Kit
The two weeks after the incident in Millfield felt like an eternity.
I was lucky to get two or three hours of fitful, interrupted sleep a night and spent most of the long stretches of dark feigning unconsciousness.
Penny tried to offer comfort, but I rarely accepted it.
My head was too loud and scattered to be soothed.
Frankly, comfort felt undeserved. A man was dead. My actions were necessary, but that knowledge failed to ease my conscience. Penny and I lived on, but that didn’t diminish what I’d done. Just… made it slightly more palatable.
My days in the caverns were endless, too.
Almost from sunup to sundown, I fought revulsion and nausea as I worked alongside the others to finish the final pieces of the Vessel, and I tried in vain to find ways to slow the progress.
Thankfully, Philippa handled most of the hands-on work and allowed me to largely supervise.
She did her best to engage me in conversation while we worked, though I couldn’t muster responses of more than a few words at a time.
She still managed to drag enough out of me to learn a fair bit about Penny and our relationship. Some days, it was all she could get me to talk about. He was the best part of my life.
I’d almost lost him, and I couldn’t forget that.
Couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep going before I no longer had the strength to stave off collapse. I wouldn’t be able to avoid letting Penny fuss over me if I ended up needing him to look after me because I ran myself into the ground. Somehow, that felt like it would be another failing.
That afternoon, everyone broke for lunch around midday and dispersed outside to enjoy the clear skies and warm sunshine.
I lingered in the main cavern, crouched at the edge of the pool and scrubbing at my hands and arms. I didn’t have an appetite to begin with, but the thought of eating with bone dust on my skin, of it ending up in my food, turned my stomach even more.
This had become somewhat of an unintentional ritual: I scrubbed until my skin hurt, and then by the time I deemed myself clean enough, I was so thoroughly nauseous that I didn’t eat, anyway.
But Penny was starting to notice that I was bringing home most of what he packed for my lunch, and that I hadn’t the stomach for dinner more often than not.
He brought it up gently several times in the last week, and again the night before, so I resigned myself to making an effort to eat something.
When I finally finished, my skin a stinging pink all the way up to my elbows, I pushed to my feet and shook the water off my hands.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Philippa peel out of the shadow of the doorway and head toward me with a towel.
We met in the middle of the room where she held it out to me.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, blotting away the last of the moisture on my arms.
“Of course.” Her head tilted slightly to the left as she studied my face. “You haven’t been joining us for lunch. I’m starting to get worried.”
I lowered my eyes to the towel now clutched between my hands like it was the only thing keeping me together.
There was a part of me that appreciated her concern, but a bigger one still that wished everyone would leave me alone for a while.
Let me run my thoughts in circles until the guilt and the horror dulled enough that I could tuck them away in the back of my mind with the rest of the awful things I’d seen and done.
Let Anders’s ghost fade into the ranks that lingered there until I someday forgot his face.
“I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”
Philippa hummed and tucked her hand into the crook of my elbow. “I can see that.”
She led me back through the caverns, quiet until we reached the entry chamber where we stopped in front of my lunch pail. Hers sat beside it. She took the towel from my hands, dropped it on a pile of used rags awaiting laundering, then bent to retrieve my lunch.
“Come sit with me,” she said when she offered it to me. When I didn’t immediately take it, she hooked the handle over my palm, then stooped to gather her own. “You look like you have some things you need to get off your chest.”
I didn’t want to tell her anything. Merrick had, wisely, disseminated our fabricated version of events from our sixth Oath to the rest of Ashpoint. As far as anyone knew, Anders had been executed by the militia, and that was that. So, how could I explain what haunted me if I couldn’t be honest?
Still, there was no escaping Philippa. She kept a solid grip on my arm the whole way outside.
We bypassed the others all gathered in a loose knot in the sunshine and settled instead against the cliff wall in the shade of an outcropping of stone.
Only once we’d both settled onto the rocky dirt did she release me.
She spread a cloth napkin on the ground and pulled a dark rye roll from her pail. She split the bread, and then set about stuffing it with thick sliced salted pork. With her sandwich made, she looked over at me expectantly.
I peered into my own pail. One of Rosie’s soft bread rolls, pickled onions and a small hunk of cheese wrapped together in waxed paper, several slices of dry sausage, and a small pouch of whatever dried fruit and nuts we had left in the pantry.
Just the thought of putting food in my stomach made bile rise in my throat, but I plucked the roll out and pinched off a bit of the crust.
When my eyes met Philippa’s again, her brows were knit together and her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Now, that lovely man of yours goes to the trouble to pack this food for you, and that’s all you’re going to eat?” She looked pointedly at the contents of my lunch pail, and then back up.
I relented and followed her example, spreading the rest of the food on the napkin tucked in alongside the nuts and assembling my own sandwich.
