Holly

  Holly woke to the pale hush of woven light, thin as silk and yet, wrong. The longhouse boards creaked like settling bones; smoke and dew shared the air. Shika was tucked against her hip, fur rising and falling in a small rhythm, and Fornaskr sat a little ways off on a low stool, elbows on his knees, watching the doorway like a sentry, unblinking.

  Her eyes felt swollen. Her face, tight with salt. For a heartbeat she didn’t remember sleep, only the last image imprinted on the inside of her lids: flame feathering into black, Ariel’s mouth opening like she meant to say I’ll be back and choosing speed instead of promises.

  A tray waited on the reed mat by her side: herbed broth in a clay bowl, roasted roots glossed with oil, a round of flatbread still warm to the touch. Beside it, a tiny cup of something bright and green that smelled like fresh rain.

  “Dewleaf tea. Drink,” he said gently, as if the word might shatter if he pushed it too hard. “And a little food, if you can.”

  Holly propped herself up, every muscle staging a quiet protest. The clay was warm against her palms. She managed a sip. The tea was bitter and honey, and the path it drew down her throat felt like chalk being erased—numbness smooth, then clean. She took another.

  Her mind, meanwhile, stampeded and refused to arrange itself:

  The first dark tear at the edge of Ariel’s nostril, a single drop of black.

  The beat arriving in the wind that Ariel couldn't hear.

  One wing burning, one wing drowning; light sputtering in choking gasps.

  The Eiranth’s pulse spearing the dark, washing Ariel in gold.

  Ariel’s last look: sorrow without panic, a choice wrapped in an unspoken apology.

  Holly swallowed. The images did not move. They layered instead, a deck of terrible cards she could only flip face-up, again and again.

  She realized her fingers were at her mouth, touching the place where the ichor had touched. She couldn’t feel the slickness of it now, but her skin remembered.

  She, then, pulled the bowl of broth closer. The steam smelled of root and herb and stubborn gardens.

  Shika, awakened by the slosh and the faint clink, lifted her head to sniff, then tucked her nose under Holly’s palm like an anchor.

  “Eat what you can,” Fornaskr said, not looking at the food now, but at Holly. “The body forgets when the soul is heavy.”

  Holly took the spoon. It shook once in her grip, then steadied. She tasted salt. Earth. A sweetness that made no promises. The warmth landed in her stomach like small weights. Enough to remind her there was a bottom to fall through, if she insisted on falling.

  “I watched it take her,” she said, voice dry from disuse. The sentence felt like a dagger that was being pulled out of her.

  “I watched.”

  Fornaskr’s jaw worked as if he had words he would not risk.

  “I saw,” he answered quietly. “I saw the same thing.”

  A silence opened. The kind that desperately tried to hold two people without cracking. Outside, the village moved in its careful morning: brooms against stone, a cartwheel complaining, someone laughing softly at nothing and then stopping, as if the weight of the world could not entertain such joy.

  Holly lifted another spoonful, and then another, like lifting a weight to keep her arms from shaking under the pressure.

  The tea cooled in its cup. The numbness didn’t leave. But the edges of it gathered; a coastline around a body of water. She set the empty bowl aside and let her head rest against the post behind her. Shika sighed. Fornaskr finally blinked.

  “Thank you,” Holly said, and meant the smallest things: heat in a bowl; a chair that held; someone who stayed without asking her to speak.

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  She exhaled, and the breath scraped.

  And one thought, small and bright and sharp, began to make itself known through the silt.

  Where was Saga?

  The thought didn’t let go once it surfaced. It sat there, bright as a shard in the palm of her mind, and every breath gave it form.

  “Fornaskr,” she said, the name catching once in her throat as she pushed herself a little straighter. “Where can I find Saga?”

  He lifted his gaze from the doorway. Something complicated crossed his face: fatigue, relief at a question with a direction, and then a small inward flinch.

  “The grove,” he said. “Behind the village. That is where she keeps watch.” He paused, the next words arriving as if he had to pull them through mud.

  “Last night… why did she not appear?”

  “I’m wondering the same thing,” Holly answered. The words weren’t angry yet. They were too tired to be anything but true. But there was steel under them, a thin line that did not bend.

  Fornaskr stood. The motion seemed to remind his body that it had joints, that tendons could ache. He reached for his cloak and settled it across his shoulders.

