“What’s this?”
Bria merely smiled and held the folded piece of paper out farther. I took it and opened it carefully as she watched, hands clasped together in front of herself, waiting.
“What’s it say?” I asked, glancing at the letter.
“You tell me.” She lifted the skirts of her long, cotton acolyte dress and sat next to me at the table in the library of House Viper. I looked at her, and she smiled. “You’ve been improving dramatically these past few months. None of the words are too difficult. I know. I wrote them myself.”
“This is from you?”
“Not quite.”
I scanned the page to the bottom, to the name inscribed in the postscript.
Warren.
My gaze snapped back up.
“I know you’ve been too busy with training to visit since you passed the third,” she told me, her voice soft like a whisper and full of emotion. Bria leaned forward and placed a comforting hand on mine. “So I did. I visited your brother. He was the only one home. I had him tell me what he wanted to say to you, and I wrote it all down.”
I stared at the letter in my hands, shaking, and blinked away tears. She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to care this much.
“Why—”
“Read it aloud.” She patted my knee and smiled. “It’s good for practice.”
I stared at her for a moment longer, then nodded. Clearing my throat, I looked back to the page. The letters in front of me, once a jumbled amalgamation of nonsense, now fell into lockstep with one another, creating a perfect form and rhythm I was beginning to be able to interpret.
“Dear Adrian,” I began haltingly. “This priestess has come to our home and informed me she is to collect com-communications for you. I’m the only one here right now, so I hope that’s good enough. First of all, cong-congratulations. It’s nice to know you’re not an e-embarrassment to the family after all.”
I snorted and smiled at Bria, who returned the joy, before turning to the letter again.
“I’ll begin with what I’m certain is most important to you, what you’ve been wondering about this whole time, and I won’t lie to you, Adrian, nor will I sugarcoat. Dahlia is unwell. Medically, she’s flawless, completely untouched. But mentally…it’s like she’s not here at all. She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t sleep. She hardly leaves his side. Only when his parents come to seehim does she give them their privacy. And even then, she simply waits in the hall. She mutters to herself a lot. Some of it is lunacy. Most times, she’s out of her mind with grief. I’m with her every day I can be. Whenever I’m not working or helping mother, I’m at her side, holding her hand and hoping it makes some sort of difference.”
Tears formed in the corners of my eyes, but I sniffed to clear them and continued.
“Orson lost his job. Apparently, he hadn’t been showing up to work for months. None of us know where he’s been instead. Dionne won’t say anything when you ask about it. She just gets this look on her face, like no one has ever known the sadness she feels, then her eyes get all moist and she turns away. Mother tries to help her but it usually consists of her cleaning her house or cooking a meal while she stares blankly at her kitchen table.”
My chest tightened, like something was constricting me, cutting off my air flow and making it hard to breathe. Was the room growing warmer? Or were my shaking hands an indication of it getting colder?
“I don’t tell you any of this to worry you, only to be honest. The truth is all we have in the Third Ring, and I’ll never keep it from you. We’re all so proud of you. Even Maurice, despite his best efforts. Mom beams anytime someone brings you up in the market or at the shop. You’ve given our family something we haven’t had for a long time, Adrian. You’ve given us hope, joy, a reason to smile during the long, hard days. And I want you to know just how grateful we are for it, for you.”
The letters blurred as I blinked away tears, refusing to wipe them away because if I did, Bria might see. Still, when I sniffled, she placed a hand consolingly on my shoulder.
“I—” I stumbled here, my voice cracking, not because of the difficulty of the words but because of the meaning behind them.I didn’t want to read what came next. It was personal, too intimate to read aloud.
I dropped my hand, blinking through the tears and heaving in great gulps of air to gather myself. Bria didn’t ask me to read on. She seemed to understand that I wanted to be alone for what came next. So she simply patted my hand and rose.
Only once she was gone, only once I was certain no one could hear me cry, did I read that final paragraph.
I love you, Adrian. We all do. So go ahead and fail the next one in some spectacular fashion so we can have you back home with us.
I clutched the paper to my chest, knuckles white from my tight grip, as tears streamed down my cheeks and onto the old gnarled wood of the table. I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve, not truly. Not since Darius. So I wept for him. I wept for Dahlia and Cyrus, for Orson and Dionne, for all the Third Ring and Deckers who’d already failed their Trials, for all those without hope. And I wept for the hole in my heart which my family had filled with their presence every day before I came here.
I missed them, I realized, and I didn’t know when I’d begun to feel that so thoroughly.
In the following weeks, my training began to all run together. There was too much to be done to keep it properly separated. Bria taught me languages, incantations, passages, and scriptures from the Holy Texts and from the family journals. She made me memorize them, read them again and again, and recite them by rote on and on in an endless loop throughout my day. When I could recite them to her forward and backward, quickly and slowly, I would be released from their bonds and granted new ones to memorize.
I was in the midst of recalling the heavier histories which Prima had written first hand in her journal as Dante sliced at me with a rapier from a few yards away. I leaped so that the thinblade met only air beneath my feet and thrust my own toward him. He dodged but it didn’t look as effortless as it always had. It appeared stunted, off-balance. As though he hadn’t expected it. I smiled.
