I clear my throat, attempting to settle in to this new peace between us. “I’ll wrap the coffin in ropes so Nara can pull it. It will take me a few minutes to secure it. You should take a look at the scrolls in the other room and choose any you want to take back with us. Remember, don’t touch them lest you touch the icy shelves. When I’m finished here, you can point the scrolls out to me and I’ll get them for you.”
“We won’t come back here?”
“Do you want to?”
She shakes her head. “I’ll take a look at the scrolls, but I’ll also need your help choosing the relevant ones, since you’re more familiar with them.”
I fight not to flinch at the forbidden word.
A small smile tugs at her lips.
Ishake the tension from my shoulders. “I will—” I grimace.
“Help me,” she says.
“That.”
She arches her eyebrows at me, and I can’t stop the upward twitch of one corner of my mouth, a smirk she seems to take great delight in.
“Thank you,” she says, her eyes twinkling as she utters the near-insult and steps into the other room, but I don’t miss the way her smile fades as she looks back at her father’s coffin.
It’s astonishing to me that she continues to seek small joys, small moments of connection despite her sadness.
A moment later, I listen to her picking her path through the debris and stopping at the bookshelf on the far wall.
I set to work retrieving the netting of ropes I’ll need to secure the coffin and enable Nara to pull it through the snow. I’ll have to first haul it up the stairs, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
As I begin positioning the ropes at one end of the coffins, my hands shake, forcing me to pause.
I swore I would never return to the place I buried my mother and sister.
To do so invites danger.
I tell myself that being near their graves won’t alter who I chose to become.
I will remain heartless. I will remain cold.
Chaos will not control me.
Fear will not control me.
Loss will not control me.
No more.
Still, my heart thumps hard in my chest, and I’m reminded of the damage caused by the assassin’s wood-handled dagger that…
Wait.
I cast around for the two blades I’d placed neatly beside the coffin before I went to claim Thyra a week ago. Both daggers have handles of ashen-brown wood with distinctive whorls on their surfaces.
One of those daggers was used to kill Thyra’s father.
The other was used in an attempt to kill me.
Now, both daggers are gone.
Chapter Fifty-Four
