramatic. This is the part she’d insist on. There were no more screaming scenes after the laundry; she’d used up whatever produced those. What was left was flat, and grey, and extremely long.

She slept eleven hours and woke unrested. She went out at night and walked the same three hundred metres of the east garden. She fed twice a week, badly, the minimum, and her physician despaired and eventually stopped saying so. She lost eighteen pounds off a frame that did not have eighteen pounds.

She did not read. She had been a reader her whole life and the words stopped going in; she would get to the bottom of a page and find nothing there, and after about a year she stopped opening them, and a set of shelves she’d assembled since she was fifteen just stood there, silently, like furniture.

She kept the schedule.

Eight-fifteen, every morning, without exception, for thirty-one years. She put her shoes in her hand out of habit on marble that didn’t need to be quiet, and she knelt down in front of the chair by the window — easy at thirty-four, hard at fifty, very hard at sixty-eight — and she said the agenda out loud.

There stopped being an agenda in about the third year. She kept talking anyway. She’d tell the chair about the weather, and the state of the garden, and things from twenty years earlier: do you remember the night Stan tried to give you a demerit for insubordinate posture. Do you remember the horrible drinks. Do you remember when Christian set fire to the tablecloth.

Do you remember when you could still walk.

She was not confused. She has been very clear about this with the only two people who ever asked, and she would be clear about it now: she never once believed anyone was in the chair. Her mind stayed sharp to the end of it. She knew the room was empty and she knelt down in it every single day for three decades and talked to nobody, because the alternative was a morning in which she did not, and she was never able to survive the idea of the first one.

And there were the times she saw her.

Bereavement hallucinations are extremely common; her physician told her that early, kindly, the one useful sentence in four years of medical contact. Perhaps half of widowed people have them. They are not madness. They are the brain running a search and returning a cached result.

She saw Rose in the east corridor eight or nine times in the first two years: not the wasted one, not the chair — the walking one, twenty-two, the cane, the terrible sober-at-a-party grin. Always at distance, always going away, always around the corner before Lissa got there.

She never saw her after year three. She would have given the rest of her life for one more and it never came, and she thinks about that: that even the symptom got bored and left.

And she thought about the other thing. Passively, in the way that the very lonely do — not a plan, never a plan, more like a door she knew the location of and checked was still there. She told one person, once, at four in the morning in the ninth year, on the phone to a facility in Oregon where Adrian Ivashkov had been sober for three hundred and eleven days. He listened. He didn’t tell her what Rose would want. He said: “Ring me tomorrow at the same time,” and she did, and then the day after, and then for two hundred days, and that is the reason there is a rest of this.

They still never met. Some things break and stay broken and can also, at the same time, save your life at four in the morning.

XXII.

She went back to St. Vladimir’s in the twelfth year and never really left.

She took a set of rooms in the guest quarters, and then a cottage on the edge of the grounds within the wards, and Kirova’s successor’s successor pretended not to know who she was, which was the single greatest kindness anybody did her in thirty years.

The grave is on the eastern slope under a stone with two molnija marks and a promise mark carved into it by a tattooist who had to be talked into the job. She went on Sundays. She pulled the weeds herself.

And once a month, in all weathers, for as long as her knees allowed and then for six years after that, she climbed the ladder into the attic over the chapel.

It is unchanged. Dust, mouse, old paper, the smell of centuries of wax. The round window looks east over the wards to the tree line, where the snow comes in sideways in February. There is a crate she sits on. There is a patch of floor where a girl of eighteen sat with her knees up on the night of a graduation she wasn’t allowed to graduate from, and a patch beside it where another girl sat down in a dress and took her shaking hand and invented a motto.

Lissa Dragomir sits on the crate and puts her hands in her lap and looks at the floor, and she is seventy years old, and she does the liturgy, because after all this time it’s a comfort as much as a punishment, which is a thing nobody tells you either.

Should’ve made you get tested at sixteen.

Should’ve healed you every five weeks forever and gone mad in the room with you.

Should’ve gone in, that week, in year nine.

Should’ve put the tube in and taken the year and let you hate me for it.

Could’ve had two weeks. I could’ve had fourteen days and your voice in them. I said no because you asked me to and I have been sorry every hour since and I would say no again, and I don’t know what to do with a fact that’s shaped like that.

Won’t hear you again.

Won’t be known like that again. That’s the one, Rose. That’s the one I can’t get round. You lived in my head for nineteen years and I never once got to live in yours — it only ever went one way, and I used to think that was the tragedy, and it isn’t. The tragedy is that you were the only person who ever saw the inside of me and you took the file with you.

Everybody I have left, if I had anybody left, would have to be told. You never had to be told.

I’m never going to be seen again. Not like that. There’s nobody else on this earth who can do it.

Won’t.

Won’t.

Won’t.

Snow comes in through the round window and melts on the boards. Down below, the Academy is going to sleep in the daylight, the way it always has, and the novices are coming out of the gym at six-forty in the morning that’s really evening, and some seventeen-year-old down there with fast hands is going to be the best in her class and thinks it’s going to matter.

And the old woman in the attic sits with her collar buttoned over a mark that was never hers, in the dust, in the cold, and says the thing she has said at eight-fifteen for thirty-one years to a chair that has nobody in it, out loud, to the empty room, to the floor where the two of them once sat:

“It’s me. I’m here.”

And nothing answers, and nothing has ever answered, and nothing is ever going to.

Part Three: The Vision in the Attic

Content notes: recontextualizes Parts Two/Two-Alternate as a dream or vision. Terminal illness; anticipatory grief; a mutual pact to die together, discussed at length across years (non-graphic, no methods, framed with resistance, renewed consent, and lasting harm to survivors); passive suicidal ideation; religious ambiguity. Ends in the deaths of both protagonists.

IX. (continued)

The first thing she did was reach behind her own neck.

Nothing there. Smooth skin, the fine hairs at the nape, her own pulse under her fingers going much too fast. No mark. No collar to button over it.

