A fever took her, seemingly out of nowhere. No plague was in the city, but her fever did not abate and she was gone the third night, like a tide receding before morning came.

Thierry was lost, broken, a shadow, alive but moving unseeing through whatever light there was for others in the world. Medor spoke to his uncle’s friend at court, and for love of Gauvard, and memory of him, Silvy Gautier of Ferrieres was buried beside him. They had come to love each other, after the riverbank.

Only their names were on their grave markers, set flat in the marble floor. They are still there, despite all the changes in the world.

Thierry stopped writing in that time. He felt emptied out, owned by sorrow. Aware of the good fortune that had been his life, but unable to reclaim a sense of that.

One day, making himself walk abroad, as another spring came to the City of Cities, he decided to do what Silvy had done, because she had done it. He went to the artisans’ quarter and stood in different doorways, watching craftsmen at work. He had a craft, he was a poet, but he couldn’t yet access that again.

Instead, he took employment at a shop that made toys for children. Small birds, of different metals and wood and leather. Their heads moved, and with some their wings also did, wonderfully. They were painstakingly made, objects of beauty and craft, much loved by the children of the city.

Thierry was told that in legend there had been a sorcerer, or more than one, who had been able to capture souls in birds like this, and that they could speak. He didn’t believe that, but he liked the idea of souls in mechanical birds, and he had been close enough to the half-world because of Gauvard to know that things were possible that one might never credit.

He did, once, on a summer night, see one of the blue fires moving—dancing—in a laneway near the Great Sanctuary. The city had been known for these long ago. They’d become rarer and rarer, he’d been told. But he saw one. He was allowed that.

He made the decision to go home the next morning. It felt, finally, to be time. He told Medor that same day.

So Thierry Villar left Sarantium some years before it fell, though the first hints of danger had begun arriving. He had dreamed of Orane many nights, in a city that instilled a habit of dreaming in people living among ruins of greatness. He began to remember his dreams. You could, some said, dream away your life here. He went to where Silvy was buried, and Gauvard, and he wept for what was lost, as we do. As we must, if we have loved. Then he left.

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