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There was no stopping the flood anymore, all that suffering I couldn’t help but relate to. My arms wrapped around Zera’s bag, and the bag moved, not enough for me to lift it, but enough to let it rest against my shoulder – enough to make me brace for what was to come. Because if I could understand Ophion, I could understand the Mother. I could understand that ice-cold rage at the death of her first son and her fury at every cursed soul standing between her and bloody revenge …
Her hollow grief joined the cacophony of emotion, a blinding misery that eclipsed everything but the need to lash out and cause more hurt, more suffering to compensate.
My heart hurt. My spine hurt. My face was wet with tears. I tried to stand, and the bag almost gave way, yet resisted that last tug off the floor … that last bit of weight. The last people I truly didn’t wish to understand.
But Ihadto.
I dug deeper.
And then I was Valter and Editta, too, and my own memories turned inside out as suddenly I saw my childhood through their eyes. I felt the fear squeezing Valter’s chest as he shouted at me for losing control of my powers again. I felt Editta’s raw grief at her miracle child turning into yet another threat, felt the powerless coldness seeping into her words, felt her avoid the child’s teary eyes rather than lose composure at the sight of the little problem she couldn’t afford to love.
Something fragile shattered inside me.
I didn’t want to understand. Didn’t want to give them an excuse for a single cold word, for a single silent hour, for the panic that still slumbered in my veins. But their fears spoke for them, and as I tried to rise again …
Zera’s bag came loose from the floorboards.
A weight I couldn’t carry but carried all the same, reducing me to a tiny fleck of dust in a cold, dark, aching void. Breathing had become painful, every gulp of air like biting acid. My arms had gone numb. My knees shook so violently that they rattled against each other. But Istood, I held the grief of the world clutched against my chest, and I did not succumb to the endless barrage of hurt battering my heart. I stood, I stood, Istood, I …
‘Emelin,’ a voice said behind me.
My eyes were closed. I hadn't realised. I tried to force them open and could no longer identify the muscles I needed for the motion, could no longer gather the strength. Cold grief rained down on me, death and hunger, destruction and heartbreak. Istood, but the gods knew on whose feet; I no longer felt mine.
My body was a hollow shell. The world still suffered.
‘Emelin.’ It was so very calm, that voice. Like a lullaby. Like a perfectly made bed whispering at me to lie down. ‘That’s enough. You carried enough. Let go of it.’
Let go?
My arms. I had to loosen my arms.
Somewhere, somehow, a few of my muscles relaxed. Not the right ones. The floor hit me, or maybe I hit the floor – my knees had buckled. I curled around the bag, breathing in little gasps now. Dying. People were dying. And mourning, and screaming, and …
Calloused fingers wrapped around my wrists, pried my arms away from the rough cloth. The gentle voice drifted back into my ears, more quietly now. It murmured soothing words I didn’t understand, hummed a melody I didn’t know … but the screaming in my head stilled, and I became aware of my own body again. Clammy skin. The friction of clothes. A brand new bruise on my hip.
The bag was gone, and so was the pain.
‘Sleep.’ The word reverberated through my depleted mind, every sound in that strange divine language infused with unyielding power. A last stubborn core of my mind tried to resist its call, but my thoughts folded in whether I wanted them to or not, surrendered to the blissful prospect of silence and weightlessness. ‘Sleep, Emelin.’
I gave up on struggling.
And slept.
Sunlight brushed over my eyelids.
I stirred against something soft – a pillow, I deduced, that was a pillow below my heavy head. A soft down comforter had been draped over my body, tucked in tight on either side of me. The smell of ginger drifted into my nostrils, strong and spiced, tickling me awake.
Every inch of my body felt stretched thin, worn down, run over – a powerless exhaustion, as if I’d swum underwater for too long and been pulled to the surfacejustin time not to drown.
I tried to speak and found my mouth parched as desert sand. A pathetic moan was the only sound that escaped my lips.
But beside me someone chuckled, and a vaguely familiar voice said, ‘Good morning, dear.’
Zera.
My brain abruptly reconnected voice to name. I shot up in the pillows, or tried to; my elbows slipped in the soft blankets, muscles lacking the strength to support my weight. The world was a patchwork of dazzling shapes when I forced open my eyes. Sunlight slanted in through a narrow window, flooding the light wood of the walls and the bed in which I lay. There was a closet, a woollen carpet, a night stand on which a cup of ginger tea stood steaming.
And in the chair beside the bed sat a goddess in a long white nightgown, a blanket over her shoulders and her hair bound in a messy grey braid.
