It's a balmy summer night. The air is filled with the scent of Belleroyal bushes that have just opened their vibrant red buds, courting the attention of one specific moth. The light is golden-hued, casting a warm glow over everything. I sit on a stone bench in the gardens, surrounded by flora, drinking in the calm of twilight. The bassom trees sway above me, rustled by a gentle night wind, and the leaves of the turtleroses brush against my leg like a pet.

I came out here after I fought with the Ambassador. I considered going back to my room, or to my office, but the entirety of the manor seemed too confining. I could feel the weight of the great house pressing down on me, making it hard for me to breathe. Somehow out here, without windows or doors or walls, I feel I can breathe freely. Out here, it's easier to convince myself that everything will be okay.

I sit for I don't know how long, half my mind focusing on the flowers growing in front of me, half of it an ocean away in Shikkah, seeking out a lost girl. I feel her absence acutely in moments like this, when it's just me and nature and silence. I can almost picture her sitting beside me on the bench. She would reach over and take my hand in hers and squeeze it, the way she did to let me know she was there, she was with me.

If only the wind could carry me across the ocean with it, I think, plucking petals from a veritas flower. They flutter away from me in the breeze, carried off to goddess knows where, little white specs wafting upwards over the garden wall. If only I had an army. If only the world wasn't what it was.

An image suddenly comes into my head, so clear it seems real for a moment. I'm sitting on the same bench, thirty years from now. I imagine lines creasing in the corners of my eyes and around my lips, where I forgot to smile. I see streaks of white winding through my silvery hair, and an aged sallowness replacing the rose of my complexion.

In my vision I've never left the garden. I've spent years there, so long that the grass has grown up over my feet and tendrils of ivy encircle my legs. Moss has grown over half my face; I've been so still for so long. I might as well be a stone. I've been waiting for, for something, I don't know what. For the world to be fair again. For O'otani to come down the path towards me. For my mother to appear and take my hand and lead me home. But no one has come, and I've stagnated in the garden, a forgotten statue locked in the same dead pose.

Is that my future? I wonder. Sitting still, reliving the past over and over and over again because I can't make so much as a dent in the future? Passed over by time, inconsequential, doomed to an eternity of waiting for love to come back? Of waiting to hear footsteps that will never come?

A real set of footsteps comes up the garden path, interrupting my morbid thoughts. I lift my head, expecting to see Avamir or Tyro, but instead a great dark woman stands in front of me. Her hair is down, shifting and whispering in the soft night wind. Her eyes are small and sharp and piercing black, and for a moment their intensity frightens me.

"Hello, Grand Councilor Nara," I stammer out, sitting up straighter and brushing my long hair back from my face.

I wait for her to answer, to return the greeting, but she doesn't. She just stares at me with the same hawkish, intense gaze, her eyes locked unwaveringly on my face. I shift in my seat, uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

"Do you want something from me, Grand Councilor?" I prompt when her silence grows too large to ignore. My voice seems to break her strange concentration: she blinks, her eyes mellowing into something close to calm, and speaks with a clear voice.

"No, Somitu's son. I don't need anything from you. I only came here to walk in the gardens; I didn't expect to find you here at all."

"Oh," I say, still a bit ruffled from her soul-searching stare. "Well, I'm sorry to have disturbed you, I was just heading back inside anyways-" I start to get up, trying to make a speedy exit before she takes any more notice of me.

"Wait," she calls when I begin to walk away.

I turn back around. She sits down on the bench, hesitates, then motions to the place beside her.

"You can sit. I didn't come to displace you."

I try to think of a polite way to decline the offer, but I can't find one, so I sit down next to her. We're both stiff-backed, obviously uncomfortable in the other's presence.

"It's a lovely night, isn't it?" I offer, trying to fill the silence.

"Don't do that," she says with a frown.

"What?" I ask, wondering how a subject as innocuous as the weather could already have offended her.

"Small talk," she answers quickly, "I hate small talk."

