“I…don’t know what that means,” Gauvard Colle repeated. “Those words.”

She held him for a long time, tenderly. Not knowing that tenderness wasn’t a thing he’d experienced very much in his days, or not for a long time. Later, they also started back west, for Orane. For home.

—

The sun moved through that long, late-summer day, rising, setting. Wind, high clouds. The carpenters were the last to leave the river. They took down the barriers and the poles and the tent cloth covering they’d contrived. Then they also went back, with their carts and wood, the way they’d come, east or west, to rejoin their armies. They bade farewell to each other courteously, the shared respect of craftsmen who knew they’d done a job well.

And then there was no one left on that bridge, or beside it, and the body of the dead man was being carried home. There was still blood on the ancient stones. Rain would wash it away in due course. It had done that before. The moons, rising, shone down upon the arched bridge and the river, and the stars did. In the teachings of that time and place, Jad of the sun was in the darkness below, battling demons to protect his children, as he did every night since the world had been made, and remade, and remade.

Epilogue

A number of years after the events here recounted, when some of those present in this story were dead, some diminished, some exalted, but with most simply going about their lives, far from any importance or illusions of it, a ship approached the celebrated harbour of Sarantium, among a number of others doing so at the same time, as was almost always the case.

It had sailed from Seressa, that immensely wealthy city-state in Batiara, flourishing in part because of its trade to the east. Escorted by two war galleys down to the end of what was increasingly being named the Seressini Sea (which they liked and encouraged) against a growing threat of pirates, including those from a small, well-guarded city across the way in Sauradia, the merchant ship, laden with goods, had proceeded out into the Great Sea and then east, without incident, to the City of Cities.

Sarantium had borne that name for past a thousand years.

On board, standing at the prow, were four people who had paid for passage, sailing to Sarantium at the behest of the oldest of them, who had lived there when much younger, and had lately wished to see it again, ardently, and wanted them with him.

He did not say before I die, but the others knew he carried that thought, and it was present for each of them in their decision to join him for this journey.

The years had deepened affection among them, and permitted love.