The ridge still smelled of yesterday's smoke. Not heavily — the wind had been working through the night and had done most of what wind did with the evidence of fire, which was disperse it into the surrounding air until it became the background quality of the place rather than the primary quality. But it was there, the remaining trace of a pyre that had burned completely and left behind the kind of absence that complete burning left.
Two new pyres had been built beside the ash of Oscar's, side by side. The people who built them had arrived at side by side without discussion because side by side was correct and correct things had a way of being arrived at by people who were paying attention.
The crowd that gathered was different from yesterday's in a way that was hard to name precisely. The same people were there — the soldiers, the fighters, the tribal hunters, the civilians, the gods — but the quality of the gathering had shifted overnight in the way that grief shifted when it was asked to do another day's work before the first day's work had fully settled. They were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Hugo was there. Jason and Mike had carried him out from the recovery room in the careful way of people moving someone who needed moving and was not going to ask for help moving and was not going to be given the option of not being moved. They had brought a chair and set it at the front of the gathered crowd and Hugo was in it with a blanket across his lap and his jaw set in the way of someone who had decided that being present was non-negotiable regardless of what being present cost. Marie was beside him. She had not left his side since Kvasir cleared her to be beside him and she was not going to leave his side today.
The children were there. Emma had brought them — not all of them, the ones who were old enough to understand what they were there for and young enough that being there was going to matter in the way that things mattered when you were young and the world showed you something true and difficult and did not look away from it. They had drawn pictures again — not the same pictures but different ones, the faces approximate and the colors chosen with the deliberate care of people who understood that the colors mattered even if they could not have explained why. Martin was among them. He held his picture carefully with both hands and looked at the two pyres with the quality of a nine year old who had seen more than nine year olds were supposed to see and had not been broken by it and was standing in what he had seen with both feet planted. Edna was behind him with her hand on his shoulder.
Saul came to the front of the gathered crowd when the pyres had been lit and the fire had taken hold and the smoke had begun its straight rise into the morning air. He looked at the crowd — at the soldiers and the fighters and the tribal hunters and the civilians and the gods, all of them standing on the ridge in the cooling morning air with the fire between them and the compound spread out below. "Sue and Elena Vargas," he said. "Two people who did their work completely and without reservation and without requiring anyone to notice that they were doing it. If you want to say something, say it. They deserve to be spoken about." He stepped back.
Amanda stepped forward. She stood at the front of the crowd with her hands folded in front of her and looked at the pyres for a moment before she spoke, carrying the composed quality of someone who had been crying and had finished crying and had arrived at the place on the other side of crying where the words were available. "Sue hired me," she said. "That's where it started. I needed work and she needed someone who could keep up with her and apparently I could keep up with her, which I did not always realize was a compliment until I watched other people try." That pulled something from the crowd that was not quite a laugh but was the sound people made when something true arrived in an unexpected form. "She gripped about everything," Amanda said. "Money especially. If Shane spent a dollar she thought was unnecessary she would find him and explain the dollar to him in terms that left no ambiguity about her position." She paused. "She called the MMA fight a necessary team building exercise. Right up until she saw the front row seats. Then the position shifted somewhat." More of the sound from the crowd. Amanda's expression stayed steady but warm. "She was always like that. She had a position and she held the position and if the facts changed the position changed but she was going to let you know about it either way." She looked at the pyres. "What I want people to know is that underneath every argument about every dollar was someone who understood exactly what we were building and was fighting for it in the only way she knew how, which was by making sure the numbers worked and the systems held and the resources went where they needed to go. After the Shroud she took everything she knew about money and applied it to goods and trade and kept the whole operation running the same way she always had — quietly and completely and without making a production of it." She stopped. "I learned more from her than I ever told her. I'm telling her now." She stepped back.
