Chapter 5
LYRA
By the time we buried the dead, Edenlo had stopped burning.
Smoke still rose from the western cottages and from what remained of Nara’s bakery, thin gray trails unraveling into a sky too clear for mourning, but there were no flames left to fight.
No screaming. No wraiths. Nothing left to do except count what they had taken and put the pieces of our dead into the ground.
Thirty-two. Elder Rina had counted twice.
Thirty-two people from a village small enough that I knew every name before she read them aloud.
Thirty-two places that would be empty at supper tables.
Thirty-two voices missing from the market.
Thirty-two bodies laid beneath white cloth in the sacred grove while the living stood around them pretending there was some proper way to survive this.
I had helped prepare two of them. Maia had taught me that the final kindness should never be hurried.
Three passes of water over every wound. Sage for cleansing.
Lavender for peace. Hair combed. Hands washed.
Blood removed wherever it could be removed.
The dead should leave the world with dignity, she had always said, because death had already taken everything else.
I had never imagined I would use her lessons on her.
I washed Maia first. I cleaned the blood from her skin and changed the bandage around her middle even though there was no longer anything left to save beneath it.
I washed the soot from the swollen side of her face.
I combed her hair until the knots were gone and braided it the way she wore it when she worked, loose enough that strands always escaped around her temples before midday.
I dressed her in the green robes she wore every spring when the first fever remedies were gathered.
There was a tear near the cuff I had meant to mend for months.
I almost went looking for a needle before remembering it didn’t matter anymore.
That was the part that broke me. Not the blood.
Not the cold. The tear in her sleeve. So ordinary that I had walked past it a hundred times and thought there would always be another morning to fix it.
I sat beside her for a long time after that with the needle and green thread in my lap. Then I mended it anyway.
Irelia was harder. Someone had cleaned most of the blood from her before I reached her, but I made them let me do the rest. Her rust-red festival dress could not be saved.
The fabric had torn along her ribs and darkened nearly black where the blood dried, so I dressed her in the pearl-colored gown she had worn to Riverlight the year before.
She had spent half that festival complaining the neckline made her look too respectable and the other half using it to make Tomas forget how words worked.
I remembered laughing at him. I remembered Irelia laughing harder.
I remembered thinking there would be another Riverlight.
Her hair took nearly an hour. Ash had tangled through it, and there was dried blood near the back of her head.
I worked through every knot with my fingers before using the comb because she had always hated when anyone pulled her hair.
When I finished, I braided it loosely over one shoulder and tied the end with the blue ribbon she had stolen from me two years ago.
I found her sun charm among the things removed from her body.
The thread was singed, but the little carved sun remained intact.
I held it in my palm until the edges hurt.
Maia had given it to her after Irelia spent an entire summer complaining that the moon charm I wore made me insufferably dramatic.
Irelia had held hers up between two fingers and announced that it made her my opposite, which meant she was obviously the more interesting one.
Day chasing night. Light chasing shadow.
I tied the charm around my own wrist. Then I helped carry her to the grove.
Tomas took her shoulders. I took her legs. Neither of us spoke.
The sacred grove sat beyond the eastern edge of Edenlo where the fire had never reached.
Ancient elms rose above us, their branches woven so densely overhead that the morning sun came through in broken pieces.
Their roots pushed through the earth in thick, twisting ridges, disappearing beneath graves older than anyone alive could name.
Maia had once told me the first settlers brought the Mothertree here as a sapling from somewhere beyond Edenlo, before the village had walls, before the Veil became the thing people whispered about after dark.
I had asked her where. She told me it didn’t matter.
There were so many things she had told me didn’t matter. Now every one of them did.
Thirty-two graves had been dug beneath those trees.
Some were smaller than they should have been.
I kept my eyes away from those. Irelia rested beneath the Mothertree, her hands folded over her stomach.
Maia lay three graves to her left with her herb satchel tucked beside her.
Nara had been placed near the grove’s edge, wrapped in the heavy wool shawl she wore every harvest season.
The bakery had crushed much of her body.
Someone had done what they could with her face.
I wished I hadn’t looked closely enough to know that.
The survivors gathered slowly until there was no one left in Edenlo who could reasonably avoid coming.
Some leaned against canes. Some stood with bandaged heads or arms held in slings.
Others had burns covered beneath strips of cloth already stained through with ointment.
Children clung to parents who looked too exhausted to hold them but did anyway.
I stood between Tomas and Fenric. Or I tried to.
When I stepped into the space beside Fenric, the woman on his other side moved.
Only a step. Barely enough to notice. She pulled her daughter with her.
I noticed. The girl noticed too. Lysa was eight and had spent most of last winter sitting at Maia’s table because a fever kept returning every few weeks.
I had made her honey water. Braided her hair.
Let her crush dried feverfew with Maia’s stone pestle because she liked the sound.
Now her mother kept one hand firmly against her shoulder and stared straight ahead. I looked away.
Elder Rina stood before the Mothertree in a mourning cloak of ashen gray.
Smoke clung to her hair and skin from the Flamewatcher’s rite she had performed before dawn.
Her cane was planted in the soil beside her, but she did not lean on it when she raised both hands.
The Old Tongue came quietly. I understood almost none of it.
Most people in Edenlo didn’t anymore. Maia knew pieces.
Rina knew more. The words belonged to people who had buried their dead beneath these trees before any of us existed, and they moved through the grove with the strange weight of a memory the body had kept long after the mind forgot.
Return. Release. Root. Rise. Those were the words Maia had taught me.
Body to earth. Name to memory. Soul to sky.
The prayer went on for several minutes before Rina lowered her hands.
No one moved immediately. Wind stirred the branches overhead and carried the smell of smoke into the grove.
Somewhere beyond the trees, someone was hammering loose boards over a broken window.
Edenlo was already trying to become a village again.
Then the offerings began. One by one, people stepped forward.
Bread. Salt. Laurel. Ribbon. Coins. Carved animals.
A lock of hair tied in red thread. A child placed three smooth stones on her father’s chest and had to be carried away afterward because she refused to let go of his sleeve.
When it was my turn, the space around me shifted again.
I felt it this time before I saw it. People moved aside.
Not much. Enough. I walked past them without looking at anyone and knelt beside Maia.
The silver hair clip in my hand had belonged to her longer than I had been alive.
She used it when she wanted her hair completely out of her face, usually while stitching wounds or arguing with someone who had ignored her instructions.
I remembered sitting on the kitchen table when I was little, swinging my legs while she twisted her hair up with it.
I remembered stealing it when I was twelve because I wanted to look like her.
I remembered her finding me wearing it and pretending for an entire afternoon that she hadn’t noticed. I placed it over her folded hands.
“I don’t know how to do this without you.”
Nothing answered. There had been a part of me, small and humiliating and impossible to kill, that kept expecting Maia to wake.
Even after I had felt the absence of her pulse.
Even after I had washed her body. Even after I had dressed her.
Some part of me had continued waiting for her to sit up and tell everyone there had been some terrible mistake.
She didn’t. I pressed my fingers over hers once before standing.
Tomas was already beside Irelia when I reached her grave.
He had carved her a fox. One ear was unfinished.
The tail had only been shaped on one side, and faint lines remained where he had planned to carve the fur.
He turned it over once in his hand before placing it against her chest.
“You still owe me a dance.”