“Oh, absolutely. Just not at the rate my bowels hoped,” Varia agreed. “I’m leaving for Windonhigh in the morning—they’ve made a new monument for the fallen. So I must be there. And so you must come to dinner to see me off.”

“I will,” he assured her.

“Good.”

She held his hand, her wooden fingers in his wooden palm for a long moment, and her smile crinkled on the edges. A smile that said more than words ever could; a smile that told him it was all right to be sad. But that they—the world—had been given a second chance, her least of all, and that to not forge forward in it was a waste.

“She’d want you happy, Luc.”

It was a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to respond to, but the gift of siblings was that one knew you didn’t always have to. Some words were just meant to be said and left to the wind, and as the two of them parted—him to the city and her to the palace—that knowing was most poignant of all.

He buried the loneliness frequently in the rush of the New Vetrisian crowd. The capital was still called Vetris, for convenience and something for the country to hold on to in the midst of rapid change, but it resembled little of its old self. The waterways were perhaps the one constant feature—too entrenched to be removed but not entrenched enough to resist an update. The pipes had been relaid in white mercury alloys and the pump systems completely overhauled thanks to Yorl’s efforts. Fione helped where she could, but for the first year while she was heavy with pregnancy, it was Yorl who did the majority of the work.

He went off Fione’s blueprints she drew up in bed, and the two had revitalized the city—a major pipeline system allowing for indoor bathrooms not just in the palace, but in every home. Running water to cook with, to bathe with. The effects were immediate; the people became healthier and had more time to spend with their families and on rebuilding their lives. The watertells became more efficient, hissing faster and delivering messages at untold speeds. Thanks to Yorl’s knowledge of beneather stonework, the buildings of Vetris were three stories taller now, allowing for more space and more shops. Connecting bridges to the buildings, such as he’d seen in Breych, allowed foot traffic to be split between the roads below and the bridges above. It was a wondrous and strange outline to see on the horizon at sunset, but Lucien felt proud of it.