He moved between the trees of the royal orchard, touched an apple, testing to see if it would yield. But the fruit wasn’t ready. It clung to the branches, the skin just beginning to turn pink.
“Patience,” Tieren used to say. “Patience is what makes it sweet.”
Rhy closed his eyes, and then it was no longer fall, but spring, three years before, and he was no longer alone because the Aven Essen walked beside him. There was a drag to Tieren’s steps, even in the memory, as if the white robe weighed more than he did.
Death was coming for him slowly, but coming all the same, winnowing the old priest down a little more with every day. When he spoke, his voice was thin, like wind through a reed.
“Some people have a talent for hiding their thoughts, Rhy Maresh. You do not.” His laugh was soft, an airy whisper. Only his blue eyes retained their sharpness. “I can see them hanging like a cloud over your head.”
Rhy tried to speak, only to find his throat going tight. He looked away.
A moment later, Tieren stopped walking, and rested his hand against a tree, weariness visible in every line of his face.
“Do you need to sit?” asked Rhy, but the Aven Essen brushed aside the offer.
“I fear that if I do, I won’t get up.” And then, at the look of horror in his eyes, that whispering laugh. “I’m speaking of my legs, not my life, Rhy. My joints get stiff.”
They walked on, and then Tieren said, “It is not a bad word, death.”
And yet, it was heavy enough to stop the king’s legs, to pin him to the path. He swallowed, and looked up. The first green buds dotted the trees, and it seemed unfair that Tieren should be withering, when the rest of the world was beginning to bloom.
“Are you afraid?” asked Rhy.
“Afraid?” echoed Tieren. “No. I am sad, I suppose, that it is almost over. And there is so much I will miss…” And for just a moment, Rhy saw the old man’s throat bob, his eyes go misty, before he pressed ahead, “… but all things end. That is the nature of the world. Death is essential. A laying down. And I admit, I am looking forward to the rest.”
“Rest,” echoed Rhy. “Is that all there is?”
“We are borrowed things,” said the priest. “Our bodies decay, and our essence—well, magic is the stream that waters all things. It lends itself to us in life, and in death calls it back, and so the stream appears to rise and fall, but it never loses a single drop.”
“But what of our minds?” pressed Rhy. “Our memories? What of us?”
“We are a moment, Your Majesty. And moments pass.”
It was not enough. Not after all he’d seen. Not after everyone he’d lost. “So in death we simply cease to be? We come and go, and then are nothing?”
Rhy could hear his voice rising, but Tieren only sighed. Over the years, those sighs had become their own language, and Rhy was fluent in them. A single exhale could be exasperated, tired, infinitely patient. This sigh had something of all three.
“Just because we do not carry on,” said the priest, “doesn’t mean we haven’t been. We live a life, we leave a legacy. But the river runs one way, and we are carried on it.”
Rhy shook his head. “If that were true, I would not be here. You forget, I died,” he said. He did not say that in that brief but solid stretch of death, he had felt nothing. “I died, and you say that should have been the end, but I came back. Which means I was still there. I did not cease to be.”
“Your death was brief,” ventured the priest. “Perhaps you were not yet gone. There is a time, after all, when the flame has gone out but the fire is not cold.”
Rhy threw up his hands. “You speak as if you do not know.”
Tieren sighed, and this time there was impatience in it. “I have never pretended to be wise. Only old. So no, I do not know. But I believe. I believe we do not linger, nice as that would be. I believe that if we do live on, it is in those we love.”
There was a word he left unsaid.
Only.
But if there was nothing beyond the dark, then what of his mother and father? Rhy couldn’t form the words. What of Tieren himself? What of those he’d lost, and those he would still lose? Alucard and Nadiya and Ren? What would become of all they’d seen and felt and known and loved? How could he carry their hearts in his, when he knew he would forget the sound of their voices, the weight of their hands? And one day when Kell died, and so did he, what then? After all that bound them, would there truly be no tie beyond the dark?