The balcony at the top of Ilyrisse's crystal castle did not have a railing so much as a suggestion of one — a low, seamless lip of the same faceted material as the rest of the tower, curved just enough to keep a careless step from becoming a fall, though nothing in the Between could actually die twice. It jutted out over open air like something that had grown there rather than been built, and from it the view did not so much stretch as arrive, all at once, the way certain things in the Between refused to be taken in gradually.
Below, and below that, and further below still, the gray continent unrolled toward a horizon that never quite resolved into a line. There was no sun in the Between, and so no true sunset, but the ambient light had a way of pooling at the edges of the sky in the late hours, a soft graphite gold that made the endless flat distance look, for exactly as long as it lasted, like something worth staying alive to see. Ilyrisse's meadow-turned-fortress rose out of that flatness like the one exception the world had ever permitted itself, glass and crystal and warmth where nothing else for a thousand miles had either. From this height you could see the shape of the whole estate laid out below — the training yards, the long glass conservatory where Iris kept her one patch of living earth, the winding paths that led toward the meadow proper, all of it lit from within by the same soft gold that seemed to gather nowhere else in the Between quite so willingly.
The wind up here was gentle and constant, less a weather event than a kind of ambient breathing, stirring the loose fabric of six very different women's clothing in six very different ways.
Six women had claimed the balcony that evening, and each of them had claimed it differently, the way a room always tells you who is in it before anyone says a word.
Ilyrisse sat at the balcony's center, in the tall chair that was hers by unspoken agreement rather than by any rule anyone had ever stated aloud, spine straight, hands folded with the particular stillness of someone who has spent centuries being watched and never once stopped accounting for it. Her pale hair was loose tonight — she rarely wore it any other way once the day's business had ended — and the last of the light caught in it like something igniting slowly. She wore a simple deep-violet robe, unornamented, the kind of clothing she only ever allowed herself once the castle's doors had closed to outside business, and she looked, as she almost always looked in company, composed. She did not, tonight, entirely feel it.
Vaelira had not claimed a chair at all. She occupied the wide stone bench along the balcony's east curve the way a cat occupies a windowsill — sideways, one leg drawn up, the other draped off the edge, her indigo-and-silver hair spilling loose across a cushion she had commandeered from somewhere and never returned. Her draped, gold-threaded layers had slipped half off one shoulder, and she had made no move to correct it. Her eyes were closed. This meant nothing. Vaelira's eyes being closed had never, in the recorded history of anyone who knew her, meant she was actually less aware of a room than everyone else in it.
Flora sat nearest the edge, legs folded beneath her, close enough to the drop that Wren's eyes kept finding her without quite meaning to. She had one hand resting flat against the crystal floor, fingers spread, the old unconscious habit of something that had spent an age of the universe needing a surface to lean into. Her pale green hair caught the light the way new leaves catch it — from underneath, somehow, rather than on top. She was watching the horizon with the specific, unguarded attention of someone who had never once, in all her time here, stopped finding it new, her lips very slightly parted, the way they always were when she was somewhere else in her own head, tracing shapes in clouds that weren't quite clouds.
Vesalia sat apart, not from unfriendliness but from an old, permanent instinct toward the edges of rooms — back straight, hands in her lap, a stillness that read, unless you knew her, as coldness rather than what it actually was, which was a woman who had spent centuries learning that being still was safer than being seen to want something. She had chosen the low bench nearest the doorway, angled so that she could see the whole balcony without anyone quite managing to see all of her at once — an old habit, a survivor's geometry, applied now to a room that held no danger at all. She said little. She was, of everyone present, the one most likely to be listening hardest.
Elowen had taken up enough space for three people, which was, everyone present understood by now, simply how Elowen sat — draped rather than seated, one arm thrown along the back of the stone bench, pale silk pooling around her in a way that looked accidental and was not. She had opinions about the conversation already forming before the conversation had properly started, and everyone could see them arriving on her face like weather. Her chestnut hair had come half-loose from whatever elaborate arrangement she'd put it in that morning, and she seemed, if anything, pleased about it.
Wren stood, or rather leaned, near the balcony's entrance, arms loosely crossed, weight on one hip in the particular posture of someone who has spent so many years positioning herself between a door and the person she's protecting that she no longer notices herself doing it. Tonight there was nothing to protect Elowen from except boredom and her own dramatics, and Wren seemed, on some private level, faintly amused by that fact. Inside the castle her sleeves had crept up, her collar had dropped, in the particular way that never quite happened when she was out in the wider Between — a fact she would have denied noticing if anyone had pointed it out.
