Rowenna’s answering grin arrived leisurely and sure. “I’ll visit again in the spring, Veilwalker. I promise.”
Rowenna lifted Beck into the carriage, the boy already half-asleep against her shoulder, the rattle of wheels fading down the road. Dusk settled fully by the time Ilys and Hanna turned back toward the Sanctum.
“Will you sit with me tonight?” Hanna queried.
Ilys glanced down at her, noting the way her fingers curled tight in her sleeve, braced for refusal. Hanna, over the course of months, had begun to learn all the ways in which the world withdrew.
“Of course,” she reassured.
Relief softened Hanna’s face and Morrigan huffed beside them, pressing his massive head briefly against her small hand, urging her forward.
At the Sanctum gates, priestesses reached out their hands for the child. Ilys spared the lot a bare glance. “I will take her,” she directed, her tone brooking no argument.
The women faltered, but stepped aside. Ilys rested her hand on Hanna’s narrow shoulder and guided her through the shadowed halls, torches guttering in their sconces, Morrigan padding after them. In the sleeping quarters, Hanna curled onto the cot, hands tucked beneath her chin, small enough to vanish beneath the blanket.
Ilys brushed her hair back, her voice low and maternal. “Would you like a story?”
Hanna nodded eagerly.
So Ilys began one, begging the words from Grim’s book into her mind. A boy traveling alone, speaking to the stars. Hanna hushed Ilys.
“Not one of those,” she whined. Ilys’s ego bristled.
Hanna untucked herself from the bed, throwing her legs to the ground. She padded over to the table across from her bed, unearthing Ilys’s sketchbook from the pile of paper. She delivered the sketchbook with an earnest invitation.
“One of these,” she requested.
Ilys observed the cool hoarding of breath in her chest. Her mind sought for an appropriate denial, but scoured without reward. These were not stories. They were nightmares. They were sins. They were dreams unsung.
Swallowing thickly, Ilys picked up the bound leather. Fumbling hesitation wreaked havoc on her grasp.Turn the page, she urged.Make the darling girl happy.Meet her needs, make her smile.
Morrigan. Grim. Baron. It depicted Ilys’s last drawing before the day she had lost it all.
“Who is that?” Hanna pointed, smudging the lines of Grim’s veiled face. The charcoal streaked the girl’s hand. Ilys wiped it gently, tenderly transferring the charcoal to her own palm.
“Careful,” Ilys noted. “The drawings like to bite.” Hanna eyed the medium suspiciously, now clearly avoiding contact with the dark art.
“His name is Grim,” Ilys explained.
“Who is he?” Ilys should have known a name is not enough. We deem the silly monikers so important, yet Grim was not a standalone adjective. It could not capture his gruff adoration. His careful self-hatred. His scattered love.
“You know Otris?” Ilys mentioned the cook’s son, seeking to illustrate the role in the words she could find. Hanna nodded in response. “And you know Ostris’s father? The lumbering man always toting him about?” Hanna affirmed through her dainty headshake.
“Grim was much like that to me as I grew. He touted me and taught me right from wrong. Much of what I teach you.”
“He was your father?” Asked Hanna.
“Not quite, no,” Ilys corrected. Gods, she longed for the words. Predecessor? Should that be the title she names Grim? The title felt hollow and sparse. No title could not convey the adolescent mourning his name evoked for Ilys. The way she wobbled and the world shook before her, unfamiliar in her place in the face of his absence.
Ilys pictured the waves she’d witnessed at the coast. She imagined them churning, swallowing the grief and the confusion. Taking it back out to sea. She gathered her composure, allowing the waves to toil and do the work she could not.
“I will tell you a story of the whole,” Ilys unfolded, her smile soft as balm. “Perhaps it will answer where my words fail.” She began, voice laced with veneration, “There once was a girl, andthe world stole her name. She was given to a storm of a man: old, gruff, and called Grim. He taught her to wield a blade and to stare so fiercely into the darkness that even the shadows would blink first. But though the girl grew fierce, her heart grew soft. Each day she ran to the birds and begged them to take her with them, to teach her how to fly.
“‘You must stay,’they told her. ‘You are not made to be like us.’She begged again and again, but still they could not see the bird inside her.”
As it is with all young children, sleep crept in and quietly stole Hanna away. Ilys thought it a rather plain place for the story to end, but supposed the girl satisfied enough to dream. Ilys snuck from the room, pinching the small candle flame til it bled darkness.
Stumbling back to her chamber, she fought to ignore the bird in her own heart.