  “We will go,” he said simply. “Now.”

  Shika slid off the mat in a small, determined tumble and shook herself out, tail curling like a question mark that had already decided on its answer. Holly managed, despite everything, the smallest ghost of a smile.

  Outside, the morning had thickened into work: the kind of purposeful quiet that follows fear. The smell of wet ash clung to the square. The statue’s shadow lay long across the stones, the Eiranth bloom in its hand gone still again. Fornaskr stepped into the light and lifted a hand in signal.

  A broad-shouldered Sylari man, the one Fornaskr had left in charge while he was away, crossed to them at once. His eyes took in Holly’s face, then flicked to Shika, then settled on Fornaskr.

  “I should stay,” Fornaskr began, apology already threading the words. “There is repair to manage. But—”

  The man shook his head, firm and kind. “Do not apologize, Elder. Go get her back.” He glanced between them, voice softening. “And be safe. Both of you.”

  Fornaskr clasped his forearm in thanks. Holly found herself nodding, too, as if the vow had been made to her as well.

  They turned toward the rear path, the one that wound between houses to the tall wooden gate carved with the Hugteikn, and Holly felt the world tilt a degree toward motion. She followed, because not moving was becoming unbearable.

  They moved through the square at a measured pace, not speaking. The work of mending had already begun: swept glass gathered in glinting piles, a torn banner being re-stitched with deft fingers, a cracked basin lifted by three pairs of hands like something wounded and dignified. No one stopped them. A few bowed their heads as they passed, the gesture quiet as thought.

  Fornaskr paused at the communal spring. He knelt, shoulders broad against the morning, and filled two skins from the clear run that sang over stone. Holly set her palms to the lip of the basin and leaned in, the water cool enough to bite. She rinsed her face, then her lower lip—the place she kept touching, the place her nerves had named—and watched the eddies wrinkle the surface. For a breath, a faint gold tremor moved through the reflection, like threadlight deciding whether or not to be hidden.

  She stared at the thread in the water until her own reflection wavered to someone she did not quite trust.

  Why didn’t I try?

  The thought arrived without mercy. Why hadn’t she thrown a net of light, bridged a thread to the Eiranth, bound the ichor the way she bound a wound? She could see her hands, even now, hanging useless at her sides while the chant rose and the blackness climbed.

  She had not acted.

  Shame pricked under her skin, hot as fever. Maybe despair had been faster than thought. Maybe the parts of her that remained after the last 13 years just didn't have the courage to act anymore. She pressed her palm flat to the stone lip, feeling the chill, and made herself stop the spiral. She could not rewrite that moment. She could only choose the next one.

  Next time, I throw the thread, she promised the water, the trees, herself. Next time, I catch her.

  Shika hopped up to the stone rim and craned for a look, whiskers trembling. Holly's gaze moved, taking her out of the thought. She cupped water and dabbed it over the red panda’s ears; Shika endured it with solemn dignity, then pressed her forehead against Holly’s wrist as if to seal an oath neither of them had spoken.

  They reached the statue shortly after. Holly had never truly seen it, only catching a small glimpse of it last night when the Eiranth bloom reacted. The Ariel in stone stood with her chin lifted, the Eiranth bloom poised in an upturned palm.

  As Holly drew even with it, the blossom pulsed once, a soft heartbeat of light, and went still again. She lifted two fingers and touched the base where hard lines carved a double helix of vines.

  “I’m not letting the world take you again,” she murmured to the stone, and to the sky, and to herself.

  Fornaskr waited a respectful pace away. When she rejoined him, he drew something from a pouch at his belt: a small charm of twigs bound with a green thread and a knot of amber sap sealed at the crossing.

  “For the forgetting winds,” he said, tying it to the strap across her shoulder with workman’s care. He affixed a small harness around Shika's middle and attached a twin charm; the little creature went very still until the knot was snug, then chirred as if in approval.

  A breath of air carried a distant beat—one, two, three—thin as a memory and then gone. Holly froze, every muscle listening. Fornaskr’s head tilted, too, the line between his brows deepening. The wind shifted; leaves rattled; there was only morning.

  She exhaled slowly. The trembling in her hands faded to a fine hum.

  “Ready,” she said, and the word felt like a step taken.