There was no body to bury, and the Drowned Faith, as it turned out, had an entire tradition built for exactly that absence, one Remus had never once needed to learn the shape of before this particular morning.
"We give the water something to carry instead," Julius explained, working alongside Remus at the edge of the settlement's calmest inlet, both of them cutting reed frames to a pattern the old steward remembered from his own mother's funeral rite decades earlier.
"A vessel.
Doesn't need to hold the body, only needs to hold something that was truly his, and a light, and a name spoken clean and whole over it before it's set loose. The Faith teaches that the deep doesn't care whether what reaches it is a man or a memory of one.
Either way, it takes him home."
Remus crafted the vessel himself rather than let Julius's aging hands manage the finer joinery alone, palm flat against the reeds, the design simpler than anything he'd built in months and somehow, for exactly that reason, harder to finish than the Wall of Shadows had been.
Craft: Funeral Boat. Materials Used: 1 x Woven Reed Frame, 1 x Waxed Canvas, 1 x Bronze Lantern Fitting.
Item Created: Funeral Boat.
Into it went the only thing of Tacitus's the retreat had left behind to grieve over: the crooked, half-melted badge, two conjoined birds behind a sword and shield, that Remus had carried off the man's own worktable in the panic of the tunnel escape without fully registering, until days later, that he'd done it at all. He set it into the little boat's shallow well and didn't trust himself to say anything else while he did it.
By midday the entire settlement had gathered along the inlet's bank, refugees standing shoulder to shoulder with soldiers who no longer had a General to report to, Duke Ferron leaning on Aminala's arm rather than his cane, King Belsarius's empty place at the front of the crowd marked, deliberately, by an unlit lantern nobody had needed to discuss setting there. Andrea stood at Remus's left, Annabelle at his right, Gregory a half-step behind them all, and Pompey, red cap removed for the first time Remus could remember, stood near enough to the water's edge that the mist curled visibly around his boots.
Julius had spent the better part of the morning teaching whoever would listen the proper words of the rite, the Drowned Faith's own funeral liturgy having gone half forgotten in a kingdom that hadn't buried anyone properly in open water in living memory, most families preferring, in ordinary times, the older, gentler custom of returning a body to the earth it had been raised on. There was no earth here that felt like anyone's yet, only reclaimed swamp bottom still settling under its first season of dams, and Julius had argued, quietly, to Duke Ferron the night before, that a man who died protecting a retreat deserved the older rite regardless, the one that predated even the earth-burial custom, back when the Faith's first believers had lived their whole lives on water and trusted nothing else to carry their dead home honestly.
"The lake takes what the land can't hold yet," he'd said, and Ferron hadn't argued the point further.
Children too young to understand what a funeral was stood very still anyway, sensing, the way children always seemed to, that stillness was the thing being asked of them today even without the words to ask for it directly. An old woman near the back, one of the forty-one Remus recognized, with a small jolt, as one of the original Hollowvale evacuees Octavius had once led east to safety a lifetime and two sieges ago, wept without trying to hide it, and nobody around her moved to comfort her, understanding, the way a crowd sometimes understands things collectively without a word passing between any two of its members, that some grief wanted only witnesses and not comforting at all.
"He was demoted once for doing the right thing quietly," Duke Ferron said, his voice carrying with the particular, hard-won steadiness of a man who had learned, over a long recovery, exactly how much a room could hold if he kept his own grief folded small enough.
"Stripped of a title he'd earned twice over, by a King too young and too badly counseled to understand what he was actually losing when he signed that order.
I make no claim to the authority that took it from him. But I claim, on behalf of every soul standing on this bank who owes him their life, the authority to give it back.
From this day, and for as long as any of us live to remember it, he is General Tacitus, and any Council that still exists to disagree with us can raise the objection to a grave that isn't there to hear it."
A low murmur ran through the crowd, not quite a cheer, something quieter and more binding than that, and Remus understood, watching it move through the gathered faces, that this was the first genuinely unified thing the exiled Southlands had done since the walk into the swamp had begun.
"I want to say something," Remus said, when Ferron stepped back, and found, standing in front of this many people with nothing built and nothing to hand out, that he had no practiced version of what came next, only the plain truth of it.
"I've spent most of my life, both of them, being the kind of man who fixes things instead of feeling them, because feeling things has occasionally gotten me killed and fixing things generally hasn't.
Tacitus told me once, a long time ago now, at a cold hearth after he'd lost his rank over a door I walked through, that losing it was the kick he needed to finally do something that mattered instead of watching a boy he didn't respect play at ruling a kingdom he used to protect. I think about that a great deal more than I've let on. I think he spent the whole rest of his life doing exactly what he said that night he would, right up to the last thing he ever did, which was buy the rest of us the time to keep doing the same.
I don't know how to be as brave as that.
I've been trying to learn it from him since the day I met him, and I intend to keep trying, because stopping now feels like the one way I could actually let him down."
He set the little boat into the water himself, lit the lantern with a struck flint rather than a skill, some part of him insisting the flame ought to come from his own two hands and nothing borrowed from the System, and pushed it gently out past the reeds into the slow current that fed, eventually, the river beyond the swamp and, past that, whatever the Drowned Faith believed waited at the bottom of everything.
Nobody spoke while it drifted. The lantern's small light grew smaller against the grey morning water, and Remus found, watching it go, that the grief he'd spent nine days outrunning had finally caught him standing perfectly still, and that for once he let it, without immediately reaching for the next practical thing to build instead.
Andrea's hand found his, and she didn't say anything either, and that, more than any of the words spoken that morning, was the thing that finally let him breathe.
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