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Water trickled down Sebian’s black silky strands, each blood-tainted droplet echoing through the silence of the tent as it fell into the bucket on the ground. After we’d left Ammarett behind in confusion and chaos, we’d broken up camp and carted our dead eastward. With Valtaris several weeks away by road, the decision had been made to hold the fire burials beside a beautiful forest of white-speckled birches and evergreen junipers.
Malyr’s jagged exhale scrubbed against the side of my neck where he knelt behind me, his trembling fingers combing the knots from my tattered hair ever so carefully. For hours, he’d held me, patiently letting me cry into his chest until my tears ran dry, leaving nothing behind but a parched landscape of grief.
But he was growing restless now, I could sense it in every second’s hesitation before he touched me. As if he wondered if I would shrink away, giving him any indicators as to what had been done to me, saving me uncomfortable questions I knew full well needed asking.
Shadows clung to crevices and secret corners, Malyr’s mother had told me, thriving in the unseen, the hidden, the unacknowledged. I would not give them more domain than they already had on him.
When his fingers brushed over my thigh, where a healer had sewn-up my wound, they clenched only to stretch out with a tremble. “Did they… did they rape you?”
I took the wooden comb Marla had let me borrow, running it down along the sleek strands with ease. “They did.”
He shot up on something between a shout and a whimper, grabbed onto the braids running along his scalp, and yanked until his knuckles yellowed. “How many times?” Left and right he paced in short, violent strides, swathes of shadows following behind him. “How many times, Galantia?!”
I flinched, not at his shout, but the way his face contorted with a dozen emotions at once under speckles of dried blood. Shame. Guilt. Anger. As if he was imagining all sorts of horrors I must have endured, seeing them vibrantly because he’d endured them, too.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
He spun around and collapsed to his knees beside me, gripping my arms and shaking me, staring at me with such devastation carved into the depth of his gray-brown eyes. “How can you say this? How can you say itdoesn’t matter?”
“Because I refuse to let it matter.” I placed the comb on my lap and took Malyr’s face between my palms, several minor cuts and scrapes marring his ashen features. “I refuse to give the perpetrators of my past any control over my life by letting this sully my thoughts, my feelings, any part of my life going forward. Shame and hate are heavy burdens, Malyr, and I won’t let them drag me down.” A deep breath. “And neither should you.”
Something fractured in his eyes. A noisy gulp tore from his throat as he pulled back from my touch, knowing that we weren’t just talking about me anymore.Yes, I know what they did to you,I didn’t say,and I love you no differently for it.
His gaze sank to the ground as if weighted down by the very shame I wanted him to let go of. I couldn’t make him; all I could do was show him that there needn’t be any, not between us.
He slid his hand to the back of my head and gently nudged my forehead to sink against his. “I failed you. Damnit, I failed both of you.”
I closed my eyes, ignoring the tang of metal while focusing on the faint remnants of lemongrass that still drifted from his hair. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have,” he whispered. “Goddess help me, I was so focused on human’s wickedness, I failed to protect you from the treachery of our own kind.”
“It’s in the past now.” Yet another perceived wrong that had cost us Sebian, making it difficult to see the right in it. Maybe it would reveal itself, maybe it wouldn’t. “The sun is almost up. We have to get him ready.”
Malyr shifted back, nodded, then turned his attention to Sebian. “Do you want me to shave his sides?”
“Hmm.” I reached for a section of Sebian’s damp hair, where he lay with his head toward me on a makeshift cot. “If we could ask him now, what do you think he’d say?”
Malyr’s scoff brought a new glisten to his eyes, but he blinked his tears away. “I’d wager a coin he’d say that he doesn’t give a shit.”
“No, he wouldn’t.”I’m just a farmer’s son, sweetheart,his voice resonated in the quiet space. Oh, but he’d never been simple. “I much prefer him like this. A little bit ragged, a little bit rough around the edges.”
My fingers parted five strands, the way he’d liked it best, his lingering scent grounding me in my resolve—earthy, like the wet loam beneath us with a hint of leather coming from the brown cuirass Malyr had already wiped down. I would miss it so much. I missed him!
I bit back the sob building at the bottom of my throat. At least for now. There would be time for grieving, but this moment was for something else—something meaningful between two souls whose lives had been as entwined as the braid I slowly wove into his hair, each twist a silent farewell.
“Here.” Malyr removed the silver clasp from the bottom of his braid, and gingerly worked it around the end of Sebian’s. “Is there anything else?”
I brushed my thumb over that single stray wisp of hair on Sebian’s cold forehead, down a cheek I’d scrubbed clean earlier, and over those plump graying lips that had done nothing but shower me with kisses these last few weeks. Why had the goddess taken him from us? Could there have been another way? Was there anything I could have done differently to prevent his death?
I would never know.
I shook my head. “I think he’s ready.”
Asker must have waited nearby, because he announced himself with a clearing of his throat before he stepped into the tent. “I came to help carry him.”
Malyr rose and, together with Asker, he carried Sebian’s limp body out of the tent and only a brief stretch toward the pyre that had been built, singled-out from the others. He deserved no less recognition, the pathfinder who had taken a dagger through his chest.
To save me. Or Malyr?
