A great man was dead. Bernat felt himself grow distant from the throaty rumble of the hearse's engine, staring out across the soot-streaked city from the top of the memorial hill. One of the windows was cracked, letting in a persistent whisper of cold air. It put him in mind of his childhood. They had been eddying around the northern part of the continent, back then, before pushing south in his teenage years in search of supplies from the ruined cities. Then, when the nights were cold like this one, and the brow of the sky so heavy with sleep, it would snow... It didn't snow in Carmine.

Around him flowed a river of black-clad bodies, heads low against the brittle air. Every now and again, Bernat could catch the snatch of a face, though most were tucked to far down beneath stiff, high collars and underneath the shadowy press of a cap or veil. He didn't risk looking out the darkened window at them for too long, for fear that a pair of eyes might look back and spy what could have been seen as distracted irreverence.

The ancient hearse lumbered onto the road, it's wheels churning the gravel-strewn road beneath with a sound like sand and bone. Bernat returned his eyes to the road, tightening his grip on the wheel as the crowd began to thin around him, the bulk of the swarm having gone on ahead. He would follow the last man walking, trying to hang on to a thought - any at all - over the grinding drone of the engine and the wheels. His grey eyes trailed the funerary procession, the road, the silhouette of the city laying grotesquely down below; the sprawling shadow of a leviathan barely sleeping.

A great man was dead.

They had waited to schedule the procession until after they detained the assassin. It was to keep everyone safe... for the fear that others in the upper echelon of society might also be in the sights of the (killer) that had felled the General. They had hauled in, predictably, the woman whom everyone's mind had gone to when the word spread (like a damn fire!) through the city that he was gone. Petra Merenias; for years outspoken against the General, against the city itself.

As the hearse wound down the long road from the memorial hill, past the hollow shapes of buildings - some half-converted, some still totally abandoned, tenanted only by the ghosts of a world that used to be - it was her face that occupied his mind's eye, not the General's. He wanted to occupy his mind with reverence for the dead man, not dwell on his murderer, but what was a more disconcerting undertone to his distraction was that... he didn't hate Petra.

On the contrary. Bernat had to see her.

"She doesn't get many visitors, this one." Said the warden as his assistant patted Bernat down routinely. He ran his fingers through his beard, moving his eyes to the narrow, closed door that separated the civilized world from the purgatory that lived within.

"I was loyal to the General." Bernat replied, his voice a low rumble against the windowless stone room. "I just want to see the face of the person that took our leader." He had felt confident in the first statement, but when he said the second something in his voice felt hollow. The warden nodded, his face held in careful neutrality.

It was entirely unceremonious. The warden let him through the heavy door, down a hallway, and then through another. As the door closed behind him, he found himself shut in an airless antechamber, a pace from a concrete half-wall, from which sprouted closely-spaced bars of iron.

Bernat's eyes adjusted slowly, and the figure in the cell began to congeal. She crouched against the far wall, feet panted firmly, shackled hands gathered between her knees. Petra's mess of red hair was down around her shoulders, her soot-smudged face, but she was entirely focussed on Bernat. He cleared his throat, uncomfortable under her gaze, and drew up a stool from the wall and took a seat. Rolling to a stand, Petra crossed the small space of her cell and leaned in close to the other side of the bars.

She had been beautiful, once. Her face was sculpted finely, beneath several slender scars of varying lengths, and a snug black patch over her left eye. Her good eye was clear; a focussed viridian pinned to him unerringly.

"I know your face."

Bernat had expected her voice to be hoarse, or weak. The things that she must have been through, being taken in for what she'd been taken in for, must have been substantial, and by the character of her vigilance, Bernat guessed she hadn't slept. That wasn't, however, the case... the woman's tone was even, unbroken.

"Yes, you've been with us since the very beginning..." Petra continued after a moment, her tone carefully neutral as she spoke, drawing a touch closer to the bars of her cell. Bernat found himself tugging at his beard almost self-consciously under the weight of her gaze, glancing around the dark space behind her to avoid having to look into her face.

"I haven't come to... to..."

"Accuse me? Lambaste the murderer of Aias Merenias, the great General, the leader of the people of Carmine?" The undercurrent of her liquid voice rolled with mirthless laughter, the faintest hint of an unpleasant smile tugging at one corner of her mouth.

Frowning, Bernat nodded a little, finding his mouth dry. She waved a hand dismissively, the gesture hindered by the chain that tethered her wrists.

"I know." She cut off her half-crowed soliloquy with the flatter statement, keeping her eye on his face as his gaze returned to it. "If that's what you had come for, you would have come and gone already, having said your words. You don't look to me to be a man so in the pursuit of self-satisfaction."

Biting his lip, Bernat could only question, "Why do you say that?"

"Well, you've come here. And here I sit, sharing the air with you, a woman damned awaiting the execution that comes to traitors. You haven't come to gawk. So tell me, what is it that you've come for? And what, pray tell, is your name?"

"Bernat Copen." He repeated as if compelled, the corners of his mouth drawn ever deeper into the frown that occupied them. "And yes, I have been with you since the beginning. That is, with the General since the beginning of Carmine."

"And with the rest of us since before that." A canny smile spread on the woman's face, less unhappy but no less predatory. If Bernat thought that whatever he had hoped to find would be simple in coming to him, he had been wrong. Placing his elbows on the narrow ledge of stone, up from which jutted the bars that held her, he nodded.

"Yes. I remember when the twins were born; I saw how you protected them, after their mother died, Petra."

"Our mother." Her voice had grown slightly hushed, a frown now overtaking her own features. As Bernat had leaned slightly forward, she now drew back from the bars, beginning to re-emerse herself in darkness. He nodded once, but kept silent, and after a moment Petra continued.

"You know... not a lot of people in Carmine know he was my brother. Or that he had a twin. Furthermore, I have discovered that very few believe me when I tell them that it's true." A pause nosed its way in between her carefully crafted words, a lull in which she drew breath, considering some spider's thread of trust between them. Not, Bernat thought, that Petra had a lot to lose in her present position. Not that he knew what he stood to gain, sitting here.

"I suppose that just goes to show how young we are, this city... this bright new beginning, as it were."

Though Bernat was having a hard time reading the demeanor of her statements, whether she meant them in irony or not, the simple fact of what she had said was true. He and Petra were among the older members of their small society, which was largely without real elders.

"But you..." She mused along, pointing a finger toward him and leaning a little further into the light. "You were there in the beginning, before the boys were born. By the lines on your face, old man, before I was born... but not too long."

"I was a boy, then. But yes." Bernat confirmed to keep her talking.

"Then..." Her lips curled upward slightly, gaze dropping for just a moment before pinning him again, "Do you really think... that I killed my brother?"

Bernat did not have an answer for her. Though it, by itself, felt like treason in the back of his mind, the back of his throat where the thought originated, he had come because some part of him didn't believe her to have committed the crime.

"You..." His voice felt weak; he cleared his throat and looked at her sternly. "You are the only one that spoke out against him, Petra. And you spoke loudly. You thought his ideals were false, that he was leading people into complacency and, ultimately, their graves."

Petra nodded. "That is true. I'm glad to know that, through all these years, at least you have been listening to me. Aias was wrong. That is true. But I would never have harmed him." The flat way that she looked at him, unblinking and unfaltering, made him shift in his seat without meaning to.

"Then tell me what really happened, and why." Letting a sigh rumble quietly through his chest, Bernat sat back a little. "That is what I have come for."