Chapter 17
Two months after Father’s funeral, Comfort called a family meeting.
At first, Mother and I refused. We’d both perfected the art of saying no without saying anything at all.
Mother kept her silence behind her bedroom door, too exhausted to cry any more.
I would pull my blankets over my head and refuse to come out until footsteps faded away.
But Comfort had sharpened into something unyielding and forceful.
She snatched the covers from my bed, picked the lock on Mother’s door, and pestered both of us until we finally dragged ourselves into the sitting room, collapsing into dust-coated chairs that hadn’t felt a body in weeks.
“We are leaving,” Comfort announced.
Mother and I stared at her without a flicker of emotion on our faces. My eyes followed the dust motes drifting along in the air then shifted to look at the dull brass gleam of a mirror’s back. I’d turned it toward the wall weeks ago so I could hide from my own reflection.
“We are leaving,” she repeated, as if the words themselves were a key we simply hadn’t recognized yet. “Tomorrow. We’ll be moving to the manor you grew up in, Mother. I’ve made all the arrangements.”
Mother slumped back into the sofa. She looked worse than I remembered. Her eyes were sunken and hollow-looking, and that spark of life she had always possessed had been snuffed out.
Comfort pressed on. “We can’t live like this anymore. Yes, Father died. Yes, Truly, you were burned. But you both need purpose. You need to snap out of this…this half-life, this depression, whatever you want to call it. Father wouldn’t want this for either of you.”
Did she think it was that easy? That we could just decide to be happy and forget our troubles?
Grief and pain couldn’t be dismissed by will alone.
Our dark thoughts didn’t ask before taking up residence where they pressed in, relentless, until there was no space left for light.
I looked at Mother. Her face was a pale mask, empty of any reaction.
I wasn’t sure she’d heard a single word.
A lump formed in my throat and hot tears pricked my eyes, but crying felt like too much work. I felt…defeated. Life had defeated me. It had sucked away who I was as a person and left me residing in an empty, emotionless shell instead.
“So,” Comfort said briskly, “pack what you want. Otherwise, I’ll have someone do it for you after we leave and they will send it along later.” Then she swept out of the room, her skirts slicing through the dust.
Mother and I remained in our seats. We didn’t even exchange glances. After a long time, I rose and silently left the room, still not having said a word to Mother.
It felt surreal the next day as I watched the castle shrink in the distance, the wheels of the carriage carrying us further into the countryside. It might have felt like any trip to Avivia, except Father wasn’t beside me and Curtis wasn’t sitting across from me.
Curtis.
I hadn’t said goodbye, even though Comfort told me he’d called on me again and again.
It was better this way, to slip quietly out of his life.
I didn’t want his last memory of me to be of me wasting away with burns on my face and my hair almost nonexistent.
Let him remember me as pretty. He would go on and find someone new, whole, and undamaged.
He deserved someone like that. He deserved someone who could love him back. I couldn’t even love myself.
I made a silent vow to forget life the way it had been before the attack. What use was there in clinging to that girl who was a skilled linguist, who had been falling in love with a prince, and who thought the world was safe to explore? Those memories were now too painful to examine.
The manor appeared slowly at the crest of a hill, its stone, ivy-covered walls softened by the glow of afternoon.
Our family used to vacation here in the summer months of happier years past. I could almost see the ghosts of younger versions of myself and Comfort running across the fields, braiding crowns of wildflowers and laughing in the sun.
Back then, Mother taught us the names of every plant, Father led us through hidden forest trails, and summer days stretched endlessly.
We explored the woods, swam in the pond, and spent hours lazily watching the clouds drift by.
Comfort had chosen well. This place was far from the darkness of the last few months.
As soon as the carriage halted, Comfort was issuing orders to the servants hauling trunks, wiping away dust, and rearranging furniture as if she were assembling a stage set for a different life.
Mother’s parents had long since passed away, and her only sister, Jaelyn, lived on the other side of Islandria.
I doubted she even knew Father was gone.
Mother hadn’t so much as picked up a quill since his death, though to be fair, I rarely left my room to see if she had done anything at all.
I expected Mother to remain seated until Comfort told her otherwise, but she stepped down from the carriage without prompting, the faintest sign of life stirring in her expression as she breathed in the open air.
I stayed hidden inside, fingertips curling in my wig.
I had picked up the habit of finding any excuse to hold my hand over my face, twirling hair, pretending to massage my forehead as if I had a headache.
Comfort had chosen the wig for me. It matched my natural color well enough but was styled in elaborate curls, so unlike the dull, straight hair I’d once had.
She’d urged me more than once to shave the few strands that remained on the right side, but I refused.
Cutting them would feel like betraying the last scrap of myself I still owned.
Instead, I twisted the short hair into a careful coil and hid it beneath the wig.
My real hair was growing back like baby fuzz on newborns, barely two inches long.
Even with the wig, I wanted more cover. Comfort had bought me hats with delicate veils that draped gracefully over my left shoulder to obscure the worst of the scarring.
They made my face almost unreadable, which suited me fine.
I still couldn’t bear to paint over my skin with cosmetics.
That would require a mirror, and I wasn’t ready to face one.
From behind the heavy curtains, I peered out just enough to watch Comfort directing two men to carry a bureau through the door. Mother stood a little apart, her face turned toward the trees, her shoulders less hunched than I’d seen them since Father’s death.
Hours passed before the work was done. Only then did I leave the carriage’s stifling heat and step into the fresh air, moving quickly up the steps and into the manor without meeting a single person.
I shut myself inside the bedroom I had always used, with its familiar four-poster bed and sturdy bureau and breathed a sigh of relief.
On the side table, stacked in a neat pile, was a small stack of envelopes, all of which bore Curtis’s unmistakable handwriting, and all were still unopened. I shoved them into one of the side table’s deep drawers and told myself that one day, I’d read them. When I was ready.
But for now, I wanted nothing but solitude. I just wanted to forget.