The second thing she did was look at her hands. Eighteen years old. Not grey. Not the hands of a woman who had stopped feeding out of spite and let her gums go the color of ash.

The third thing she did was make a sound, and Rose Hathaway — who had been in the middle of a sentence, whose mouth was still open around the end of it, who had one arm around Lissa’s shoulders and a smear of attic dust on her collarbone from the floor — said, “Whoa. Hey. Hey. Liss.”

The round window was grey with dawn. Somebody was crossing the quad below, badly, laughing, a novice out too late on graduation night. The air smelled of old paper and mouse and wax, and Anna’s journals were in their box against the wall where they’d always been, and the dust had that trick of turning to gold where the light came through.

Forty seconds. Maybe less. The length of a sentence.

“Say something,” Lissa said.

“I was saying something.”

“No. Say something else. Say my name.”

“Lissa,” said Rose, in the exact voice — the real one, the eighteen-year-old one, the unslurred, un-thickened, un-ruined one that Lissa Dragomir had spent thirty-one years unable to remember. “Liss. What just happened, you went white as—”

Lissa got both hands around her face and kissed her, hard enough to hurt, and then held her there, forehead to forehead, and started to shake.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m here.”

“Yeah,” said Rose, bewildered, “I know. You’re crushing my arm.”

And something answered. Something had answered. Something was going to keep answering, for years, for a decade, for as long as it could, and Lissa sat on that attic floor and sobbed with her fists in the front of her wife’s — her girlfriend’s, her graduation-night girl’s — dress, with total silence from below and the whole ordinary world going about its business outside the round window.

X.

It took her an hour and ten minutes to get it out, and she got it out badly, in the wrong order, the way you’d describe a car accident.

Four flattened rectangles in a carpet, pale and crushed and never coming up again.

A trolley, and two men in coveralls, and an inventory.

A nineteen-year-old girl crying against a corridor wall over a laundered pillowcase.

Dimitri Belikov closing a paperback and saying All right.

Eleven minutes of audio, played four thousand times, that was a photograph of a voice.

Rose listened. She didn’t interrupt, which Lissa had not expected and which frightened her more than questions would have. She sat with her back against the crate and her knees up and her hands — steady tonight, steady most nights still, that was the horror of this particular month of their lives — flat on the boards, and she listened to an account of her own death and the thirty-one years that came after it.

When Lissa stopped, Rose said: “Okay. I’ve got questions.”

“Ask me.”

“Did I get a promise mark?”

“You refused one. Twice. You said you hadn’t earned it and you’d break the arm of anybody who gave you one out of pity.” Lissa wiped her face with her wrist. “I got one instead. At four in the morning. From a man who was dragged out of bed and told not to ask.”

Rose made a small noise. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I know.”

“That’s really stupid, Liss.”

“I know.”

“Did I punch anybody?”

“You threw a cup at a guardian’s head. And you told Adrian Ivashkov, at a dinner, in front of nine people, that he’d never been useful in his life.”

“Was he?”

“He was the only reason I survived year nine.”

Rose absorbed that. Her jaw worked. The shoulder rolled, patiently, on its own schedule, and neither of them looked at it.

“Did we get married?”

“Here,” said Lissa. “In this room. In six years. In the snow, with the window open, and Christian said words over us that were mostly jokes until they suddenly weren’t, and Dimitri carried you up the ladder and then put you down on your feet for the part where you stand.”

Rose laughed — the real laugh, the snort in the middle of it — and then stopped laughing, all at once, the way a tap stops.

“How long could I talk,” she said.

“Rose—”

“How long.”

“You had words until nine,” Lissa said. “The board until eleven. Yes-and-no until thirteen. After that—” She stopped, and made herself finish it, because the one thing in the vision that everybody had failed at was telling the truth in that room. “After that, one syllable. For four years. And I told everyone it meant go get 'em, and I never knew if it was a word or a spasm, and I couldn’t ask.”

Rose sat very still.

“And I couldn’t remember your voice,” Lissa said. “That’s the part I need you to understand, because it’s the part that— it went so slowly, Rose, it degraded so slowly that by the time you couldn’t speak at all I’d lost the original. Fifteen years of hearing it get worse wrote over the top of it. I had a girl of eighteen’s words in my head and no sound to put them in.”

The dawn came further up the round window. Down on the quad, somebody was being told off by a guardian, and the guardian was Stan Alto, and that was such an obscenely ordinary fact that Lissa nearly went under again.

“Was it real?” Rose said.

XI.

Here are the three things it could have been, and Lissa Dragomir laid all three of them out that morning, and never in the next thirteen years chose between them.

One. Spirit. Something she’d done without meaning to, the way she had brought Rose back from a highway at fifteen without knowing there was a name for what she was. They were sitting eight feet from a box of a saint’s papers; St. Vladimir had visions, dreamed in other people’s heads, saw things that hadn’t happened yet and wrote them down in a hand that got worse as he got madder. Nobody understood spirit. Nobody had ever understood spirit. Maybe there was a door in it that opened backwards and she had leaned on it.

Two. God. She was in the attic over a chapel. Father Andrew was asleep two floors below with his little library of saints’ lives, half of which were warnings and half of which were mercies and all of which, he’d once told her, came to people who were too stupid or too frightened to ask.

Three. A dream.

She was eighteen years old. She had been told nine weeks ago that the girl she loved had fifty-eight CAG repeats on chromosome four and ten to fifteen years, and she had gone and read every paper she could get from the human journals, and she had memorized the whole vocabulary — aspiration, cachexia, dystonia, perseveration, anarthria — and she had a mind with a genuine talent for catastrophe and a tendency to lie awake composing the worst available future in full sentences.

Everything in it was extrapolation. Every single piece.

She had known about the genetics. She had known about the darkness and what it had done to Ms. Karp and that Adrian could mop. She had known Abe Mazur had forty-four repeats and no symptoms, because Rose had told her in March in a stairwell. She had known Rose saw Mason at the foot of the bed, because Rose had told her ten minutes before she fell asleep. She knew there was a nurse’s aide from a commune near Missoula, because Rose had made her read the entire assignment roster out loud in February while ranting about the non-combat problem.

