Final Answer
by Catherine Rain

When Elenor heard the verdict—one month to be gone from the imperial lands—she knew at once where Graham would spend the intervening time. When he dropped from sight, though most assumed he'd fled the empire already, Elenor knew better. He would stay within these borders every moment that he could. And when he failed to show up elsewhere after one month's time, she knew he'd decided to risk the penalty here: death on sight. She hardly intended to have him killed, but this was not acceptable. Not from one who, as far as she was concerned, answered to her still.

The sight of a familiar horse tied outside of the cabin confirmed her guess.

Deep in the Lorimar woods, the cabin nestled among the embracing branches, its walls still faded blue, its shutters closed like a pair of resting eyes within the bright arbor cradle. Elenor stared at the old house, aware its inhabitant could suddenly emerge. Her nose tingled in the dry cold; she could smell her own blood. The air on her skin was that of sharp and dry winter, but she'd known colder. She could stand here all day if need be.

Swan whickered and trotted towards Elenor, straining at the tether that kept him by the tall barren tree. She spread her hands wide. "Sorry. I've got nothing for you." As Swan nudged his nose out close to her fingers, she pulled back her hand—like his namesake, he was prone to snapping without warning. He tossed his head in offended play.

The exchange served its purpose, drawing Graham to the open door of the cabin like a bright streak in the black gaping hole. He raised his arm in greeting—a habitual gesture that had looked defensive to Elenor even before he'd had it replaced with metal. Now, more than ever, he seemed to be warding her away.

"So," she said.

He looked at her levelly. "I knew you wouldn't send troops to smoke me out."

"Don't get me wrong," she objected. "I have questions. That's all."

Graham merely smiled, and stood back against the doorframe. "Please, come inside."

Instinctively she found herself stepping forward, despite misgivings. Graham, she had come to realize, would try anything if pushed far enough—even things that lay beyond the compass of reason. She knew of no reason why he might harm her, but it was still a risk. Yet now she had now taken a step, and to hesitate suddenly, with no pretext that could be spoken openly, would make her the very sort of coward Graham might consider unworthy to live. It was safer to act certain, to go on inside. That way she might stay alive.

Strange, she thought, that she'd once trusted this creepy man implicitly. Had she denied to herself the wild force in his eyes, the will that would make a sovereign decision and act without a blink? Or had she always known it as some tempest within him she did not understand? She'd thought that surely no reasonable person would use such strength for such evil. Clearly her definition of reason was not Graham's.

The inside of the cabin was shrouded in darkness and blanketed in dirt. Tiny dust motes floated everywhere—past the white glow of daylight from the cracks in the window shutters, in Elenor's eyes, in her nose. She sneezed. The place must not have been cleaned once in the year since she'd last been here.

Graham went to the sideboard and poured two glasses of Kanakan wine; he must have been living in some comfort here. Elenor took the proffered fluted glass and wondered whether to sit down. The chairs looked both dirty and unstable from rot, and the table was covered in creeping mold. She sat down anyway.

Surely he wouldn't be so stupid as to assume he could keep the cabin secret by killing her. He ought to know she was not such a fool. But he was, events had shown, not as predictable as she'd once believed.

Graham took the chair opposite her, holding his own wineglass shielded with his metal hand. "I suppose I'll have to vacate."

"I would have forced that from you anyway. You will leave this country." She cast him an annoyed glare—how sympathetic did he believe she was to his nonsense?—then turned her eyes back to the glass she held, speculatively. Let him see her sulk.

"But you had to see me first," he pointed out. "You couldn't leave well enough alone, and you couldn't just destroy me."

"No," she echoed absently, "I couldn't just destroy you." That would have been pointless. She examined the color of the wine; under this half-light, it was so dark that it seemed almost black. She could not see her fingers through the glass on the other side.

Graham stood from his chair; she heard him walk to the window and open the shutters wide. She kept her eyes on the wineglass—if he intended violence, showing fear or suspicion would only hasten her end.

"It's snowing," said Graham.

"Here? This far south, I thought it would be rain." Good. She'd bought time.

"It's coming down all right," he said, sounding mildly irritated. "Even in this forest. Wait here for a moment." He closed the shutters and disappeared out the door.

He would be stabling his horse. No cause to fear for her safety just yet. She took a long drink, deciding now was not the time nor the place to worry. Her brother's knowledge of the cabin was her safeguard; if she didn't return, Dwayne would destroy this place. Graham would be aware that she would not put herself in danger just to ask him a few questions; he surely thought better of her than that. She could trust that at the least. She finished the glass and helped herself to another while waiting for his return.

"I can't ride out in this weather," Graham said, closing the door. "Have some pity for Swan's sake, if not for mine."

"I have enough pity for you to last you both," said Elenor.

Good. She'd provoked a reaction. He made a noise of disgust, and turned away.

She waited. In a minute, as she'd known he would, he began to fill the silence with words. He could never stand the silence; he would crack before she did.

"I suppose you're sorry you ever taught me."

