CHAPTER 464: 464: LANTERNS AFTER THE STORM PART TWO

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Mia’s laugh startled her; it softened the day’s angle. She talked about kai’s worker ant stories. "He sleeps like a thief," she said. "Fast, guilty, and only when he thinks no one is watching. He doesn’t steal enough food to blame him for it. But if there is dried fruit within reach, he thinks no one can count."

Akayoroi’s eyes warmed. "Then I will count them for him and leave exactly one more than he expects. A king should suspect generosity."

Thea made a noise that wanted to be a scoff and ended up being a fond huff. "If you all turn him into a legend, I’m going to write a very plain account of him snoring," she warned.

"He does not snore," Mia said, shamefully quick, then groaned softly at herself.

Luna’s eyebrows climbed, pleased and wicked in a friendly way. "Noted."

A small run of laughter rustled the table like a breeze through dry grass, then folded itself away. Mia tucked an escaping lock behind her ear; her knuckles came back faintly stained with road dust, and she rubbed them clean against the hem of her sash without thinking. Thea’s gaze slid to the doorway and back, counting footsteps that weren’t there. Akayoroi, unhurried, adjusted the lamp wick a fraction lower until the flame purred instead of hissed.

Silence came—but not the brittle kind. The hall breathed around it: cups set down with quiet clinks; cloth shifted; the soft, hollow sound of someone’s soles finding a warmer place on the stone floor. Outside the open door, Shadeclaw’s last commands drifted away. Somewhere down-shaft, Lirien’s forge ticked as it cooled, like a sleepy beetle settling under a leaf. From the tunnel came a careful drip —three counts, then one— as though the mountain itself were practicing patience. A drone on watch murmured a challenge and received the soft countersign that meant friend, fed, permitted.

Mia turned to Yavri. Formality reasserted itself, not hard, but present. "I gave a word in the court’s name," she said. "To stay your hand. You gave a word to lay down your weapons. Tomorrow, I will carry a fuller word. Tonight...I want to say thank you for not taking a shorter road."

Yavri looked at her for a long moment. "I would lie if I said I did not consider it," she said. "But I could not ask my women to die to satisfy a point. And a princess told me to wait for a voice. I have always been good at waiting for voices."

"Not mine," Thea muttered. "But I suppose I will practice being second."

"You will be noisy about it," Yavri said dryly.

Thea’s chin came up, then lowered, conceding a hit.

Luna reached across and squeezed Mia’s wrist. "Sleep," she said. "Questions breed in the dark. Answers show their faces after water and bread."

Mia’s eyes had gone heavy in spite of herself. The cup’s heat had traveled into her shoulders and switched off smaller fires she had not realized she’d been tending. "Just a little more talk," she said, the words thickening at the edges.

Akayoroi stood. "Then a little. And then we will build a bed of blankets in the arch so the mountain hears you when you dream." She glanced toward the door. "I will walk the ledge once. It helps me put rooms in the right place in my head."

She touched the doorframe with two fingers as she passed—an old habit, a queen’s way of greeting stone—then paced the short length of the outer step, testing the night’s seam. The wind came clean off the ridge; somewhere below, a night insect sang a single stubborn note and stopped, deciding the cold was not worth the music.

Thea shifted her weight, trying to find a new posture that did not belong to a soldier or a prosecutor. She failed, but the attempt suited her. "Tell me one thing before you pretend to sleep," she said to Mia. "Are we talking about friendship—and I will sharpen my questions accordingly—or are we not?"

Mia’s face fought itself. She stared, mutinous, at her hands. "We are not friends," she said at last. "We are sisters."

Luna’s mouth softened into the kind of smile that forgives the truth for being thin when it is too new to be thicker. "That is a good start."

"And it might be the end," Mia insisted, to prove she could still say words Thea would respect.

Akayoroi’s eyes laughed without sound. "Sometimes the road is the house," she said. "Sometimes it is only the way to the door. Either is fine, if you sleep under a roof and wake with your name."

Yavri tipped her cup in a small soldier’s salute, as if to mark the thought on a ledger she kept behind her eyes. The flame took a slow breath and burned smaller, agreeing.

Thea huffed again. "Fine," she said. "Tonight I will be content with everyone possessing their names and their skin."

