I peered at her in the darkness, the confusion on her face slowly morphing into understanding.
“I knew you’d been keeping something from me. I knew you knew more than you were telling me,” she said quietly. I felt shame settle deep, but Millie never pulled her hand out of my grip. Instead, she squeezed it, stepping closer. “Tell me now. Please.”
Taking in a deep breath, I said, “The child died in her womb. A mere month before she was due.”
“Oh gods,” Millie whispered, her brows scrunching, dismay stretching over her expression. “Was…was the child…was the child my father’s?”
I shook my head. “Unlikely. She had been married to my uncle for a year by then. Unless your father was still living on Krynn.”
“When was this?”
“Twenty-six years ago,” I answered.
“Then no,” she said. “That was around the time my father found me. He had been working on Genesis prior to that.”
“Then the child was my uncle’s,” I said. A child of House Kaalium.
“She went mad, you said,” Millie prompted.
I gestured to where we stood, eyeing the way the silver flashed in the moonlight.
“The trees,” I told her. “Every day, it was like she was possessed. Carving them up. Hammering metal into the trees. Like she was marking her way. Or marking someone else’s.”
“My father,” Millie guessed.
“Likely,” I told her. “She barely ate. Never fed on blood, choosing to survive on food alone when she could stomach it. She rarely slept. For years and years, she looked like a ghost. Once, I saw her standing in this very clearing, and for a moment, I thought she was a soul. A soul casting their previous form before me. She looked like she was dissolving around the edges. Like she wasn’t even there. It appeared as if she was stretched between all three realms.”
I still remembered that moment, clearly imprinted on my mind. I felt guilt now, whenever I thought about it. Another shameful, guilt-ridden memory that I wished I could take back.
“I was around your age then,” I told her gruffly. “I’d been in Erzos for a short time. I knew Ruaala, knew she’d left the union with my uncle, but I hadn’t seen or heard much of her in the years after. But as I explored Stellara, I discovered the trees. I found her here. But by then, she was a shell. She didn’t want help. She just wanted me to leave.”
“She lived here, all this time?” Millie wondered. “But the cottage looked as if it had been abandoned for decades.”
“I tried to convince her to leave this place,” I told her. “She was of House Kaalium, after all, despite the circumstances. She would always be our blood. I wanted her to live in Raana. I told her I would secure her a home, make her comfortable, get her a helper from Erzan. But she refused to leave. She told me that she was too deeply rooted in this place, that the trees had hold of her ankles, her wings, and she didn’t want to disappoint them.”
Millie frowned.
“She said she was waiting,” I confessed to her. “She told me she was waiting for a quiet place.”
She stilled.
“You said that to me before—a quiet place,” I said. “It took me a while to place it. Until I came here, until all those memories came flooding back.”
“It was in my father’s letters to Ruaala. He…he always called the cottage their quiet place. He said it was a realm of their own making. I assume it was because they couldn’t be with one another elsewhere. Here they were hidden. Safe. They could forget that she was meant to marry into the most powerful family on Krynn.”
My heart twisted, like a tangled branch of these silvered trees.
“Where is she?” Millie asked, looking at me steadily. “You know, don’t you?”
“A letter came to the keep,” he told me. “Eight years ago. She didn’t sign her name, but I knew who it was from.”
“What did it say?”
Swallowing, I said quietly, “She asked me to bury her body. To let the trees take from her. To wait quietly beneath the earth for the day that her love returned for her.”
The hand not gripped tightly in my own flew to Millie’s mouth, her eyes widening. “But the Kylorr…you don’t bury your dead. It’swrong.”
Because in burying one’s dead, you would be condemning their soul immediately to Zyos. No soul gem to anchor them into place in Alara. It was a desecration of a body to be buried—the flesh slowly rotting away beneath the earth, insects and roots feasting, the bones laid bare.
