He didn’t notice falling asleep until a gentle hand gripped his shoulder and shook it. It pulled at a haze that seemingly appeared over his brain, and he blinked, seeing only the table and the books through the smear of his eyelids.

‘Ashy?’ Evelyn’s voice was a soft breath against his ear. ‘C’mon sweetie, you need sleep.’

Sleep. He had fallen asleep. He turned his head and saw his aunt’s face hanging over him, which made him jump, tiredness evaporating as quickly as he had noticed. Evelyn jumped back. The windows were pitch black, and the lantern on the table was spluttering, struggling against it’s last puffs of gas. Asher rubbed at his eyes. ‘What time is it?’

‘Just after two,’ Evelyn said. ‘Come on, the maids have prepared your room.’

Asher shook his head. Now that he was awake he wasn’t going back to sleep. ‘Are you just getting in?’

‘I just finished up, yes,’ Evelyn said. ‘You’re drooling on the records.’

Asher noticed a dark, wet stain across the parchment where his head had been, and he hastily dabbed at it with his sleeve. It didn’t clear.

Evelyn produced a large envelope, placing it down over the mark as though to hide it. ‘There was a young girl here before, she said to give you that,’ she said. ‘You needed some information from the archives?’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Asher shook the last of the sleep from his brain, and pulled the envelope open. ‘Missing persons,’ he lied. ‘I want to see if this goes back further.’

‘You’re going to find them, aren’t you?’ Evelyn sounded desperate, and Asher turned to meet her eye. He hadn’t asked about how she was doing after what Henri had done – though he hadn’t had much of a chance – and now all he could see was sadness in her eyes.

‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘Are you doing okay?’

‘All this work has kept me busy,’ she said. She then sighed. ‘I’ll be honest, Ashy, I don’t know what to make of… everything that’s developed. It’s not like I’ll get anything from Henri. Part of me has accepted I’ll probably never see him again.’

There was that feeling again, that there was no reversing any of this. Whatever he was looking at, it was something for the very books covered in his slobber, and not some experiment that could wave it away. He couldn’t make himself believe it though. Navarre was coming back. ‘Would you be okay with that?’ Asher asked. ‘Never seeing him again?’

‘Well, it’s really not up to me, is it?’ Evelyn said. She absently tugged at one of the books. ‘I never married him for love. You know that, right? I married him for the security, for the comfort and the safety. Before you were born, things were very different. They don’t talk about it. I don’t think any old fool wants to talk about it, but war coming to the mainland was a very real thing. I just wanted to look out for myself, and Henri knew that. Still… I thought we were pretending to be happy in those early days. I tried to be at least.’

‘Do you really want to talk about this?’ Asher asked. He knew if she continued it would go into a heavy subject, and he wasn’t sure if he was in the right mind to take it in.

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‘I think we won’t get time outside of this,’ Evelyn said. ‘I just want you to understand. I tried my hardest to have a boy of my own. A sweet little thing who could grow up to be… well, to be just like you. I want us to have a relationship, Ashy. I don’t want you to hate me.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ Asher mumbled.

Evelyn gave a dry laugh. ‘I hated your mother. When we first met, I mean. I think I saw myself in her. I saw a woman who would take my dear Willy for his status and his power. A simple dock-woman who wanted a chance to stand next to the King. I only told Wilhelm that because I was worried. I didn’t want him getting hurt.’

Asher swallowed. He half expected her to switch to her usual tirade, but the energy never came. The situation around them had muted her. ‘I never met father, you know that,’ he said. ‘But I know my mother loved him.’

‘And I believe you, I suppose,’ Evelyn said. ‘Not much else to do there. All I know is that when I heard about you, a sweet little cherub so happy and rosy and healthy, I was so happy. But Willy told me to never return to Fanmaryh. I wasn’t welcome.’

Asher blinked, and straightened in his chair. ‘Father was the one who barred you?’

‘He wouldn’t be forced to chose between me and Tasa,’ Evelyn said. ‘With you, the choice would always be the same, and I refused to admit I was wrong to worry after him. When I reached out to your mother… I’m surprised you convinced her to let you go to Jordueax.’

‘It was her idea,’ Asher said. ‘She said if I stayed, I would only be a dock worker like her, but if I took the offer, I’d have the choice to go back later.’

‘I see,’ Evelyn said. ‘Did you even want to —’

‘No.’

Evelyn flinched, and all at once it came rushing back. He had only been a boy, alone and on the other side of the Kingdom. He had no friends. Even Navarre at that point was an older boy who scared him. It was then he had learned to hate Evelyn, the woman he had met once, and the few letters he’d received from her went unanswered.

‘I know you still don’t forgive me,’ Evelyn mumbled. ‘But I only wanted you to have a chance. You could be powerful, smart, you could have the entire Kingdom.’

‘That wasn’t it,’ Asher mumbled. He didn’t want to say it. Though she had put her emotions out, and she probably deserved to know the truth of his. ‘I don’t hate you, Evelyn. I didn’t turn away because I didn’t want to be at that school.’

Evelyn opened her mouth to respond, but Asher got to his feet, twisting around to sit on the table so he was level with her. She snapped her mouth shut again.

‘You remember Grey Lung, don’t you?’ he asked her. ‘The pandemic that followed the war. So many of the boys in that place would laugh it off, because it came from Telkesi. It came from that place, and all the people who arrived from there were getting it because they deserved to get it. They came and brought their disease with them, and they deserved to die.’ Just saying it made him feel sick to the stomach. Who would get the blame for what was happening now? Someone would; history had a bad habit of foreshadowing.

‘You know that’s not true,’ Evelyn mumbled. ‘I know it’s not true. A lot of people came down with it.’

‘I was fourteen, I didn’t know that,’ Asher said. ‘All I knew was that I was scared. I had… a really bad feeling, and I just wanted to go home and make sure mother was alright. I finally got a note to the dean, and you said no.’

‘Ashy, I didn’t know…’

‘You said no,’ Asher pressed. ‘Because you were the one he asked. Because you were my legal guardian. That was how I found out she had already died. That’s how I learned my mother had died.’

Evelyn’s lips thinned into a line.

‘I don’t hate you,’ Asher said. He sighed. He didn’t want to talk about this. He didn’t want to go through all of this now, just because the woman responsible – even if she wasn’t complicit – had her own ghosts for Asher to hold. He shouldn’t have said anything. He needed to go back to work.

Evelyn reached out to place a hand on his shoulder, but Asher got up from the table and dropped back into the seat. His leg had gone stiff from how it had been sitting for so long. She stayed there for a moment, watching him, then she made to touch his shoulder again before thinking better and pulling away.

She stopped in the doorway, her silhouette casting a long shadow across the library. ‘I’m sorry, Asher,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry for all of it.’ She sucked in a deep breath, standing still for a pregnant silence. ‘You’re all I have left now.’