Singing, “Bainne Na Mbó Ar Na Gamhna”

April 489 I.C., Odin

Hilde was still staying in Kircheis’s apartment, and so was Kircheis. She wished that she could say that nothing between them had changed, but that would have been a lie. They were both different people, ones who didn’t know each other the same way anymore. 

Kircheis was quiet. His right hand had required surgery to fix the shattered metacarpals, to hold them in place, and he wore a cast. The conditions of the surgery seemed borderline archaic, performed by a surgeon that Oberstein had found for him in one of Braunschweig’s safehouses. But Kircheis had not uttered a word of complaint. Hilde nursed worries about how his hand would function when it healed, but he said nothing about what life would be like after the cast came off. He just held a pen in his left hand and wrote excruciatingly slowly whenever he needed to send a message to someone, or typed with two fingers.

She thought about suggesting that he go to stay with her cousin out in the countryside, but every time she opened her mouth to ask if he would, the words died on her tongue. She didn’t know if Kircheis would be offended by the idea of being shipped off to the house of ill health, but Hilde realized that she couldn’t bear his absence. It was selfish of her to want to keep him, and so she pretended that it was for his sake that she didn’t make the offer.

She didn’t know if he cared much about pride, but he wanted to be useful, if only because it kept his mind off of things. He would accompany her to see Bronner in the newly occupied Ministry of War, or Reuenthal in his countryside exclave, and they would walk side by side through the greening forest afterwards, not speaking. But she didn’t take him with her to go see Merkatz in Neue Sanssouci, and he never asked to follow her. Even during the meetings he did attend, he sat silently and just listened, having nothing to say unless he was asked directly.

Hilde, as seemingly one of the least affected by the course of the war, had taken it upon herself to perform as much of the coordinating and communication work as she could. There were plenty of disparate groups in the capital who all suddenly needed to work together. There was Reuenthal out in the country, keeping Litchtenlade prisoner, and working with Oberstein as the head of the few of Brauschweig’s and his own forces that had remained on the planet through the entire Civil War. Merkatz brought with him a whole host of new soldiers, some of whom stayed in orbit, but most who were on the ground, working everywhere in the city. Soldiers who had once been loyal to Litchtenlade, or who had spent the entire course of the war in hiding, came to join Merkatz’s camps, and had to be dealt with. Baron Flegel took over the military police, taking great joy in vetting the ranks. Prisoners, former soldiers of Littenheim, had to be kept under control. The shattered remains of civilian infrastructure and governance had to be pulled together piece by piece.

As Hilde ran back and forth carrying messages and giving orders on someone else’s behalf, she became aware of just how easy it might have been for Bronner to perform a similar duty in disguise in the Littenheim camp during the war. No one seemed to care who she was or where the messages and instructions she was carrying came from— they were all too wrapped up in their own problems to care, and they accepted her at her word that Commodore Leigh or Admiral Merkatz or Kaiserin Elizabeth would vouch for her.   

It was tedious messenger work at times, but she made the best of it. It got her in the room, and it was something for her to do. She wouldn’t have said so to anyone, especially not Kircheis, but she almost missed the chaos of the days when she had been planning her attack on Litchtenlade. She liked the feeling of participating in something that felt crucial and larger than herself, the real passage of history, and running errands felt hollow in comparison.

Still, she made herself present and known as herself as much as she could. Ingratiating herself with the upper echelons of Braunschweig’s military was good practice for being Elizabeth’s advisor. When she went to these meetings, she often wore Kircheis’s uniform jacket. It was too big for her, but was a comfort to have wrapped around her in the chill spring wind. 

She clung to the small hope that once Hank returned to Odin, things would improve. He felt like the missing piece in at least some of their lives— the lodestar for Kircheis, the friend for Reuenthal, the husband for Magdalena, and the one man capable of carrying the entire country on his back. 

Perhaps it was unfair of her to rest all of this on him. She had come through the war relatively unscathed, but that was not true for everyone, and she doubted it was true for him. She often wondered how Hank was doing; the news from Merkatz and Mittermeyer when they came back from Iserlohn was unsatisfactory, as were the short text communiques that followed once the jamming between Odin and Iserlohn lessened. She wanted to speak to him, but military transmission bandwidth was limited due to the destruction of some of the satellites normally in orbit around Odin, so she could only jot down notes to be sent along in the daily update packet, and none of those could contain anything personal.

Even though the fighting had abated, and there were regular (if limited) disbursals of food to the public from the supplies that Merkatz brought with him from Iserlohn, life in the capital was still difficult, and Hilde doubted that it would ever be the same as it once was. 

The winter snow had completely melted off into dreary spring rain, and so nothing remained that could hide all the damage. The garbage on the streets was being hauled away, but this made the roads feel even more deserted than before. Anyone who had left the capital for the relative safety of the countryside would not return for a long time, and so the empty streets echoed with the odd engine roar of solitary vehicles. 

In between her self-imposed military duties, she still had to haul gallons of water up to their apartment and deal with the thousands of pressing, individual problems that came from living without enough electricity. It exhausted her, but she treated this exhaustion as a blessing: if she was always busy, she wouldn’t ever have time to sit down and think about anything except the problems of the day that she could solve.

After Merkatz spoke with the command on Iserlohn, preparations began to launch a fleet to Geiersburg to retrieve the Kaiserin and bring her back to Odin. Hilde knew that, as Elizabeth’s advisor, she would be given permission to accompany the fleet if she asked for it, but she hesitated before asking, and brought the subject up with Kircheis.

It was evening, and they were both in their apartment. It had been raining earlier, but it had stopped, and so they opened some of the windows, less concerned about keeping in heat than getting fresh air. 

Hilde was boiling water on their single hotpot, just enough so that they could both take some approximation of a bath— or at least sponge themselves down— without freezing. This was an activity that Kircheis, with his hand in a cast that he couldn’t get wet, wasn’t able to do easily on his own. Hilde usually helped him wash his hair, and then left him to scrub the rest of himself down at his own pace. 

Washing his hair was a curiously intimate experience, and Hilde wasn’t ever sure if she should feel as aware of the intimacy as she did. It was almost medical— a nurse would have done the same with a clinical detachment— but she was his friend.

The first pot of water finished boiling, and she quickly switched it with the second pot, and  carried the first to the bathroom and dumped it into the already half-full bucket of cold water. She stirred it with their soup ladle, which now lived in the bathroom for this purpose. Kircheis, who had been sitting on the couch in the living room, watching the darkening April sky, got up and leaned in the doorway. She didn’t want to waste their supply of candles on this, so it was dim in the bathroom. The last of the red sunlight dripped in through the window and across the ceiling. Hilde knelt on the tile in front of the bath and stirred the water in the bucket, testing it with her arm, sleeves rolled up, to make sure that it was neither too hot nor too cold. 

“Do you want me to wash your hair?” Hilde asked.

With his free left hand, Kircheis reached up to touch his head, the red curls lank with grease and drooping down. They usually only did this about once a week— it was too much of an effort to do it more often than that— but it meant that they were filthy by week’s end. Everyone on Odin was in the same situation, at least. But when Merkatz made his video call to Iserlohn two days ago, Hilde had been too embarrassed of her unkempt appearance to ask to appear in the frame, though she had sat in the room and listened.

