The Autumn Republic

Epilogue

Vlora stood outside of her carriage, looking up at the three-story town house situated on a quiet street on Adopest’s east side.

It was late in the afternoon, almost four o’clock, and Vlora cocked her head to listen for the church bell that had been rung every hour for the many years that she’d lived in this home. It was several moments before she remembered that every church in Adopest had been destroyed, and the thought of never hearing that bell again brought her sadness.

“Would you like me to come in?” Olem asked from the carriage.

“Give me a few minutes,” she said, closing the carriage door. She walked past the overgrown garden and up the front steps, slipping a brass key from her pocket.

Long practice made her stop in the foyer and listen for voices to call her name, but nothing answered her presence in the old home but the familiar creak of the floorboards beneath her feet. Dust filled her nostrils, and she wondered if anyone had been here since before the night of the coup so many months ago. Her inquiries had told her the servants were dismissed last winter.

She was a general now, but felt no sense of accomplishment from it. The newly minted House of Ministers had showered her with praise and given her the promotion with Tamas only a week in his grave. Now, six weeks later, it didn’t seem any less strange. The youngest general in Adran history, even younger than Tamas himself when he first achieved the rank. She wondered if everyone else saw it as the political stunt that it was.

Use them before they use you, she heard Tamas’s voice say in the back of her head. Show them you earned it.

She went up the stairs and sought the first room on the right – her room for six years of her life, after Tamas had saved her from the street. She remembered a time from before the coup. Before Taniel was sent to Fatrasta and before that blasted nobleman.

Laughter echoed in her memory and she tilted her head, wondering if she had heard it for real. No. Of course not.

The bed seemed so much smaller than she remembered. How had she and Taniel fit in there on those nights when Tamas was gone? Had Borbador still been in the house? Or had that been after he was taken away by the cabal magus-seekers?

The memories seemed distant now, and she left the room and continued down the hall, pausing beside the door to Tamas’s office.

His desk was coated in dust, a map of Adopest still held down at the corners by Tamas’s favorite teacup and a handful of musket balls. Vlora crossed to the desk and rolled up the map carefully before returning it to its place on Tamas’s bookshelf. She unbuttoned the gold epaulets on the shoulders of her uniform and set them on the desk where the map had been.

She felt tired. Dizzy. Weeks straight of shaking hands. Of parades and memorials. Tamas’s funeral as well, which had been attended by two kings, a queen, and what the newspapers had said were eight million mourners. It had even been presided over by the newly pardoned Arch-Diocel Charlemund.

She opened the window of Tamas’s study and watched the dust swirl in the sunlight. Slowly, she went through the various knickknacks Tamas had collected in Gurla. She ran a finger down the spines of his leather-bound books on warfare, religion, and economics. She remembered the contents of this study like she remembered the palm of her own hand, and tried to recall the first time she had ever been in this room.

The memory seemed distant. Perhaps even manufactured in the back of her mind, pieced together from the scraps of a hundred other memories. It was a faded thing, like cloth left in the sunlight for too many years.

There was a creak on the floorboards and Vlora opened her eyes, not remembering that she’d closed them. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, but she did not wipe them away.

“You don’t have to go,” she said to the figure in the doorway.

Taniel wore faded buckskins and held an old, secondhand rifle in his hands. He had grown out his beard and his hair. His eyes were brighter than she’d seen in years and he looked as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

“I do,” he said with a smile. “I’m free, Vlora.”

She stepped around Tamas’s desk and walked up to him, examining his face and eyes. She glanced back at the epaulets she’d left on the desk and she thought she understood.

“They made you a general,” Taniel said.

She glanced at the epaulets again, a bitter taste in her mouth.

“The country will need you. Tamas’s death has left a gap.”

“One I can’t hope to fill.”

“Just concentrate on the tasks at hand,” Taniel said.

Vlora responded, “Beon je Ipille has gone into hiding and there are rumblings of a Kez civil war. General Hilanska still needs to be brought to justice. Bo wants to combine Privileged and powder mages in the new republic cabal, and Gavril wants to make sweeping reforms to the Mountainwatch. There is… a lot to do.”

Vlora had expected a more emotional response from Taniel at the mention of Hilanska, but he just nodded and reached over to touch the gold epaulets she’d left on the desk.

“Tamas would be proud.”

Vlora looked down at her uniform, at the variety of accolades that she wanted every day to rip off the front. “You sure?”

“I am. Will you sell the house?”

Vlora blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I read about the will in the newspaper. With me dead, Tamas left everything to you and Bo,” Taniel said, touching the door frame with two fingers. “I’d sell it, personally. Too many memories.”

“Pit, no. I’m moving into it.”

Taniel seemed surprised, but after a few moments he smiled again. “That makes me glad, for some reason. We had a good time here, didn’t we?”

“We did.” They stood quietly for several moments before Vlora said, “Forgive me?”

“Only if you forgive me.”

“I already have.”

They hugged, and Vlora felt Taniel’s lips pressed to her forehead. She felt dampness in her hair, and when they separated, Taniel wiped tears from his eyes.

Vlora took his hand. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

He left her in the quiet of her new home.

She remembered a night not long after Tamas had taken her in, when she’d had nightmares. Tamas had come to her room and put her back in bed. He had kissed her on the forehead, which no one had ever done for her before, and told her that nothing would ever harm her or Taniel while he lived.

Even with the blood and slaughter and death, she hadn’t had a nightmare since.

“Were you talking to someone?” Olem asked, entering the office.

Who would keep the nightmares away now, she wondered, but even as she did so, she could hear Tamas’s voice in her head. You will, he seemed to say.

“No one,” she answered Olem. “Just shadows of the past.”