None of them had planned this gathering, exactly. It had assembled itself the way most good evenings in the castle did — Flora wandering up because the view called to her the way views always did, Vesalia following because Flora had asked her to, once, gently, and it had become a habit neither of them examined too closely, Elowen and Wren arriving because Elowen had declared the balcony "criminally underused" and refused to let the crime continue, Vaelira arriving because Vaelira arrived wherever she pleased and called it fate, and Ilyrisse arriving last, as she always did, because a hostess does not get to enjoy a gathering until she has confirmed there is one to enjoy.
"It really is unfair," Elowen said, apropos of nothing and everything, gesturing at the horizon with a hand that trailed silk like a comet trails light. "That the most beautiful view in this entire dead world belongs to the one woman who almost never has time to sit and look at it."
"I look at it," Ilyrisse said.
"You glance at it. On your way to something more important." Elowen sighed the particular theatrical sigh she had refined over what was, by now, a very long practice. "There's a difference between looking at a view and living inside one."
"She has a point," Vaelira murmured, without opening her eyes.
"I did not ask you," Ilyrisse said, and there was, underneath the dryness, something almost fond.
It began, as these things so often did lately, with Flora.
"Ilyrisse," she said — soft, the way she said almost everything, though never uncertain, not really, not anymore — "will you tell us a story tonight? About him?"
It was such a small question. It had also, over the past several months, become something close to a ritual, and Ilyrisse had come to recognize the particular shape of the silence that followed it: five women, in various postures of studied casualness, waiting to see whether she would say yes.
"I don't know that I have one," Ilyrisse said, which was, on its surface, true. She had centuries of memory of him as a voiceless, rootbound thing on a colorless hill, memories so old and so worn from handling that she sometimes worried she had smoothed the truth out of them the way water smooths a stone. What she did not have, in any real supply, was the kind of story the others meant — the kind Eremos told about them, about the women he loved, stories with beginnings and turns and endings that arrived somewhere. She had stories about a seed that did not speak. She was not certain those were stories at all, in the sense her daughters-in-law meant.
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"You always say that," Elowen said, delighted, "and you always have one anyway."
"I have memories of a flower," Ilyrisse said. "Not stories."
"Mother's being modest," Vaelira said, and there it was — the word, dropped into the conversation the way Vaelira dropped most things, casually, with a faint private smile, as though she hadn't noticed the effect it would have.
Ilyrisse's composure did not crack, exactly. It simply developed, for a moment, a very fine and very visible seam.
"Please don't," she said.
"Don't what? Call you what you are?" Vaelira cracked one gold eye open, delighted with herself in the specific way she only ever got delighted when she had found something soft to press on. "You raised him for an age of the universe. You are, by any honest accounting, his mother."
"I am also," Ilyrisse said, with the particular careful evenness of a woman choosing every word like she was defusing something, "his wife."
"Yes," Elowen said, savoring it, "that's rather the whole delicious problem, isn't it."
It was not, strictly, a joke that had ever needed elaborating before, and Ilyrisse had spent a very long time simply not elaborating it, the way one does not elaborate a bruise by pressing on it repeatedly. But her daughters-in-law — and there it was again, the word arriving unbidden even in her own head, because if the logic held for one relationship it held for the rest of them too, and the logic very much held — her daughters-in-law had apparently decided, collectively and without any actual conspiracy required, that tonight was the night to enjoy it out loud.
"You raised him from a seed," Elowen went on, clearly warming to the theme the way she warmed to every theme that let her perform delight. "You loved him before he had a voice. You named things about him. That is a mother, Ilyrisse, in every sense the word has ever had."
"And then," Vaelira added, entirely too pleased with the rhythm they had built together, "several centuries later, he grew up, found you again, and married you. Which makes every single one of us, strictly speaking—"
"Do not finish that sentence," Ilyrisse said.
"—your daughters-in-law," Vaelira finished, because Vaelira had never once in her existence let a warning stop her from finishing a sentence she wanted to finish.
Flora laughed — a small, startled, delighted sound, the kind she rarely let herself make in company, and it undid something in the tension of the moment simply by being so unguarded. Even Vesalia, who said almost nothing, allowed the corner of her mouth to move.
"It is," Ilyrisse admitted, after a long moment, in the tone of someone confessing something under duress, "the single most confusing relationship structure I have ever had to hold in my head. And I once ran an empire. I once held a continent's succession law in one hand and a war in the other, and neither of those ever gave me the particular headache that this household gives me before breakfast."
"Tell us honestly," Elowen said, sitting forward now, chin propped on one hand, eyes bright with the particular mischief of someone who had once assumed the Between would run on the same rigid hierarchies her old court had, and had been corrected exactly once, gently, and had never needed correcting again — which did not mean she had lost her taste for testing edges, only that she now tested the ones that were safe to test. "Do you lie awake at night thinking, I am married to my own son?"
