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“It just makes me think of a question I asked myself over and over again after opening those first Freynan Mirrors: is it better to be safe and broken than it is to be dead?”

“I don’t know,” Thomil said honestly. Not for lack of contemplation. Because Sciona’s conundrum was hardly original. Is it better to be safe and broken or dead? This was a question every Kwen had to ask themselves.

Now was the part where he should berate Sciona for comparing her plight to his, for thinking she could ever understand.

But when he drew a breath to voice the thought, he considered the little mage at his side and found that he couldn’t do it.

Because Sciona would need to kill herself to be what Tiran demanded of its women—a doting wife who tempered her every ambition and put some man’s career before her own.

From what he knew of the irrepressible innovator at his side, the effort alone would kill her.

Or at least, it would kill everything that made her Sciona.

In her own sheltered, Tiranish way, she also faced a choice between death and authenticity.

“You never thought about having your own?” she asked.

“My own what?” Thomil said, having lost the thread of the conversation in his thoughts.

“Children,” Sciona said. “I mean, obviously, you’ve had your hands full supporting Carra for all these years, and that’s wonderful, but she’s almost a woman, and you’re still young…” She trailed off, seeming to realize she had hit on something raw.

Thomil had learned to hide his emotions from Tiranish so well. Damn him, when had he become so unguarded with this particular mage?

“The woman I courted before—” Gods, had Thomil almost said ‘before you’? “Before I started working for you… She wanted children.”

“The one who worked in Bringham’s factory?” Sciona said.

“How did you know?” Or, more importantly: “How did you remember?” It had been months ago that Thomil had mentioned Kaedelli. And Sciona, by her own admission, never remembered small talk about other people’s lives.

“I don’t know. I just remember you looking…”

“What?” How had he looked? Because, thinking back on Kaedelli now, he knew how he felt.

“Broken.”

Feeling suddenly far too visible, Thomil looked away. But even as he trained his eyes on the pavement before his boots, he wanted Sciona to know. For whatever reason, it was important to him that she understand what no one else had.

“Kaedelli wanted a baby more than anything. I couldn’t be that man for her.

That is to say I… I wouldn’t be that man.

One night, we argued about it. I told her this city wasn’t made for people like us, for our families, for our children; it was made to destroy us, and we would be monsters to bring a child into lives like ours.

She didn’t speak to me again. I heard from Raehem a year later that she’d found someone else to get her pregnant. It was a stillbirth, unsurprisingly.”

“Why is that unsurprising?”

Thomil was quiet for a moment, regretting the decision to bring up the last part. But if he had wanted to spare Sciona the pain of his honesty, well, it was rather late for that, wasn’t it? What was one more twist of the knife?

“I think Archmage Bringham is the leading employer of Kwen women because no mage would ever want a Tiranishwoman working with those particular dyes. Not when her role is to bear children.”

“No.” The word was a mourning cry more than a denial. She already knew Thomil was telling the truth. “No.”

For some time, Thomil had felt a vicious sort of satisfaction watching horror dawn on Sciona, as she came to understand the tortures that had plagued him for his entire life.

The satisfaction had been hollow and fleeting, even in the beginning.

Now, it was completely absent. The two of them just walked together under the weight.

“I worked in the building where those dyes were developed,” Sciona whispered at length. “I probably sourced the energy—”

“You didn’t know.”

“But you did.” Sciona looked up at Thomil, her green eyes brimming with pain.

“You knew what Bringham was—what his factories did—and he visited for tea all the time. We spent that week in Trethellyn Hall. I just… I had you stand there and be quiet while we chit-chatted about his work. I made you serve him.”

“I’ve been in this city a long time,” Thomil said.

“I’ve served a lot of men who don’t care for the lives of Kwen.

And, when it comes to Bringham, I’m not the one who deserves your sympathy.

” As someone who had done his own part to hurt Kaedelli, he did not deserve it.

