I need her… to see me.
She doesn’t move, even though I’ve paused beside her for several seconds longer than I should have, the coal gripped in the tongs I hold above her bowl.
Maybe if I could somehow free one of my hands from my task to touch the back of her hand…
I edge closer, only to finally glimpse enough of her face between the strands of her hair to understand that her eyes are far away. Her mind isn’t here.
She is somewhere else.
“Silly boy!” Ayla calls out and I stiffen to find myself the center of her attention—and everyone else’s. “Don’t waste coal on my useless daughter.”
She laughs, a melodic sound, and the entire class laughs with her. Their ridicule washes over me as I wait for Asha to respond to her mother’s cruelty.
Nothing.
Wherever she is within her mind, it’s a long way from here.
Or so it seems. Until her palm presses to her thigh and her fingernails curl inward.
She doesn’t otherwise move. She certainly doesn’t look at me, but her whisper sounds softly beneath the loud laughter. “Please don’t risk burns for me.”
Her voice is so quiet that I could believe I imagined she spoke. That is, if my deep light didn’t spark and my heart didn’t kick.
I raise myself upright beside her, needing only to hear her voice again.
I need it as badly as I need air.
My heart is pounding and my deep light is threatening to glow.
I’m about to speak, preparing a whisper when the door at the side of the courtyard opens again, loudly enough to draw everyone’s attention away from me.
Two small children, a boy and a girl, both with silver-blond hair like Asha’s, stand in the doorway, while a human man hovers behind them.
They can’t be more than nine years old, possibly younger, judging by how small they are.
Even from this distance, I can see the dark rings around the children’s eyes and the haunted looks on their faces as they shrink back from the courtyard.
“My little tributes!” Ayla throws her arms open and crouches to the ground. “Come to your mother!”
She called themtributes. Maybelle told me that Asha’s twin siblings had suffered Malak’s power while their mother looked on.
Asha’s head snaps up, her eyes suddenly acutely present and her focus on the children as they cross the courtyard to their mother.
Asha jolts forward, well and truly out of eyeline with me now, and then stops, her palms pressing to the edge of her anvil, as if she would push the damn thing out of her path.
Across the way, the children look to her, their faces ashen, their pale-green eyes pleading, and their expressions beseeching.
Asha’s palms press so hard to the edge of her anvil that the blood leaves her hands while her mother embraces each of the children and draws them away from the human man, even as they edge back toward him.
It stuns me that Blacksmith children would rather stay with a human than go to their own mother.
“Thank you, Kedric,” Ayla snaps at the man, prying Tamra’s hand from his arm. “You can leave now. Tamra and Gallium will watch the lesson today.”
Kedric.I’m sure that’s the name of Maybelle’s husband. I study the man more carefully. He looks gaunt, wiry, but he’s alive and I’m certain that Maybelle will be relieved to hear it.
He retreats slowly, darting glances back at the children.
Ayla ignores him, clapping her hands for attention once more.
