15

The thought of Tharaen settled too heavily within her, she lowered her eyes, but the warmth gathering behind them refused to fade. She swallowed, willing the ache in her throat to loosen, yet the memories only rose more sharply.

She did not want anyone to see, not here, not among people who had only just learned her name and so she rose and walked away from the table. The noise of the dining hall followed her for a few steps, then gradually faded behind her as she passed beneath the stone arches.

She kept her face lowered; she only needed somewhere quiet, somewhere no one would see the emotion she had been holding back and so she made her way toward her room, carrying the weight of Tharaen's memory with her.

She opened the door, lowered herself on the edge of her bed and thought about past months, it was the first time she had nothing left to plan. The examination was done, her name was upon the list, and she was a student of Aethoria Central University, with a Charter standing between her and everything that had chased her since the fall of Solari.

She had a bed, a room, and three roommates who were not hostile to her yet.

It had been sixty-two days since Soreke had told her to run, and she had done so without knowing whether she would make it out alive. She had not known it was the last time when Soreke gave her that brief embrace before sending her away. Had she known, she would have held him a little longer. She had not thought of whether it would be the last time, and yet that was something she could not forgive herself for.

She had not allowed herself to think of her family in the past sixty-two days, she did now and tears slipped down her face for her mother, her father, her brothers, her handmaiden, her people, the highland grove through which she had wandered each morning, and the scent of mineral water, salt, and iron that she would never smell again.

The three of them arrived shortly after, but Ryska didn’t seem to notice. They settled into their beds and chairs, feigning busyness, avoiding any obvious glances, yet their minds wandered all the same.

Cyren was pretending to read while she watched her staring at her hands. The things done to Draconians, she'd heard the whispers, everyone had, and they were the kind of stories that made a person go quiet just repeating them. If the whispers alone were enough to make her shiver, she couldn't begin to imagine what the reality had actually been.

Nehara looked up from her own corner of the room, and she wondered, what would I even do if there was no family left to go back to? No home waiting at the end of a term, no one to return to once all of this, the whole chapter of Aethoria was finally over.

Erynae, nearest to her, didn't look away as quickly as the others. How do you breathe, she thought, after your mother is gone?

None of them said anything. Ryska didn't seem to want them to.

The door opened sometime later, the three girls returned and they stopped almost at once when they saw her. Ryska lay curled upon her side, her eyes were closed, though the faint tracks of tears remained upon her face.

The sight seemed to silence the room itself. Cyren's sat on her desk, but her gaze lingered upon her, and the stories she had heard came rushing back, the stories of Solari, of what had been done there, of the atrocities spoken of in hushed voices and the crimes committed against Ryska's people. She had heard those accounts as stories told by others, distant horrors given names and numbers, but now the survivor of them lay only a few steps away.

Cyren wondered how she had endured it. How did someone wake each morning after losing everything and still find the strength to stand? How did a person carry the memory of such cruelty without allowing it to consume every breath?

Nehara too got on her desk and her eyes softened as she looked upon the quiet figure upon the bed, the emptiness that must have followed the loss of an entire family. She wondered how anyone learned to live when the voices that had filled their childhood were gone forever. How did you wake in the morning when there was no mother calling your name, no father waiting beyond the door, no brother's footsteps crossing the hall? How did you sit at a table and accept the silence where an entire family had once been?

Nehara could not imagine it, the thought alone made something ache within her chest.

Erynae got in her bed and watched Ryska breathe. Her gaze fell upon the pillow beneath Ryska's cheek, upon the loose golden strands scattered across it, and then upon the trembling rise and fall of her shoulders. How did you breathe when your mother was gone? How did you draw breath into a world that had lost the person who had first taught you what warmth meant?

The thought of that presence being torn away left Erynae unable to imagine what remained afterward.

The air, heavy with a certain feeling, drifted from there and soon enough found another room carrying the same thoughts.

Bram's thoughts kept returning to Ryska despite himself. He knew little of courts, bloodlines, or the histories that filled the academy's books. He had grown up beneath open skies, where the seasons mattered more than kingdoms and a good harvest meant more than the name of the lord upon the nearest banner.

Yet even he knew what had happened to Solari. He had heard the stories in fragments, carried by travelers and merchants who passed through his village, and he had never imagined that someone who had lived through such things would one day sit beside him at supper.

She was only a girl, he thought. A girl who should have been worrying about lessons, friends, and whether the food was worth eating, not about whether she would survive long enough to see another morning.

Kohl carried a heavier thought; his kingdom had stood against hers and though he had not wielded a blade upon its fields, he could not pretend that his hands were entirely clean of what had been done in his kingdom's name. Somewhere within those armies, somewhere beneath those colors, men had carried out the orders that had destroyed Ryska's home.

For the first time, the history of his kingdom did not feel like something written in old chronicles. It had a face now, it had golden hair, quiet eyes, and a name spoken softly at their table.

Rhovyn thought only of her pain, he remembered the way she had sat among them, answering when spoken to but never reaching for attention. He remembered the faint furrow between her brows and the way she had finally risen from the table without explaining herself.

He had known sorrow, as all people did, but hers seemed different. Hers had not come as a single wound that could be allowed to heal. It had come as an entire world torn away from her. Family, home, country, the people whose names she would never hear spoken again.

Valere knew more than the others, far more than they could imagine. His father's counsellors had spoken of Solari in closed chambers, and he had heard the details that never reached public ears, the names of villages, the families that had vanished, the things done after the fighting had ended, the numbers spoken in low voices as though lowering them could lessen their weight.

He knew what had happened to her people and that was the part he could not understand. How had she stayed safe? How had she crossed the lands between Solari and Aethoria when so many others had been massacred? How had she escaped the hands of those who had hunted her? How had she reached the academy carrying nothing but the life that remained to her?