Once Upon a Broken Heart

Chapter 5: The Court Between Courts

The invitation arrived a week later: a card in the shifting script, slipped under the door. The Court of Fates convenes at the new moon. Your presence is required as witness to the terms of the compact. —R.

Petra read it over her shoulder. Petra said nothing for a moment, which meant she was thinking in a very organized way.

"The R," Petra said finally. "Not 'the Prince of Ruin.'"

"No."

"That's—interesting."

Isla folded the card. "I'll be back by morning."

"I know you will." Petra looked at her with the particular quality of twinhood, which was not telepathy but was something in the neighborhood of it—an intimacy of long observation, of knowing someone's rhythms and tells and the specific angles of their face when they're not saying the thing they're thinking. "Be careful of Hunger."

Isla looked at her. "Hunger."

"The Fate of Hunger. Read the mythology again before you go." Petra turned away, then back. "The feeding loop that sustains the Prince's curse—he isn't the only one who benefits from it."

She read the mythology again. She added Hunger to her notes.

He came for her at midnight.

He came to the front of the shop, this time, without appearing from nowhere—she heard the footstep on the cracked front step and opened the door before he could knock. He looked slightly surprised by this, which she catalogued as: not accustomed to being anticipated.

"Ready?" he said.

"Yes."

The route he took made no architectural sense—three left turns that should have circled back to Merchant Street but didn't, a staircase she'd never seen that went somewhere the city's vertical geography didn't support, a door in a wall that opened onto a corridor that was made of materials no building in Aravel was made of.

"How does this work?" she asked, watching the transition.

"The between-space is accessible from points of intersection. Places where two distinct territories meet—physical, emotional, conceptual." He walked ahead of her, but not in a way that suggested she should fall behind. Beside her, slightly forward, which she read as: directing without excluding. "Crossroads. Thresholds. Places where someone was once undecided."

"My father used to mark those on maps," she said. "Not literally. But he'd note where two different surveys disagreed—where two versions of a place conflicted."

He glanced at her. "He thought the disagreement was important."

"He thought it was data. The place where two accurate accounts contradict each other is often where the truth is most interesting." She looked at the corridor around them—the material was stone but warmer than stone, with a slight luminescence that didn't intensify in her direct vision. "He marked them with a double line. Here, accounts diverge."

"Practical," he said.

"He was."

A pause. Then, quietly: "You use the past tense easily."

She thought about that. "He's been gone three years. The grammar shifted somewhere around the second year." She watched the corridor. "It felt disloyal at first. Using past tense felt like—conceding something."

"And now?"

"Now it feels accurate." She glanced at him. "He taught me that accuracy was a form of respect. Pretending something is present when it's absent doesn't honor it. It just—muddles the map."

He was quiet for a moment. "That's a useful philosophy," he said.

"For maps," she said. "I'm still figuring out whether it works for people."

The corridor opened.

The Court of Fates was—she had to take it in pieces. The whole of it, attempted at once, was too much: the scale (a hall larger than any building in Aravel, open to a sky that wasn't the sky she knew—wider, with stars in wrong configurations), the light (sourceless, clear, the quality of very early morning before the sun is up but the darkness has already committed to ending), the presences.

Seven.

She counted them twice to be sure.

Fortune was in the center, which seemed appropriate—she occupied space the way luck occupied time, pervasively and without obvious structure. She was mid-thirties, bright-eyed, with the particular energy of someone who was winning something that wasn't yet over. She looked at Isla with the direct assessment of a person evaluating odds.

Hunger was to the left. He was—unsettling. Not monstrous. Unsettling in the way that something hungry was unsettling when it looked at you and you weren't sure if you were being assessed as company or as food. He was thin in a way that suggested the thinness was philosophical rather than physical, a statement about the nature of want. He looked at Isla for longer than the others. She looked away first.

Grief was behind the others, and she looked away from Grief quickly. She would try to describe it later and fail. What she retained was: enormous. Still. The quality of a thing that has been everywhere and has stopped needing to move to be present.

Silence she couldn't see at all. She knew it was there from a quality in the air—a particular absence that was denser than ordinary absence. When she looked at the space she thought might be Silence, the looking didn't return any information.

Wonder was ageless. Neither young nor old nor in-between. Wonder wore the expression of someone at a museum who has just found the room they'd always wanted to exist, which, given that this was Wonder's permanent expression, said interesting things about the nature of awe.

Love was at the back.

She'd expected Love to be beautiful, or radiant, or to have the warmth that word implied. What she found was a person who looked older than the others—not in years but in experience, in the accumulation of knowing—with eyes that were tired in the very specific way of someone who had been present at every version of the thing they embodied, the good and the bad and the ordinary, for longer than could be imagined. Love looked like a person who had stopped expecting things to be easy and had kept going anyway.