“If you’re willing to,” he said.

“I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t,” she said, and motioned him forward. He pulled off his sweater, leaving him in a white tee shirt, and he came to sit cross legged on the tile floor of the bathroom in front of her. She looked at him carefully for a moment. Over the past few weeks, most of the obvious bruises and cuts that had littered his body had faded, and all that remained was the ghost of them, the purpling around his eyes that could have been mistaken for exhaustion.

She pushed his head back, over the edge of the tub, and he slid down so his shoulders were resting on the porcelain. Carefully, she ladeled the hot water over his head, like a baptism. She supposed the intimacy came from her not trying to do it as fast as possible. Even though her knees ached from kneeling on the tile, she was very slow and deliberate as she put the shampoo in his hair, squeezing out the dregs of the bottle that they would soon need to replace (maybe the military had some soap— she wouldn’t know where to start looking otherwise). She ran both her hands through his hair, brushed the lather off his forehead and away from his eyes with the palm of her hand, traced the crease where his ears met his head with her fingers.

She wasn’t sure how he felt about all this. He would have told her to stop if he disliked it, or would have insisted on washing his hair himself, but he sat at her side without complaint, and closed his eyes.

“Sieg,” she said. He didn’t open his eyes, but he turned his head towards her slightly. His hair was still full of shampoo foam, and as she spoke, she pushed his curls back across the top of his head, combing her fingers through them and teasing out the tangles she found. “Would you be alright, if I left for a few weeks?”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

This was probably true— Kircheis was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, even with one hand— but that hadn’t really been what she was asking.

“Admiral Merkatz is sending a fleet to Geiersburg, to bring Elizabeth back here. I’m going to ask to go with them— unless you don’t want me to go.”

“You should go.”

“Sieg—”

He cracked open his eyes to look at her, and didn’t say anything. 

They had never actually talked about what had happened on March fifteenth. All she knew was that Kircheis was alive, and Martin was dead. Everything else, she had gathered from what Bronner told to her later— though what Bronner knew and how he knew it was a question that didn’t have an answer. His information had consisted of marked up maps showing no-longer-secret entryways into the palace, and lists of dead men. 

She had never asked how Martin died while Kircheis lived— it had seemed like the only impossible outcome. When she had discovered Kircheis’s note, telling her where he was going and what he was doing, she had put her head on her arms and cried, knowing that she would never see him again. But he came back, like a living ghost returning home.

Whatever had happened to him in the halls of Neue Sanssouci was unbearable, but somehow he kept moving. An equally unbearable misery had landed on Eva’s shoulders, forcing her to run to Phezzan. And something, too, had happened to Reuenthal in the Litchtenlade house that had changed him— even Hilde could see it in the way he moved and spoke. A storm had passed everywhere around her, and she had stayed standing perfectly still in the eye of it, untouched by any wind that blew, just watching as it rent bodies and buildings apart. 

With her hand tangled in Kircheis’s hair, she said, “You must be stronger than I am.”

“No.”

“I don’t think—” She paused, and tried to say what she meant. “I wouldn’t want to be alone,” she said. “If I—” If the storm had not passed by her. “I wouldn’t want you to leave.”

He didn’t say anything.

“What do you think I would have done, if my father had died as Castrop’s prisoner?” she asked. It was the only thing she could reach for, the closest analogy she could draw to what had happened in Neue Sanssouci, or what she imagined had happened. What she might have really wanted to ask was, What would I do if you were dead? But she couldn’t ask that. She was afraid Kircheis might have preferred that outcome.

“You would have lived,” he said. He closed his eyes again. “He would have wanted you to.”

Kircheis was answering for Martin— they both understood this, even if Kircheis’s words felt flat and dull— the true thing said by rote because he couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

“And that’s all?”

His left hand was resting on the ground, palm up. His fingers were so loose and floppy, like there was no strength left in him. “I’ll be fine if you go,” he promised again.

“Do you want me to leave?” This was, perhaps, the more important question to ask, though she regretted it as soon as she said it. His fingers twitched on the floor, like the legs of an upturned insect.

“No,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was lying. “But you should.”

“When I come back—” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. She hadn’t started it with any particular conclusion in mind; it was just acting as the promise of a future.

“The civil war will be over,” Kircheis said.

“Yes. That’s true.” She tried to hold on to the idea of crowning Elizabeth on Odin, but the idea felt incompatible with the ruins of the city, and the blood that she imagined spilling across Neue Sanssouci’s marble floors.

She tried to push the image out of her head, and picked up the ladle again, pouring water through Kircheis’s red hair until all the soap was gone, and the water dripping onto his shoulders and down the drain ran clear.

---

The one question that remained about the force being sent to escort Elizabeth from Geiersburg to Odin was who would command the fleet. The random assortment of high-ranking (or otherwise included despite rank in that number by blessing of Commodore Leigh) members of Braunschweig’s camp met in a briefing room in the Ministry of War. This group included Merkatz, Flegel, Mittermeyer, Reuenthal, Oberstein, the recently allowed to join their ranks Fahrenheit and Bronner, and Hilde, along with a few subordinates of Merkatz and the other men that Hilde didn’t know very well. The room was on the upper floor of the building, which was now the most used floor due to the abundance of skylights. Here, she could see out of the  huge plate windows looking out over the still-dead and pitted grass in front of the building. Outside, the sky was a cold grey blue, a cloud-haze not entirely distinguishable from bare sky.

The building itself had been cleaned up with traditional military discipline, and so aside from the lack of electricity in many areas, the building felt much like it had before the war. Hilde suspected that the reason the hallways were so full of soldiers was because off this: these small stretches of hallway felt normal, and like a sign that there was continuity of the past before the war with the present. The civil war had been a momentary aberration in the course of things; the military and the Empire would keep on as they had been.

Of course, all the soldiers in the hallways smelled like sweat, and the hems of their pants were often crusted with street-mud, since both laundry and personal hygiene remained in short supply.

Hilde was only at the meeting because she had arranged her trip to ask Merkatz if she could accompany the dispatch to coincide with the planning meeting, and simply stayed in the room when everyone else walked in. No one objected, at least not openly. Looking around, Hilde could see that this was an uncomfortable coalition at best— even Mittermeyer and Reuenthal, who were fast friends, seemed to be at odds with each other and sat on opposite sides of the table. The greetings everyone else exchanged as they came in were the frosty ones given to strangers and other allies of circumstance, at best. Hilde sat between Merkatz’s aide, Schneider, and Bronner, who gave her a grim smile.

“Lieutenant Kircheis not here today?” Bronner asked, which made Fahrenheit look over at the two of them.

“He’s not interested in coming on the dispatch,” Hilde said. “I’ll be going, since I’m Elizabeth’s advisor.”

“Your father was on Geiersburg, wasn’t he?” Bronner asked.

“He went to the frontier, trying to arrange for supplies to be sent to Geiersburg,” Hilde said. “There have been supplies making it there, so he’s probably still out there, and just radio silent. Communication hasn’t been easy for anyone.”

“I must admit,” Flegel said, butting into the conversation, “it seems like my uncle made the right choice in helping free him from prison.”