"I do not lie awake at night thinking anything so vulgar," Ilyrisse said, with the particular dignity of someone who absolutely did think something adjacent to that at least once a month. "I lie awake at night thinking that I have several hundred women who all, in some sense, married my child, and that not one of you will let me forget it."
"We call you Mother because we love you," Flora said, quietly, and there was nothing performed in it at all — it landed in the middle of the teasing like a stone dropped into still water, simple and entirely sincere. "Not only to bother you."
"I know that," Ilyrisse said, and something in her, some old defended thing, softened for a moment before she caught herself. "It is only — I have never been anyone's sister, before. I have commanded people. I have raised one person, in the oldest and strangest sense that word can carry. I have never simply been one woman among equals, teased the way sisters tease each other, and I find I have no idea what to do with my hands when it happens."
It was, for Ilyrisse, an unusually direct admission, and the balcony went quiet around it — not an uncomfortable quiet, but the kind that happens when someone says a true thing plainly and everyone recognizes it costs something to say.
"Well," Elowen said, gentler now, some of the theater dropping out of her voice, "you're doing better than you think. My mother figure, back home, would have had someone flogged for less familiarity than we've shown you in the last five minutes."
"Don't tempt her," Wren said dryly, from her post near the door. "She's had a long week."
"I have had," Ilyrisse said, "a long several centuries, and you are all somehow the least of my difficulties and the entirety of them at once."
It was Vaelira, in the end, who pulled the moment back from wherever it was threatening to sink — not because she had grown tired of teasing, exactly, but because some older, more careful instinct in her had clocked the exact moment Ilyrisse's discomfort tipped from amusing to actually cornered, and Vaelira, for all her laziness, had never once let someone she cared about drown in a joke she'd started.
"All right," she said, stretching with the deliberate, unhurried luxury of a cat deciding to move, "leave Mother alone for one moment. I have decided to be helpful."
"You," Ilyrisse said, with open suspicion, "helpful."
"It happens more than you'd think. Rarely, but decisively." Vaelira rolled off the bench in one long, lazy motion and drifted toward Ilyrisse's chair, and there was, underneath the theater of it, something genuinely protective in the way she inserted herself into the center of the conversation, drawing all its attention away from Ilyrisse and onto herself instead. "I will tell the story tonight."
"You," Elowen said, delighted anew, "want to tell a story? You, who fall asleep in the middle of your own sentences?"
"I fall asleep during things that bore me. This will not bore anyone." Vaelira perched herself, with theatrical casualness, on the arm of Ilyrisse's chair — and then, in a single fluid motion that surprised absolutely no one who had watched the two of them together before, folded down into Ilyrisse's lap instead, arranging herself like she'd been invited, which she very much had not.
"Vaelira—"
"Mother," Vaelira said, with a perfectly straight face, "since we're doing this, I believe it falls to you to discipline your daughter-in-law when she misbehaves."
"You have not misbehaved yet."
"Give it a moment."
Ilyrisse's hand found Vaelira's hip more out of long habit than any actual plan, and there was a brief, warm silence in which everyone on the balcony seemed to understand, without anyone saying it, that whatever came next was simply how these two had always spoken to each other — teasing worn soft with genuine centuries of affection underneath it.
"Fine," Ilyrisse said, and there was real humor in it now, the seam in her composure widening into something closer to play. "A mother disciplines an unruly daughter-in-law."
The swat, when it landed, was light — barely more than a tap, delivered with the exact restraint of someone who did not actually want to hurt the person curled in her lap. Vaelira made a small, unbothered sound.
"That's it? That's your discipline?" She turned her head, gold eyes gleaming with mischief. "Everyone always goes for the same place, you know. It's remarkably unoriginal of the entire household."
"You make it very easy to aim for," Elowen said sweetly.
"I resent that on principle," Vaelira said, "and I feel nothing when—"
Ilyrisse, who had spent several centuries learning exactly what Vaelira's nothing sounded like when it was actually something she was too proud to admit to, delivered the second swat with rather more intention behind it. Vaelira's composure broke for exactly one syllable — a small, sharp exhale that was not quite a laugh — before she recovered, sitting up properly in Ilyrisse's lap with as much dignity as the situation allowed, one hand pressed briefly, betrayingly, to the spot in question.
"There," Ilyrisse said, not quite hiding her own satisfaction. "Now. Was there a story, or was this simply an elaborate excuse to sit in my lap?"
"Can it not be both?" Vaelira said — and then, settling, some of the play draining out of her voice and into something quieter, something that made even Elowen stop smiling and lean in. "There was a story. There is a story. I've been sitting on it for longer than I've sat on anyone."