“I can explain all of it,” Lissa said. “That’s the thing. I can explain every single piece of it, and I still know what I saw.”

“That’s not evidence.”

“No.”

“That’s the opposite of evidence.”

“I know what I saw,” Lissa said. “I was seventy. My knees hurt. I knew how long it took me to get up the ladder.”

Rose looked at her for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Okay, I believe you.” Rose shrugged with one shoulder, the good one, the voluntary one. “You believed me about Mason ten minutes ago and you didn’t make me prove it. Turns out that’s a thing we do now.”

XII.

And then — this is the part Lissa is not sorry about, has never once been sorry about — she lost her mind a little, for about four months, in the specific direction of worship.

She could not stop looking at her.

It was tactile and it was constant and it was, Rose complained loudly and often, completely deranged. Lissa learned her. She sat on the end of the bed in the guest suite at Court that summer and went over her like an archivist: the chipped lower molar from a basement in Spokane. The scar through her left eyebrow from a fence at thirteen. The callus at the base of her right index finger, from a stake, which was going to fade, and did, and Lissa cried about it in a bathroom in year three and never told her.

The hair. God, the hair — that ridiculous, glorious, insubordinate dark hair that had never in eighteen years done a single thing it was asked, that got everywhere, that Lissa found in her own clothes for the rest of her life and, in the sixth year after, found one of in the spine of a book and had to sit down on the floor about.

The way she ate: appallingly, at speed, talking. The way she slept: on her front, one leg out, like a dropped marionette. The way she laughed, which involved a snort in the middle that she had spent her whole adolescence trying to suppress and had never once managed. The way she said “Comrade,” with the affection buried under about four inches of sarcasm. The way she smelled after the gym, which was frankly not good, and which Lissa in year fourteen would have paid actual gold for one more lungful of.

The way — and Rose had no idea she did this, none, not ever, not once in her life — that Rose Hathaway shifted a half-step sideways every time they came to a doorway, so that she went through it first.

“Stop it,” Rose said, in July, pinned to a couch. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“No.”

“Liss. Honey. I love you. You’re being so weird.”

“You’re going to have to get used to it,” said Lissa, “because I’ve had thirty-one years of practice and you’ve had six weeks.”

And once, that summer, she found herself on her knees in front of Rose’s chair on the balcony, both hands around one of Rose’s hands, out of nothing, out of pure habit — eight-fifteen, shoes off, the agenda — and Rose went rigid all over and said, “Get up. Get up. Lissa. You’re a Dragomir, you don’t—”

“I’m going to spend thirty years kneeling in front of a chair,” Lissa said. “Let me do it while you’re in it.”

Rose shut her eyes. Then she put her free hand on Lissa’s head, in her hair, and left it there, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“My silly dhampir,” Lissa said, into her knuckles.

“Yeah,” said Rose, very thickly. “Yours.”

There was also the recording, which started that first week and never stopped.

She bought two little digital recorders, and then four, and then she just used her phone like everyone else. She recorded hours. She recorded Rose reading the sports page out loud in an outraged voice. She recorded Rose singing, which was a crime. She recorded a whole forty-minute fight about whether Christian Ozera was funny on purpose. She recorded Rose saying Vasilisa Dragomir forty-one times in forty-one different tones, starting bored and ending filthy, because she was nineteen and thought it was hilarious.

“You know this is completely insane,” Rose said, into the recorder.

“Say my name again.”

“Lissa.”

“Again.”

“Liss. Lissa. Lissa Dragomir. Liss.” A pause; the machine caught her breathing change. “Hey. Hey, look at me. It’s okay. Come here.”

Thirteen hundred hours, by the end. It’s all in the royal archive under a seal that expires in fifty years, and there is one file, forty-one seconds long, recorded in a rented cabin in Montana in August, of a girl of eighteen with a perfectly intact voice saying the same name over and over, that Lissa Dragomir played on the last night of her life.

XIII.

The fight happened in the second week and it was the only real fight of their lives, and they had it at four in the morning on the floor of that same attic, having gone back up there deliberately, because it was the room where the thing had happened and neither of them was superstitious and both of them were completely superstitious.

Lissa’s opening position was simple.

“I heal you every five weeks. Forever. Adrian mops. I don’t care what it costs.”

“No.”

“Rose—”

“No.” Rose’s hand was going. She pinned it under her thigh, which was a habit she’d had for nine months and would have for eleven years. “You’d get two, three years in before the darkness took the top off your head, and then you’d be Ms. Karp and I’d be exactly where I was going to be anyway, except you’d be gone too, and then what was it for?”

“Two weeks,” Lissa said. “In the vision, Adrian said I could have had two weeks at the end. And I said no, because you’d told me not to, and I spent the next thirty-one years at three in the morning listing the things I should have—”

“Good,” said Rose.

“Good?”

“Yeah. Good. Because that’s the point, Liss, that’s what the paper was for—” She got her breath. “I wrote that thing at twenty-four, right? In the version you saw? While I could still spell. And you read it out to a room full of people and you did what it said, and you hated every second, and you did it anyway. Do you understand what that is? That’s the only thing anybody can actually give me. The disease is going to take my hands and my mouth and my—” she stopped, and said it— “my self, it’s going to take whether I’m nice to you, and the one thing it can’t reach is whether somebody listens to what I said when I was still me. You’re not allowed to buy me with your mind. Not when I’m past asking.”

“Then I’ll hate it,” Lissa said. “I’ll do it and hate it.”

“Yeah,” said Rose. “That’s the deal. That’s the whole deal.”

And then Lissa said the thing that changed the arithmetic, and she said it in a flat, reasonable, decided voice, the way you’d read out a time of day:

“I’m not going to outlive you.”

Rose’s head came up.

