My mother was dead and gone.
Until now, some part of me had believed—really believed—none of it had happened. That it had been a dream, a delusion, andstill, still I clung to the wild idea that she might be alive. That I wouldreturn, find her, step into her floury kitchen and the smell of yeast and run my finger over the pale surface of her counter.
Mothers couldn’t die. They simply couldn’t.
Truth collided with longing. The scene before me blurred.
I turned toward Dorian before I knew what I was doing. His arms came around me, and he stepped us back into the alley we’d come from. He leaned against the wall and pulled me into him and held me so tight the breath was pressed out of me. I pushed my face into his chest and gripped at his shirt.
She hadn’t even been my mother, yet she’d loved me like one. She’dknown, yet she’d kept me.
Whispered words drifted from somewhere close—his voice. It was his hand stroking my hair. Stroking it just like my mother did when I was a girl.
It didn’t feel quite the same. But nothing ever would.
He didn’t press me, didn’t push me away. He just kept murmuring and stroking until my fingers unclenched and I lifted my face.
Through wet eyelashes, I saw him. He looked down at me with sadness like I’d never seen. Like it was his mother who’d died.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’m so sorry, Eury.”
“She didn’t deserve it.”
“No, she didn’t.”
I swallowed phlegm. Dorian wiped at my face with the edge of his cloak. Certain things were inviolable, and one of them was your mother. Somehow, I’d known Dorian would understand that.
He held me a while longer in the quiet of the alley, until the wetness on my cheeks dried in the fetid breeze and I shifted in his arms.
“There’s one other place I need to see,” I said. “Before we leave here.”
He nodded.
Ten minutes later, we stood near the entrance to the barracks. So small now, shabby under moonlight. The yard was quiet, empty—and the massive section of wall that had fallen in the center of it was gone. As was the infirmary, as if it had never existed.
“Was this where you trained?” Dorian asked from beside me.
I pointed. “That was where I slept.” My finger circled. “And this is where I ran.”
I started forward, half-expecting Dorian to stay me. But he didn’t, and he didn’t ask where I was going, either.
The well sat like a small round sentinel in the night, the bucket drawn up. I saw myself from the outside, the moment I’d shored up against it and had the breath knocked out of me.
I’d been thrown off the porch of the infirmary. Saved by someone who knew exactly what she was doing.
My steps carried me across the yard and stopped at the spot where she’d stared up into the sky. The ground met my knees as I dropped into the dirt and lowered my head.
I didn’t even know who Isa’s family was, whether she’d gotten a funeral. Those were rare in the southern district, reserved for those with a modicum of power. And an old nurse had none.
My hand went to my belt pocket, fished until my fingers closed over the cold iron of the guard’s pin. Drawn out under the moonlight, it gleamed with a strange pallor. Thalassa’s gift.
A shadow passed over the moon. Dorian stood above me. Then he was kneeling in the dirt beside me.
I set the pin on the ground. Isa should have a headstone, a memorial. Not a pin in the dirt. Not two fae kneeling for a woman who had spent her life distrusting what lurked beyond the walls.
But life rarely gave us what we deserved.
The middle wall stood so high, we used to say even our prayers couldn’t climb it.