If this was the whole of the Peace Gate… but of course, it was not that simple. We reached another split in the path. This time, one sloped up, the other down.
I stopped. “Which way do we go?”
“That is for you to decide.”
I should have slowed my pace and waited to see which way maybe-real Rylynn would go.
Ideas?I asked my familiar.
Whichever way leads out.
Helpful.
I chose down. Down toward the Dark God’s realm. Down because my thighs were still angry from sprinting and trying to catch up to Rylynn.
The decision felt inconsequential a few minutes later. We’d only sloped downward for a few yards, then the path flattened out again. I was beginning to suspect that the path did not matter as much as the person beside me did.
“Do you have anything to say?” Navigating around stalactites gave me an excuse to avoid looking at her.
Rylynn found her way around them easily, as graceful in death as she had been in life. “This is not about me,” she said calmly.
Not just calm. Gentle.
It was not just the gray hair that made this version of Rylynn different than the one I had known. This was not the sister I’d known in life. This was Rylynn as a mother. Maybe even a grandmother.
“You are here because of me,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a question. She did not answer. A new thought occurred to me. I stumbled. Isanara was there.
This was the worst of me—Garrick had already heard it at the Justice Gate, but this was different. I was splayed open before Isanara, my singular familiar who had chosen me alone…she was going to change her mind. She was going to realize I was not worthy of her choice, her love.
Just like Rylynn had after Janessa died. Instead of grieving with me, my elder sister had shut herself away. She’d isolated herself and left me alone, with a father who barely remembered my name and our middle sister’s gruesome death imprinted on my young brain.
It wasn’t an excuse for what I’d done to her. The fact that she’d hurt me did not entitle me to hurt her, but… we were bothtraumatized. By our mother’s death, our father’s abandonment. By Velora’s curse.
The difference was that Rylynn had not seen what she was doing to me. She’d hurt me, but only because she could not look beyond herself. My grief had not stayed in. It had lashed outward. The damage I did may not have been intentional, but it was malicious.
Did she still suffer for it in the afterlife?
“Am I the reason you are trapped here? Do you have no peace in death… because of me?”
Rylynn paused. We were both adults now, in this strange in-between space of life and death. The Peace Gate. She no longer looked down at me. We were the same height. I recognized the intensity in her eyes, a mirror of my own. But hers were earnest with an emotion I did not understand and struggled to name.
“Which path will you take?”
I blinked. She had not stopped to answer me, but because we’d reached another split in the path.
I can’t do this, I said to Isanara, even as my feet chose one of the paths at random. I walked faster. Rylynn kept pace.
“Don’t you remember?” I demanded of Rylynn. I barely watched where I was going. A stalactite scraped against my cheek. I did not care. “I am the reason your husband was hurt. He did not walk again because of me.”
“It was a hard life,” she acknowledged. Her brow remained smooth. She might have been talking about the weather instead of the tragedy I’d created in her life. “He was never happy again after that, not truly. Only when the children were born did I see him fully smile. Then as time went on?—”
I grabbed her arm. “Did you not hear me? It is my fault, Rylynn. My power did that. I am a witch.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“You should be angry!”
“I was,” she said. It wasn’t an admission; it was just a statement of fact. “But the centuries have a way of erasing the pain.”