She knew the voice. That was the point; that was the terrible, perfect, awful symmetry of it. Rose Hathaway had used that exact voice in April at eighteen years old, sitting on the end of Lissa’s bed, handing over a stake and saying I’ve been planning how to die for a week and a half and I’ve started to like it. She knew the flatness. She knew what a stone in a pocket felt like when it had been turned over enough times to go smooth.

“No,” she said.

“I sat in that attic for thirty-one years, Rose. I abdicated. I sent away every person who ever loved me — Christian, Jill, Adrian, your mother, I said unforgivable things to your mother in the snow at your grave — and I sent away Dimitri, and he stood up and said All right and went, and he wrote to me every Christmas for twenty-six years and I never answered one. I knelt in front of an empty chair every morning for three decades and said it’s me, I’m here, and nothing answered.”

“And you lived,” said Rose. “Which is more than I—”

“I did not live. I want you to hear the difference, because I was there and you weren’t. I did not live. I sat in a room where a bed used to be and ran out the clock.”

“Liss—”

“I don’t want that to happen.” Lissa’s voice broke in the middle of it and she let it. “I’m not being brave about this. I’m not doing arithmetic and arriving somewhere noble. I don’t want it. I don’t want the trolley and the inventory and the four marks in the carpet and thirty-one years of should’ve, could’ve, won’t. I’m eighteen and I’ve already done it and I’m not doing it again.”

Rose was crying. Rose cried very badly, always, with her whole face.

“I’ll haunt you,” she said. “I swear to God, Lissa, I’ll stand at the foot of your bed like—”

“Good,” said Lissa. “That’s the plan.”

The compromise took until dawn, and it took the journals.

Because Anna was in that box eight feet away, and they had both read her: Anna, shadow-kissed, bonded, who guarded a saint and went slowly strange and who did not outlive Vladimir by long. It happens to the bonded. It has always happened to the bonded. Nobody in the history of their people had ever managed to untangle a shadow-kissed pair with anything but a shovel.

“We’re backwards,” Rose said finally, hoarse, looking at the box. “That’s all. Everything about us is backwards. The dhampir’s the one who gets sick and the Moroi’s the one who—” She stopped. “You know this is the worst thing you’ve ever asked me for.”

“Yes.”

“You know it’s going to wreck my mother. And Dimitri. And Jill, oh my God, Jill—”

“Yes.”

“And you know I think you’re wrong.”

“I know you think I’m wrong,” Lissa said. “I’m asking anyway. Because I’m going to do it either way, Rose, and I would rather do it with you, in daylight, on purpose, than alone on a laundry room floor in nine years’ time.”

So Rose Hathaway — who had spent her whole short violent life in front of doorways, who had written a directive at twenty-four in a timeline that no longer existed, whose entire remaining kingdom was the question of who gets to decide — took the terms and made them hers.

They went like this, and they were written down, in pencil, on the back of a photocopied page of Anna’s journal, and that page is in the archive too.

One. No back room. No fifteen years hidden on the east side of a residence as a discreet royal sadness, with a nurse she’d never met and courtiers discussing her prognosis three feet from her chair. Wherever this went, it went in public, with her name on it.

Two. Front-load it. Spend the good years on the good years. Not on a Council chamber; not on eleven years of legislative attrition while the hands went. (The crown came for Lissa at twenty anyway, because that is what the Moroi world does to the last of a line, and she took it, and she was very good at it, and she handed it to Jill at twenty-six and never regretted a day of either decision.)

Three. Healing: only by request. Never unasked. Adrian present, every time, sober or not at all. And — Rose’s clause, the one she dictated twice to make sure it went down right — when I can’t ask, you stop.

Four. Two directives, one page, same day, same witnesses, two names. Mirror-image. Nobody would ever be in the position Lissa had been in, standing at the end of a bed while a decent man named Lucian Voda explained what she was legally entitled to override.

Five. The recordings. Hours of them, every year, for as long as there was a voice.

Six. They go together.

Seven — and this was the price, and Rose made her say it out loud three times — the sixth clause got renewed. Every year. In this attic, on the anniversary, out loud, both of them well, both of them sober, both of them able to speak. And if Lissa ever wanted out of it, she got out of it, no argument and no shame, and it would never be mentioned again.

“Say it,” Rose said.

“I get out of it if I want out of it.”

“Again.”

“I get out of it if I want out of it.”

“Okay.” Rose put her forehead against Lissa’s. “Okay. Then yes. God help us both. Yes.”

They renewed it thirteen times. Twice Rose had to be carried up the ladder. The last four years Lissa said both halves, and Rose blinked, and then for two years Rose could only look, and Lissa asked anyway, out loud, in a dusty room, every April, and she has always maintained that the look was a yes and always admitted that she could not prove it.

XIV.

Here is what the vision bought, and here is what it didn’t, because it did not buy a happy story and Lissa Dragomir would be furious at anyone who said it did.

It didn’t buy time. Thirteen years, not fifteen — they refused the tube and they refused the fourth round of antibiotics, and those two refusals are worth about twenty-two months between them, and they were both signed for in pencil in an attic when she was eighteen.

It didn’t stop the rage years. Lissa knew they were coming, every day of them, and knowing did not help; Rose still fixated, still asked for the same song twenty times an hour, still threw a cup, still — in year seven, in a hallway in Baia with Dimitri’s sisters in the next room — said you should have let me stay dead in that car, then at least you’d have kept the good one, and said it three more times over eight months, because it was a groove in a record and not a thought in a person.

It didn’t stop the bond dying in year eleven. That was tissue. Nothing stops tissue.

It didn’t stop the leak: a photograph got out in year nine, a different one, uglier, and the caption made a point about the Queen’s judgment, and Lissa had it prosecuted and sat in the room for the sentencing.

It didn’t stop the mirrors coming out of the bedroom, because that turned out to be Rose’s call and not hers.

It didn’t stop the night in year ten when Lissa stood in a hallway for ten minutes and could not make her hand touch the door, or the morning she caught herself thinking I want this to be over, and it certainly didn’t stop the relief — forty seconds of enormous, obscene, physical relief — when it finally was.