She snorted. "I'm your teacher, not your babysitter. It was hardly my job to keep you out of trouble."

"Yet you did not move to stop me."

"It wasn't my business." She shifted in her seat, recrossing her legs and resting her wineglass on the dirty table. "My job description does not include telling you how to be."

"You could have had me arrested."

"Perhaps. Who would believe you would go through with it?" She folded her arms.

"You don't consider yourself responsible, then?" He turned around, gazing down at her where she sat.

"Why should I?" She picked up the glass and took a drink.

He shrugged.

The snow would be heavy, Elenor knew. There would be no leaving here tonight; perhaps tomorrow, if it melted, in the morning. She did not want to walk back to town in this blizzard, nor would Graham be able to ride in it. "I think we're stuck here for the night," she said. In this one-room cabin. With Graham. Which meant sleeping on this filthy floor.

"I have an extra blanket," he offered.

"Thank you," she said, genuinely.

He half-smiled, and sat down on the bed. He picked up the book lying next to him and began to read.

Elenor felt suddenly at a loss for what to do with herself. She'd thought that if she stayed long enough, the silence would make him speak. He wasn't good at silence. But if he could fill the silence with written words, he could resist her better than she'd hoped.

She was beginning to think of him as the old Graham again—familiar, sometimes smiling, usually absorbed. It was strange to see him now, just like his old self, but with a layer of something frightening beneath that hadn't seemed meaningful until now. He was more complicated than he'd seemed, which meant that she could not handle him as easily she'd once thought she could. Irritated, she noticed dirt from the wineglass on her finger, and wiped it on the side of the chair.

It would be obvious to him why she'd come; to speak it would be a potential insult to his perception, just as a serious attempt to hide it would be. She'd asked him, the night before the incident, why he would think of going so far. It made sense that he wanted revenge; even at personal cost, people often wanted revenge. But this cost seemed ludicrous. To prioritize the memory of his hometown above the welfare of his son, that went against reason. He could not save his home, but could he not try to protect his son?

She couldn't have believed he would do it. He'd only smirked at her, and turned back to his books, and she'd walked off down the hall to her own room—thinking he was only talking crazy nonsense, that he'd never go so far as to do such a thing—and to hear the news, the next day, had been a shock.

Well, it was hardly her fault for not speaking out, was it? She'd thought he wouldn't do it. He was Graham. Though she'd known that just because someone is familiar doesn't mean they will be reasonable, she hadn't thought someone with as much potential as Graham would commit such an irrational act. To report what he'd said would have been jumping at shadows.

He sat there, infuriatingly reading his book as though she weren't even present. She thought of refilling her wineglass. She would feel safer pouring her own from his bottle, but perhaps she should make the formality of asking permission, if only to keep her motion from being sudden. "Graham?"

"Yes?" He put the book's ribbon in its place and closed it on his lap.

He clearly expected her to say something important, as if she were unable to keep her silence. She frowned. "Never mind."

"Oh, Elenor, you and I are so much alike." His mouth stretched out in a slow grin.

Not likely, not at all, she thought, irritated. How dare he make that comparison.

He hadn't even addressed her politely, for the first time in his miserable life. Did he think he was no longer her subordinate? She rose to pour herself another glass of wine anyway. How dare he. But she would be silent, wouldn't let him know that he'd affected her. She set the bottle down on the sideboard sharply.

Let it go, she told herself. She walked to the window, glass in hand, and unlatched the shutters. The snow was pelting down now, whizzing chaotically past her vision in the foreground; further out she could see, individually, against the dark trees, the frantic motion of the flakes. This woodland wasn't built for cold; the unusual frost seemed to have killed a good many young leaves. She was lucky, or perhaps unlucky, to trap Graham here.

She would win this. She would be silent. The chaos whirled before her, obscuring clarity and sense. From above, large flakes drifted lazily down. She closed her eyes. The wind, and the tiny cold dabs of ice, covered her in patterns she could not anticipate or understand.

"Elenor," said Graham.

She latched the window, and turned to face him, approximately, in the darkness. Her hair and coat were speckled with snow. "Cray," she said pointedly. "I don't know you anymore. Or I never did."

"Sit down, Silverberg," he commanded.

She did, setting her wineglass away from her on the table, with a sullen glare.

"Why is it your business to goad me to leave?" Cray demanded. "Who put you up to it? Or was it an Imperial order?"

"No one put me up to it," she snapped. "I'm here by my own choice. It is my business."

"If it's so much your business, then why didn't you stop me in the first place?"

"I just didn't imagine you'd be so stupid." She shook her head, reliving her amazement. "You must know. I never did approve of you wholly to begin with, but this is too much. Just too much."

He stared at her for a second before turning his head away with a detached look.

"Surprise?" She reached again for her wineglass.

"You were my teacher," he said. "Why, if you did not approve of me."

"That was not my job."

She watched him curiously, as he kept his eyes fixed on the window shutters. He was really crushed.

