Chapter 82. Two Walls Stood Beside Me While I Fell Apart, and Neither Said a Word

Chapter 82: 82. Two Walls Stood Beside Me While I Fell Apart, and Neither Said a Word

I wasn’t listening to what she said next.

I walked through the door.

It hit me at once, a cold so deep and so clean that it felt like I’d stepped into the sea. It poured through my clothes and my skin and straight into the marrow of my bones.

Every step was heavier than the last. The light beat down on me, white and pure, and I felt my breath turn to ice in my throat.

Behind me, I heard Velora shout my name.

I heard boots on stone, but... I kept walking.

I reached the pool, and then I knelt.

I got my arms under Bonette’s shoulders and knees, and I lifted her, and she weighed almost nothing at all.

She was so small... She’d always been small, and I’d never really noticed, because she’d filled every room she walked into with her fussing and her gentle bossiness.

I turned and started back.

My hands were burning.

It wasn’t heat... It was a deep, stinging, freezing pain, as if I’d grabbed an iron bar in January.

I looked down and saw that the skin of my palms had gone raw and shiny, with blisters rising in long white lines.

A strand of my hair drifted in front of my eyes... It was white at the tip.

I took one more step... Then another...

Thump... thump... thump...

I could hear my own heartbeat... and I could even hear Velora screaming, though I couldn’t make out the words.

The doorway was ten paces away... Then five...

Then I was across the threshold, and two hands had seized my shoulders and hauled me through, so hard that I nearly dropped Bonette.

Velora was glaring at me with her golden eyes blazing and her face bone white.

"You fucking idiot..." she said.

Her voice shook. "You utter, absolute fool...!"

I couldn’t answer... all I could do was look down at the woman in my arms.

Sylvara was already beside us.

She took my wrists and turned my hands palm up, hissing through her teeth, and a cool silver light spread over my skin, easing the burn...

I didn’t feel it...

I wasn’t feeling much of anything.

"I promised her," I said, and I could hear my voice was a croak.

Nobody said anything.

After a moment, Velora put her hand over mine, over the silver light and the ruined skin, and held it there.

...

We buried her at sunset.

The garden behind the shrine was a small, walled square of frozen earth, with a few bare rosebushes and a stone bench, and it lay just outside the reach of the pillar.

When the sun dropped behind the mountains, the pillar threw a long, slender shadow across it, and the shadow touched a corner of the garden where the ground was soft.

I dug the grave myself.

I did it with my bandaged hands, and I wouldn’t let anybody help.

I dug for an hour... My palms split open again and bled through the wrappings, and I kept going.

Magnara stood watching for a long time.

Then, without a word, she picked up a second shovel and started digging on the other side, and we worked together in silence until the hole was deep enough.

We laid her in it... wrapped in a clean white sheet.

They were all there.

Sylvara stood at the head of the grave with her hands folded, her eyes red and her face still.

Velora had come, and Magnara and Bryn had come, and a few of the Hearth Guard had known her in the long, tense week before the battle.

Elsbeth stood at the very back, alone, in the shadow of the wall... She didn’t say anything. But she’d come.

I knelt beside the grave.

In my hand was a silver knife, the one Bonette had carried, with a worn hilt wrapped in blue cord.

I’d found it by the Moon Font... It was clean, though I’d have sworn there was blood on it.

I laid it carefully at her side.

"I’m sorry," I said.

My voice was small... I’m not sure the others could hear.

"I held her hand... I held it the whole time..."

"I held it like I promised." I stopped.

My throat was closing. "It wasn’t... enough."

I’ve made a lot of jokes in my life. I’d made jokes at funerals, and weddings, and once at a hospital bed.

I’d used them like armor, like a wall that I could shove between myself and every real thing, so I’d never have to feel it.

I opened my mouth to make one now... because I always had one.

But... There wasn’t one... not at this... moment...

I put my face in my hands...

I... cried.

It wasn’t pretty... I want to be clear about that.

It wasn’t a single tear or a dignified silence. And it was ugly, convulsive, and gasping, the kind of crying you do as a small child, with snot and spit and shaking shoulders.

I cried for Bonette... and I cried for Millie.

I cried for the merchant I’d killed in a market, and for a woman named Torunn I’d never met, and for a boy in another world who had spent twenty-six years making sure nothing could ever hurt him.

Nobody touched me...

...Nobody tried to stop it.

Velora stood at my left side, half a step away, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her.

Magnara stood at my right...

And they didn’t speak.

They didn’t even reach out.

They just stood there, one on each side, steady as two walls, and it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me... a human around beastwomen who hate humans...

When the worst of it had passed... Sylvara began to sing.

It was a short song, in the old tongue, low and slow, like a lullaby or a prayer... It rose and fell in the cold air.

The shadow of the pillar crept across the grave, and the last light slid from the sky, and a faint silver gleam touched the top of the mound.

I never knew what the words meant... But I’ve never forgotten the sound.

...

Night fell... Sylvara went to the pillar.

She wouldn’t let anyone go with her. She stood just outside the radius, at a spot she’d marked with a line of stones, with a notebook in one hand and a small violet light bobbing over her shoulder, and she read.

She read for hours.

I sat on the steps outside the door with my knees pulled up and a blanket around my shoulders, and I watched her.

She walked back and forth along the line.

She muttered, and then she stopped... just to close her eyes and put her hand to her forehead.

She wrote something down, crossed it out, and wrote it again. I could tell she was reading something that she had never wanted to read.

When she finally came out, it was well past midnight... Her face was gray with fatigue. She sat down on the step beside me without a word, and we stayed that way for a while.

"I have finished," she said.

I didn’t answer.

"It is an inscription... A very old one, older than Lunhare, and even older than the shrine." She turned her notebook over in her hands. "I have read it three times..."

"I wish to be certain."

"Just tell me."

She took a breath.

"It says that when the Bright Moon is struck down by the Hollow Man," she said slowly, "she will sleep for seven nights in stone."

My heart gave a single, heavy thump.

"On the seventh night, she will descend and be born again as one of the Ten Sovereign Beasts..."

I didn’t say anything about that... I couldn’t.

"No one may stand in her shadow when she falls." Sylvara’s voice shook. "And the Hidden Sister will be free when the bright moon descends."