What it bought was readiness, and readiness turned out to be the entire difference in the world.

She knew to go to Adrian Ivashkov in the first year instead of the fourteenth, and to say I’m going to need you for a long time, so let’s get you well first, and he got sober at twenty-three instead of thirty-nine and stayed that way for forty-one years, and painted, badly, constantly, and was the second person at the grave every April for the rest of his life.

She knew a name, and hired Marisol Badica in year four, and Marisol stayed until the end and then ran a foundation with a building named after her — and Lissa has never been able to decide whether that was prophecy fulfilled or prophecy caused, and has always thought that if you can’t tell the difference from the inside, the question may not mean much.

She knew Janine Hathaway would visit eleven times if nobody made her, so somebody made her, and it was two hundred and six, and the two of them got a decade of awkward, clipped, ferocious love that neither of them would have organized alone.

She knew Christian’s line about she’d want you to be, and forgave it in advance, in about year two, and so he was at the wedding and in the room at the end and in the archive photographs, holding Mia’s hand, weeping and making an appalling joke.

She knew to keep Dimitri, and kept him, and he never once had to close a paperback and say All right and walk away from a door.

And she knew, with total precision, the exact value of a sound, and so there are thirteen hundred hours of it.

She was fifty-one when it ended, and Rose was fifty-one too — they had lost the trick of having separate ages somewhere around year six — and it was April, and the fourth pneumonia came the way the woman in Zurich had said it would, and they did it at home in the house on the eastern slope inside the wards, forty minutes’ walk from an attic and eleven from a chapel.

It took nine days. It was not peaceful; Lissa has corrected people about that in writing. There was the rattle, and the mottling coming up the feet like a tide, and the long stops in the breathing that make everyone in a room count. There were the two hours where the jaw clenched and nobody could tell pain from dystonia, including the doctor. Somebody said the weather out loud every few hours, because the paper asked for that, in plain language, in a paragraph written at twenty-four.

On the last night Lissa put the forty-one-second file on, at low volume, near the pillow, and a girl of eighteen said Lissa over and over in the dark.

At about five in the morning, with the daylight coming up over a school that was going to sleep, Rose Hathaway lifted her right hand off the blanket — she had not had voluntary movement in that arm in eleven months — and reached toward the foot of the bed.

“Go on,” Lissa said, into her hair. “He’s been waiting a really long time.”

Three breaths, spaced very far apart. Then one more.

What happened in that room in the twelve hours afterward is not written down anywhere, and the two people who could tell you about it were both in it. There was a page with two names on it, signed on the same day in front of the same three guardians thirty-one years — no; thirteen years — earlier, and there was a great deal of legal opinion afterward, none of which has ever been resolved, and there was Dimitri Belikov standing in the doorway at seven in the morning with a cracked paperback in his hand, being asked, without words, to go back down the stairs and wait.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “All right.”

And went, and sat on the bottom step for eleven hours with the book shut on his knee, and did not let anybody past.

Janine Hathaway never forgave either of them. She said so, once, at the burial, in a clear carrying voice, to about two hundred people: that she had spent sixty-one years in the business of keeping people alive and would not be pretending this was beautiful. Then she stood at the graveside with her feet apart and her hands behind her back for four hours and would not be moved.

Jill Dragomir did not speak to anyone about it for a year, and then spoke about it for the next fifty, in public, angrily, on the subject of what monarchs owe the people who love them.

Adrian Ivashkov said, “Yeah,” and lit a cigarette, and went on being sober, and painted a very small canvas of a round window that hangs in the Court archive with no title.

Nobody ever established whether it was God, or spirit, or a bad dream in a dusty room on a graduation night. Father Andrew — who was ninety-one by then and had refused to perform their wedding and had come to it anyway and stood at the back — was asked directly at the funeral and said that in his experience the difference between a vision and a nightmare is entirely a question of what you do in the morning, and then declined to elaborate for the rest of his life.

They are on the eastern slope under one stone with two molnija marks, a promise mark, and two names. There is no chair anywhere near it. There was never a chair.

And forty feet up and half a mile east, in an attic over a chapel, there is a patch of floor where two girls of eighteen sat with their knees up and the dust turning gold in the round window, and one of them said it’s me, I’m here, and the other one said, “Yeah. I know. You’re crushing my arm.”

Part Three (continued): The Twelve Hours

Content notes: the death of both protagonists. Extensive depiction of caring for a body after death; grief; a mutual pact carried out (entirely non-graphic — no methods are described or implied). Suicidal ideation and self-determination; moral ambiguity about consent; the lasting harm to survivors is shown and not softened. This chapter does not argue that anyone did the right thing.

XV.

5:04 a.m.

The first thing she felt was relief.

She had been waiting thirteen years for those forty seconds and she recognized them the instant they arrived, the way you recognize a face in a crowd you’ve been told to look for. Enormous. Obscene. Physical. Her whole body coming up out of deep water.

“There it is,” she said out loud, to the room, to Marisol standing at the foot of the bed with one hand over her mouth. “There it is. It’s the relief. It’s fine. It’s supposed to happen.”

And then the forty seconds ran out.

5:12

Lucian Voda came in at five past and confirmed it and said the time out loud, and Lissa said “thank you” in a perfectly normal voice, which is the sort of thing bodies do.

He was sixty-eight. He had been at the first appointment — a young man with a plastic brain on his desk, thirteen years ago, saying fifteen to twenty, but early onset is often ten to fifteen, and I will not give you a number for herself — and he had been at every one since, and now he stood in a bedroom in a house on an eastern slope inside the wards and folded his stethoscope into his coat pocket with enormous care, as if it were breakable.

“Your Majesty—”

“Don’t call me that. I gave it away twenty-five years ago.”

“Lissa.” He had never once used her name. “There are things I am required to offer you.”

“I know what they are. No.”

