Children Of The Sky (The Scripts Of Neptune, Book 2)

Chapter 46

It was strange, what details Crynia's mind chose to make stark when she remembered her father's murder. There was the blood--always the blood, red as roses and winestains--and there was the smell of Jack's shirt as he held her back, and there was the sound. The sound of Mick's shout, of gurgling breath, of her dad's last words.

You know I love you, yeah?

The silence in the days following that awful, awful moment was stifling, suffocating, unbearable. She spent the days sitting in the shop, listening to it until her mind collapsed and drove her to the woods. There she ran until she could no longer, and then she walked, and more than once found a hollow and spent the night in the crisp of the outdoors, wanting to weep and yet remaining unable to do so.

Mick came to see her once, and Rook came three times, but neither of them managed to get her to speak more than a few words, nor to accompany them anywhere. They were worried for her, and perhaps rightly so--but she couldn't bring herself to care. The woods beckoned, and the silence gnawed.

The nightmares followed in a few days, though she couldn't remember when exactly they began again. Again? Yes, that was right, she'd seen these demons before. The boy with the sea-green eyes whose name and face were lost to her when she woke, the snow and blood and stone, the scream. Her father was there now, too, always speaking softly, always warm and welcoming and right until she woke up and felt the hole of his absence, his loss, in her chest. The voices bled into the morning, sometimes, and she'd hear them in the song of the birds before she was fully awake, leaves and twigs tangled in her short hair. And there would be stars in the trees, too, like they were against the dark woman's skirt and skin in her dreams, and tears on Crynia's cheeks, and rawness in her throat from her screaming. Did the townspeople hear her, she wondered, when she cried out and wept without waking, or were they too deep in their own slumber?

Some of the numbness faded after the first week, and she opened the shop and started selling her father's works to the townspeople. Putting on an act was easy enough for the five or ten minutes that people spent in the shop; smiles were painfully easy to fake. They were pitying--she could see it in their eyes--and it made her so sick some days she retched in the kitchen. Who were they to know her grief, to pretend to understand, to even think of offering comfort? What did they know of her loss? Of the silence in the smithy where there should have been the ring of a hammer, the hiss of hot steel in water, the roar of the bellows and the forge? What did they know of the loneliness of a house with an empty bedroom, and a table with two chairs that would never again be filled the way they should have been?

The anger set in when the wares were gone and the door remained shut through the days once more. The nightmares had grown worse, and Crynia found herself staying up to avoid them and rising at dawn in a cold sweat anyway, shaking from the bitter cold of the woman's touch and choking on her own sobs. It was easy for her mind to get away from her in those early mornings, and she found herself wanting someone to blame. Someone was at fault, surely, and she knew it was Dalved--or whoever he was; she'd recognized his changed face somehow--but he was gone, out of reach, and soon out of mind as well. Mick was next to come into her head, but seeing him when he visited pushed the thought out of her mind as quickly as it'd come. Squill couldn't be blamed, either; he'd only been accompanying them. It only left two people: herself...or Jack.

And it was him, wasn't it, who had organized the meeting, who had brought Dalved to the smithy in the first place? He'd lied to her about the Storm, too, about his pain. That pain had been there tenfold the night she'd run, so stark on his face that she'd almost stayed, almost taken her words back. And he'd been nervous the day he'd brought Dalved--he'd known what was going to happen, he had to have, he had to. It was the only answer that made sense. He was at fault; she latched onto that and let it poison whatever she felt for him until all that was left was bitter grief.