She rose and scanned the room for something to fix that wasn’t a person. Finding nothing offending, she did the next best thing and went to the door to glare politely at the corridor, which had the good sense not to glare back. In the lamplight her armor read as pale bone, not threat; the shadow she cast was long and square-shouldered.

Mia’s head nodded once, twice. The cup slipped; Luna caught it without looking down, the movement born from years of rescuing small things from gravity. "Enough," Luna said quietly. "Lie down."

Mia folded without ceremony. The bench’s shadow held her. The world narrowed to warm stone, wool, the smell of dry tea leaves, and the dull ache of injuries that had been outrun and now had caught up on quieter feet. Thea sat at her shoulder like a carved guardian. Yavri closed her eyes with her palm on the table, a soldier’s substitute for a pillow. Akayoroi ghosted once to the door and back, then nested at the threshold with her plates turned so their edges wouldn’t find anyone’s sleep. Someone —Luna, by the neatness— drew a spare blanket over Yavri with the same matter-of-fact care she would give a child or a captain.

The lamp burned low. The mountain kept its own watch.

On the rooftop, Kai sat with Miryam’s chrysalis and learned again the art of being still. The cocoon had deepened in color with the night, the gold now a warmer, heart-lit shade that pulsed on a long, slow beat. The air around it felt like the inside of a cupped hand—kept, protected, focused. The two nine-star cores flanking the altar were dull stones to anyone else’s eyes now, their brilliance banked to the last ember. All aura was gone. To his senses they were a steady feed of breath, the last gentle current a body takes from a river before it steps onto land.

He set the spear within reach and rested his palm lightly on the cocoon’s shell. The hum answered him. Below, the mountain’s corridors thrummed: the last wash pails set aside, a guard’s quiet cough, Wolf’s soft yip when a dream reminded his paws of running. The high air smelled faintly of iron and cool dust; somewhere a grain of grit skittered, and Alka’s head turned, cataloging it and letting it go.

"Almost," he whispered to the shape inside. "Do not hurry. We can hold it until you knock."

The wind combed his hair back from his face and left it where it liked it. Stars made their old, indifferent propositions. Alka perched on the lip of the mountain with her back to him, large and alert, the scholar of every sound that dared cross the ridge. Twice she ruffled her feathers without taking flight. Skyweaver pressed the air into smoothness and yawned into her sleeve. On her second breath she tested a tiny eddy, fingers splayed, then stilled it with a small, satisfied nod.

Kai let his mind make small rounds: check the weakness at the edge of his shoulder plate; count the breath between the cocoon’s pulses; flick his attention down the mountain to feel the cool presence of Luna and the steady weight that was Akayoroi’s patience and the bright, quick spark that was Mia slipping into sleep. He did not listen to their words. He let only their being there steady his spine. He did not know they were talking about him in the hall below; that was a mercy and an irony. He watched the cocoon and thought about tomorrow’s work: a choice with Yavri, a long conversation with Mia, a ledger of wounded to balance with time.

The cocoon thrummed once, a deeper note, as if to say: first things first. He laughed under his breath. "Alright," he said. "First things first."

The night went on doing what nights do when they are tired: keeping the world in one piece and asking very little in return.

Sometime after the lamp gave up and the hall settled into the soft chorus of living bodies resting, Luna woke up enough to pull a blanket from her shoulders and lay it over Mia. Thea, who pretended she didn’t sleep sitting up and did exactly that perfectly, cracked one eye, judged the blanket adequate, and shut the eye again. Akayoroi drifted the length of the arch, laid two fingers against the stone beside the door, and listened for any change in the far-off song above.

Satisfied, she returned to the threshold and kept a queen’s vigil that did not need a crown to name it. Yavri dreamed of shields and woke once, not because she was afraid, but because discipline measures itself against sleep the way a runner marks the road. She drank a mouthful of cold tea and lay her head on her forearm without apology.

And above them all, Kai kept the mountain’s highest promise with a hand on his adopted daughter’s cocoon and his own breath slowed to match hers. He did not know the five women below had finished their words and made their small, practical peace with one another for the night. He didn’t need to. Morning would bring talking. Tonight had brought staying.

Zzzzz zzzz zzzz