Love looked at Isla. Isla felt, briefly and entirely without permission, completely known.

She looked away.

Cassian stood at her left shoulder. He had not moved to the center of the Court or to any particular position of status—he stood slightly apart from the other Fates, in the way of someone who has arrived at a gathering where they are both required and unwelcome, and has stopped caring about the second part.

The proceedings were conducted by Fortune, who had the crisp efficiency of a person who valued her own time. The compact's terms were read aloud—Isla listened with the focused attention her father had taught her to bring to legal documents—and the other Fates witnessed, and the compact was formally entered into the Court's record by a process she couldn't follow but felt as a vibration in the air.

When it was done, the Fates began their quiet dispersal.

Hunger stopped near her.

He was very still, which was worse than movement. He smelled of something she couldn't identify—not unpleasant, but intense, the smell of wanting, which was specific and present. He looked at her with those eyes that assessed.

"Mapmaker's daughter," he said. His voice was exactly as advertised: it made you aware of an appetite you hadn't known you had, which could be anything, which was the point. "You've entered an interesting compact."

"So I've been told." She kept her voice even.

"The Prince of Ruin's grief loop has been sustained for three centuries," Hunger said pleasantly. "It generates a significant amount of secondary grief in the world at large. Loss of hope. Lost causes. The grief of things that were never begun, never risked." He tilted his head. "Do you know what that kind of grief does to appetite?"

"I can guess."

"Then you can guess why some parties might have an interest in the loop continuing." He smiled. It was a complete, technically correct smile. "I don't wish you harm, Isla Vane. I simply want you to know that I exist. And that I'll be watching."

He moved away.

Cassian appeared at her shoulder within thirty seconds, which told her he'd been watching the exchange from whatever distance he'd been at.

"What did he say?" he asked.

"That he benefits from your curse and will be watching me." She looked at him. "You didn't tell me about Hunger."

"I should have." He said it without deflection. "Hunger has a stake in the loop. I—" A beat. "I minimized it."

"Don't minimize things," she said. "I need the complete map."

He looked at her. Something in his expression shifted—a calibration, a recalibration. "All right," he said.

Love was still at the back of the hall. As the other Fates completed their withdrawal, Love crossed toward Isla with the particular deliberateness of someone who has decided to have a conversation rather than simply observing it should happen.

"Child," Love said, and the voice was exactly as overwhelming in proximity as it had been from a distance—the three-in-the-morning voice, the voice of every conversation about the important things. "Do you understand what you've entered?"

"A compact with the Prince of Ruin. Three tears in exchange for my sister's freedom."

"You understand the mechanism?"

"I'm learning it." She held the gaze. "I know the curse. I know the loop. I know what the grief needs to be." A pause. "I know I need to be careful."

Love looked at her for a long moment with those exhausted, comprehensively honest eyes.

"I've watched this loop for three hundred years," Love said. "I've watched every person who came to his crossroads. I've watched him warn them. I've watched him—" A stop. "He has never asked anyone to know him. The bargain has always been transactional. The tears in exchange for something concrete." Love tilted its head. "He changed the terms for you. He changed them before you arrived."

Isla went still.

"He knew I was coming," she said.

"He'd been watching you for two years," Love said. "Since your father died. He said the quality of your grief was—" A pause. "He said it was the most complete grief he'd felt in a century. Grief that loved and lost and kept mapping anyway."

She absorbed this. She thought about the two years since her father's death: the shop maintained, the commissions completed, the atlas carried forward as best she could. The specific quality of continuing.

"He chose me deliberately," she said.

"Yes." Love's voice was not without kindness, but it was not soft. "I tell you this not to frighten you but because I believe you deserve to make your choice with full information." A pause. "He told you to ask him directly. He will tell you the truth when you do. But he is—" Love searched for the word. "He is afraid of what asking that specific question will do. He thinks it will make you leave."

"He thinks knowing I was chosen will feel like manipulation."

"Doesn't it?"

Isla thought about it honestly. "I don't know yet," she said. "I need to think about it."

Love nodded—a slow, comprehensive nod. "You have time. For now." A beat. "One thing more. The compact you've made—the extended proximity, the emotional residue—it will do what it was designed to do. You will understand him. Thoroughly." Love's tired eyes were very direct. "When that happens, Isla Vane, remember this: you can survive a broken heart. The organ heals. But you cannot survive a broken self. The you that makes choices, the you that decides what to do with what you know—that part matters more than any feeling." A pause. "Do not let the knowing become a reason to stop choosing."

Then Love walked into the margin, and was gone.