Shane stepped forward. He stood where he always stood at these things — directly, without preparation, with the quality of someone who had decided what needed to be said and was going to say it. "Sue argued with me regularly," he said. "About spending. About decisions she thought were financially questionable. About the sponsorship that got us close to Olaf, which she thought was an unnecessary expense right up until it turned out to be one of the most important things we ever did." He looked at the pyre. "She was usually right about the money. I want that on the record." Another sound from the crowd. "What she was always right about was the work. Every time I needed something done that required precision and competence and someone who was going to do it correctly rather than approximately, I went to Sue. And every time, regardless of what she thought about the decision that had led to the ask, she did it correctly." He paused. "She died in a supply hall swinging a laptop at something twice her size because her friend was in trouble. That's who she was. All the arguing about dollars was the same person who did that. I don't think those things are contradictory. I think they're the same thing expressed in different ways." He looked at the smoke rising from both pyres. "She was exactly what we needed and I didn't tell her that enough and I'm telling her now." He stepped back.
Emma came forward for Vargas. She stood at the front of the crowd and looked at the gathered faces and at the children with their pictures and at Hugo in his chair and at Nathan Hill near the back standing straight with his hands at his sides. "Elena came here under difficult circumstances," Emma said. "She arrived as part of a force that had been sent here under false pretenses and she knew something was wrong before most of the others did. And what she did when she understood the situation — when Saul and I came out and the tension was still very much present — was she helped me hand out cookies." That landed softly in the crowd. "The children had made them. She took the tray and she went down the line of soldiers and she handed cookies to grown men and women who were standing in full gear in a cold field and she did it like it was the most natural thing in the world." Emma paused. "The children drew her pictures that day. They gave them to her before they knew her name. Children are good at knowing who is safe." She looked at the children present, at their pictures. "She protected those children through the entire siege. She stood at the door of the education hall and she extended something over that space — a protection that I felt every day and that held even after—" She stopped. She collected herself. "It held after she was gone. That protection held after she was gone. I have never seen anything like it and I don't expect I will again." She looked at the pyre. "Elena Vargas forgave herself eventually for almost attacking us. I want her to know she had nothing to forgive. She was exactly who she was supposed to be from the moment she arrived. We were lucky to have her." She stepped back.
Nathan Hill stepped forward — not smoothly, with the deliberate motion of someone who had decided to do something difficult and was executing the decision before the difficulty could change it. He stood at the front of the crowd and looked at the pyre. "I was there the first day," he said. "When Sergeant Vargas started helping Emma with the cookies and the blankets. I was talking to Gary — trying to help where I could, same as she was. And I watched her from across that field and I watched her hand cookies to soldiers who needed something human in that moment and I thought — that is someone who understands what the actual job is." He paused. "The actual job was never what we were sent here to do. She figured that out fast. She spent the rest of her time here doing the actual job, which was protecting the people who needed protecting." He stopped. "I stayed at Sanctuary because of what I saw that day. Because if this place produced people like Emma who came out with cookies when they should have been afraid, and people like Sergeant Vargas who saw that and immediately understood it — I wanted to be part of whatever this was." He looked at the pyre. "She was the reason I stayed. I just wanted her to know that." He stepped back.
Edna did not step forward. She spoke from where she was standing — behind Martin, with her hand still on his shoulder, in the place she had been since the beginning. "I didn't know either of them long," she said. "We came in with the Fillmore group and there was a lot happening and you don't always get time to know people the way you want to know them." She paused. "But I saw Elena with those kids every day. I saw the way she stood at that door. I saw what she did when she had to choose between staying and going and I know what that choice cost her because I know what it means to leave your children." She looked at Martin briefly. "She didn't leave them. She made sure they were covered and then she went anyway because someone else needed her." She looked at the pyres. "That's not a small thing. That's not something you can be taught. That's just who you are." She stopped. "I'm glad my son knew her. Even for a short time. I'm glad that's one of the things he got to see."
The ridge was quiet.
The children moved forward. One at a time — the careful procession of children doing something they understood was important and were treating accordingly, each one laying their picture at the base of the pyres, not on the fire itself but at the base, the pictures arranged with the deliberate care of people who had made something and were giving it to someone and understood the giving was the point.
Martin laid his picture last. He stood at the base of the pyre for a moment and looked at what he had drawn — Vargas at the education hall door, approximate and specific at the same time in the way children's drawings were both of those things — and then he stepped back and stood straight and looked at the fire. He stood with the stillness of someone who did not have words for what he was feeling and had not yet decided he needed them.
