Page 34

SORA

CITY OF HALLAN, GAYA

A eri and Royo leave like Mikail and I might draw blades…again. Instead, after both looking at the door, we sit on the patterned couch.

“Is your arm all right?” I ask. “Does it need stitches?”

He looks down at his torn, bloody sleeve. There’s an angry red line where I made a cut with my dagger. It looks deep, but it doesn’t appear to be bleeding anymore. “It’s fine. I put salve on it before we left Rahway.”

“I am sorry, Mikail,” I say.

He smiles that easy, unaffected grin. “We’re fine, Sora. I promise.”

He’s being gracious, and that makes me feel worse. I stare down at the floral cushion. “I…”

“I forgave you the moment after it happened,” he says. “We’ve all been through a lot—no one is at their best. And that is not where the standard is set. We’re just dealing with hardship and setbacks as they come. You thought I knew about Tiyung. I understood your rage.”

He makes it sound so logical, but it wasn’t. I had no other outlet for my feelings, and I chose to take them out on my friend.

“We have been through a lot, especially you, but you haven’t attacked me,” I say. “You’ve saved me—from the gang, from my own mercy with the Marnans…”

He shakes his head. “It’s not about keeping score with each other. It’s about settling them with everyone else. I’m with you to the bloody end, Sora.”

Tears prick my eyes. “And I’m with you.”

I rest my hand on his despite my nerve damage making it tremble. He notices but doesn’t say anything. There is a lot going unsaid in our group, and we’ve all gotten by on words unspoken. But I know better than anyone else that tensions, unreleased, can boil over.

“Do you want to talk about Euyn?” I ask. I search Mikail’s face. He hasn’t spoken much about him, and while I might not be the ideal person to talk to because of how I felt about him in the end, I am here to listen.

“No.” Mikail looks to the side and shakes his head. “It’s not that I don’t want to speak with you about him—I know you’re grieving as well—but it feels like if I open my mouth, I may never stop screaming. So it’s better to not.”

“I understand.”

Maybe there is no benefit to trying to process things now. That rabbit hole might lead too deep, and there isn’t the time or space to put ourselves back together if we come undone. It’s probably why Daysum hasn’t been on my mind much. The grief is too much to take on, so I ignore it.

“I know you do, Sora,” he says.

I tap his hand. “Numb comfort it is, then.”

“Cheers.” He raises his water glass to me, then finishes it. He sets it on the coffee table. “So, Misha is…”

“A poison maiden—the last one aside from me.”

Now that we’re out of Rahway, I feel more comfortable telling the truth. Fallador and Rune won’t find out, and there’s no one to overhear us.

Mikail doesn’t react at all. Sun-ye’s beauty made her suspect from the start, I’m sure.

“It’s as smart as it is desperate on Seok’s part,” he says.

“Oh, she told me something today, but with everything that happened… I didn’t get a chance to tell you. She said that Seok emptied Idle Prison when he took Qali. If your father was brought there, he’s free. Hwan, too.”

I smile brightly and wait for him to show some kind of joy. Instead, he just nods.

“You’re not…happy?” I ask.

Mikail sighs, and his shoulders curl. “It’s good news, but I… Seeing the house… I don’t think he survived. I’ve made my peace with it…as much as I can.”

“I can’t do the same with Tiyung,” I say.

“Nor should you. I believe he’s alive. Survival in that place comes down to whether or not you have something or someone to live for. And he does.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know that I’m—”

“We’re going with false modesty now?” He arches an eyebrow at me. “I’m not saying what he is to you, but what you are to him—that’s what matters in Idle.”

“And Fallador is…” I trail off, allowing him to fill in the sentence.

He blinks. “What about him?”

There’s the tell again in the corner of his mouth. Surely, he knows I’ve caught the glances and the affection between them. Mikail relaxes in his presence in a way that I’ve never seen before. I would think he was seeking solace after losing Euyn, but that’s not exactly it, either.

“I don’t know. You tell me,” I say.

Mikail rubs his forehead. He opens his mouth to speak and then closes it. Then he does it again. Sometimes we don’t have the words to express what someone means to us. Sometimes they aren’t necessary.

“Something?” I ask.

He sighs. “That’s a good way of putting it. We’ve known each other a long time. And it’s always been a line I didn’t want to cross for any number of reasons, which I suppose makes him special. But now I don’t know. Trust is a tricky thing, and this isn’t the time for affection.”

“I hope one day you’ll figure it out,” I say.

He smiles kindly at my dreams of the future. “I doubt it. This… We won’t all survive this, Sora.”

I grip the cushion as a cold wave of apprehension washes over me.

It’s the first time he’s spoken of any kind of defeat.

Normally, he’s all fiery sword and vengeance.

Mikail sounding resigned makes my empty stomach knot.

But I suppose it’s logical—there are only so many times the four of us can walk away from battling the world.

With all these odds stacked against us, it seems ridiculous to fight.

It’s easier to lie down and die. To wait for the realms to descend on us and accept our fate.

But we need to keep going. If for no other reason than this: Why should we make it easy for them?

They’ve tried to ruin and break us, but we’re still here.

We’ll go down swinging a blade in a burst of blood.

“I’ve survived worse at the hands of powerful men, Mikail,” I say. “And so have you. And it was at a time when we didn’t have each other, or Aeri, or Royo. The gods have handed immense power to the two of you in order to change things—not just for ourselves but for the four realms.”

I get up and grab the water pitcher. I pour him another glass and one for me, and my hand hardly shakes at all.

“To defying the odds,” I say.

He taps his glass to mine, and light shines in his eyes again. “To the bloody end, Sora.”