Medor Colle remained in Sarantium, in the east, building a life there, allowing himself, belatedly, joy. Much later, at a great age, but still strikingly vigorous, he died on the walls beside the last emperor, wielding a sword for Jad and the City of Cities, fighting at the end next to two other men, both from Batiara, a soldier and a cleric. Fighting for the golden city, where he had found acceptance for what he was, and acceptance of himself thereby.

—

Thierry left his ship at Seressa, and stayed for an interval there this time. He had nothing, he realized, to hurry back towards. He travelled to cities and towns nearby, including a visit to Varena and the mosaics there, because Silvy had told him her family was from that place, and she had come to love mosaics, and because Gauvard had wanted him to see these. They moved him, unexpectedly, to tears.

He dearly wished he knew the name of the artist who had made the two facing-each-other images of Sarantine courts a thousand years ago. The faces and the craftsmanship haunted him. He stood there and looked, and felt he couldn’t leave, couldn’t stop looking. No one would ever know who made them, he thought. It was a grief. But they were here, he told himself. They could still be seen. There was that.

Eventually, when the weather allowed, he joined a party and went overland through the mountain passes back to Orane, the city he had never stopped loving all his days.

And there he remained, with only short journeys two or three times a year to the country château of his last dear friend, also a poet, where she mostly lived, some days’ ride west of the city, north of the Livraise River.

He had a son who had grown up very near there, on one of the closest estates, in fact, but he never knew that. What we know, what we don’t know. The stories we tell, the stories we cannot.

—

And so, finally, at this leaving and this end, is truth, among all the interwoven tales: I knew love, had true friends, may have done good in the world in a time that threatened war. And I wrote some poems. I did that. I did that.

Acknowledgements