"That's - okay with me. It makes sense."

"Okay.

"I'll miss you. To be clear. But - I think I might need some time. I could send letters, I think? I don't know if you would want that."

"I don't have anyone to read them to me. I guess I could ask Fazil."

"Yeah. That's what I was thinking. I could - there's just no reason to do it if you wouldn't want to read them."

"Of course I'd want to!"

" - sorry. I can send letters.

"Is there a pool, in the other palace? It's not very important - "

"No, but there's the ocean, it's right there, you can swim in it."

"That might be good.

"Things hurt less when you're floating. Is all."

"It's easier to float in the ocean. Dunno why but it is."

"Zakiya says it's easier in saltwater.

"Will I have a room with a window?"

"Yeah, sure. Lots more rooms than people, what with." Handwave.

Nodnod. "That sounds good.

"I'm sorry for - asking for this."

"I - asked you to be happy. That's what I want."

"Okay. I'll - try."

She writes to Fazil.

Fazil,

I am sorry for failing to consider the effects my actions would have on you. I failed to think about the position that I would be putting you in, or to keep track of what information it was reasonable to burden you with. I was very scared. But I would like to be a person who thinks about the costs I am imposing on other people, even when I am very scared. I am sorry.

We are appreciated your suggestion that I live somewhere else for a while. I don't actually know whether this will be enough to give me the strength to solve the problem that we have created. But maybe it will. I will try to become stronger.

Thank you for talking with us.

- Korva

Zakiya packs up her things and they get a Teleport over to the other palace. 

It's by the ocean; there's a sandy beach that appears to stretch for miles and miles. It's much hotter than the palace in the Dome.

She hadn't thought about the heat. Maybe she'll regret this. But there's a sky here, and an ocean, and it feels less like a cage. She stares at it for a while. 

"Do we have rooms?"

"Yes." She takes her to them. In the rooms the heat is less bad (though still unpleasant); the walls are thick stone, and the windows positioned to move the sea breeze through.

She starts unpacking.

She does not like the heat, but she has a window here, and can look out of it whenever she wants. Maybe she can even convince herself to wander through other parts of the palace again, now that she isn't in the specific room that she so strongly associates with being pinned, like a bug under a glass.

She does eventually get used to the heat. The baby does, too, though it takes him a little longer. At first she fills her days in much the same way she did before, playing with the baby, and thinking, and eating, and sleeping, and staring into space. She explores the area immediately around her room, and then a little further, and a little further, taking note of where people are and trying to stick to the unpopulated parts. She asks Zakiya if they can visit the gardens, and the ocean. She writes letters - short ones, at first, about the baby and the beach and the plants and the corners of the palace that she likes, with only passing mentions of herself. But they get a little longer, over time, and a little more prone to complex sentences and thoughts. She thanks him for allowing her this.

He writes back that he hopes it is helping. It seems like maybe it is helping. The country is not on fire or anything. He loves her.

She reads his letters a maybe slightly excessive number of times, whenever she gets one, and keeps them in a little pile at her writing desk, so she can go through them again whenever she wants. 

She finds herself writing longer letters that spill more things than she means them to. She doesn't send them all. She follows the spilling where it leads, tentative hopes and wishes and dreams sandwiched between apologies, and tells herself that she does not have to send them, does not have to tell anyone about any of them, ever. The letters grow paragraphs of embarrassing wishing, and then those letters get shoved to the back of her drawer, only to be fished out and re-read whenever she wants to remember her own wishing. But she hides them, and doesn't say; they are too fragile to be looked at.

She wishes that her husband were with her, or that they had never left the deep plane. She wishes that there were a way for him to know which parts of her were fragile, and not injure those, and be comforting and protective and respectful and safe. She wishes that he were trustworthy. She wishes that he would apologize. She wishes that he did not do things that made her feel small.

The wishes grow little plots, and she finds herself writing embarrassing little stories, too raw and real and unfiltered for anyone's eyes but her own, and barely even suitable for hers. They are stories about her, mostly, and about her husband, and occasionally about her baby. She writes different ways that all this could have happened, or not happened, or stopped happening. They are achingly sweet and horribly painful. They build up at the back of her desk.

She feels the need to make something. She asks Zakiya if she might take up painting. She is very bad at it. She does not tell her husband, because she thinks that he would be annoyed with her, for doing something that he's specifically told her is not valuable. She swirls her paints and looks for the things of value in them. Her figures are odd, misshapen things, but that seems right; they have come out of her odd, misshapen heart, and been painted by unsteady hands. 

The baby starts walking. She feels as if she knows him better, now. She had been worried that the baby did not feel like he was hers, not even as much as Verita had, as if someone was paying her to watch him for just a few hours, and would be back to take him away in the morning, never to be seen again. But now little Khemet has desires, and opinions, and a personality, and she feels as if it matters a little less who he really belongs to, for they are both stuck here together, and he will need someone to teach him what it is to be a person. To hold the walls of the palace back long enough for him to grow up without being too malformed by them. She takes him to the beach, and to the garden, and she sings to him. She begins to tell him stories, at night, the way that she used to tell stories to Kanir and Zara, when they were small. She has Zakiya order books, and reads to him from those, when she is not quite able to spin new stories herself.

She takes the pile of wishing-stories at the back of her desk and tries filtering them through verse, when the same lines come up over and over again, and she wants some way to save them in a form that might not need to be hidden. She couches her feelings in metaphor and implication; she writes of people further afield from herself. She spins more complicated emotions. She locks more things within the lines, and polishes the form. 