"So does Irei," I say, remembering him saying something very similar only a month ago. He told me he couldn't stand empty pleasantries. Said they were too Shikkan for his taste.

Taís stiffens. "You call my brother by his first name?"

I pause, a slow flush coming over my cheeks. It must seem impertinent to her, and after she already accused me of arrogance... "he told me to," I tell her quickly.

She grimaces. "That was what I was afraid of." Her finger taps against her leg, betraying obvious agitation. "He talks about you, you know," she blurts out. "He even asked me to take you up the mountain, even though I told him clearly I wanted nothing to do with you. But he ignores me when it suits him." She shakes her head. "And when he talks about you, he calls you his friend." She laughs, a mirthless, hollow sound. "I'm forced to conclude that my brother cares for you, Somitu's son."

"Cares for me?" I repeat, blushing deeper. What is she trying to say?

"Yes," she says with a curt nod. "I've told him he's a fool to get attached at all, that you'll likely be dead before all of this revolution business is over, but he seems to have taken you under his wing. He always did have an affinity for broken things, you know."

I stiffen, unsure how to respond to her bluntness, to the coldness of her words.

"It's done, now," she says, "I can't stop him for caring for you. It's gone beyond an old vow now. He wants the best for you for your own sake." She sighs. "I don't like it, but it is what it is."

"We're just friends," I say. "We talk, we play cards together, that's all!"

"I know," she tells me. "But my brother doesn't have many friends. Millions of acquaintances, yes, but very few friends." She pauses, biting her lip in a way that suddenly makes her look very young. "I will be blunt with you, Shira. I have very little family. My parents were both buried before I counted twenty years. My older brother is gone, too. I am not married and I have no children. It is just Irei, for me.

"He has risked everything to shelter you," she continues. "And now he has come to like you, and that means he's prepared to risk even more. I know him. Once he's bound himself to someone he never lets go.

"What are you trying to tell me?" I ask, trying to cut through her thoughts to get to the heart of the matter.

Her face hardens. "I am telling you I only have one brother, and that he means the world to me. If anything happens to him because of you, I will hold you personally responsible. Vow or no vow, if Irei is injured in any way I will drag you in front of the Council myself and have you sent back to Shikkah to hang."

"I would never do anything to hurt him," I assure her, choosing not to bristle at her threat. "He took me in when no one else would. I owe him my life."

"Always remember that," she says, "and remember that if anything happens, you will have to answer to me."

In that moment, I quail at the thought. She looks fierce, hair blowing wildly about her as the wind picks up, eyes pinning me to my seat like blades. The shadows of dusk fall in all the crevices of her face, deepening the hollows so her features look almost skeletal. She looks like a goddess for a split second, a harsh, otherworldly being sent to punish mortals for their sins.

"Nothing will happen," I repeat. "I promise." Even if it might be a promise I can't keep.

She nods her head once. Again her eyes linger on my face, almost searching for something.

"What are you looking for?" I ask her, unable to bear the scrutiny in silence for a second time.

"What?"

"When you look at me, you're looking for something," I reply. "Or you see something already, I don't know. What is it?"

"The past," she answers with a sigh. "From some angles you look so much like the past it almost breaks my heart. It's your eyes," she says, reaching forward, as if she's going to touch me. At the last moment her hand drops. "And your brows, and the curve of your lips. So much like him."

"Like who?"

"Just somebody I used to know," she says. "Somebody I used to love."

I frown. It seems like everyone around me is keeping secrets, looking at me and seeing some past they won't disclose.

"Tell me about it," I press. "Who do I look like?"

Taís shakes her head. "It is not my story to tell. I promised Irei I would let your mother tell you."

"Why is everyone so damned inscrutable," I mutter. "There's too many secrets, too many stories nobody will tell."

"Don't worry about them," she advises. "They're in the past. You have enough to trouble you in the future, Somitu's son."

And with that she leaves, and it's just me and the flowers again.