“You have two hours before—”

“I know how long I have.” She was still on the bed, on her side, where she’d been for two days, with Rose’s head against her collarbone and one hand flat on her wife’s sternum. She had felt it stop before she heard it, which is what the hand had been for. “Lucian. Go home. Kiss your husband. You’ve done thirteen years of this and you did all of it properly, including the parts where I screamed at you, and I’m dismissing you with thanks.”

He stood there for a moment.

“I read both directives when they were filed,” he said. “In pencil, on the back of a page of somebody’s journal, and then typed up properly by a lawyer, and I have never in forty years of medicine seen a document like the second one.”

“I know.”

“I want it in the record that I asked you, this morning, whether you were of the same mind. Because a clause about renewal is only worth what the last renewal was worth.”

“You asked me,” Lissa said. “It’s in the record. Go home.”

He went. He wept in the hall, which Marisol saw and never told anybody, and he retired eleven days later and lived to be a hundred and four.

5:40

Marisol Badica had done this more times than anybody else in the house and she did not need to be told what came next.

“I’ll get the water,” she said.

“I’m doing it.”

“Then I’ll get the water and you’ll do it.”

It took an hour and ten minutes, and it was the last practical act of Lissa Dragomir’s marriage, and she would like it understood that it was not beautiful and it was not degrading and it was simply the work.

You wash downward. The skin does not respond; that is the thing nobody tells you and that no amount of anticipating prepares you for — there’s no gooseflesh, no flinch, no small automatic accommodation of a limb being lifted. Rose Hathaway had weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds of muscle at eighteen and weighed seventy-four now, and the arms came up like objects, and Lissa held each one and washed the inside of the elbow where the skin was still soft, because it always had been, because that had always been Lissa’s place.

The splints came off the wrists. The hands did not open. Contractures don’t release out of politeness; the fingers stayed curled in toward the palms the way they had for five years, and Lissa worked lotion into them anyway, and could not straighten them, and stopped trying.

Marisol took the far side. They rolled her together, the way they had eight times a night for nine years, and Marisol said “one, two, three” out of pure habit, and that was the first time Lissa cried, hard, into a towel, for about ninety seconds, and then stopped, and said “again,” and they did the back.

There was a stage-one pressure spot on the sacrum, faint, which Marisol had been fighting for three weeks and which had not broken the skin.

“You won,” Lissa said.

“I did,” said Marisol Badica, with forty-three years in the work, and her chin went, and she held it.

Then the braid.

Marisol had done it every morning for nine years and done it well, and she stepped back and said, “No. You.”

So Lissa sat on the edge of the bed and combed out that ridiculous, glorious, insubordinate hair — grey through it now, a hard streak at the left temple, still thick, still doing exactly what it wanted — and plaited it down over the right shoulder, badly, twice, and then properly on the third go.

She put her face against the top of Rose’s head and breathed in for a long time.

It was already going. Twelve hours later there would be nothing there at all. She had known that in advance. Knowing it in advance turned out to be worth precisely nothing, which was, by then, an entirely familiar exchange rate.

7:00

Dimitri Belikov came to the doorway with a cracked paperback in his hand.

He was sixty-nine. He had stopped dyeing the grey out about fifteen years ago and had let the whole thing go white, and he was still enormous, and he still read westerns, and he had been in the corridor since four.

He looked at the bed. He looked at the braid, and at Marisol sitting in the chair with her hands in her lap, and then at Lissa standing beside the window in a dressing gown with her hair down like a girl.

She did not say anything. She didn’t have to. There are, in a very long life, perhaps two people who can be asked something without words, and the second one had just died at 5:04.

He was quiet for a long time.

“How long?” he said.

“Twelve hours. Give or take. There are letters.”

“And you want the stairs held.”

“Yes.”

“By me.”

“By you,” Lissa said. “Because Janine is going to come, and she’s sixty-eight and she was a god and she’ll go through anybody in this house except you, and because Jill is going to come and I can’t — Dimitri, I can’t say it to her face, if she gets in here I’ll do what she asks and then I’ll be seventy in an attic and I’ve already done that once.”

Dimitri Belikov looked at the floor.

He had spent fifty-one years standing outside doors for people named Dragomir. He had carried her up a ladder in a snowstorm so she could stand for the part where you stand. In another arrangement of the world — in a dusty room, in a nightmare, in whatever it had been — he had closed this same book and said All right and walked away from a door and written one page every Christmas for twenty-six years to a woman who never answered.

“You know what I think,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You know I think she’d have fought you about this until her last breath.”

“She did,” said Lissa. “Thirteen times. It’s in the pencil.”

He absorbed that, the way he took hits: feet planted, chin down.

“All right,” he said.

And went, and sat down on the bottom step, and put the book on his knee, shut.

He sat there for eleven hours. He did not read a word of it. At about eleven in the morning Janine Hathaway came up the path, and there was a conversation on the stairs that lasted forty minutes, most of it conducted in a low voice, some of it not, and at one point Janine Hathaway — five feet nothing, sixty-eight years old, the most decorated guardian of her generation — put both hands on his chest and shoved a man twice her size hard enough to move him, and he let himself be moved, one step, and then no further.

She sat down on the path. He sat back down on the step. They stayed like that, ten feet apart, until evening.

Neither of them ever described that afternoon to anybody.

8:00 – 1:00

She wrote seven letters, longhand, at the little table by the window while the Montana daylight came up hot and stupid over a school that was going to sleep. Somebody, somewhere on the grounds, was running a leaf blower on the Moroi night schedule, and she stopped and listened to it for a while, because there had been one the day a doctor first said Huntington’s out loud, and there had been one in the vision on the day a man explained about feeding tubes, and she had stopped believing in coincidences about thirty years ago and had never entirely started believing in anything else either.

To Jill — eleven pages, and six of them were about the crown: what the Council would try in the first year, who could be trusted, which of the Conta grandchildren was the dangerous one, how to let a man finish talking before you destroyed him. And then five pages that said, in various ways, I’m sorry. This is a thing I am doing to you. I know exactly what it is. I have no defense except that I could not do the other thing, and I tried it once, somewhere, for thirty-one years.