“I hope that you can now consider any debt repaid?” Hilde asked, which just made Flegel laugh. He might have been about to say something else, but Merkatz brought the room to order to discuss the plan, needing only to look up from the paper Schneider had handed him and give a single quiet word to get most of the room to fall silent. Flegel, who had been about to say something starting with, “I think your father—” trailed off, the last one talking.

He had Schneider present most of the detailed logistics: which ships were fit to be dispatched, how long they could travel without resupply, and what potential routes they could take to make it to Geiersburg, in case they encountered resistance from the remaining Imperial fleet. All of this was very standard information, but some of it made people around the table raise eyebrows.

“That is quite a large number of ships you’re dispatching,” Fahrenheit said. “Won’t this be leaving the capital under-defended?”

“Commodore Leigh suggested that it would be better to ensure the Kaiserin’s safety with a larger fleet,” Merkatz said. His voice was very flat— he clearly expected someone to press him about the reason, but it was delivered with the resigned hope that they would simply accept it from their leader. But command structures in this informal group had become frayed, and it seemed to Hilde that coordinating noble officers was like herding cats. 

“Oh, of course, if Leigh suggested it,” Flegel said.

“He is also concerned about a potential rebel invasion while we are weak,” Merkatz continued. “Mobilizing a large force in that area would be useful to prevent further intrusion into the country, if there is a corridor breakthrough.”

Everyone at the table could picture a map of the galaxy: Geiersburg was far closer to Phezzan than Iserlohn, and any troops dispatched there would have a difficult time protecting Odin if the Alliance came through the Iserlohn corridor. But when Hilde glanced around the table, expecting anyone to point out the implications of this troop movement, no one said anything. Perhaps even Flegel, though he was frowning, had been convinced enough of Hank’s prescience to risk it.

“The remainder of the duke’s fleet is still stationed at Iserlohn,” Merkatz said, following up his own statement. “This is just a precautionary measure.”

Reuenthal asked, “Will the fleet remain there, or will they escort the Kaiserin back to Odin?”

“As many of them should remain as they can,” Merkatz said.

“Then how will this, in any way, be guaranteeing her safety?” Flegel asked.

“Duke Braunschweig has expressed interest in negotiating with Litchtenlade for a surrender of the remaining holdout forces,” Merkatz said. “I hope that by the time Elizabeth is ready to depart Geiersburg, we will have obtained some guarantee of her safety. But Her Majesty can choose from the ships sent which ones return with her.”

“I should speak with Litchtenlade,” Flegel said. “I don’t understand why we haven’t yet. He’s our prisoner— he doesn’t have much to bargain with.”

Merkatz frowned. “Because, Baron, I am not the Kaiserin, and neither are you. I do not want to overstep my place and sign an agreement that she would have to live with.”

“Admiral Merkatz,” Hilde said. “Perhaps I might speak with him?”

“You?” Reuenthal asked from the end of the table.

Hilde looked across at him, her gaze as unflinching as she could make it. “Kaiserin Elizabeth appointed me to be her advisor. I may not be able to sign anything in her stead, but I might be able to find terms that Litchtenlade would agree with, and that she would not find objectionable. That way, they could at least be presented to Her Majesty immediately.”

It was a fair enough argument. Merkatz nodded. “You may speak with him.”

“And I couldn’t negotiate similar terms?” Flegel asked.

“You had no success negotiating the surrender at Iserlohn,” Mittermeyer said. “I don’t see why you’d do any better today. If we need Litchtenlade to cooperate with us, it will be easier if he doesn’t end up with a knife in his throat. I’m told he’s in poor health to begin with.”

Flegel turned white, then red. “Rear Admiral, if you’re relying on Leigh to tell you what happened at Iserlohn, I think you’re making an error of judgment. He’s never been a man who tells the full story.”

“I doubt it,” Mittermeyer said.

“Enough,” Merkatz said. “The matter of the day is the fleet going to Geiersburg.” He swept his gaze around the room. “It needs a commander. Are there any of you who feel willing and able to take the task? All of us have either just returned to Odin, or have had a challenging past few months— I don’t want to assign a critical task to a man who doesn’t think he is capable of performing it.”

Merkatz was looking at a sea of bad options, Hilde realized. The table was filled with flag officers of dubious competence (Flegel), dubious loyalty to Braunschweig’s camp (Fahrenheit and Bronner), dubious stability after receiving bad news (Mittermeyer), or injured in the past few months on Odin (Reuenthal). Merkatz had already recused himself from the running, deciding that he was needed in the capital. Despite the fact that all of them were bad choices, Flegel, Reuenthal, Mittermeyer, and Fahrenheit all raised their hands, as did several of the adjutants, who were clearly hoping to leverage an independent command into a promotion down the line. Merkatz surveyed this completely expected result with a grim eye. He opened his mouth, and might have just named Mittermeyer for the task, but Bronner spoke up before he could.

“What a conundrum,” Bronner said. He looked over at Merkatz, whose face twitched in momentary displeasure. “It certainly is an honor to be the one to escort the Kaiserin home. I would hate to be the one to decide and deprive the rest of you all of the chance.”

“I’ll go,” Flegel said. “She is my cousin. I’m sure she’ll feel safer with me.”

“Don’t you have the Military Police to reform?” Fahrenheit asked. “I assumed they would keep you quite busy.”

Once again, Merkatz was about to say something, but Bronner reached behind himself, towards the sideboard behind him, on which was set up a tray with coffee service. He took the cup holding the plastic coffee stirrers, and held it up. “Well, if you can’t decide, gentlemen, maybe we should draw straws and let fate choose?”

Bronner met Merkatz’s eyes down the table. There was a strained silence from everyone, and Hilde couldn’t understand what Bronner’s intentions were— to rig the game, but to make it appear that Merkatz was unbiased and assuage Flegel’s paranoia? Even if that was his intention, it was a blow to Merkatz’s authority, if he allowed it. Merkatz looked at the candidates and frowned.

“Flegel, Reuenthal, Mittemeyer, Schneider, Bayerlein, and Bergengrun— draw straws if you wish.” It was a compromise— pruning the selection enough to maintain authority while not openly selecting against Flegel. Though with this many other people in the running, even if Bronner didn’t weigh the results, Flegel only had a small chance of being selected.

“Ah, nevermind, sir,” Schneider said, even though he had originally volunteered. “I’ll stay out.”

“Don’t like fortune’s wheel?” Bronner asked. He arrayed five of the straws on the table, and took out his pocket knife to draw a line diagonally across the bunch, shortening all of them, with a distinct shortest and longest straw.

“I wouldn’t play Russian Roulette either,” Fahrenheit said— though his voice was a little dark at having not been allowed to take place in the selection.

“I don’t like leaving things up to luck,” Schneider said. But he watched Bronner’s hand very carefully as he picked up all the straws and banged their tips against the table to make their heights appear even in his hand. Bronner turned around, ran his palms together to shuffle the straws, and then held them out to one man after the other, letting Flegel go first and leaving Reuenthal for last. He drew the last straw from Bronner’s cupped hand with a stiff jerk and a disguised scowl.

There was a strained silence as the five laid their straws out on the table. Even though they were at odds, Mittermeyer and Reuenthal held theirs up to each other first— Mittermeyer had the longest straw by far, and Reuenthal ended up with the shortest. Hilde glanced first at Bronner, then at Merkatz, wondering if Bronner’s probable slight of hand was still giving Merkatz an opportunity to make the final choice between the longest and shortest straws. The two adjutants with middling length straws shrugged and sat back— an unsurprising result for both of them. Flegel’s face was darkening, and he looked at Bronner as well, narrowing his eyes.

