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“I thought you were dead,” Saber rasps. “I thought we had lost you, lass.”
The night is quiet and warm, a clear sky opened to countless lonely constellations, and Duma is slain—just as Celica had nearly been, not a handful of hours ago, in that dark tomb where Mother Mila lay. They’ve won, or so everyone around her keeps saying, as though this had been an ordeal for which victory and defeat were so easily divided. They’ve won.
She has had her fill of guilt today—if she hadn’t before, she certainly has now, now that Saber has spoken to her in that voice, with that rent look on his face. Any more of it, she thinks, and she may lose the nerve to keep breathing.
“I’m sorry,” she says, turning the words over in mouth and mind, if only to remember they still mean something, or ought to. There’s nothing more she can offer than that—a paltry handful of words she hasn’t the courage to confess she resents.
She had slipped out of her room—Conrad’s old room, a sheltered nook in Halcyon’s cottage—to walk about the Sage’s Hamlet, because she could not sleep. She hadn’t expected anyone else to be awake, so exhausted were they all, and yet here Saber is, a pace or two behind her at the edge of the path leading back into the Lost Treescape. She might have known.
On her way to the door, she had gingerly stepped over a softly snoring Mae, who was sleeping beside Genny on the floor, and lingered with her fingers over the knob, gazing back at her. The sliver of moonlight sheaving through the curtains cast a line across her cheek, just over a purpling bruise. They had insisted that Celica take the bed—insisted it with all their might. She had not been able to explain why it grieved her so, and so she had not tried.
“Sorry isn’t what I want from you, lass,” Saber tells her. The mingling of moonlight and shadow casts his face with a despair that doesn’t suit him. “And I’d never dream of asking it. You’ve had enough of that, I’d say.”
Childishly, Celica wants to answer that she has.
“What’s done is done,” Saber goes on. Celica’s eyes land on the dagger at his hip, the rubies in the hilt, winking faintly in the dark. She finds she cannot look away. “Most important thing is that you’re here with us, still. History will be better for it.”
Celica can’t help but laugh behind her lips. “I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I’d say it’s a good thing I do, then,” Saber says, with a bit of his usual gruffness back again, but then it wanes. “It’s near the middle of the night, and you’ve been through hell. Damn near put me through it, too, with all that. I don’t suppose it’d do much good if I told you to get some sleep?”
Celica considers him for a moment and then shakes her head. “I don’t think I can stomach it.”
“Fair enough,” Saber says—as though it really is. “Don’t give me that look. What is it they say? All’s fair in love and—”
Love. Celica’s mind darts to a memory of Mae by the blue ocean, the letters of her mother’s name, Nomah singing hymns in the chapel, Alm tugging her through a field of wildflowers. Mother Mila’s voice, gentle and true. Out of the darkness, light—jarring, blinding, and somewhere in the white, Mae crying out her name, her real name, Celica.
“Don’t go putting it all on yourself, now,” Saber chides her. “I know how you can be.” He sets his hands on his hips, bowing his head, his face haunted and obscure in the dark. “Part of what put you into that mess in the first place. That heart of yours will be the death of us all.”
“Please don’t say things like that,” Celica says, wincing. “Death was never what I wanted; that was why I—”
“Why you did something so damned foolish,” Saber says, with none of the anger or resentment that she had feared—only something weary. “Always thinking of us, you are.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
Saber, to her surprise, loosens around a laugh. He steps forward over the pine needles and lays a hand on her shoulder, rough, but warm. Emotion swells in Celica’s chest all at once, just as she’d known it would if he were to do something like that, something so plain and loving. She has never known what to do with the plainness of these things. To think them a lie seems cruel, but to trust them as truth—
“Saber,” she blurts out, swallowing to keep her voice steady, “where will you go now?”
Saber squeezes, gently, and then releases her, scratching thoughtfully at the crown of his head.
“Where the wind wants me to, I suppose,” he says. “But not for a while yet.”
It’s a promise, and she knows it. “You sound like an old pirate king,” she settles for saying, instead of thank you.
“Hah! Maybe so,” Saber replies. “Say, that’s an idea, lass. A pirate king. Now that would fetch some coin!”
The laughter comes before she can want for it. “Would it, now? Let’s meet on the high seas, then.”
“It’s a deal,” Saber says, and the night shadows on his face soften. “I always thought that was what suited you best. The sea. I hope you find your way back to it.”
“Me, too,” Celica says. A feeling has begun to overtake her, bittersweet, and after dwelling with it a moment she realizes what it is: the preparation for tears. “Saber, I—”
“None of that now,” Saber tells her, low and gentle. “The goodbyes will come, lass, as they always do. But not tonight. I’m only glad—” A hard breath leaves him, a little broken in the middle. “Well. You’ll make a fine queen, should you choose it. Or a fine explorer, or pirate, or sage or farmer or bread-maker. Whatever you’ll be… you’ll be it.”
“You’re too kind to me, Saber,” Celica says, the truth that dwarfs all others, the truth that follows her everywhere.
But Saber shakes his head, looking to the sky with an unusual expression—one of fond exasperation.
“Enough of that poppycock,” he says. Celica blinks at him, dumbfounded. No one has ever quite used the word poppycock so bluntly to describe her deepest uncertainties. He motions for her to follow him, brushing past her to walk back into the hamlet. “If we’re to be night owls, we may as well pass the time with stories and a fire.”
Celica watches him go for a moment, rooted in place. There are fewer shadows and sharp edges cluttering her head, now, simplified by the sight of Saber’s back and the rough and easy honesty of his words, among them not tonight, among them the sea. When he notices she hasn’t yet followed, he turns halfway.
“Right,” she says, and hopes that all the rest is evident in it. She thinks of Mae, still sleeping, and of Saber’s hand on her shoulder, and starts to walk. “Tell me your favorite.”