Allissa
We did not go back to rest. There was no rest to go back to, and no one suggested it, because every soul on that terrace knew we would be gone before the steam burned off. But there was an hour yet before the Rememberer would tell us the rest, while the sages roused and the light came gray over the pools, and in that hour the fight found us at the edge of the terrace, the way fights do when terror has nowhere left to go.
It started over nothing. It always does. I said we should hold a moment and think, and he said thinking was a luxury our daughter did not have, and somewhere in there the words stopped being about strategy and became about the thing neither of us had let ourselves say since the crystal went dark.
“You wanted to say yes.” It came out of me before I could stop it.