She gave a satisfied nod, and once I’d forced a few meager mouthfuls down, she started in on her lunch.
We ate in companionable quiet for several long minutes before she spoke again.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?” she asked, voice quiet enough not to carry beyond the two of us.
I nearly choked on a bite, swallowing past the sudden tightness in my throat.
“What do you mean?” I forced out.
She glanced over at me, brown eyes soft, and a sympathetic half-smile on her lips. She tugged on an old, tarnished chain looped around her left wrist, something she did often whenever we talked about serious things. “During your Oath.”
I wondered then if she disbelieved our story. She’d undertaken the Oaths decades ago, so she knew what the trials entailed. Though, if she’d supported my father and his vision for the Bone Men, I wasn’t sure she found them as abhorrent as I did.
Could she see my guilt, heavier than a millstone, weighing me down? Did she suppose it was the act of poisoning the well that haunted me, or did she suspect Anders’s fate was my doing? Whatever she thought, her expression remained the same: sad, and worried, and compassionate.
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept quiet.
“You haven’t been yourself since you got back,” she said when it became clear I didn’t intend to respond. “Sometimes it helps to say it out loud to get it out of your head for a bit. I’m happy to listen.”
The only problem was, in my head was the only place I could handle this.
It was hard enough discussing it with Penny.
I still couldn’t bring myself to put words to what I’d done.
I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to. It was like, as long as I didn’t say it out loud, as long as no one did, I could pretend it was a bad dream.
Not that I imagined that would last forever. I would have to face it someday.
“It didn’t go as planned, but I’ll be fine.”
Her mouth twisted in a frown. “You’re not fine now, Kit.” She set aside her sandwich and turned to face me, pulling my free hand into her lap between both of her own. “The Oaths are cruel. We’d have to be stupid not to see that.”
I glanced around, worried that the cliff might reflect our hushed words back out to the rest of the workers gathered too close for my comfort. They continued on with their own conversations, oblivious to the blasphemous sentiment Philippa had just uttered.
I didn’t know what to make of it. I was so sure she believed in my father’s vision, but now I had my doubts.
Thinking back on our conversations over the last two weeks, I found myself seeing little things she’d said with new eyes.
Offhand comments about how much better things had been under Levitt’s authority, or how kindness and softness were virtues oft discounted amongst the Bone Men’s ranks, or that suffering need not be a precursor to community.
Gentle hints that she wasn’t who I thought she was, despite how she performed when Merrick or Klaus were around.
My eyes slid back to hers, and I immediately wanted to look away again. She held my gaze with such intensity that I couldn’t.
“You needn’t sit with this alone,” she said gently.
“I know how hard it can be to talk about these things with the people we love. We want them to see us as better than we see ourselves, but that can mean we marinate in the hurt alone when what we really need is to air out the wounds so they can heal.” She squeezed my hand tight.
“You’re not alone, Kit. If you can’t talk to Penny, talk to me. ”
If only it were that easy. Even if I wanted to unload every awful detail of what happened in that clearing, the words caught in my chest and choked off my throat before a single one could emerge.
Finally, I managed to say, “I appreciate your concern, but this isn’t something you can help with.”
She heaved a sad sigh. One hand left mine to dig in her lunch pail, and then she was pressing a small glass dropper bottle into my palm and holding it there as she squeezed my hand again.
“I can at least help with part of it. You clearly haven’t been sleeping well.
I know you have a contentious relationship with our herbalist, so I took the liberty of stopping by yesterday afternoon to ask for this for myself.
” She gave a soft smile. “A few drops in some tea before bed, and it will help you get some deep sleep.”
When she let go of my hand, I stared down at the bottle of pale, yellow liquid she left behind. It wasn’t the sickly green of hemlock, but the bottle was the same. It made my stomach ache to think of taking it.
“Milk thistle,” Philippa supplied as an answer to the question I had yet to ask.
It might help me sleep, but that was only half of my problem.
What I needed was some potion or herb that would strip away my dreams. Because the thought of being trapped in the endless nightmares that dogged my sleep was terrifying.
Usually, they replayed what I did to Anders, over and over and over until I clawed my way back to wakefulness.
But sometimes, it was Penny under my knife, or Rosie, or Isla, and I’d rather not sleep at all than not be able to wake myself when it got too bad.
“Thank you,” I croaked, tucking the bottle into my lunch pail and resolving never to take a drop.
“You’re welcome, Kit.” She turned back to her lunch. “And the offer to talk is always open to you.”
All I could do was nod in response.
“Now,” she said, plastering on a smile. “When are you going to bring your lovely man over to have dinner with me? I would love the chance to get to know him, too. Maybe get him to tell me some stories about you for a change.”
I managed a wan smile of my own, glad for the respite from heavier topics. “I’ll talk to Penny, see if we can figure out an evening that works for all of us.”
She reached over and patted my arm. “Good boy.”