At some point her magic trickles out again, like a dam that is just barely thinking about bursting. It's mage hand. If she wants a thing - something small, and near to her - she can pull it to herself.

She tells her husband some of how she's feeling. She's feeling - less empty, and more connected to the baby, and feels like perhaps she is building the foundation of something. She does not think that he should come yet. It is too fragile a foundation. But she misses him, and looks forward to seeing him when she is stronger. Maybe she will not be so easy to break, the next time. She tells him how often she rereads the letters he sends. And she tells him that she loves him.

The next letter is longer. It had not occurred to him that she would save them. Sometimes when he's not feeling overwhelmed he reads his brother's notes about his plans and can then try to do a bit of them. Only a bit. Many of them were very ambitious. His brother wanted to do so many things. He's so sad.

They should be exposing baby Khemet to lots of languages, they're easiest to learn when you're small. His father taught him a dozen, though they didn't all stick. Probably it doesn't matter, there's translation magic, but. 

He is glad she is doing better. He will tell Fazil this was a good idea.

Well, she can teach baby Khemet Taldane, and ask Zakiya to find some other people to speak to him in other languages. And of course the baby can always visit him and he can talk to the baby in some of the languages that stuck.

She's sorry that he's so sad. She writes him a poem about the baby, and another one about the ocean. She's proud of him for working on his brother's plans, even if it's just a little. 

She tries to start learning Osirian again, with Zakiya. She wants to be able to write in it. It is slow work, but it's interesting. She feels capable of tackling it in a way that she didn't before. She tries reading Osirian poetry, familiarizing herself with their forms and their themes and their history. She keeps painting. The misshapen figures begin to look more like people and less like melting half-remembered monster faces. She asks Zakiya for a lute, and experiments with it in front of baby Khemet, who is very easily impressed. She keeps telling him stories, and there are fewer nights when she can't think of anything. She keeps taking him to the beach. She teaches him to pick up seashells, and amasses a respectable collection of the prettiest ones for her room. She tells him about the gods, and their struggles, and of heroes of legend, without limiting herself to stories that are meant to breed lawfulness. He will have plenty of that from the his tutors. But a wise pharaoh will need more stories than that, more tools with which to understand other people.

She does not keep track of time. It is not healthy, she thinks, to wonder how long it's been, or give herself a timetable for recovery. She is a person who writes, who plays, who sings, who paints, who reads, who walks along the beach and collects seashells, who sews, who cleans, who dreams. She does not need to be anything else, not yet. Not until the darkness has all been pulled out of her and into the words and the music and the paints and sand and the sky and the ocean. They can hold it for her, until there's enough space inside her to grow something else.

The baby starts speaking. Only a little, at first, and mostly Taldane. She asks Zakiya to make a habit of speaking to him in Osirian, and to see that he spends more time with speakers of other languages, too. She tries to speak to him in Osirian sometimes, too, for practice, but she keeps telling him stories in Taldane. 

She feels like her magic is progressing, even when it's been a long time since she last gained a spell; she can feel herself getting closer to being able to pull together the sorts of stories that will be able to move the world more directly. She finds that she wants to be able to move the world. She wants to have done something. She wants to move feelings, and people, and plots. She writes a collection of fables, over the course of a few months, many of them more polished versions of bedtime stories for her son. She translates them into Osirian, leaning on Zakiya some. She wishes she could send them outside, to be read by other people. She's not sure whether there's any way to send them out that's appropriate. She asks her husband in a letter. She wouldn't want anyone to know who they were by. It's not really very important that anyone sees them at all. It just seems worth asking about.

He thinks that they could be published without a name on them, if she wanted that. His mother published things. And he would like to have them read to him, maybe.

She thinks that she would like that. She makes a copy for him. She's picking up the copying cantrip, now, and can make as many copies as she wants, as long as she has paper.

She starts working on something else, a thin little set of poems about women and children and pieces of ordinary lives, the elements of human existence that she supposes must exist everywhere. It seems like there ought to be poems about that, and she's not very sure that there are. And it makes her feel less homesick, a little bit, to be able to trap on the page some pieces of what it was like to live a mostly ordinary life, before the palace. These ones she composes directly in Osirian. She is not entirely sure whether she's good enough to pull that off, but if she isn't yet then she will be, someday, and can only get there by practicing.

Baby Khemet starts having conversations. He isn't really a baby anymore; he is talkative and curious and likes exploring and climbing and fighting with imaginary swords. He tells her that he is a wizard, a soldier, a dinosaur, a dragon, a pirate, a cleric of every god that exists. She plays along with him. She does not tell him that he can be anything he wants, because he can't, but he ought to be able to imagine. She gets a spell for sharing memories, shaped out of poems that capture little slices of life to be given to other people, and occasionally shows him things she's seen before, in the deep plane, and in Cheliax, and in some of the places she visited earlier. She shows him little snippets of his father as an adventurer, before the palace. She wishes that she had a greater wealth of memories to share with him. 

She writes long, imaginary dialogues between herself and different versions of her husband, trying to give herself the things she wishes for without actually having to rely on him to give them to her. It is not very good at getting her to stop wanting, but it is enlightening, maybe, writing out specific things and examining how they make her feel, developing a better map of what it is that she wants. She misses him. Misses being held, and hearing his voice, and seeing his face. She wonders if he's actually still in love with her, and whether there's anyone else he's decided he likes. She doesn't ask him.

She sends him the poems. She tells him that he doesn't have to have someone read them to him, if he doesn't want, but they're there if he does.

He has Fazil read him the poems. They do not make a lot of sense to him. He's not really a poems person. He scries her, sometimes, when he wants to see her. He does not tell her he's doing that.