Jill Dragomir read it twice and then put it in a drawer and spoke about it publicly for fifty years, angrily, on the subject of what monarchs owe the people who love them. She was right. Lissa wrote that in the letter too, in advance: you are going to be right about this.

To Janine — one page. You were the only one of us who never pretended. She forgave you at twenty-two in a letter you carry. I’m not asking for anything; you’ve been asked for enough. She said “Mom” on the eleventh of June, year nine, at about four in the afternoon, and it was the last word she ever got out that anybody could understand, and I have never told you that because I was saving it, and I don’t know what I was saving it for.

Janine Hathaway carried both letters, hers and Rose’s, in the same inside pocket, for the remaining nineteen years of her life, and never forgave either of them, and said so out loud at the burial to two hundred people in a clear carrying voice.

To Adrian — half a page. You were the mop. You were sober for forty-one years and you started because I called you at four in the morning in a version of this that didn’t happen. Thank you for year one. Don’t drink. Paint something ugly.

He did not drink. He painted a very small canvas of a round window with dust in the light and never titled it and never sold it and left it to the archive.

To Christian and Mia — you will want to have been able to stop this. You couldn’t have. Tell your daughter the one about the tablecloth.

To Marisol — a page and a half, and a number, which was a great deal of money, and one line at the end: Alberta Petrov told a seventeen-year-old girl in an office in 2010 that the oldest lie our people tell is that a dhampir who can’t fight is worth nothing. You are the reason I know she was right. Go home to Missoula.

To Dimitri — four words, and nobody has ever known what they were, because he read it on the step at about six in the evening and then put it in the stove at his sister’s house in Baia eight months later without showing it to anyone.

And one to a girl called Anica Petrova, aged nineteen, on the housekeeping staff at the royal residence at Court, whom Lissa Dragomir had never met and had never once spoken to and who had never, in this arrangement of the world, done anything at all.

I am writing to apologise for something I did to you that never happened. You laundered a pillowcase, because it needed laundering, three days into a job you were proud of, and I screamed at you in a corridor until you cried and then had you dismissed, and stood there while it was done. It took place in a dream, or a vision, or a life that got cancelled, and I have carried it for thirty years and I am not going to be able to put it down, so I am putting it here instead. Enclosed is a sum of money. You do not owe me an answer and there is nothing you could possibly have to forgive.

Anica Petrova received it at nineteen, in a bewildering envelope with a royal seal on it, and read it about forty times over the following decades, and never understood one word of it, and framed it, and was the only person at the funeral who laughed.

1:00 p.m.

She did the archive instrument last, because it was the only document with a future in it.

Thirteen hundred hours of audio: Rose reading the sports page in an outraged voice; Rose singing, criminally; forty minutes on whether Christian Ozera was funny on purpose; the whole of the eleven-minute Council testimony at twenty-two with the place at minute six where her arm jumped and she said sorry and then no, actually, not sorry, you can wait; four hundred hours of an ordinary woman saying ordinary things in a voice that got worse and worse and worse.

Sealed fifty years. Not out of shame — Lissa was very specific in the instrument, because she knew exactly how the Court would read it otherwise. Not because there is anything here to hide. Because in fifty years everyone who could use it to be sentimental about her will be dead, and what will be left is a record of a person, which is what she was.

And then she sat down on the edge of the bed and said the thing to the room that she had promised, thirteen years earlier, in pencil, to say.

2:00

“Clause seven,” she said.

The body on the bed had been there nine hours. It was not warm. It had stopped, some time in the late morning, being a face; this is the part nobody tells you and no amount of anticipating prepares you for. The features had gone slack and then set, and the mouth had changed shape, and the shape it had changed into was nobody’s. Lissa had known this was coming. She had watched it happen to a girl in a car on a highway at fifteen and then undone it, which was how any of this had started.

The braid was still good. The braid was the only thing in the room that was still Rose.

“I get out of it if I want out of it,” Lissa said. “That’s the clause. You made me say it three times in the attic and I’ve said it out loud every April for thirteen years and you are going to get it one more time, so here it is. I’m asking myself. Properly. Not the way you ask a question you’ve already answered.”

She sat with it.

This is what she found, and she wrote none of it down, and the only reason any of it is known is that she said some of it out loud to a dead woman with the window open and Marisol Badica sitting in the next room with the door ajar, which had been the arrangement in that house for nine years and which nobody thought to change on the last day.

First: she did not want to die. She said that out loud, flatly, twice. She was fifty-one years old and in good health and had a sister she loved and a garden she’d made and eleven years of a reign she was proud of and a great many books she hadn’t read since the words started going in again around year four. She wanted none of it enough to stay.

Second: she was not in the dark. That was the distinction she kept coming back to, and it was the distinction Rose had beaten into her over thirteen Aprils. An eighteen-year-old girl on the end of a bed with a stake in her hand saying I’ve started to like it — that was a symptom, that was a disease in the part of the brain that does wanting, and Rose had walked herself across a quad in daylight to hand it over. Lissa had spent thirteen years watching for the same thing in herself, with a counselor, with a physician, with a directive that required her to renew consent out loud while well and sober. She had gone looking for the version of this that was an illness. She had not found it. She is aware that people do not always find it. She said so, out loud, to the room: I might be wrong about myself. I might be exactly what I’d have talked her out of.

Third — and this is the one that took the longest:

Whether she had permission.

Because clause seven ran both ways, and everybody has always missed that. The renewal wasn’t just Lissa’s exit. It was Rose’s, every April: both of us well, both of us able to speak. And Rose had been able to speak for nine years, and use a board for two, and blink yes for two more.

And then for two years she had only been able to look.

“You looked at me,” Lissa said. “Nine Aprils ago, and eight, in the attic, with Dimitri holding the ladder. And I asked you, out loud, both halves, and I said is it still yes, and you looked at me. And I have told everybody who ever asked that the look was a yes, and I have told all of them, every single time, that I can’t prove it.”

The room was very quiet. Outside, a bird was doing something in the eaves.

