I slowly make my way down the road, past empty houses with boarded-up windows and crumbling façades. Some buildings bear terrifying gouges carved down the walls, rents in the roofs, or doors hanging from their hinges. The only sound is my footsteps and the occasional caw of a raven from the woods. With each step I take, I see a younger version of myself walking ahead.
Six-year-old Inana, holding her mother’s hand while they buy bread from the baker.
Ten-year-old Inana, climbing over the fence that lines the wheat fields, then striding to the other side, where she whispers her first words of fiction while gazing at the forest beyond.
Nineteen-year-old Inana, kissed by Henry for the first time, right here on the corner on Beltane Eve.
My teeth chatter as I approach the home I grew up in, a two-story abode of pale stone and a thatched roof, a withered garden outside. The front door is missing and the windows are shattered. I approach the walkway, but my feet refuse to move any farther. All I can see inside the house is darkness, perhaps a few pieces of overturned furniture, but I can’t bear to see more. I already knew my parents didn’t make it. Seeing how they may have suffered won’t make this better.
I’m here for one thing.
My memories.
I choke on my short, sharp breaths as I leave my parents’ house, quickening my pace as I proceed to the other side of town. I’m dizzy from all the destruction I pass. All the open, empty houses, the abandoned businesses. It seems like such a waste to have left Dunway like this. It could have been rebuilt. Salvaged.
But, no, of course it was left in this state.
Because it stands as a warning.
An example.
To most, it says:This is what happens without the Sinless. This is why you need us.
To the few who know the truth, it says:This is what happens if you defy us.
Finally, I reach my adult home. The dressmaker’s shop. The only place I was allowed to participate in something like art and be only mildly condemned for it.
This is the last place I was before I was imprisoned.
I ball my shaking hands into fists as I follow the same path I did then, recalling how light my steps were, how bright my hope was, when I strode toward the main street where the duke’s procession would be held. I follow those same steps now, my heart aching with memories of my own naïveté. Gods, how happy I was then, in those moments between stepping outside my door and getting captured by the guards.
Such a brief and beautiful slice of joy, where I was certain my life was going to be perfect. Dunway had a duke and Henry was home. I’d see my love at any moment. He’d sweep me into his arms, and in a matter of weeks, we’d marry. Of course we would, for how would he be able to stand waiting a moment longer?
Those were the thoughts of a woman who’d only lost her heart the gentle way.
I halt in place, right where I remember seeing those guards, how they blocked my path, stared down at me, then took hold of my arms. My heart collapses in an echo of how it did then, with the fear, the confusion, the sense that all the hope I had so stupidly built up was about to come crashing down.
My eyes are glazed as I whirl around, just like the guards turned me, marching me back toward my home. Then past it. I remember how I called out to my neighbors who passed us by. Most stopped, but none said a word in my defense. None asked what was happening. Some didn’t even stop at all.
My feet slow to a halt as I recall the most painful memory of that horrific walk through town. One I didn’t have the heart to relay when I shared this story with the others.
This is where I saw my parents.
This is where they locked eyes with me, brows lowering, not with concern.
With disdain.
Mother shook her head. “What did she do now?” she muttered.
And they just walked on by.
They let them take me.
They didn’t fucking care.
I bite my bottom lip to keep it from wobbling. I can’t even be angry now. I can’t be hurt. Because even though my parents watched with disinterest as their cursed child—the girl born on the most inauspicious night of the year, the one who was always scolded for telling lies, the one they caught reading a novel she found buried in the woods—was dragged away toward the village jail, I can’t blame them.
Because they died.
