By late afternoon, the market square was unrecognizable.
The garlands Maximus had hung so badly had been quietly re-hung by persons unknown — persons with functioning eyesight — and now swagged in proper arcs between the stalls. The long tables stood in rows over the bridged fissure, groaning under their cloths. The strung lanterns hung dark and waiting from every wire. And the people were coming: streaming in from Chandler's Row and the tenements and the upper streets, in their best clothes, children darting between the tables like minnows.
Maximus stood at the square's edge, watching it fill, and felt something unfamiliar crawl up his spine.
"That's happiness," Pip said from his shoulder. "It's supposed to feel weird. You'll get used to it."
"I've been alive for centuries, Pip."
"And emotionally you're about twelve. Come on." She grabbed his ear and pulled. "Food first. Feelings later."
Pip's approach to the feast was a tactical assault. Within twenty minutes she had sampled crusty brown bread, glazed boar, cinnamon-scented glowing blue berries, and a skewer of dark meat Maximus strongly suspected was cavern lizard.
She held up a tray of shimmering, translucent jelly squares. "What's this?"
"Don't know," Maximus said. "And don't touch it. I don't trust food that wiggles."
Pip picked one up anyway. "I'm evaluating the threat. You should eat one first."
"Why?"
"If your ancient bloodline can't handle it, I'll stick to the bread."
"That is not how friendship works."
"Should I be concerned," a smooth voice cut through the noise, "or is this a standard culinary hostage situation?"
Seraphina approached, a silver goblet in hand, her silver hair braided back around her glowing spell pendant, an indigo mantle threaded with silver catching the late light.
"No," Maximus said instantly.
"Yes," Pip countered at the exact same moment.
Seraphina smiled. "I see the peace hasn't softened either of you."
"Maximus and I have grown profoundly close," Pip declared, holding her skewer like a sword. "A deep, unspoken bond. We've known each other for months."
Seraphina paused. "Months? I thought you two met right before you came here."
Maximus slowly turned his head toward Pip.
Pip froze, her mouth full of lizard meat. "...What?"
"You told Seraphina yesterday that we'd known each other for days," Maximus said.
"My memory gets hazy when I'm malnourished."
"Yesterday you swore to Kael we were childhood friends. Last week you told the quartermaster we met in a ditch."
Pip shrugged. "Technically, months are made of days, and childhood is a state of mind."
Seraphina laughed. "I will never get an accurate history of your origins, will I?"
"You won't," Maximus said. "She changes the timeline based on who has food."
Pip raised her goblet. "To vague timelines and questionable origins!"
Maximus sighed, clinking his cup against hers. "To whatever lie we're sticking to tonight."
As the light dimmed toward evening, a hush moved through the square like a tide going out.
Queen Lyra walked to the center — to the seam in the new flagstones where the fissure ran beneath — and the crowd parted for her without being asked. She wore no crown. Her hair was unbound. In her hands she carried a single paper lantern, unlit.
Behind her, Maelik's elves moved through the crowd handing out lanterns — small paper moons, one for every family that had lost someone, one for every name that needed saying.
Lyra waited until the square was silent. Hundreds of faces. Hundreds of lanterns.
"One month ago," she said, and her voice carried without effort, "the dark came up through the floor of my city. And people stood in front of it." She looked down at the lantern in her hands. "We rebuilt the stone. Tonight, we remember the ones the stone couldn't save."
She touched a flame to her lantern. It glowed to life in her hands.
"Dain." The lantern trembled. "Maren. Jessa. Corvin. Pell." She looked up. "My guards. They held the lower stair for eleven minutes against things that should not exist, so that the wards above could bar their doors. Eleven minutes. I counted."
She released the lantern. It rose — wobbling, then steady, then climbing into the dusk.
Maelik stepped forward. Three lanterns, lit from Lyra's flame. He spoke three names in the old tongue of his people — Faelar. Nym. Thessia. — and then, in the common speech, so the whole square would understand:
"My blade-kin. My dead. In my mother's tongue we say: the mountain keeps them." He released the lanterns. "The mountain keeps them."
Ailsa came next — flour still on her sleeves from the day's baking, her youngest clinging to her skirt. She lit one lantern with shaking hands.
"Bram," she said. "He was fixing the shutter when the wall came down. He'd been meaning to fix that shutter for a year." A wet laugh moved through the crowd. "I told him — I told him — the shutter could wait." She let the lantern go. "I was wrong about a lot of things."
Then Lyra spoke the last of them — ten names for the tenements, read slowly, every one given its weight: Sella. Odo. Marris. Vanna. Kess. Doran. Liora. Tam. Bessa. Colm.
Nineteen lanterns rose toward the great vault overhead.
No one spoke. The only sound was the soft rush of flame and paper, and somewhere a child crying quietly, and being held.
Then the singer — the one from the corner, the one Lyra had hired on one strict condition — struck the first chord on his lute. And all across the square, the strung lanterns bloomed into light: crimson and gold, hundreds of them, turning the dusk to warm amber.
The feast began.
What followed was, by every account, the loudest night in Veyloria's history.
The singer performed his ballad of the Hollow King's fall — with the wanderer firmly and exclusively on foot, at Her Majesty's strict instruction — and the crowd roared the chorus. Ailsa's tables emptied and refilled and emptied again. Someone produced the badger cake, and Pip took one look at its lopsided ears and declared, at full volume, "IT'S MAGNIFICENT. I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I'VE EVER SAID ABOUT ANYONE."
Seraphina found herself cornered by a dozen children near the fountain.
"Do the butterfly thing again!" a young boy cheered, tugging her mantle.
