Ten days after we came through the Dawn Gate, Kael found me in the yard where I was helping Bastien re-fit a wheel extension.
"A grain caravan came through from the eastern crossing this morning," he said. "Whole. Crew, cargo, every tuspak accounted for. They came from the east. Word is half of Spartova's Hoplites are fighting the other half over which Strategos gets to call himself the law now."
"Is that good news or bad news?"
"Ask me again in a year." He almost smiled, which for Kael was a considerable concession. "For now it's the first good caravan report I've filed since before you left. I'll take it."
I went to see Olen's mother that same afternoon. Putting it off another day would only have made it a duty instead of a thing I wanted to do. I told her what I had told my father, plainly, in order, without the parts I still couldn't say out loud to anyone. She did not cry in front of me. She thanked me for coming myself instead of sending Bastien.
The Quartermaster's family I visited the day after.
I never asked Bastien what it was like, meeting a daughter old enough now to notice him, who had learned to exist in a world without him in it. Some things are his alone, and I never asked. I only know that when I saw him again three days later, back at the yard, he had a strip of blue cloth knotted around his wrist that hadn't been there before, the kind new fathers in Heliqar wear for the first year, and he touched it more than he needed to, the way I still touched the white stone in my pocket some mornings without meaning to.
My mother found me a week later on the patio outside her quarters, the same place she had once told me the story of the Desert Starsuckle. My father came out to join us without being called, which meant it had been arranged between the two of them before I arrived.
"You've been quiet," my mother said. "Quieter than you were even as a boy."
"I keep thinking about something I told myself in that cell, in Spartova. That I had been spending people. Olen. Bastien. The men in that garrison block, whether they lived or died the moment I needed a variable to move." I hadn't meant to say it so plainly. "I still think it was true."
"It was true." She didn't say it gently. "You used people to get an outcome, Elyan. You forced Ruvuk's hand in a way that put a whole Hegemony to the sword, and people who never agreed to be part of your arithmetic are dead because you made a guess about which evil was less. It was wrong. You own it."
"Then what am I supposed to do with that."
"Carry it. You made the best guess you had. Waiting for a better answer would have gotten more people killed. That doesn't make the guess right. It makes it the best a person could do with the choices actually in front of him. Being wounded by it isn't a flaw in you. I would be frightened for you if it weren't."
She let that sit a moment before she went on.
"The thing I actually want you to guard against isn't the wound. It's what happens to a man who stops feeling it. Ruvuk didn't start his life a monster. I'd wager he started it much the way you did, weighing a lesser evil against a worse one. At some point he found a way for it to stop mattering when he made the trade. That is what ruin actually looks like. What's sitting in front of me now, still flinching, is something else entirely. Guard the flinching. Don't let anyone talk you out of it, including yourself. Especially yourself. The day it stops is the day you should start being afraid of what you've become."
My father waited until she had finished. He had never been a man who interrupted her, not even to agree.
"I broke a law once to save my sister. Stole flowers from the Royal House to cure a fever no physician in the city would touch without money we didn't have. I got forty lashes for it in the public square. One of them took this eye by mistake. The King's son thought that was very funny at the time. Then they put me away for what was meant to be the rest of my life. I believed for the better part of two years that she had died anyway. That I had lost my eye and years of youth in a cell for a sister who was in the ground regardless. I grieved her the whole time. I built a life out of that grief, Elyan, because it was the only thing I had left."
"What happened."
"She hadn't died at all. A woman I hadn't even properly met yet took her in the same night I was arrested and hid her in the palace under a false name. My stolen flower had nothing to do with any of it. I found out two years later that I hadn't failed her, and I also hadn't saved her. Someone else had. That is how I learned a man can be entirely wrong about whether he saved anyone, in either direction, for years at a stretch."
"And the throne."
"That woman was Aliya. Your mother. I did not seek her out, or the crown that came after. I told the Council I would not be King, twice, and meant it both times. The crown caught up to me anyway. Same as the eye and the cell. I have not wanted it a single day since I put it on. I will not tell you it was worth what it cost me. That was never the kind of thing I got to decide either."
He let that sit before he went on.
"What you did in Spartova wasn't simple, and your mother's right, I won't stand here and call it clean. But you had a duty to this city that no one else in that fortress could carry for you, and you made the choice that duty put in front of you, knowing there would be serious consequences. It did. Whether Spartova rebuilds into something better or worse, whether Carth's bargain is fair, none of that was ever yours to decide. Outcomes will not tell you whether you did the right thing. My choices came with a crown. I don't know yet what yours will come with, and neither do you. Not knowing is your burden."
"That's not much comfort."
"The truth rarely is," my father said. "I've found it outlasts comfort regardless."
I had spent my life believing that certainty was the bedrock beneath the world, and Spartova taught me I was wrong. Bedrock isn't knowing the truth. It's choosing anyway, knowing you will never learn which choice was better.
I left for Carth two weeks after that, with a smaller column than the one that had carried me to Spartova and back. Bastien did not come. I did not ask him to, and he did not offer. He had a daughter who was finally old enough to notice when he left a room.
My mother didn't cry at the gate this time. I noticed she had stopped pretending not to watch me the whole way to the horizon.
"Come back to us," my father said. They were the same words he'd said the first time.
"I intend to," I said. It was the only promise I had left that was actually mine to make.