The hall broke.
The priest's scream was the permission everyone had been waiting for and a hundred people took it at once. Chairs went over. Bodies moved toward the two exits with the specific violence of a crowd that had made a unanimous decision and was executing it immediately. The Countess moved with her children pressed against her, composed and urgent simultaneously, the face of a woman who was afraid and had decided that afraid looked better in motion.
Dorian's wine glass fell.
It hit the stone and shattered and he did not look at it.
He had not moved.
In the fourth row, a woman from an outer house pressed both hands to her mouth and made a sound through them that started as a scream and couldn't quite finish itself. The man beside her was already standing, already pulling at her arm, already done with this room.
Liss made a sound — small, involuntary, the sound of a child who had kept leaning toward something and was now understanding why everyone had told her not to. Sera grabbed her arm with both hands and moved.
Cael pressed back against the wall.
His face had gone pale the specific pale of blood leaving somewhere it was needed. His hands were fists. He was staring at the casket and his mouth was slightly open and he looked like a person who had spent three days standing vigil for someone who was dead and was now recalibrating what dead meant.
He did not leave.
The man from the far side of the hall — dark coat, arrived alone, spoken to no one — had his back against the stone pillar now and was watching with his jaw set and his eyes steady. Not the eyes of someone afraid. The eyes of someone doing arithmetic on something they hadn't anticipated.
At the back, the two men had not moved at all.
One of them — the one with his hand resting at his hip — shifted his weight forward by approximately two inches. His hand stayed where it was. His gaze stayed where it was.
The other one was watching the mist.
Just the mist. Following its edges as it spread. The expression of a man reading something in it that the rest of the room wasn't looking for.
She looked at her hands.
These are hands, some part of her observed from a distance that felt like glass. These are not my hands.
Smaller. A scar on the left index finger. The skin a different shade than she remembered, catching the candlelight in a way that was familiar and not.
She turned them over slowly.
I was in water.
She knew that. The cold of it was still in her chest — not metaphorically, literally, the specific cold of going under and not finding up anymore. The burning in her lungs. The gold light getting smaller above her until it was just a point and then not even that.
And then her mother's face had arrived in the last seconds like something her mind had saved for when it mattered most. Her tired smile. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes from years of careful expressions. The single birthday candle. The careful look across the table that said I see you and also I don't know how to reach you.
She had left that.
She had let the water take her and she had left that woman to wake up tomorrow and find out.
Mom, she thought, and did not let herself stay there because she could not afford to stay there, not here, not now, not in this body in this hall in whatever this was.
I'm sorry.
Dad... wherever you were. I'm sorry.
Brother.. your cheek pinches and your voice too loud and I should have hit you harder the last time. I'm sorry.
She looked up.
The hall was not full anymore. Roughly forty people remained — those who hadn't made it to the doors, those pressed against walls, those who had made the specific decision to stay. All of them looking at her with the same face. Forty people, same expression, as though the terror had arranged their features into a consensus.
Stone walls. Black draping fabric. Candles burning wrong. White flowers going stranger in the cold she was apparently still producing.
Architecture that belonged to no century she recognized. Clothing on the remaining people that confirmed it. Iron candle stands. The particular quality of a room that had never heard of electricity and never would.
Where, she thought, am I.
She looked at the portrait.
Brown eyes looking back. Warm. Ordinary.
She looked for the nearest reflective surface. Found a polished candle stand. Her own face returned to her.
Crimson.
The red of something old. Nothing like the portrait.
Oh, she thought.
Her face moved. She was trying to operate the muscles — they had been still for three days and needed to be reminded of their function. She moved the corners of her mouth.
Every remaining person in the hall flinched simultaneously.
A man in the second row began praying under his breath.
She let her face settle.
The woman in the black dress was still there.
Against the left wall. Not pressed against it, not retreating toward the door. Standing — the only person in the hall who had moved toward her while everyone else moved away, and had stopped just short of the casket, shaking so visibly her dress moved with it.
She was small. Wide-hipped. Strong hands pressed flat against her sides in the way of someone keeping them from shaking by main force. A face that had been lovely once and was still that face under three days of devastation. Eyes that were —
Warm brown.
The same warm brown as the portrait.
The woman's hand came up.
Slowly. Trembling badly. It rose and stopped an inch from her face and stayed there, offered, in the space between them.
"Elowen?"
Barely sound. The ghost of a word. The specific sound of a name that had been said into empty rooms for three days and was terrified of being said now in case the answer was wrong.
She looked at this woman's face.
At those warm eyes. At the three days of not sleeping. At the hand that had not lowered itself.
Brave, she noted. Terrified and not moving.
"No."
Her voice came out rougher than intended. She let it.
"My name is Zolani."
She looked at the woman's face. At the devastation rearranging itself around this information with the desperation of something that would accept whatever was offered.
"Who are you."
A pause.
"Beautiful lady."
The woman's knees hit the stone.
Both arms reached forward, grabbing at white fabric and the casket's edge, pulling herself toward her with the single-minded physicality of someone who had received one instruction and everything else had become irrelevant. Her hands found her face — both thumbs pressing against her jaw, checking, confirming, the grip of someone who needed the thing they were touching to be real.
She said Elowen into her hair. Quietly. Like a word that had been waiting three days to land somewhere.
Swords were drawn. Three of them, the sound of metal leaving its housing going through the remaining silence cleanly. Nobody moved to use them. The drawn blades held in the air like questions nobody wanted to answer first.
Zolani looked over the woman's shoulder.
At the pale young man against the wall with his fists and his open mouth. At the eldest son standing in his row with his shattered glass at his feet, watching her with something that was not fear and was not relief and was entirely too patient to be either. At the two men at the back who had still not moved, the one's hand still resting at his hip, the other one still reading the mist.
At a hall full of candles burning wrong in a world she didn't have a map for yet.
Here then, she thought.
The woman's grip tightened. Both arms around her now. Holding on with the specific force of someone who had been shown the shape of a world without this person in it and was not going to be shown it again.
She let herself be held.
Here.