"I am a battle mage of the High Circle," Seraphina said, attempting to sound stern. "I do not perform parlor tricks."
"Again! Again!"
Seraphina sighed theatrically, snapping her fingers to produce a burst of warm amber fire. With a flick of her wrist, the flame dissolved into glowing light-butterflies that fluttered into the air. The children squealed, chasing after them.
"I GOT IT!" Pip dove through the air, waving a wooden spoon wildly. "I GOT THE MAGIC BIRD!"
She tumbled headfirst into a pile of silk cushions, sat up with her hair sticking in every direction, and held up her spoon. "Victory!"
"Those are light constructs," Seraphina laughed. "You cannot catch magic with a spoon."
"Persistence, Seraphina!" Pip lunged for another, slipped, and crashed into Maximus's knees as he walked past.
Maximus grabbed Pip by her collar, hauling her up like a scruffy puppy. "Are you hunting spellwork again?"
"It was a tactical ambush," Pip wheezed.
While Seraphina shook her head in amusement, Pip noticed the cluster of children sitting by the fountain, watching with wide eyes. Pip's face lit up. She unslung her lute with a dramatic flourish that nearly clipped a nearby guard.
"Gather 'round, small people!" Pip declared. "You've seen light tricks, but now you shall hear the true high art of bards! This is an ancient educational ballad called The Goblin's Great Misfortune, or Why You Don't Eat Beans Before a Heist!"
She struck a heavy, off-key chord and bellowed:
"Oh, the goblin named Snark had a terrible itch,
He tried to rob a tavern and make himself rich!
He snuck through the door, but his belly gave a shout,
And a massive, noisy fart blew his pants right out!"
The children gasped before bursting into wild, screeching laughter.
"With a pop and a blast and a terrible smell,
He blew down the guard tower and blasted straight to—"
"PIP!" Seraphina shrieked, flushing red as she lunged forward and slapped a hand over Pip's mouth.
Pip muffled a protest while the children clapped, chanting, "MORE FART SONG! MORE FART SONG!"
Maximus covered his face, groaning. "I don't know her. I have never seen this creature before in my life."
"She's singing about intestinal distress to noble children!" Seraphina hissed, wrestling the lute away.
"It builds character!" Pip yelled around Seraphina's fingers. "And it's educational! Always vent your gasses before stealth missions!"
Kael walked past without slowing his stride, taking a long drink from his horn. "I am adding public performance to your list of security threats."
At some point in the evening, Maximus found Maelik at the square's edge, watching his elves laugh with human laborers over a shared cask — the vanguard's stiff formalities dissolving one cup at a time.
"Your mother would not believe it," Maximus said.
Maelik was quiet for a moment. Then, echoing the queen's words from a month of breakfasts: "Believe it."
They stood there a while, two warriors, no words needed. Then Maelik raised his cup — to the nineteen lanterns, long since vanished into the dark above — and drank.
Later, Pip sat cross-legged on a table attempting to teach Kael how to balance a grape on his nose. Kael — Commander Kael, terror of the watch, scourge of bards — was allowing it, his arms crossed, his dignity in ruins, a grape wobbling on the bridge of his nose while soldiers wept with laughter around him.
Lyra watched it all from the square's center, her wine untouched, her face lit gold by the lanterns — and laughed until she had to sit down.
It was near midnight when the music slowed into a dark elf waltz, and Lyra crossed the square to where Maximus stood watching from the shadows by the fountain.
"It is customary," she said, holding out her hand, a playful spark in her eyes, "for the host to dance with the champion."
"I don't dance, Lyra."
"You took on the Hollow King twice. You can manage three steps."
Maximus took her hand, placing his other lightly at her waist. They moved together across the flagstones — over the seam where the fissure ran beneath — in time with the music, and the crowd made room for them without being asked, the way crowds do when something matters.
"What keeps you alive now, Maximus?" she murmured, looking up at him. "When the battle is over?"
"I'm still figuring that out," he admitted, his voice softening. "But this... helps."
Around them, the square turned and glowed — children asleep on cushions, old soldiers arm in arm, Maelik's elves teaching human children a vanguard marching song, Ailsa dancing with her youngest on her feet. Nineteen lanterns' worth of grief, and underneath it, holding it up: joy.
Much later, when the feast had burned down to embers and quiet conversations, Maximus slipped away to the balcony of the old merchant hall above the square. Below, the last lanterns swayed. The tables stood empty. Someone was snoring in a pile of garlands.
"You always wander into the shadows when the noise stops," Lyra said softly, stepping up beside him.
"I was contemplating a stealthy exit."
"You're terrible at stealth when you're not killing things," she replied. "Are you content, Maximus?"
The word still felt strange to him. He looked down at the square — at the proof that the city had remembered how to be alive — and thought about nineteen lanterns climbing into the dark.
"I suppose," he said slowly, "I've grown accustomed to the noise."
"You could stay," Lyra said softly. "Permanently."
"Careful, Lyra. You might regret offering an ancient terror a room."
"I already regret letting Pip into the wine cellar. You are a minor concern by comparison."
"MAXIMUS!" Pip's voice shattered the night from below. "KAEL SAYS I CAN'T FIGHT THE FOUNTAIN! TELL HIM I HAVE THE RIGHT!"
The moment broke. Lyra laughed softly, resting her forehead against his shoulder before stepping back.
Maximus groaned, resting his head on the railing. "I take it back. I prefer the undead army."
Below, the square glowed — crimson and gold, embers and lantern-light, the whole city asleep beneath the great vault, where nineteen paper moons had climbed into the dark and vanished.
It had been a good night. The best kind of night. The kind you remember.