“Reuenthal will go, then. I expect that you’ll need some time to prepare yourself for the dispatch and integrate yourself with the fleet. Mittermeyer can give you any information you need about the ships we brought,” Merkatz said, picking up his papers and passing them to Schneider. Reuenthal nodded. Merkatz then looked at Flegel, and said, “Baron, if you have a moment to discuss the MPs, I would appreciate your time.”

Flegel nodded, though gave another nasty look to Reuenthal as the meeting ended and everyone began to disperse. Reuenthal was among the first to leave, and he stalked out the door and down the hallway with Bergengrun on his heels. Another uniformed captain called out to Bergengrun from down the hallway, and Bergengrun peeled off from Reuenthal, leaving him alone, except for Hilde, who jogged down the hallway to catch up with him. She steeled herself to speak with him— although they had spoken often, given Hilde’s unofficial position as coordinator, their conversations were frosty at best. It was, at least partially, for lack of trying on Hilde’s part, but she doubted that Reuenthal would want her to be friendly.

“Rear Admiral,” she said, catching up to him in the hallway. He stopped and turned towards her. He stood rigid and tall, but where once he might have stood with his hands behind his back, they now hung at his sides— it was likely the burn wound he had received still paining him and limiting his range of motion. Like Kircheis’s hand, she hoped it would heal eventually. He hadn’t been the one to tell her about it; his adjutant, Bergengrun, had mentioned it in passing.

“Merkatz already gave you permission to come on the dispatch, and to speak with Litchtenlade,” Reuenthal said. “You don’t need to ask me for them.”

She was tempted to point out that he would be annoyed if she showed up without asking permission, but instead she said, “I wanted to ask if there’s anything I should be aware of before I speak to him.”

“I haven’t told him that Erwin Josef is dead,” Reuenthal said. “He might have guessed, since I haven’t mentioned having him. But if you want to pretend he’s alive, you may.”

“Do you talk to him often?”

“No,” Reuenthal said. There was no reason for him to lie, and she didn’t think he was.

“I’ll come see him tomorrow,” she said. “I should be able to figure out some kind of compromise he’ll agree to.”

Reuenthal’s lip curled. “I’m sure, Lieutenant.”

She was wearing Kircheis’s jacket, and her ears reddened at the sarcastic address. This was the first time anyone had commented on it— and maybe she had been naively pretending that she could blend in to the crowd of soldiers, shoulder to shoulder with them. Maybe it was refreshingly honest for him to point out that everyone else was humoring her, even if he meant it to cut. But she tried to smile, and she said, “Just like everybody else— I’m angling for a promotion when this is all over.”

He almost smiled, but if his cheek twitched, the expression never made it to his eyes, and he stopped it before it could go anywhere. They stared at each other uncomfortably for a second.

“I’m glad you’re the one going on the dispatch,” Hilde said. It wasn’t so much of an olive branch as it was a statement of fact.

“Mittermeyer would be the better choice,” Reuenthal said.

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Hilde said, and she stuck her hands into her pockets. “But I don’t know him very well.”

Bergengrun was coming back down the hallway, returning from the short conversation he had been having with the other captain who had called him over. Reuenthal glanced over to watch him walk the long stretch of dark hallway. Light was coming in from the skylights, but the clouds passed in front of the sun and made it gloomy inside. His return saved either of them from saying anything too personal, though perhaps neither of them were in danger of that.

“Will you be traveling on my flagship?”

This was as much permission as she was going to get, so she nodded. “Yes.” She paused, then added, “My father will be glad to see you again. If he’s made it back to Geiersburg— I hope he is there.”

Reuenthal gave a curt nod. “I’ll let you know our departure time as soon as it’s settled,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

He turned down the hallway, and she didn’t follow him.

Outside, Hilde stood on the marble steps of the building, under the bluing sky, and watched the pigeons flutter from the eaves of the Ministry of War. Even though she bet that people had been eating them, they didn’t appear any more afraid or fewer in number than they had a year ago. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking out at the stretch of grass and the decorative trees along the front lawn. It was strangely peaceful, with no fear of sniper fire or Littenheim’s soldiers. She could stand there forever, trying to let the sensation that the war was over settle down onto her shoulders and into her heart. It didn’t quite feel real, still. Compared to Kircheis’s apartment, the white columns, pillars, steps of the building were like cutout scenery in a set of paper dolls, the colors as strangely saturated as a lithograph in an old book. It was over; she had survived; she still had work to do. One foot in front of the other, she marched down the steps.

---

Litchtenlade was still being held in the campground that Reuenthal had turned into a military outpost. It might have been more secure to keep him in the brig of one of Merkatz’s ships, but no one had coordinated to take him away from Reuenthal. 

Hilde had been tempted to bring Kircheis with her, and had also thought about going to her cousin’s house to ask Elfriede if there was anything she could use as leverage to get her grand-uncle to cooperate, but she decided against both of these things, and instead came alone. Reuenthal wasn’t there either, although she had expected him to be. He was in the city working on preparations for the dispatch, which Hilde was informed of by the gate guard.

After so many visits, the forested camp was familiar to her. Today, there were no men bathing in the lake; it was raining. Hilde pulled her raincoat hood over her head, and splashed through the mud towards Litchtenlade’s cabin, in the central area of the camp.

He was under guard, but not chained down. Every time Hilde came to camp, she was forced to run through the possibilities in her head of how she would escape if she were in Litchtenlade’s shoes. The cabin was wood; if she set fire to it, someone would have to take her out, and she could escape in the chaos. The floorboards in all the cabins were only held in place to their lower structure with rusty old nails— a few of the boards could easily be pried up, and then in the crawlspace beneath the cabin floor, perhaps she could shimmy on her belly to freedom, with just a few pieces of stone to push out of the way. The windows would never work to climb out of— the guards were too attentive. Perhaps the chimney, though it narrowed to a metal cap at the top, might be an escape route. She could climb it, squeezing her knees against the brick, inching upwards with her hands above her head, removing the metal cap and popping out like a puppet from a box.

Although Hilde thought about all of these things, Litchtenlade was in no position to try any of them. Mittermeyer had been right that he was in ill health. He was an old man, and he had been injured in Reuenthal’s invasion of his home. 

Hilde didn’t know why she was thinking about it so closely as she walked up to the small cabin. It wasn’t just practicality, although she would say that was the reason if asked. She trusted Reuenthal and his men to not let their valuable prisoner escape. Perhaps it was just memory of the time she and her father had spent as Castrop’s prisoners. Sometimes, at night, she ran it over and over through her mind’s eye, mentally checking every intersection and decision to see if there was something she could have done differently, some way she could have freed herself without waiting for rescue. She didn’t think that there was, which only enhanced the nightmarish, labyrinthine quality that the ship took on in her thoughts and dreams. She hated the feeling that there were unwinnable situations, mazes that she couldn’t escape, even if she climbed the walls in search of an exit.

Although the guard at the door of Litchtenlade’s cabin unlocked it for her, she knocked, a facsimile of politeness, before opening the door and stepping inside.