He glanced back at her and smiled. "Of course it wasn't."

Like hell, she thought, and took a drink, abandoning herself to the motion with a visible flair.

"Your pathetic approval could mean nothing. You could never understand," said Cray, "without the memories of the Rune. You could not imagine what it means to bear it—the arbiter of punishment."

"Excuses," she snarled. She'd seen it in his eyes long beforehand. She simply hadn't thought he would ever act on it. A wildness buried so deep she'd thought it safe. The Rune hadn't changed him, merely given him the tools to act. Making a tool of his own son. Destroying the things he'd built.

He fixed his gaze back on those closed window shutters, lingering for a moment; then abruptly he reopened his book.

Triumph. Of a sort.

She liked seeing him in pain. But it felt shallow, not enough to satisfy her—this minor triumph would fade, and the hurt would not be gone. She wanted him to pay fully for the trouble he'd caused her. But she could not bring the Imperials down to destroy him. After she'd spent so much time taking care of him, trying to guide him towards proficiency, she couldn't undo it all.

How could one undo it all.

The snow had melted into her hair and scarf, leaving her damp with chilled water. She should not have exposed herself to this weather. Well, her heart was beating loud enough, though her skin felt numb.

Of how long she sat there, she had little awareness and less recollection. The silence needed no maintaining; it swallowed her into its blur. She became aware that nothing in her vision was sharp; though she had adjusted to the dark, it swam with tiny dots of uncertainty, all things visible but obscured with spotted pinpoints that whirled and taunted her eyes. Like a painting that seemed at first realistic, but at a closer look unclear, and made of small almost-mistakes: that was not a flaw peculiar to art, but a flaw of real vision as well. She had better not drink any more wine.

Her heartbeat was strong, and eternal.

She must have gotten up from her chair at some point, and taken the blanket, and gone to sleep. She felt someone touching her shoulder and a moment of blind panic, and fought to focus in the stronger sunlight of morning.

A familiar person bent over her, and he was Cray, his human hand stretched towards her. "You slept a bit."

She sat up, wary, sorting out in her head that he presented no immediate danger. "I surely needed it."

The morning felt like oppression itself. She was on the floor, tangled in a blanket, dust and mud all over her. She would want a bath as well. She wanted to get out of here, to somewhere safe and sane and far away from the headache that was this man in whom she had once misplaced trust.

He brought her a glass of water, and she accepted it without speaking. She grimaced. It tasted terrible. Most likely it was pure, but she put it aside anyway.

She pulled herself up to stand. It was time to go on. "How is the snow?"

"Melting," he said. "Even shaded by the trees."

"It's time for you to leave here, then."

His voice betrayed no regret. "I have Swan ready to ride."

Running a hand over her hair and her coat, as though she could possibly remove any of the dirt with a brush of her palm, she glanced around. She had brought nothing; she had nothing to leave with. Somehow, the idea of just walking away felt wrong. She had come to ask something, had she not?

She took a step towards the door, but hesitated.

How could he just stand there and let everything that was wrong be wrong. How could he succumb to this cycle; he should have known better, should have been strong. How could he undo everything. And, when he had worked so hard in the first place, why destroy it all.

"Well, Silverberg?" he demanded.

"I am not vengeful," she said carefully, her voice sounding like she hadn't slept at all, "but I feel that I am owed something."

"You, owed anything."

She raised her head to look at him. He was smiling with a pained amusement.

He went on, "I fail to see how you are the one owed anything. I've lost everything. My home, my country, my family. I've lost my permission to be everything I was. You'll go on back to your smug little place, and look down on me self-righteously, and forget I ever was your student."

Elenor felt a shock through her heart. "Don't you know I resigned?"

"What?"

"You don't know?"

"No." He controlled his expression.

"I'm leaving here," she said, "just as you are. I intend never to speak to Dwayne or any other Imperial so long as I can help it."

His brow furrowed. "Why?"

She spread her hands. Wasn't it obvious?

"Why," he demanded. "If it isn't your responsibility. If it isn't your fault. If your job was never to approve of me. Why should it matter, then, and why should you resign?"

She opened her mouth to answer, and could not.

"You're pathetic," he said, walking briskly to the door of the cabin. He stopped on the threshold. "And that, to you, is my final answer."

She heard his steps crunch across the snowy ground, heard him mount and ride away, in some distant awareness beyond the scope of now. Her own breathing was loud in her ears. Her blood burned and froze alternately. She felt as though she had been stabbed with a shaft of ice. Her vision closed off. Putting her hands over her face, she tried to control herself.

No, no. She had done nothing wrong…

Surely the dread she felt was some stupid relic of something she ought not to feel bad about. It wasn't that rational for her to feel bad, and it was pointless. She merely wanted out. Out of this situation, out of this place, out of these reminders. They closed in on her, crushing her unfairly. She did not deserve this. She'd done nothing incorrectly. She simply had to go.

She walked out of the cabin. She hurried through the woods. She felt her memories closing in around her. And she began to run.