The barrier's light had settled, by the ninth morning after the tremor, into something closer to a heartbeat than a wound: a slow, steady pulse along the eastern horizon that nobody in the settlement bothered to flinch at anymore, the way nobody flinches, after enough years in the same house, at the particular creak a familiar floorboard makes underfoot. Remus stood at the edge of the new watchtower with his charcoal turning between two fingers and understood, watching the mist come up off the black water in slow curling sheets, that the settlement had reached the strange, suspended calm that only ever arrives after a disaster has finished happening and before anyone has found the time to grieve it properly.
He'd built twelve dams, forty stilted houses, three granaries, and a watchtower in the weeks since the walk into the swamp, and not one hour of headroom to build the thing everyone actually needed, which was somewhere to put down the weight of General Tacitus's name without immediately having to pick it back up again and carry it toward the next emergency.
Below him, the settlement was waking up the way it woke every morning now, in careful, rationed stages rather than all at once: smoke rising thin from the cookfires along the eastern row before anyone had bothered lighting the western ones, buckets creaking on their ropes down at the water mill Remus had raised out of a valley that had been standing water only weeks earlier, a rooster somebody had smuggled the entire walk from the old Southlands crowing itself hoarse over a coop no bigger than a crate. Chickens had made the retreat. So had two goats, a blind hunting dog Julius refused to explain the provenance of, and, against every reasonable expectation, one entire beehive that Annabelle had personally strapped to a cart and refused to abandon even when the road narrowed to a footpath too tight for the cart's own wheels, carrying the hive the last two miles on her own back rather than let it go.
Remus had asked her, once, why she'd bothered. She'd told him, without looking up from her ledger, that a kingdom that stopped making honey had stopped believing it was coming back, and she wasn't prepared to let anyone in this settlement believe that, including herself, on days when the belief was hardest to hold onto.
He thought about that answer more than he let on, most mornings, watching the smoke rise and the buckets creak and the whole fragile, stubborn machinery of a people refusing to stop living just because their home had burned behind them.
"You've been up here since before first light," Andrea said, climbing the last few rungs to join him, her breath fogging faintly in the cold morning air.
"Julius says you didn't eat last night either."
"I wasn't hungry," Remus said.
"You're never hungry when you're avoiding something," Andrea said, not unkindly, settling against the rail beside him with the easy, economical stillness she brought to everything, the stillness of someone who'd spent centuries learning that most problems got worse the moment you flailed at them.
"You built us a barrier out of a dead king's crown and a stolen sword and a claw you still haven't fully explained, and you haven't once flinched doing any of it.
But you haven't said his name once since the tunnel. Not to me. Not to Annabelle.
I asked her this morning, in case I'd simply missed it."
"I know," Remus said.
"That's not an answer."
"I know," he said again, and found, turning the charcoal stub over one more time, that the admission cost him more than he expected it to.
"I keep starting to say it, and then some part of my head redirects straight into the next practical problem instead, the granary roof or the water table or whatever's easiest to actually finish.
I've noticed myself doing it.
I don't seem to be able to stop myself doing it."
Andrea considered that for a long moment, watching the mist rather than him, the way she'd learned, over the past year of knowing him, that he sometimes needed a conversation to look somewhere else entirely in order to keep having it.
"You did the same thing after Genesis," she said.
"After the Basilisk.
You built for three straight days before you let yourself say out loud that Octavius's grandson didn't make it.
I remember because I asked Leo about it, and he told me it was the first time he'd ever seen you refuse to talk about something instead of simply being too busy to."
"I don't know what to do with it if I stop moving," Remus admitted, and the words came out rougher than he meant them to, some of the flat, managed calm he usually kept wrapped around everything finally slipping loose at the edges.
"He told me to go.
He looked me dead in the eye and told me to take everyone and go, and I went, because it was the right call and because he'd earned the right to make it and because staying would have gotten everyone killed instead of just him. I know all of that.
I've told myself all of that a hundred times since the tunnel, and it hasn't once made the going feel like anything other than what it actually was, which was leaving a man to die alone in the dark because I was too much of a coward to stay and die alongside him instead."
"That's not courage you're describing," Andrea said, and there was no comfort in her voice, only the same flat, unflinching honesty she'd given Leo once outside a ruined fortress, an honesty that had always, Remus had come to understand, been its own particular kind of kindness.
"That's guilt dressed up as an accusation against yourself so you don't have to sit with the actual grief underneath it.
He didn't ask you to die beside him. He asked you to live, and to keep everyone else alive doing it, and you did exactly what he asked. Feeling guilty about obeying a dying man's last order isn't loyalty, Remus.
It's just another way of making his death about your own failure instead of his choice."
Remus said nothing for a while, the charcoal gone still between his fingers for the first time in longer than he could remember, and felt something in his chest that had been sitting clenched and managed since the tunnel finally, slowly, begin to give.
"I keep thinking about the last time somebody died because of a decision I made and I didn't get to see it happen," he said, quiet, and understood, saying it, that he was reaching further back than the tunnel now, further back than this whole life.
"I was standing at a window when it happened to me, watching a woman kiss another man two floors down, and I never once saw the actual moment the knife went in, because it came from behind and I never turned around fast enough to catch it.
I've spent a long time since then telling myself the not-seeing was the worst part. I don't think it was, anymore. I think the worst part is that I've now watched it happen twice, once from the outside and once from close enough to hear it, and neither version left me any better prepared for the third time.
There's no version of this where I get good at it."
"No," Andrea agreed, quiet.
"There isn't.
I don't think anyone's meant to get good at it.
I think the people who do are the ones you should worry about, not the ones who still can't say a dead man's name out loud nine mornings later."
"His name was Tacitus," Remus said, testing it, the way he'd tested the word Nightforged in Corvin's forge a year and a world ago, and found that saying it plainly, out loud, into the cold morning air, cost him considerably less than he'd spent the last nine days fearing it would.
"General Tacitus.
Not just Tacitus.
He earned the rank back a hundred times over between the day the King stripped it off him and the day he died holding a tunnel door for us, and nobody with the actual authority to give it back to him ever did, and I think that's a debt this family still owes him even now that he can't collect on it personally."
"Then we pay it," Andrea said.
"Properly.
Today, if you're ready, or tomorrow if you need one more day to be.
Nobody in this settlement is going to think less of you for taking the day."
"Today," Remus said.
"He waited long enough on us already."
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