Yara blinked.
Then she waited, because gods who spend a year rehearsing a confession expect a scene at the end of it, and she’d clearly budgeted for one.
Soren didn’t give her a scene.
"Okay," he said again. "Now the follow-up."
"You’re supposed to be angry."
"I’ll get to it."
"People get to it first."
"People aren’t me." He put his hands in his pockets. "What else did you move?"
Her ears went back.
He’d watched her do it exactly twice before, both times when he’d said something she hadn’t planned for, and both times she’d come back sharper.
"That’s your question," Yara said.
"That’s my question."
"I told you I emptied a boy to make room for you."
"I heard you."
"I told you I killed people."
"You said you killed the ones who looked too close. That’s a category, not a number." Soren rocked back on his heels. "So. What else did you move?"
Yara laughed.
It came out startled, cracked at the edge, the same laugh she made when he beat her at something small and stupid, and it was possibly the least godlike sound ever produced on a sealed grave.
"You’re doing the thing," she said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you skip past the part that’s supposed to break you and go straight to inventory."
Her red eyes were bright now, delighted, the appetite fully out.
"I dreamed about this conversation for months and you’re doing inventory."
"You built a man who does inventory."
"I did," Yara said. "I did that."
"Sit," Soren said.
"On the ground?"
"On the ground."
She sat, cross-legged, on her own sealed grave, and folded her hands in her lap the same way she had that first night on his floor, and looked up at him with the identical expression, which was somewhere between worship and appetite and had never once been anything else.
"You told me to sit again," she said, pleased.
"I’m going to be here a while and my neck hurts looking up at a god."
"That’s the least reverent thing anyone has ever said to me."
"Get used to it."
He sat down too, across from her, on the pale patch, and the east yard was cold and empty and lit by nothing, and the two of them looked at each other over Selah’s ice.
"Start at the top," Soren said. "What am I standing on?"
"You won’t like it."
"I’ve disliked everything since midnight. I’ve built up a tolerance."
◆◆◆◆
"You already know."
"I want it said."
"A piece of my mother," Yara said.
Soren’s hands did not move in his pockets. That took something.
"Explain that."
"There’s a thing under this yard. You’ve met it. It’s old and it’s hungry and it doesn’t have a face because it never finished growing one."
Her voice stayed level.
"It came off her. A long time ago, before this world had academies to build on top of it. It’s not a monster, master. It’s a piece of a bigger thing, and the bigger thing is my family."
"You have a family."
"Everything has a family. Mine’s just older and worse at letting go."
"Does it know you?"
"It knew me the second it came up through that floor." Yara’s ears stayed flat.
"You saw it. On the ice, at the end, when Grimm stood on the seal and it turned its head."
"It tilted."
"It was recognized. That’s family, master. That’s the only greeting they have."
"Where’s the rest of her?"
"Down." Yara’s ears flicked once toward the seal. "Very far down. Asleep in the place I left when I decided I’d rather have you. She doesn’t come up. She has no reason to."
"And the piece?"
"The piece is mine. I kept it." She said it the way a person says they kept a knife. "It’s useful."
"Useful how."
Yara smiled.
"That’s the next question," she said. "You’ll like the answer less than this one."
"Try me."
"You’ll want to be standing."
"I’ll risk it."
"Master."
She leaned forward on her hands, and the yard’s shadows leaned with her, every one of them, which was the first genuinely inhuman thing she’d done all night.
"I’m going to tell you what I did with a year of your life, and it’s going to reorganize every memory you have of it. You’ve been building a count all winter. It’s a very good count. I’ve watched you build it."
"You watched me build a count about you."
"It was the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me."
"Yara?"
"I’m serious. Nobody’s ever tried to catch me before."
Her hands flattened on the ice.
"Three hundred years and not one thing that walks ever looked at what I’d arranged and thought someone arranged this. You did it in a winter. Off a coordinate and an oil can."
"You left the oil can out."
"I did not."
"You polished the wear faces on a chain until they had a groove in them. That’s leaving the oil can out."
Yara’s ears went flat, and she looked, for one second, extremely annoyed.
"That was maintenance."
"That was sloppy."
"It was maintenance. You don’t understand what it takes to keep a thing like that on a leash for that long."
"Then explain it to me."
◆◆◆◆
She stopped.
He watched her understand what she’d just walked into, which was a man who had spent a year learning to ask small questions until the big ones fell out on their own.
"You did that on purpose," Yara said.
"Yes."
"You made me defensive about my own crime scene."
"Yes."
"That’s not fair."
"You emptied a person to get me here. Fair left the field a while ago."
Yara looked at him.
Then she started laughing again, and this time it went on, and she put her forehead down on her own hands on the ice of the seal and laughed at the ground while the shadows of the east yard shifted around her in shapes that had nothing to do with the light.
"Gods," she said, into her hands. "Gods, I picked well."
◆◆◆◆
When she sat up, whatever had been careful in her was gone.
"Alright," Yara said. "You want the year."
"I want the year."
"All of it. Every hand. You don’t get to stop me in the middle and say that’s enough, because you’ll want to, around the fourth thing."
"What’s the fourth thing?"
"The fourth thing has names in it."
Soren sat on a grave in the cold with the goddess who’d built his life, and he ran one last check against the count, and the count had been ready for this since the tunnel.
"Names of people who died," he said.
"Names of people you’ve met."
The wind came across the east yard and the shadows didn’t move in it, because the shadows out here weren’t taking orders from the wind tonight.
"Start with the shell," Soren said.
"That’s the boring one."
"That’s the one with the founding date. Start there and walk forward, and don’t skip the delegate, and when we get to the names you say them slowly."
Yara rose to her feet and offered him her hand.
"Then get up, master," she said. "This part I’d rather show you."