Page 249

The ground is damp beneath my boots when I step down, the grass long enough to brush my skirts, the path ahead nearly swallowed by weeds and bramble, and yet I know it better than any road in the world.

My feet remember before my mind does.

I take one step then another.

Kylian follows. “Where are you going?”

I keep walking, and the path feels narrower than it was when I was small, overgrown, crowded now by roots and rocks that make me stumble.

After a moment, my boots feel wrong, too heavy, too much a part of the life I have lived since leaving. I stop, bending down to remove them.

Kylian is beside me in an instant, his hand gripping my arm as he peers around. “What are you doing?”

I set the boots aside and step barefoot onto the gravel.

Sharp stones bite into my soles, grounding me in a way that makes my breath tremble.

“Alessia,” Kylian says, as I continue walking.

The stones cut into my feet, the cold mud squeezes between my toes, and I welcome each sting because it feels real, because for once the pain belongs to a memory I chose to walk into instead of one dragged out of me by someone else.

The farther I go, the more the present thins, the wind softens, and the cold fades. For one shuddering breath, the sun warms my face. For one impossible moment, Sable’s hand is in mine, small and sticky from stolen berries, and she is singing some song she made up just to annoy me while we skip along the path together, both of us barefoot because my mother always said the earth speaks to us through our feet.

Sable laughs. The sound is high and breathless and so young that it hurts.

I start humming, the old tune slipping from my throat in broken pieces, and the sound carries through the trees ahead of me, thin and trembling, but alive.

The air changes again, smoke from the hearth, wildflowers crushed beneath our feet, and bread cooling on the sill. Something savory is simmering in the pot because Mama always stretched meals further than they should have gone and somehow made them taste amazing.

The path opens.

Sable runs ahead, her dirty blonde hair flying loose down her back, and I chase her because she is always faster when she thinks something good waits at the end.

“Mama,” she squeals. “We’re back.”

Sheets sway in the wind ahead of us, pinned high on one side of the line with sticks split into rough pegs, white cloth billows around a woman as she lifts another sheet from a basket and shakes it out with strong arms that used to carry me through the woods when my legs were tired.

My mother turns, and I see her face, the one that was almost forgotten over time. Not the one from the fire when she was burning. Just my mother, alive beneath the sun, smiling.

I open my eyes and the village is gone. The sheets are gone. The hearth smoke is gone. Sable’s hand is gone from mine, and the song dies in my throat as I stand barefoot in the ruins of the place where I was born.

The charred remains of stone, rotted beams, broken doorframes, and walls half-swallowed by moss are all that remain. The forest has grown across the thresholds that still stand, claiming spaces that once held us.

The earth has taken almost everything back.

Almost.

Because at the center of the village, where the ground should have healed, twelve black circles remain burned into the soil.

Each scorched ring holds a single stone at its center, placed there by hands I cannot remember, perhaps by someone from the town who came back after the smoke cleared, perhaps by someone who could not save them but could not bear to leave them unmarked.

Twelve circles.

Twelve stones.

Twelve dead.

And the land around them still carries the scar.