“You wrote the whole thing to stop me doing this,” Lissa said. “That’s what I keep— Rose, that’s what clause three was. When I can’t ask, you stop. And here I am, doing the thing on your behalf, past the point where you can tell me no, and calling a look a yes because I want it to be one. That’s exactly the crime. That is precisely, exactly, the one crime you cared about.”

She put her forehead down against the curled fingers.

“So it’s not permission,” she said. “I’m not going to lie to you in this room on this day. It’s not permission. It’s mine. I’m doing it because I can’t do the other thing and I’ve seen the other thing, and if you’re somewhere and you’re angry, you’re entitled, and I’ll take it when I get there.”

Then she reached for the bond.

There was nothing there and there had been nothing there since year eleven. She had reached for it every day for two years after it died, the way your tongue goes to a missing tooth. She reached for it now, the way you check a door you know is locked.

Nothing came back.

It had only ever gone one way. That was the shape of them: twenty-eight years in which Rose Hathaway could fall into her like falling into water, and Lissa Dragomir could never once look back. Everything she had ever known about being loved by her, she had been told. All of it. Every fact.

“I never got to see inside your head,” she said. “Not one minute of it. Thirty-three years. That’s the thing I actually mind, at the end. That’s the whole— I’d have given the crown for ten minutes.”

She looked at the foot of the bed.

There was nothing there. Sunlight on floorboards; a rug that needed beating; the shadow of the window frame. No seventeen-year-old boy with lake water dripping off him, patient, fifteen years patient, twenty-eight years patient.

“You could have left me something,” she said.

4:00 – 5:00

Marisol Badica came in at four to say goodbye and would not sit down.

“I want to tell you what I told the doctor,” she said. “I’m not going to be in this house for it. I’ve got forty-three years in the work and I have never once in my life helped anybody do this and I’m not starting at sixty-two.”

“I never asked you to.”

“You never asked me to,” Marisol agreed. “And I’m still not going to pretend I don’t know what the afternoon is for. That’s the part I won’t do.” She stood there with her hands at her sides. “You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re a coward,” said Marisol Badica. “And I loved her, and I love you, and I’ve wiped both of you and I’ve held her head up while she choked and I’ve listened to you tell that chair the news every morning for nine years, so I’ve earned the right to say it in this room. You’re a coward and it isn’t the worst thing a person can be and I’m not going to forgive it, and I’ll come every April as long as my knees hold.”

“Okay,” Lissa said.

“Okay,” said Marisol.

They held onto each other in the middle of that room for a long time, the way they had on and off for nine years, over a bed, across a body, at three in the morning.

Then Marisol Badica went down the stairs past Dimitri Belikov, who stood up for her, and out along the path past Janine Hathaway, who did not look up, and she kept her word about April for twenty-six more years.

5:04 p.m.

Twelve hours, give or take.

She washed her face. She brushed her hair out and left it down, because Rose had liked it down and had said so about four thousand times over thirty years, usually in a stupid voice.

She took the mirror out of the room and put it in the hall, face to the wall, because that was a habit from year nine that she’d never got out of and because she did not want to see herself doing this.

She opened the window, all the way, so the late afternoon came in with the smell of cut grass and pine and somebody’s leaf blower a half-mile off.

She lay down on the bed on her left side, the way she had lain for two days, and for nine years, and for thirteen, and put Rose’s braid over her own wrist, and got her hand around the curled fingers and held them.

Then she started the file.

Forty-one seconds. Recorded in a rented cabin in Montana in August, thirty-three years earlier, by a girl of eighteen who thought it was hilarious: Vasilisa Dragomir. Forty-one times, in forty-one tones, starting bored and ending filthy, and underneath the joke of it the most ordinary voice in the world — unslurred, un-thickened, un-ruined — going Lissa. Liss. Lissa Dragomir. Liss.

And near the end, the recorder catching the change in her breathing, the girl saying: Hey. Hey, look at me. It’s okay. Come here.

She set it to repeat.

She put her forehead against her wife’s shoulder in a room full of daylight with the window open, and she said the thing she had said at eight-fifteen every morning for thirty-one years to a chair that had nobody in it, out loud, into the quiet:

“It’s me. I’m here.”

And nothing answered.

XVI.

Dimitri Belikov came up the stairs at 6:40 in the evening, which was morning, because St. Vladimir’s kept vampire hours and had long since ruined everybody’s relationship with the concept.

He stood in the doorway for a while.

Then he went in and closed the window, because there was a bird that kept coming to the sill, and he could not stand the thought of it in there. He turned off the recording, which was still running, and it is worth stating plainly that the last human sound in that house was a girl of eighteen saying come here to a room where both of them were dead.

He put the little machine in his coat pocket. Nobody has ever found it.

Then he went down the path and crouched in front of Janine Hathaway, who had been sitting on the flagstones for seven hours, and told her, and she hit him once, hard, on the shoulder, with the heel of her hand, and then held onto his sleeve while he got her up.

There was a great deal of legal opinion afterward. There were two directives on one page, signed on the same day in front of the same three guardians, and a clause about annual renewal that had been observed thirteen times in a dusty attic, four of them by a woman who could no longer speak and two of them by a woman who could only look. There were opinions from the Church and from the Council and from two dhampir commune councils who disagreed violently with each other, and there was a monograph, and there was a great deal of shouting on the subject of the ninth clause and the word look.

None of it was ever resolved. Jill Dragomir refused, for fifty years, to allow it to be settled in law in either direction, on the grounds that a question that difficult deserved to stay open, and she was probably right, and she was also very angry for fifty years, and those were not unrelated.

They are on the eastern slope under one stone: two molnija marks, one promise mark, two names, one date.

There is no chair anywhere near it. There was never a chair.

And half a mile east and forty feet up, over a chapel, there is an attic with a round window and a box of a dead saint’s papers and a patch of floor where two girls of eighteen once sat with their knees up in the gold-turning dust, and one of them had just come back from thirty-one years of kneeling in an empty room, and the other one said, “Yeah. I know. You’re crushing my arm.”