Side Story 5.5: August Responds
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Invitation to a Place Once Called Home
Several days passed before August gave the matter a proper answer.
Not because he was avoiding it. He had read the letters more than once, turned the details over in his mind, and spent two evenings sitting in his father's chair in the quiet after the household had gone to bed, thinking about things he had not allowed himself to think about in years. The old families. The old village. The people who had left and the people who had stayed, and what the difference between those two choices had amounted to in the end.
The House of Arbe. The House of Nebe. The House of Bern. Fifty-two people who had walked out of Maya Village and disappeared into the wider world before the night the rest of it burned. He had been eight years old when they left. He remembered them clearly enough — faces, voices, the particular way Patriarch Aldrin Arbe always held himself when speaking in council, the sound of Elena Bern's practical, clipped sentences that never wasted a syllable. He remembered standing with his parents to watch them go, and the particular silence that settled over the village afterward, the kind that comes when a community realizes it is smaller than it was.
He had not blamed them then. He did not blame them now. The village council had respected the decision, and August had grown up with that respect built into how he understood the world. People made choices. Sometimes those choices protected the people who made them and left others behind. That was not something you could consider as evil. It was human nature after all to choose survival above all. The three families had looked at what was coming, with the noise of Imperial soldiers and allied forces marching along the imperial highway, a scouting party already turning its eyes toward the forest, the echoes of death from those who they found to be allies of the Fresco League of Kingdoms and they had made a calculation based on that, that the people who stayed on imperial held territory one that wasn't supposed to exist in the first place would not have made it alive.
Their choice was correct in the end to abandon what they have known all their lives to be home as now all of those who stayed were dead, buried in the ground they have known to be home.
The three families who opted to return to their ancestral lands have survived indeed, but it felt bitter as to the question of what ifs that may or may not have changed the outcome anyways.
August had sat with that arithmetic long enough to stop finding it comfortable and start finding it honest. And he had sat with Angeline, who listened the way she always listened, completely, without interrupting, until he had run out of things to say and only then did she offer her quiet opinion that whatever he decided, she would support it.
It was Aunt Theressa who had actually moved him into the final decision.
She had found him on the second evening, standing at the window of the main hall with the letters in his hand and the celebration sounds fading outside. She had brought him a cup of the warm caprine milk he had developed a preference for and handed it to him without comment. Then she stood beside him for a long moment looking at the same darkness he was looking at.
"August," she said, "don't be too harsh on yourself or them."
He glanced at her.
"They are only trying to confirm whether those they left behind still exist," she continued. "Although unfortunately, the answer is only you now. So here is what I think." She set her own cup down on the windowsill. "Invite them. At the very least, they deserve to know the truth. And as you're probably afraid — they may not recognize this place anymore. What they left behind is gone. This is something else entirely." She paused. "But I'll tell you something else, too. The village respected their decision to leave. I know how seriously you take that. So let bygones be bygones. They have suffered for their own choices in ways we'll probably never fully know. And aren't you at least glad that you're not the last one left who remembers? Maybe between the two sides of this, some of the missing pieces of history will finally get filled in."
August was quiet for a moment. Then he looked at the letters again.
"Yeah," he said. "I think you're rightaunty."
The draft took him the better part of that night. He was not a man who found formal correspondence easy, as his natural instinct was brevity, the same directness he applied to everything else — but this required something more than brevity. It required accuracy. He wrote it out twice before he was satisfied.