The interior of the cabin, though as rustic as all the others, was neat and clean. The bunk beds that lined the walls of the other cabins had been removed, and only one bed remained, as did a table at which Litchtenlade was sitting. Hilde had seen him many times in the past, but all of those seemed to exist in a different world, and the man who now sat at the table was almost unrecognizable. He was dressed in warm, if plain, clothes— a heavy white sweater and neat pants. It was so completely unlike the formal clothing that was the only dress Hilde had ever seen him in that Hilde almost didn’t notice his arm in a sling, and the way he looked weaker and older than he once had. But she took in his image at a glance as he sat at the table and looked at her.

They didn’t give him shoes, Hilde realized, looking around the room. He was barefoot, to stop any chance at him running. What a strange indignity for someone who had once had his hand on the tiller of half the universe.

Litchtenlade didn’t seem to recognize her, which wasn’t exactly surprising. He knew her father, but wouldn’t have paid any attention to the girl occasionally tagging along at her father’s side. And she was in her strange, adopted uniform, which made her gender hard to read at a moment’s glance, and incongruous when he figured it out.

Hilde saluted. “Good morning, Herr Litchtenlade,” she said.

“I wasn’t expecting a visitor,” he said. His voice was rough— it sounded like he had been coughing, and, indeed, he did cough after he finished his sentence, holding a handkerchief up to his mouth delicately. Smoke inhalation, she guessed. A man like Reuenthal could perhaps recover more easily than the septuagenarian Litchtenlade.

Hilde walked over to the table. “I’m Hildegarde von Mariendorf,” she said. “Advisor to Her Majesty Elizabeth. Do you mind speaking with me?”

“You’re Count Mariendorf’s daughter?”

“Yes,” she said. 

“Is he still alive?” he asked.

“I have no reason to believe otherwise. He’s been at the frontier.”

Litchtenlade nodded. “I’m sure everyone who took themselves to the frontier at the start of this hoped that it would be untouched. It’s strange that you didn’t.”

“I have had pressing business on Odin,” she said.

“I can see that,” he said. “You must have been making yourself quite useful to be sent here to talk to me— either that, or Duke Braunschweig is entirely out of otherwise capable staff.”

She ignored the implied insult. “Did your family go to the frontier?” she asked. “I know that not all of them did, but…” She had no choice but to trail off.

“Some of them,” Litchtenlade said. “Though I’m sure those who did are now on their way to Phezzan.”

Hilde took this opportunity to pull out the chair and take a seat at the table in front of Litchtenlade. “They don’t believe that Her Majesty would be generous to your family?”

“Where is Duke Braunschweig? I would like to speak to him about that myself.”

“At Iserlohn Fortress.”

Litchtenlade’s lip curled. “Is that so? I’ve been told that my requests to speak with him have been denied because of a lack of bandwidth to transmit to him. Iserlohn’s broadcast power is quite great.”

“The problem is with Odin’s satellites, not Iserlohn,” Hilde said.

“And so someone has sent you— or have you come by yourself?”

“Someone has to unlock the door to let me in to talk to you,” Hilde pointed out. “I’m here with Admiral Merkatz’s blessing, on Kaiserin Elizabeth’s business.”

Litchtenlade looked towards the window. “And will that blessing be worth much?”

Hilde studied him. “Yes,” she said. “And my word, that I will speak to Her Majesty on your behalf, is also worth something.”

“I’m waiting for you to make your demands, Fraulein Mariendorf,” Litchtenlade said.

“You already know what I’m here for.”

“A surrender of the forces in the frontier?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Let me ask you a plain and simple question, Fraulein,” Litchtenlade said. “How are you going to pretend to those forces that Erwin Josef is alive, for me to surrender on his behalf?”

It was a grim question, and a difficult one, but Hilde didn’t flinch. “Didn’t you kill his mother, and say you sent her to Earth?”

“She went there alive, by His Majesty’s mercy, and anything that happened to her after that hardly concerns me,” Litchtenlade said. “And it would not have mattered if she was alive or dead— unlike the actual heir to the throne. Rear Admiral Reuenthal should have been more careful.” 

She wondered how much of his dry tone was carefully practiced, years of being a politician, and how much effort it was taking for him to suppress anything he might have felt about Reuenthal’s attack on his family home. She tried not to think about it— the more that she did, the more of a risk she had of letting feeling into her own voice. Hilde cast her thoughts away, pushing past her memory of the last month, and tried to picture the cool and stoic Elizabeth, holding her up as a model, trying to put her confident voice in her mouth.

“If you say that Erwin Josef is alive, and abdicating the throne to live on the frontier, that is all we need,” she said. “You have the ability to sign an abdication as his regent.”

“I do wonder why you don’t simply kill me,” Litchtenlade said.

“Her Majesty wants to restore peace,” Hilde said. “Even a symbolic surrender from someone respected will ease tensions. The forces on the frontier have no leadership, and no ability to stand down from their last orders unless they’re defeated or surrender individually— the longer this goes on, the more lives will be lost as we gain piecemeal surrenders from every individual fleet. Lives and time are both precious things, and an order from you would save both.”

He nodded, but said nothing.

Hilde spread her hands. “Sir, you are the one who is in a position to make demands. What do you want? If it’s something I can give—”

“The one who names their price first always loses,” Litchtenlade said. “Did your father never teach you that?”

“I can promise that you and your family will be treated well.”

“What remains of my family.”

“Your grand-niece, Elfriede von Kohlrausch, is alive and well,” Hilde said, though she realized after she said it that he hadn’t been asking a question. “I could bring her here, if you want to see her.”

This made Litchtenlade look at Hilde with a keen but inscrutable expression. “The one other member of my family on Odin who survived.”

Hilde shivered, but she looked him in the eye. “If no one else has said so,” she began, “let me be the on to express how sorry I am.”

“You will be the only one to say such a thing.”

“I mean it.” She wondered if there was anything she could have done to have changed Reuenthal’s plans. She didn’t think there was, and she looked around at the cabin that Litchtenlade couldn’t escape from— no way out of the labyrinth, even if he set it on fire. “Please believe me when I say that I wish things had gone differently.”

He nodded.

“Is there something else that I can offer you?”

“I’m afraid that people will not accept the little authority I have, when I issue my surrender,” Litchtenlade said. “You’re going to offer me safety contingent on the result you’re looking for, and when you fail to get it, my safety will not be assured.”

“I will assure it,” Hilde said.

“Will you?” Litchtenlade’s voice was dry.

She wanted to tell him again about promises that Elizabeth would make, but she realized that it wasn’t his safety that he was truly asking for. This was merely a prelude, to make her offer him something else. She realized what it was he was asking for— she found her answer in the sharp way he looked at her, in the clarity of his voice, the way he spoke without real fear, or without the appearance of fear.

“Why do you think that the fleets won’t accept your surrender?” she asked.

“I was the prime minister, and the government that I represented is no more,” he said. “You might as well find any functionary from the embassy on Phezzan, or —” and he stopped and smiled, “— the colonial affairs office. Your father could surrender on the government’s behalf. He has as much authority as I do.”

Hilde pinched her lips. “What are you asking for, Prime Minister? You have to make your request before I can offer it.”

