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Ellehra Cantar, beloved wife and mother.
A headstone.
My foot dislodges a rock, and her gentle song, full of hope and sorrow, cuts off mid refrain. She spins around, her eyes magnified in her fair features.
“What are you doing here?” she says, fingers tightening around the bouquet of wild blossoms. Their heady perfume permeates the air. Her shoulders draw in, and I can almost feel the vibrations of her heart’s elevated beat. Like a cornered rabbit, her eyes dart for her path of escape.
I hold up my hands to show I mean no threat. But from the way she shrinks back and her brows lower, I know I have made a mistake.
Unwilling to let her slip away from me a third time, I cast around for something to say. But what do I have to talk about, other than dead Light Creatures and the thing that draws me to her, the thing she tries to hide? My mouth gapes. I hate the witless fool I’ve been reduced to.
She moves as if to leave, and I repeat her question back at her. “What areyoudoing here?”
She stills and angles her head to the side, taking me in. I feel conscious of my mud-caked boots, my disheveled hair. And the guilt boiling inside me that I’m certain is plastered all over my face.
My heart flutters when her cool eyes meet mine. But there is no judgment in them. Her expression eases. She lifts a hand to tuck her long hair behind an ear. “It’s late,” she says, as if I am a child pleading with her to tell me another story before bed.
That, I realize, is exactly what I am. A child in desperate need of someone to help me forget the terrors of the night.
My reply is nothing more than silence and a cautious step closer. She bites her lip but shifts aside so I can see what she is working on.
“I come here sometimes when I need clarity.” She kneels to rest the flowers reverently at the foot of the grave. “And to honor the memory of my mother.”
A fresh sadness, this time not selfish in nature, pulses through me. I crouch inside her circle of light and trace my fingers across the letters, smooth and ornate. They were cut by a hand skilled with a chisel, but the marks have faded, aged by wind and weather. It has been here a while.
“Why is her grave so far from the boneyard?” I ask, although this talk of graves makes me feel like an awl is working its way through my chest.
Amyrah pinches her lips together for a while before responding. “After the Shr—” She catches herself, swallowing the word before it can escape. “Aftertheytook her life, my father wanted nothing to do with the forest. He needed some way to grieve, so he hid her memory as far from prying eyes as possible.”
I shift uncomfortably. It is a valefolk custom that those who have provoked the kaligorven into killing do not deserve a proper burial. My brother’s passing warranted nothing more than a leaf-strewn mound at the edge of Utsanek. I’m certain a headstone has already been ordered, but there won’t be any other ceremony by which to remember him. That is, perhaps, one reason my mother stands at the window for days on end, growing thin. Why I feel a chaotic presence ripping at my insides whenever Rhun’s name flickers across my thoughts.
But this moment isn’t about me. I can’t let what happened—what I’ve done—bleed into every single part of my life. My nostrils flare, and my chest heaves as I will myself to lock it all away.
When I turn back to Amyrah, she studies my face. Her brilliant necklace glints sharply in the soft light surrounding her.
“You need to grieve them,” she says.
My mouth gapes. How does she do it? Move past all my pretense, unearth the parts of me I hate most?
“What?” My voice is small and terse. Who is she talking about, beyond Rhun? She can’t know of the sola I mangled—can she?
Amyrah persists. “You need to grieve your brother and every person they have taken from us.”
I sigh and disguise my relief by dragging a hand across my face, leaving it pressed against my eyes. She doesn’t know the monster I am. Not yet.
“What for? It can’t bring them back.” It can’t erase what I’ve done.
Air rushes into my lungs when warm fingers wrap around my wrist, gently pulling it down. She doesn’t let go when it’s at my side but slides her palm down until her fingers slip between mine. I hope she can’t feel me shiver. She tugs on my arm until I look her in the eyes. Nothing suggestive, nothing desperate dwells in their steady gaze. Only a quiet confidence, an understanding beyond words.
“Of course, it won’t do anything like that. But it can begin the healing process, if you let it.”
“I—”Why does she have to be holding my hand?I can’t keep it from shaking. “I don’t know how to do that.”
Her fingers release mine, and I breathe again, though the absence of her touch makes me feel the cold even more. She picks up the bouquet and plucks the flowers off their stems. One by one, she sets them into the fragrant tapestry woven around her mother’s name.
“You start by remembering them. All they were to you, the things they made you feel and think.”
A rueful laugh shakes from my clenched jaw. “My brother was a nuisance. I hated always taking the fall for him when he wouldn’t accept responsibility for his actions.”