“I just wish…” He sighed into the mist. “I wish Kaedelli could have been right about the world, and I could have been wrong.”

“Alright, so you were right about Bringham,” Sciona said.

“And maybe you’re right about everything else, too.

But you’re wrong about yourself. You’re a good father.

” She said it with such conviction. Thomil looked at her, on the verge of begging her to stop.

Did she know what she was doing to him? Did she understand how badly he wanted to believe her?

“You’ve been good for Carra,” Sciona went on, “and you would be— will be—for any children who might come along in the future. Honestly, if Carra’s life—even these last ten years of it—are your only legacy in this world, then you are the greatest of all men.

” She met his aching gaze in what looked like total sincerity.

“I mean it, Thomil Siernes-Caldonn. If more fathers were like you, the world might not be so terrible and cruel. Hell, if more men were like you, I might not be so…”

“So what?”

“Vehemently opposed to them.”

Thomil laughed, the pain lifting slightly.

Far ahead, Carra looked back at them. Unable to hear any of their conversation but seeing that they were walking leisurely together, she rolled her eyes—or rather rolled her whole head to make sure they didn’t miss her exasperation—and resumed walking.

“That seems unfair to your own father,” Thomil said, “considering you never knew him.”

“Oh, I know him. In a way.”

Thomil turned to her in confusion. He distinctly remembered Sciona sullenly referring to a dead father when the subject came up. Had he misunderstood?

“My father is Perramis.”

“The City Chair!?” Thomil exclaimed.

“Yes,” Sciona said tightly. “Keep your voice down.”

All this time, Sciona’s birth father had been one of the most powerful politicians in Tiran, and it had never come up? “But you said—”

“I tell people he’s dead because it’s easier than the truth.” Sciona fidgeted uncomfortably, her mouth smushed into a pout-like frown and her gaze fixed ahead. “It’s probably how he prefers it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sent me to stay with Aunt Winny the day after my mother’s funeral. He didn’t want me.”

“Why?” Thomil said, truly uncomprehending. “Why wouldn’t he want you?”

Sciona shrugged the question off without Thomil’s emotion.

“I have my theories. Maybe I wasn’t really his, and he tolerated my presence in his house only out of love for my mother.

Aunt Winny swears up and down that that’s not true.

Her story is that I just look so much like my mother that my father couldn’t bear to see my face in his grief. ”

“That can’t be,” Thomil said fiercely. He didn’t pretend to understand what went on in the head of an affluent Tiranishman, but he had to imagine that there were some things so fundamentally human that they came stitched into any man’s soul.

When you saw a woman you had loved and lost in a child’s face, that child was the most precious thing in the world. “He’s a monster and a fool.”

“Is he?” Sciona smiled. “I mean, I did end up being rather difficult as daughters go.”

Carra was ‘rather difficult as daughters went.’ Thomil would die before he gave her up.

“He’s an idiot,” Thomil insisted. “He’d have to be to give up a girl like you—the greatest of all mages.”

Feryn’s Feast decorations lit up the train station—clusters of five lights that mimicked candles, each set representing the staffs of the five Founding Mages holding the line against the Horde of Thousands and the darkness of the Deep Night.

The symbolism may have been pointedly anti-Kwen and the rituals infested with the usual Tiranish opulence, but the Feast itself was the most Kwen thing the Tiranish still practiced.

The holiday pre-dated Tiran by at least a thousand years.

At its roots, it was not a celebration of any specific god or mythic figure.

It was a celebration of family—the one thing that got all people through the Deep Night.

As he and Sciona joined Carra beneath those mist-softened lights, Thomil let himself wonder, for a moment, what it would be like to have a family with these two and to let that family grow.

He was on the verge of berating himself for the thought, which was as na?ve as it was presumptuous, until he caught Sciona’s gaze and had the strange feeling that she had just imagined something similar.

She was flushed, green eyes full of affection.

It was a beautiful thought—for a different world that was just, and kind, and not about to collapse.