Once Upon a Broken Heart

Chapter 3: What Lives in the Atlas

Petra walked out of the prison at dawn.

Isla had been standing at the gate for an hour, in the particular cold of four in the morning that had given up being dramatic about it and simply was, and she watched her sister emerge into the pale light with the dazed quality of someone who has survived a thing they weren't sure they would.

Petra walked to her and held on.

"I didn't do it," Petra said, into Isla's shoulder.

"I know." Isla held on equally hard. "I know."

They stood there for long enough that the gate guard looked away out of courtesy. Then they walked home through the waking city—the bread-sellers arriving at their stalls, the canal boats beginning their morning runs, the ordinary machinery of Aravel recommencing its daily operation in apparent ignorance of everything that had almost happened.

Petra slept for fourteen hours.

Isla sat at her father's desk and looked at the atlas and thought about the shape of what she'd done.

She had expected to feel relief, and she did. She'd also expected a kind of clean completion—thing done, price acknowledged, mind back to the known territory of the shop and the work and the familiar. What she found instead was that a door had opened in the architecture of her awareness, and what was on the other side of it was not clean or complete. It was new. It was the quality of attention the Prince had directed at her, complete and unhurried, and the way he'd looked at his palm when the tear had landed there. It was the specific phrasing: ask me directly and I'll tell you the truth, which implied a person who valued accuracy. Which implied a person.

She had not expected him to be a person in any way that would require subsequent thought.

She was thinking about him consequentially. She noted this. She found it inconvenient.

When Petra finally emerged from sleep—rumpled, still slightly dazed, holding a cup of tea like a navigational instrument—she found Isla in the back room, restoring a water-damaged map of the northern provinces with the focused attention she usually applied to problems that were easier if you didn't think about them directly.

"Tell me," Petra said.

She said it the way she said most important things: simply, without preamble, with the directness that was her particular quality. Petra had never required elaborate approach. She received information the way she received stray animals: without conditions.

Isla told her. All of it—the crossroads, the contract, the three tears, the mechanism of the first collection. She told her about the warning he'd given before it served his interests. She watched Petra's face move through alarm and then the thing that came after alarm in Petra: a still, careful consideration.

"The tears," Petra said when she finished. "He takes the feeling."

"Yes."

"So what does that leave?"

Isla thought about it. "The memory. The love underneath it. Just—the acute weight of the specific grief. He takes that."

Petra turned her tea cup in her hands. "That's a very specific kind of taking," she said slowly. "He doesn't take the whole grief. Just the part that's too heavy to carry."

"He feeds on it, Petra."

"Yes, I know." She looked up. "I'm not saying it's altruistic. I'm saying it's precise." A pause. "Do you trust him?"

The question landed with more weight than Isla had expected. She considered it honestly. "I trust that he told me what he told me. That he warned me when he didn't have to." She set down the restoration brush. "I don't fully know what I'm trusting yet."

Petra nodded. Then: "Isla."

"Yes."

"The old mythology texts." Petra stood, went to the bookshelf her father had kept in the back room—paperbacks and research volumes and the occasional novel Petra had left here and never reclaimed. She pulled out a slim volume Isla recognized: Fate Mythology and the Old Compacts, one of the scholarly texts their father had acquired when he'd been researching the between-spaces for a series of maps he'd never finished. "I read this when you were sleeping. Before you were up."

Isla looked at her sister. "You knew."

"I knew you'd come back with an agreement. You're thorough." Petra opened the book to a page she'd marked with a strip of paper. "You need to read this section."

The section Petra had marked was three pages long and had the dense, citation-heavy quality of academic writing that was trying to be precise about something that resisted precision. It described the mechanism of the Prince of Ruin's curse in language that was considerably more detailed than the summary Isla had grown up with.

She read it standing at the bookshelf, and then she sat down on the floor and read it again.

The curse had been enacted three hundred years ago by the Fate of Grief, in response to an agreement between Ruin and Grief that Ruin had subsequently violated. The nature of that agreement was not specified in this text. What was specified was the mechanism: anyone who developed genuine love for the Prince of Ruin would die. Not metaphorically. The love itself became a vessel for Grief's energy—intensified, weaponized, turned back inward until it became fatal.

But the text went further. It described the sustaining mechanism: the Prince's resulting grief, when each person died, fed Grief in a loop. Grief maintained the curse. The Prince cared again. The loop continued. It was, the scholar writing the text noted in a footnote that had the quality of someone who found this professionally admirable, an extraordinarily efficient piece of constructed suffering.

The text then described what was required to break it.

She read that section four times.

"He needs someone to grieve for him," she said. "Genuinely. Completely. Not love—grief. The specific grief of knowing someone fully and knowing they will be lost."

"Yes," Petra said, from the doorway.

"He's not just collecting tears," Isla said. "He's looking for the specific quality of grief that can break the loop." She looked up. "The three tears aren't a price. They're a selection process."

"That's my read."

Isla sat with this. "He told me to ask him directly," she said. "He told me things would become complicated."

"He told you a great deal," Petra said carefully, "while also not telling you this."

"He told me there were things he hadn't volunteered. He told me to ask."

"Isla." Petra sat down on the floor beside her, which was a thing they had done since childhood in the back room of the shop, sitting among the papers and the books and the maps. "I'm not telling you this to frighten you. I'm telling you because I think you should know everything before—" She stopped. Looked at her hands. "Before you spend a year in close enough proximity to a Fate that the emotional residue starts transferring."

"You think I'm in danger."

"I think," Petra said, "that he chose you specifically. That the quality of your grief—our father's death, the atlas, the particular texture of the loss—is exactly what he's been looking for." Her voice was gentle and very precise. "Which doesn't mean he's malicious. But it means you weren't random."

Isla looked at her father's atlas, open on the desk above them. The southern coast. Here, the known world ends.

"I'll ask him," she said.

"Good." Petra stood, dusted herself off, and went to make more tea. At the doorway she paused. "For what it's worth: from what you've described, he sounds—" She searched for the word. "Tired. In the way of something that has been going on too long."

"He's three hundred years old."

"I know." Petra looked back. "I'm just saying: there's a difference between a predator and an exhausted thing looking for a way to stop."

She went to make the tea, and Isla sat on the back room floor with the mythology text in her lap and the atlas overhead and the slowly settling awareness that the map of this situation was considerably larger and more complicated than the version she'd agreed to.

She was a mapmaker's daughter. She noted the terrain.

She continued.