“Exactly that.” He coughed again, delicately, into his handkerchief, though it sounded like he was doing his best to contain to contain it. “I would like to keep my position.”

She had been expecting that, but it still was difficult to stop herself from grimacing. “Are you sure you really want that, Herr Litchtenlade?” Hilde asked.

“You believe the duke would stab a man who’s working for him in the back?” Litchtenlade asked.

“I don’t understand why you would want a position in his government,” Hilde said. “I’m offering you safety— you should take it.”

There was something predatory in his expression. “You must think I’m power hungry,” he said. “Say so, if you like. You won’t offend me.”

“You’re a career member of the court,” Hilde said. “I understand what that means.”

“Good— you’re one yourself, after all.”

She felt heat creep up her neck, beneath her uniform collar. She had felt prepared when she walked in the room, but she felt more and more like she was being drawn into a trap. “I know when to cut my losses,” Hilde said.

Litchtenlade smiled. “Fraulein Mariendorf, there are some more important things than my own life and safety. I’m an old man— if I am lucky I have ten years left in me, even if I stay out of danger. But this country has gone through something terrible, and I am very, very afraid for its future.”

“So am I.”

“So, I see that there is a price I could pay— eight years of my life. Seven years. Five years— however many it ends up being. If I can exchange that time to set this nation on a proper course again, I will pay that price.”

“Very selfless of you.”

“What do I have to gain?” he asked.

She didn’t know, though she knew it was something. She said, “I don’t have the authority to make that promise— but I do have the authority to ask Her Majesty on your behalf.”

“Please do,” Litchtenlade said, and he leaned back in his seat, very pleased. She knew she had lost whatever battle had been happening here. She thought about asking Elizabeth for this concession in such a way that she wouldn’t grant it, but she knew that Litchtenlade would not cooperate unless he got what he was looking for.

“Please understand,” Hilde said, trying to claw back some semblance of control, “even if Her Majesty agrees, I doubt that this will be anything other than a symbolic position. An advisory role.”

“That’s all I want,” Litchtenlade said. “All I would like is to be in the room.”

---

Hilde phrased the results of her meeting with Litchtenlade very delicately when she reported back to Merkatz. She told him that Litchtenlade would likely only rein in the fleets in exchange for an advisory role in the government— she didn’t mention the title that he wanted. That, she would save for Elizabeth. But Merkatz was a savvy man, and he understood what Hilde was saying, and what Litchtenlade was hoping to bargain for.

“I hope he’s satisfied with what he gets,” was all that Merkatz ended up saying. “Another man would have taken a promise of safety.”

“I don’t think he believes that kind of promise holds much weight,” Hilde admitted, which made Merkatz nod, though he looked suddenly very weary.

“I like to believe that Duke Braunschweig understands honor, and what promises mean.”

“His daughter does,” Hilde said.

“I would like to believe that, too,” Merkatz replied.

But she at least wasn’t forbidden from bearing the proposal to Elizabeth for approval, and and she managed to get a recorded message from Litchtenlade to use to present to her. The video was of the old man sitting as primly as he could in the ramshackle camp lodge, facing the camera, and saying in a cold voice that he intended to abdicate on Erwin Josef’s behalf, contingent upon a personal meeting with Elizabeth. Hilde hoped that this would be enough for anything she needed to use it for.

She boarded Reuenthal’s flagship along with him. It wasn’t the gleaming white ship that Mittermeyer came back to Odin on (that one remained on the planet), and it wasn’t a ship that Reuenthal was familiar with, either. It was simply picked out as one of the largest and least damaged from the fleet that had come from Iserlohn to Odin.

The journey was not a short one, and there was very little to do during interstellar travel, but that did not mean that she saw much of Reuenthal. He spent his time on the bridge, or in his personal quarters. Although Hilde was allowed in the former, she rarely went there unless she had a specific errand that brought her there. She wasn’t uncomfortable on the ship— she felt quite safe and aware of her purpose— but it reminded her of being a child in her girls’ school. There was something that unmistakably set her apart from everyone else, and even if no one would say anything about it, it remained a salient difference.

Communications between Odin and Iserlohn had been clear enough, because they controlled most of that space, but they remained jammed around Geiersburg, making Hilde feel like they were flying blind, into the unknown.

She wanted, almost desperately, to talk to Reuenthal, but every time they found themselves in the same place, she found she had nothing to say to him, unless she confined the topic to the operations of their fleet. She understood that being allowed to discuss the movement of the fleet with him was in itself the only, and most salient, acknowledgement of her competence that she was going to get.

Surprisingly, they didn’t meet any resistance as they made their way out of Valhalla starzone and towards Geiersburg. Hilde had expected that perhaps some of the frontier fleets, having been given an undefined order to attack Braunschweig’s forces, would head in their direction, but there was no sign of them. Perhaps a smarter commander would be laying in wait to attack their supply line, but Reuenthal’s fleet had no supply line— there had been no supplies on Odin for them to take. They would, and might very well be, having better luck attacking ships arriving from the frontier to Geiersburg.

Braunschweig’s fleet had started out extremely well supplied, bringing with them months worths of provisions and munitions, and that had carried them so far, especially when combined with what they had taken from Iserlohn’s vast stores. But if the civil war had stretched on for longer, the supplies that her father had been procuring from the frontier families and sending to Geiersburg would have formed the basis of new supply lines. Hilde was hoping that they would find these supplies waiting for them in abundance— those would be a basis for recovery on Odin, if not continued war against the Alliance. 

As they got closer to the fortress, occasionally dropping down to sub-light speed, the transmission jamming abated, allowing them to warn the fortress of their approach, and from them learn if they were safe from ambushes in the small and rocky area where Geiersburg was situated.

The commander of the fortress was a man that neither Hilde nor Reuenthal were familiar with, and so hearing his businesslike tone crackle through over the radio stirred no real relief in either of them. Hilde wanted to see Elizabeth, or hear her voice, but there was no reason for her to make the call, since it was of a wholly military nature, and also designed to carry the bare minimum of information.

They approached Geiersburg slowly and cautiously, scanning the space around them continuously for any sign of trouble. Hilde stood on the bridge, having invited herself up, and Reuenthal didn’t object to her presence, though he said nothing to her. The fear that lingered in the back of Hilde’s mind, though it was not a reasonable one, was that somehow Geiersburg had been taken before they arrived, and they were walking into a trap. She held her breath as they crossed into the range of Geiersburg’s main gun, and even when nothing happened, she didn’t relax until they began to dock their ships inside the fortress’s bays.

Geiersburg was mostly unharmed; even the parts of it that had been damaged during the first battle of the war had been repaired over the past few months, the crews living inside it having little to do other than maintain the fortress. Reuenthal’s fleet docked to the sight of soldiers in the fortress bay windows, silent behind the glass, cheering and waving flags of victory. This was a strange little enclave, Hilde thought, watching them. They had seen the beginning of the war, and only that.

When their ships were all settled, Reuenthal’s top staff and Hilde made their way inside, going to greet the Kaiserin and the rest of the command at Geiersburg. She was waiting for them inside an audience hall, which they were led to quickly, hustled along through Geiersburg’s utilitarian corridors without Hilde getting a chance to either admire them or memorize their layout. 

