So, dinner.
My last meal was zucchini. I leaned against the end of the table and I laughed. Then I wept.
Thandi moved over along the bench to make room for me and Xie. Han and Atta knotted closely around. Elián was not there.
And the zucchini, I almost hate to admit, was good: sautéed with browned butter and basil. There were corn and peppers cooked up with onions and herbs and a lot of garlic. There was flatbread that was scorchingly hot on my fingers. There was butter for the bread, too. Generous butter, thick slices of chèvre piled on brilliant tomatoes, salt in a jar. Some of these things were things we were careful with, things that we rationed. Not today. This was our abundance.
I ate, and when I pushed my plate away, I felt fingers on my shoulders. I turned. It was a little boy, five or six, black, slight, with brilliant beads in his hair. I did not know him. “Greta,” he said, and touched my face shyly. And then he ducked away. Fingers brushed my ears on the other side, and I turned again, and again a Child touched my face and said my name softly: “Greta.”
One by one they came to me, not all of them, but many, the Children of Peace. They touched my newly sensitive hair, my shoulders, my freckles one by one. They called me by name. Da-Xia had to put her hand between my shoulder blades to hold me steady. There were a few gifts. An origami koi fish, no larger than the end of my thumb. “For immortality.” A carved wooden comb for what had once been my hair. “S-sorry,” said that boy, stammering. A little girl, just the right age to have the care of bees, brought me a dripping honeycomb. It was so fresh that it was warm. “For now,” she said. “Eat it now.”
So I did. And by the time I had finished the sticky sweetness, the room had fallen quiet. Han spoke into it: “Are you going to die?”
Oh, Han. Always, always, always the wrong thing.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I did not know what to say to the others. Atta, who sat soaking everything in, like a stone in the sun. Thandi with her anger and her damage. And Xie. But surely I had said what I needed to say to Xie. I reached across the table and took Atta’s hard, strong hands. “Talk to her.”
“I’m done with silence,” he answered. But his voice caught—not with disuse but with sudden tears.
“You and Grego and Elián,” said Thandi. “We’ll be shorthanded.”
“I know.” I looked at her—proud, strong, unbruised, unmarked. Once, she had been a terrified and tortured child. I had missed my chance to help her through that. I had missed it by years.
“You remember Talis’s first rule of war?” she asked. The impulse to speak quietly to condemned people did not seem present in her. Her strong voice filled the room. Everyone was looking at her, at us. I nodded, but she answered for me anyway. “It’s ‘make it personal.’?”
“I know,” I said again.
“So,” she said. “If you get a chance, do something for me?”
“Of course,” I said. Everyone hung on the solemn edge of the moment, listening.
“Kick Talis in the nuts.”
The room burst into laughter. But Thandi was not laughing. She nodded to me, queen to queen.
Then she smiled. And I smiled.
I scraped the bench backward. I stood. I wobbled. I squared my feet. “I’m ready.” Or I thought I had been. My voice snagged. “Xie, would—would you come with me?”
“Always,” she said. As I had known she would.
We went out. And outside the refectory door was Elián.
“Oh,” he said, “your hair.” He folded his hand and ran his knuckles across the cut velvet of my scalp.
I shivered at the softness of his touch. “Elián . . .”
He wrapped me in his arms. I could still smell the pyre on him as I turned my nose toward those untamable curls. He pulled back and kissed my cheek, and then, his voice rough as if with smoke, he said, “It’s the Abbot, Greta. . . . Could you come?”
In a pool of lamplight in the misericord of the Fourth Precepture, there is a memory cushion that lies like a nest in the grove of columnar bookshelves housing classical philosophy. In it the Abbot was sprawled as a man might sprawl, with his arms limp, and the soles of his footpads off the ground. The forward bend in his mainstem meant that his head was a foot off the surface of the cushion. Someone had piled books under it, into something halfway between a buttress and a pillow. The Abbot had not been built to lie down.
And yet he lay there.
I had been lying in just that place when he had taken this damage to save me, rushing to unhook me from the dreamlock magnets while the Cumberland ship roared down. He could have shielded himself, but he’d saved me instead. I had been lying there, and he had been torturing me.
I knelt. “Abbot.”