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*To the Houses of Arbe, Nebe and Bern,*
*My name is August Finn. My father was Julius Finn the Second. My mother was April Finn. My sister was called May. They are gone — all three, along with nearly everyone else who remained in old Maya Village on the night of the raid. I myself did not come through it unscathed, and even now I cannot fully explain how I survived. I have accepted that some things are not meant to be understood, only carried.*
*I buried our dead here, where they are meant to be. Every last one of them. Their graves are in the village cemetery, and they are tended regularly.*
*I will be honest with you: I had not allowed myself to believe that any of you were still alive. I know that may sound cold, but it was the truth of how I managed. So learning that the Houses of Arbe, Nebe and Bern survived the journey and the years that followed is something I did not expect to feel as I do. I am glad. Whatever came before and after, I am glad.*
*On the matter of the village itself — I need you to understand that what stands here now is not what you have decided to leave behind. The old Maya is gone, and what has been built in its place was built by other hands alongside mine. People who were not born here, who had no connection to the old families, who came because they needed somewhere to belong and this place needed people willing to build it. If you walked through the gates tomorrow, the only structure you might still recognize would be my house, and even that has been significantly changed. The mountain at the rear of the settlement is the same. The forest is the same. But everything else is new.*
*With that said: this village is always open to those who were part of its beginning, its long and painful history. If any of the three houses wish to return and begin again here, you are welcome. That is not a courtesy offer — I mean it without conditions. If you have built lives where you are now, and those lives are good ones, then stay and be well, that too is fine. I hold nothing against the decision that was made, and I will not pretend otherwise. But if any among you wish to come back to the forest and see what it has become, the door is always open.*
*I am only glad I am not the last one left to tell this story.*
*Yours sincerely,*
*August Finn*
*Of the House of Finn*
*Friend to the Houses of Arbe, Nebe and Bern*
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He sealed it with green wax, with the characteristic color of the Finn household, taken from the particular shade of eyes that had marked his family line as far back as the stories went — and set it beside the three reply letters he had already prepared to Carys's specific questions. Those were more straightforward: the state of the village, its population, its leadership, whether certain names had survived. He had answered each question honestly, omitting nothing that was not a military secret.
He went to bed with the satisfaction of a burden he had been carrying finally being lifted away. He hugged his wife and turned off his mind and everything went blank.
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The festive mood had wound down by the time morning came. The merchants who had moved quickly during the discount period were already hitching wagons and checking load distribution, the particular organized urgency of people who had gotten what they came for and were ready to be somewhere else. August found Carys's caravan — the Timog-Sur Tradings, a tight, well-organized operation that clearly moved regularly through difficult routes — and sought her out before the first wagons rolled.
She was tallying manifests when he found her. She looked up with the professional calm of someone who had been expecting him.
"Miss Carys," August said. "I hope these (letters) will find them in good health." He handed her the four letters — the three replies to the formal questions and his personal letter to the families, all sealed. Then he placed a single Imperial gold coin in her hand. "For your troubles and your discretion."
He had also arranged a parcel. Ten kilograms of premium beast meat, divided for the journey and for distribution — a portion for Carys herself and the remainder intended for the three families when she reached them. Three bottles of the village's better alcohol, selected somewhat at random since he was not Brus and did not have strong opinions on the matter. And from the Thornwick stock, several bottles of the finest fruit wine that had cleared the household allocation and reached the market — he had bought them himself specifically for this. Something from the orchard, from the village, from the hands that had built what was left.
It felt inadequate for the weight of the occasion. He suspected it was. But it was honest, and it was what he had.
"I'll see that they reach their destinations," Carys said, looking at the parcel with the evaluating eye of a woman who had moved valuable cargo for a living. "The letters especially."
"That's all I ask, thank you."
She gave him a short nod, the kind that sealed things without ceremony, and returned to her manifests.
August stood at the edge of the road for a moment longer, watching the caravan finish its preparations. Somewhere far to the south, in a merchant compound in Swolenburg, in a noble estate in the Duchy of Heran, in a warrior clan's hall in the Kingdom of Talvasia, three families who had spent over a decade carrying guilt for a death that had not quite happened were going to receive word that someone was still standing in the ruins that they mourned.
What they did with that news was their own to decide.
He turned back toward the village. There was a full day's work waiting, as there always was, and the summer was only going to get hotter from here.