Reuenthal marched along at the front of their procession. Although his face was completely impassive, deliberately so, Hilde couldn’t help but read into it. She doubted that he was enthusiastic about bowing to Elizabeth. She was a Braunschweig; she was young; she had no demonstrated accomplishments; she was a woman— all things that Reuenthal could easily fault her for. Looking at his thin lips pressed together, she wished, for the thousandth time, that Hank was with her.

The audience hall that they were let into was luxe— there were tapestries hanging on the walls, and a throne at the front of the room. But as soon as Hilde entered the room, she felt strange and uncomfortable, in a way that it took her a moment to recognize the source of. It wasn’t anything to do with Elizabeth, who was sitting on the throne waiting, or any of the soldiers in attendance on either side of the room, or Princess Amare, standing at Elizabeth’s side. The discomfort came from the clicking of her own shoes on the floor: in contrast to every other audience hall Hilde had ever been in, the floor here was not carpeted, and the bare aluminum of the hall wasn’t covered by vinyl as it usually was in the hallways and dining rooms of military vessels. Although she wanted to look at Elizabeth, her eyes swept around towards the wooden molding on the walls, down to the baseboard, and there she saw evidence of where the red carpet had been ripped out: there was frayed red fabric still trapped tacked down in corners. Since no one had pried it out yet, the carpet removal must have been very recent, and quickly performed.

Perhaps she thought about this, and looked around at the decor, to avoid the strange feeling that watching Reuenthal bow raised in her chest. It was right that he should bow, since Elizabeth was the Kaiserin, but she didn’t want to watch it, and she didn’t want to listen to her greet him.

So, she was almost startled when Reuenthal stepped aside and Elizabeth called her name.

“Hildegarde von Mariendorf,” Elizabeth said. “It has been too long.”

She took Reuenthal’s place in front of the elevated throne, and she ignored the sensation of his eyes on her. 

“Your Majesty,” she said. “I’m very sorry that I couldn’t join you here before now. I hope you are satisfied with the duties I’ve performed for you while I was on Odin.”

Elizabeth was silent for a second, and in that moment, Hilde decided that she could raise her head to look at the young woman on the throne more fully. She seemed smaller than Hilde remembered. But perhaps it was the gilt of the throne and the wash of her blue dress around her that made her shrink in the chair, like a porcelain doll rather than a girl. The illusion was broken as soon as Elizabeth spoke again.

“It was your father who demanded you stay on Odin,” Elizabeth said. “I cannot fault you for his desire to keep you safe. My father kept me here.”

Hilde didn’t know what to say in response to that; it seemed like the wrong time to bring up the dangers of Odin.

“I’m glad you were safe, Your Majesty,” Hilde said. 

“And I, you.” There was another strained pause. “I must ask,” Elizabeth began, “do you intend to remain my advisor?”

“That was what I came here for— I will if you will have me. It hasn’t been so long that I’ve forgotten anything I promised—”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “But the world is different now. And you will have different duties.”

Hilde looked up at her, and though Elizabeth’s face and voice were totally impassive, she understood what Elizabeth meant before she said it. Her heart fell down to her stomach, and the blood rushed from her face. There was a long moment of silence before Hilde could form the words.

“Has there been any word from my father?” Hilde asked.

“Do you remember when we first met, Lady Mariendorf?” Elizabeth asked. It was perhaps the kindest thing she could muster to say. “What we spoke about?”

“Yes.”

“You said you couldn’t answer for your father,” she said. “You will have to speak for the Mariendorf line now, Countess Mariendorf.”

Hilde felt trapped like a bug under glass, but she couldn’t look away from Elizabeth’s face. She had once thought that if anything had happened to her father, the news would come from Hank, or even from Sieg, but here it was coming from Elizabeth. Perhaps that was a blessing; her cool face and slightly upturned lips— a smile not intended for cruelty but painted on some hours before— imprinted themselves on Hilde’s mind. It would be a memory of dispassionate leadership, and not one of shared pain.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” she choked out.

“Think on it,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t believe I will have need of your services until we return to Odin.”

Hilde nodded mutely, then said, “Your Majesty— may I ask what happened?”

Elizabeth turned towards her mother, Amarie, who spoke up. “He left planet Hochwasser with a convoy in October. The convoy arrived here in late November, and reported that he had left on a ship alone. He said that he would be heading to Schwarzerburg to discuss purchases from the Kleinhoff family. He never arrived at Schwarzerburg— we learned that after we sent our own ship to investigate.” She paused. “I’m sorry, Countess Mariendorf.”

“Thank you for telling me,” Hilde said. She refused to voice the childish hope that he might still be alive; there was no chance that he was. 

She didn’t know what to say, or what to think. Perhaps it was a blessing that she couldn’t form thoughts. There was a dead silence in the hall until Elizabeth raised her hand to dismiss her and the rest of their group.

“Rear Admiral Reuenthal, I understand that you have some preparations to make with the fortress…” Elizabeth began, but Hilde didn’t process the rest of what she was saying as she summoned Reuenthal away, to speak together in a private room. Hilde perhaps should have followed— it would be important to quickly bring up the subject of Litchtenlade’s proposal— but instead she found herself wandering mutely back through the hallways to go back to Reuenthal’s ship.

Geiersburg still didn’t have communications with the rest of the galaxy; there was no way to tell the news to Hank or Sieg. She was alone.

Reuenthal’s temporary flagship had a standard layout, and her weeks on board made sure that she knew her way around it well, but still she found herself wandering aimlessly through the identical corridors, looking for her own room and not being able to find it. She had an officer’s quarters, somewhere, but one slate metal door looked the same as any other, and they slid past her eyes without her registering where she was. She might have walked past her own room some five or six times without noticing it, climbing stairways and descending them again, walking the hallway in a loop. She wasn’t in a hurry, which would have compelled her to pay more attention to her surroundings and get to her destination. 

She wandered like this for several hours, miles and circular miles passing beneath her feet without her notice. The ship was almost deserted, with most of the non-essential crew having been given license to leave to eat in Geiersburg’s dining halls— since fresh supplies were arriving here on a semi-regular basis, thanks to her father’s efforts, the food was better than on the ships. This meant that no one interrupted her or asked where she was going, and seeing another person was rare. She didn’t cry; it was like she had forgotten how. She had forgotten how to think entirely.

This was why she was startled when she heard footsteps that were not just the soft echo of her own in the empty hallway, and turned a corner to find Reuenthal, walking with a scowl on his face in his own silent contemplation, though he was headed directly to his own room, just down the hall where Hilde had just been.  He was just as surprised to see her, and they both stopped for a second and looked at each other.

It felt very painful to meet his eyes, one black and one blue. But perhaps it was painful for him, as well; he had known her father. He said nothing, but gestured for her to follow him, and she did. He let her inside his suite of rooms, just down the hallway. His room was furnished with nothing other than the standard furniture that came with any ship, and the leather couch she sat down on felt cold and unwelcoming. But she sat on it anyway, and he fixed her a drink, bringing the whole, mostly full, bottle of brandy over with him when he sat down across from her on the armchair. He set it down on the coffee table between them, and then raised his glass.

“Count Mariendorf,” he said.

She couldn’t say anything, and she couldn’t raise her glass either, except to her lips. He watched her for a second, and then looked away, off into the middle distance, as he drank his own cup. 