Vigor felt it before anyone else registered it. He had been at Shane's side since the ceremony began, but now he moved — not urgently, with the quiet certainty of an animal that had read something in the air and had decided where it needed to be. He crossed the few feet between Shane and Martin and pressed himself against the boy's leg with the steady warmth of a dog that understood grief in the way working dogs understood things, which was through the body rather than through language. Martin did not look down. He put his hand on Vigor's back and the dog held still and they stood together and watched the fire — the boy who had lost someone who stood at a door for him, and the dog who understood that standing beside someone was sometimes the whole of what was needed.
Shane watched from where he was. He did not call Vigor back.
Between the two funeral days, in the hours after Oscar's pyre had burned down and before the second ceremony had been prepared, a woman from the Niagara chert settlement found a quiet place at the eastern edge of the inner compound near the base of the Great Tree. She was not one of the fighters — one of the people who had come through the corridor because Darlene had said it was time to move and when Darlene said it was time to move you moved. She had been at Sanctuary since the convoy arrived and had worked in the supply distribution and had done her part through the siege in the practical way of someone who understood that the people doing the fighting needed people behind them doing everything else. She sat at the base of the Great Tree with her back against the roots and her hands folded in her lap. She was not performing anything. She was not trying to be seen. She was doing what she did in the private hours — what Darlene had always done, what the people of the chert settlement had done in their own way for as long as any of them could remember, which was simply turn toward whatever they turned toward and be present with it. She sat. She was quiet. The compound moved around her — the cleanup, the preparation for the second day's ceremony, the organized activity of a place that had been through something and was continuing — and she sat at the base of the Great Tree and was quiet and turned toward whatever she turned toward. Darlene was somewhere in the compound doing the same thing. Neither of them knew what was coming. Neither of them was doing anything in preparation for what was coming. They were simply being what they had always been. And what they had always been was enough.
The pyres burned through the morning and into the early afternoon. The crowd thinned the way it had thinned for Oscar's — gradually, the compound's requirements pulling people back toward the work that kept everything running. The gods stayed. Hugo stayed until Jason and Mike decided he had stayed long enough and carried him back with the same careful efficiency they had used to bring him out, and Hugo did not argue because arguing required energy he was spending on staying conscious. Marie walked beside him. She held his hand the whole way back.
Three days after the funerals the mourning period had done what mourning periods did, which was not end but shift — the transition from the acute phase of grief into the sustained phase, the weight still present but distributed differently, carried in a new way that allowed the carrying to continue alongside the other work of living.
Gary found Amanda in the operations building in the early evening. Not a dramatic moment — the ordinary moment of someone finding the person they were looking for in the place that person usually was. He stood in the doorway. She looked up from what she was doing. He looked at her for a moment with the expression that was not performing anything and was not managing anything and was simply what his face did when he was about to say something true. "We should tell people," he said. Amanda looked at him. At the note that Frigg had tucked back into his pocket. At everything the note contained that had not yet been said out loud to anyone. "Yes," she said. "We should." She stood up. She took his hand.
They went to find the people who needed to find out first — Saul, Emma, Mike, the inner circle of people who had been through all of it and deserved to hear it before it became general knowledge. They told them in the operations building with the evening settling outside and the compound doing what the compound did in the evenings now, which was breathe and rest and continue. The reaction was what the reaction was — the quality of people who had been in grief receiving something that was not grief, something with a different weight entirely, something that pushed back against the accumulated heaviness of the past days with the gentle force of a thing that was coming rather than a thing that was gone.
Emma put both hands over her mouth. Saul looked at the ceiling briefly. Mike laughed — short, real, the laugh of someone who had not expected to laugh today and was glad to be wrong about that. Gary looked at Amanda. Amanda looked at Gary. "Sue or Oscar," Gary said quietly. "When the time comes." Amanda nodded. The room held that — the warmth of it, the rightness of two names being given forward into something new rather than left behind with the ash on the ridge.
Outside the Great Tree stood in the evening light with its roots in the same ground they had always been in and its branches holding the last of the day the way they held everything — steadily, without announcement, for as long as the holding was required.