It took North over two years to find Songbird.
In his defense, he wasn’t looking for her. She’d been in Metrol on the Day of Mourning. He’d assumed her dead, like…
Anyway, he hadn’t been looking, but one day in the early winter of 996 YK, he’d tailed a target to a theater in Downstairs. Crouched in the rafters, one eye had been on the Brelish parliamentarian, but the other had been on the production.
And something about it had been…familiar.
Not just the story—it was a story about war, and he knew the stories about war. But the way the story was told. The tempo and beat…and most of all the music.
It was haunting, slow and sad and soft, but it stirred a flicker of memory, somewhere in the back of North’s head.
And then, on the way out of the theater, at just the right moment, when he’d been about to drop from rafter to empty box, there had been a ripple in a curtain across the theater, the curtain across the box that everyone said the playwright had set aside for her use, and a silhouette had stood behind the fabric, and just for a moment-
He’d tried to shake the feeling of familiarity off, followed the parliamentarian home and sent his schedule to Whitehearth, but it just wouldn’t go.
So he started doing his research instead.
Nobody knew much about Luca Syara. She’d come to the Diamond shortly after the Mourning. She wrote deeply heartwrenching, poignant plays about loss and grief, with a focus on the cost of the War. Nobody could agree on where she was from, or why she had chosen to take up residence in the tiny, obscure Diamond.
She was deeply private, hardly ever appearing in public. It took North nearly a week to catch a proper glimpse of her, and when he did, the human woman bowed by grief was nearly unrecognizable. Probably would have been unrecognizable, to anyone else.
But North too, had been changed by the Mourning, down to his very soul. North too had been broken by grief and remade into something new, and he could see what Luca had once been.
So in early Aryth, Luca Syara entered her office to find the window open and a man with hooded eyes and grief carved into his face like a mask waiting in it.
“Songbird.”
“Spectre.”
Neither name was right.
There was a long beat of silence.
“How did you find me?”
“I’m very good at what I do, Songbird.” North’s eyes, once-bronze rusted to red, bored into Luca. “How did you survive?”
“I had no other choice.” Luca can hear the question layered beneath the one North asked. “Flame is gone. I’m sorry, Spectre.”
North’s hand touches the ring hanging from his neck, ever so briefly. “I have mourned them.”
They both do the courtesy of pretending they believe the lie.
North drops lightly off the window ledge, feet landing silently on the floor of the office. “Spectre died with Flame, but I’m someone else now—Avenger North. I found the others-the other survivors. Cyre may be gone, but there is still a memory we can fight for, still a people to protect, and Avenge.” Luca stood there silently, watching him approach. “I’ve been wanting a more dedicated Avenger for Lower Sharn, and we could use your help at the meeting at Thronehold next-”
“North.” Luca’s voice was soft. “Stop.”
North halted, eyes narrowed.
“I am done.”
“What?”
“I am done.” Luca’s voice shivered, rattled like ice in a storm. “Done watching you die. Done trying to change it.”
North’s gloved hands curled into fists. “Done?” He couldn’t match the cold in Luca’s voice, suffusing her entire form, but he had always been very good at being sharp, and his voice had a truly razored edge. “You’re just done. You just quit? I need you, Songbird.” His voice was taut, like a bowstring held at full draw far too long. “We-”
“Songbird is as dead as Spectre.” Her voice wasn’t even a snarl, but it was broken, the ice cracked and shattered, spread in shards across the floor of the office. “You’ll all die in the end, Spectre. And none of it will matter. I am done pretending otherwise.”
North had always known something was different about Lia, the way that emotion and narrative seemed to shape itself around her. He’d never pushed—he’d understood the inclination to hide one’s planetouched nature, sometimes.
But now she stood before him, a statue sculpted of exhausted apathy, despair radiating from her like heat from a bonfire, a human where she had once been an elf, and he understood she was far more than a hexblood.
And he didn’t care.
He came nose to nose with her, rusted eyes that had once been bronze locking with blue that had once been green. “They are not dead yet. Not all of them. Cyre may be gone, but there are still Cyrans, and they are vulnerable, they are a people without a nation, and Oargev is doing his best but there is an entire people of problems and no country to help fix them. They need us. Help me give them something we have lost our chance at.”
Luca stares down at North, the ghost of a Spectre who was once a man driven by bright hope, by the certainty that Cyre was right, that the War would end with justice. Who now stands in her aura of despair without buckling because hopelessness consumed him years ago. Who despite being scraped empty and rendered hollow has still managed to stitch the shredded surviving scraps of Cyran espionage into something that can make a difference, who is still the North for people who follow him.
And she delivers her answer without hesitation.
“No.”
A deep, bitter light sparks in North’s eyes. “Did you ever care about us at all, Syara?”
“Yes,” Luca whispers, but North isn’t waiting for the answer, as he whirls and leaps to the window, and the night has swallowed him by the time she finished speaking.
“That was my great mistake.”
Days later, Avenger North watched Prince Oargev stand in front of Thronehold, looking rather stunned as the doors closed in front of him, barring him entrance from even negotiations for the Treaty. North did not think about how someone capable with words and wielding the power of Thelanis might have changed things. There was no point.
And in the weeks to come, as North’s demeanor further cooled and hardened, as he grew more ruthless and began laying out more plans, as he drove himself harder and harder, nobody thought to wonder if it had anything to do with his month in Sharn.