It was funny that they had nothing to say to each other. They had known each other as children, even though Reuenthal was older than she was by almost a decade. He had come to her mother’s funeral— she remembered that, how he stood next to Hank in the summer heat, stiff and unhappy and younger than she was now. With both her parents dead, and Reuenthal’s father dead as well, it was strange to think that she was the person who had known him the longest— and he was the person who had known her longest, as well. 

They hardly knew each other at all anymore; they were intimate strangers. She alone had a glimpse through the keyhole into his past— surely he resented her for that. Perhaps it was a relief to him that her father was dead— the last person who had held an adult understanding of who he had once been, young and in need of help that he didn’t want. But that was an uncharitable thought, and when she was finally able to look at him, the grim lines around the corners of his mouth and the squint in his eyes resolved themselves into expressions of grief, even if it was one he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, express. She couldn’t fault him for that; she had no idea what to say either.

“When we all get back to Odin, I’ll hold a funeral,” she said.

He closed his eyes. “You don’t have a body to bury.”

“No,” she agreed. “But people would want— I want—” The words caught in her throat, and she switched the topic to stop herself from crying. “My father was glad that you let us come to bury your father,” she said. “I know it wasn’t a real memorial— but…”

“There was nothing to memorialize,” he said. “And it wasn’t my idea.”

“I know,” Hilde said. “Still.”

One father with nothing to memorialize, and another with nothing to bury.  

“Will you come?” she asked.

He nodded but said, “Leigh will.”

“You knew him longer than Hank did.”

“I’ll come,” he said shortly.

“Thank you.”

He shook his head.

“He would want you to come. He loved you like a son,” Hilde said, which made Reuenthal laugh, hard and unhappy. She almost regretted saying it— she wasn’t sure why she had. It might have been an attempt to comfort Reuenthal, to distract from the fact that the thing she wanted most in the world, curling up in her father’s arms and crying messily onto his shirt, was impossible. Pick something to do, to keep her mind off it. But saying this kind of trite phrase was its own kind of twisting the knife. Maybe Reuenthal preferred that. If she had still been a child, if they had both still been children, she would have been able to cling to him. But that was a long time ago.

“An unwanted obligation dropped on him by his wife,” he said. “I suppose most children are that way.”

“Oskar—”

Reuenthal raised his hand. “I know.” He was grim and bitter, but honest. “I was a very ungrateful child. I didn’t like owing him a debt. I suppose I should have apologized to him for that.” 

“He understood.”

This made Reuenthal’s lips pinch together. “I’m sure.”

“And he didn’t think of you as owing anything.”

“No?” Reuenthal looked away. “You don’t think there were duties I abandoned? If he loved me like a son—”

“No,” she said. “The filial duties belonged to me, anyway.”

This hadn’t been what he had been referring to.

“A rare daughter who gets to inherit.” His voice was very dark.

She nodded and looked away, then said to no one, “I think he might have been glad he didn’t have a son— if I had a younger brother, I wouldn’t get the title.”

He refilled his glass, then hers, and raised his in a silent toast. To what, she didn’t know.

“He must have been glad when Leigh was given a title of his own,” Reuenthal said after he had drained half his glass. “He didn’t have to feel guilty about not leaving him anything.”

Hilde almost laughed, though nothing had been funny, and the sound that emerged from her throat was choked. “Yes— he was. He didn’t say so, but he was.” It was an uncharitable thing for her father to think, and she wouldn’t admit it to anyone else, but it was the kind of thing that she could share with Reuenthal— a very human thing.

“It’s a relief to be free of a burden. Even moreso when you’re a generous man.”

She should have told Reuenthal that her father never resented any of the help he gave out to him or Hank— but she was sure that he already knew that, and wouldn’t want to hear it. So they were silent again. When she drank her glass, she felt like she couldn’t taste the alcohol, but she could feel it settle hot inside her stomach. She couldn’t tell if she was getting drunk— she had been in a haze since she left the reception hall, and the alcohol sweeping that away might be making her more able to think.

“I’ll tell Hank,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“Will you write him?”

“I’ll tell him in person. I’d rather—”

“It would be better if he were here, rather than myself,” Reuenthal said, and reached for the bottle again. 

No, Hilde thought. If Hank had been here, she would have needed him. She could picture the scene exactly, the weight of both her grief and his own landing on his shoulders, and him staggering under the weight. He wouldn’t complain, and he would comfort her in a way that she did, desperately, want— all to his own detriment. Reuenthal’s cold misery was a better companion by far. It gave her nothing to feel guilty about, and it was still a shared grief, better than being alone. And it kept the tears and wailing bottled up and hot just behind her eyes— he didn’t want to watch her cry, and she didn’t want to be seen. That would come later, when she was alone.

But now, she did not want to be alone. 

“He has too much to worry about,” Hilde said.

Reuenthal looked away for a second. “He’ll feel guilty.”

This would have been true regardless of the circumstances— Hilde remembered the New Year’s party at Duke Braunschweig’s house, two years ago, where Hank had cautioned her father against allying with the duke. But then Reuenthal’s words took on their true shape and meaning in her head, and she realized exactly what it was that her father had left, alone on his own ship, to do.

“Did they catch him because he was warning Hank?” She asked. The broadcast to tell Hank to wait for Mittermeyer’s arrival from the other side of Iserlohn. It had been the last message she had sent to her father; she wasn’t even sure if he had gotten it until Mittermeyer described the saga of Iserlohn. But Count Mariendorf had been the closest of their allies to the mouth of the Iserlohn corridor at the time, and before all communication out of Odin was blocked, they were able to contact him with instructions. Reuenthal had told her what he needed to do; Hilde had sent the letter telling him to do it.

But one ship, broadcasting wildly, hoping that someone would hear— that was an easy target.

Reuenthal nodded. She wondered, if when he talked about Hank, he was speaking for himself. He was a soldier— a commander used to ordering men to their deaths. And was she thinking about Reuenthal’s guilt to avoid thinking about her own? Her father and Martin both seemed, for just a moment, to be victims of her cold calculations of necessity. But what else could she have done? She looked at Reuenthal, opened her mouth, and found that she couldn’t say anything.

Reuenthal didn’t have any platitudes, true or false as they may have been: he went willingly, or he won the war for their side, or it wasn’t her fault, or maybe he’s not dead. Other people would say things like that, but the practicality they shared kept them mutually silent. Maybe that was something she had accidentally learned from him in childhood— looking up to him from a great distance away. 

She wondered, for just a moment, if anyone had been with Reuenthal when he learned that his father had died. She couldn’t picture it, him seeking out company, or if she could, she couldn’t imagine him saying anything.

With another person, she might have had some kind of shared reminiscence. Do you remember the day you got the acceptance letter to the IOA? You came to dinner that night. My father talked about it sometimes. He thought it was funny the way I used to jump on you. Things seem a lot different when you’re young, I guess. Or, You came to New Years, a few years ago. I remember— I was just so glad you came— but you and my father went into his office to talk. What did you talk about? Or, I don’t remember much from before my mother died. But you— do you remember what my father was like back then?

But she said none of those things. It was her turn to pick up the bottle, pour herself another drink. Reuenthal watched her hands.

“To my father,” she said, and raised the glass.

“Your father,” Reuenthal said.