The day after was the worst day ever.
No one celebrated. No one screamed. No one even smiled. People walked around the city like zombies. They become bodies. They saw the wall broken. They saw that the enemy was gone. And no one cared.
Someone hung the tribe's flag at the main gate. Ten minutes later another guy came and knocked her down. Nobody said anything.
Jian stole all the beer from the council's warehouse. He dragged three tables to the middle of the square and shouted that he had a party. No one came. In the end he and Mina sat there alone and drank all the beer in silence. No one told a joke. No one laughed.
Dona Mara buried the baker in the afternoon. She left a cinnamon bun on top of the grave. No one knew they were cousins. She had never said that to anyone.
Kelser sat on a wooden box in the corner of the square. He stayed there all day. From dawn to dusk. The parchment with the symbol in his hand. No one spoke to him. Everyone knew they shouldn't.
The rain stopped. The sun has fallen. The night came.
He was still there.
He wasn't thinking about Tian. He wasn't thinking about the army. He wasn't thinking about the dead. He was just looking at that circle with a dot in the middle. Staring till your eyes hurt.
And then he remembered.
It didn't come like lightning. It didn't come as a big revelation. It came slowly, like cold water rising up his leg.
Five months ago. First of all. Before the city, before the poison, before everything. They had fled the capital. They stopped to rest on the edge of a river. She was sitting on the sand, drawing things with a stick.
And she drew that symbol.
Exactly the same.
He asked at the time what it was. She put it off with her foot immediately. He smiled and said nothing. Just a drawing.
Kelser felt the world spin.
He leaned on the box so he wouldn't fall. The blood came out of his face.
All the dead. Tomas. Lily. Old Hem. Two hundred and seventy-eight men on the wall. All that fear. All that pain.
She was there all the time.
Or not?
That was the worst. He didn't know. It could be a coincidence. It could be a perfect lie from Tian. It could be anything.
But now he could no longer not see. All the little things he'd ignored.
She knew exactly what the poison was before anyone else.
She knew exactly how to heal him.
She was always there. Exactly at the right time.
He heard footsteps. He raised his head.
It was her.
She had two glasses of hot tea in her hand. She smiled when she saw him. She walked slowly and sat next to him in the same wooden box. He passed him a glass.
"You were here all day," she said. "Everyone is worried."
Kelser looked at her. For your eyes. The same person who had cried in his bed for two days. The same person who had held his hand when he was going to die in the sewer.
He couldn't say anything.
"You're thinking about what Tian said," she said. She shook her head, and her voice was soft and sad. "He's lying Kelser. That's all he knows how to do. He just wants to separate us."
"I know," Kelser said.
And he didn't know.
A black cat came and sat on the floor in the middle of the two. No one moved him. No one talked about him.
They sat there for almost an hour. Looking at the bonfires burning in the square. Listening to people sleep. Listening to the wind.
Elara leaned her head against his shoulder.
"Everything will be fine," she said.
Kelser did not answer. He held the cup of hot tea in his hand. He didn't drink.
For the first time in his life he was not afraid of armies. He was not afraid of gods. He was not afraid of monsters.
He was afraid of the person sitting next to him.
And worst of all, the thing he couldn't say to anyone, the thing he was going to eat him alive for the rest of the night:
He still didn't know who he should believe.
He didn't know who the monster was.