3. Cassiel #2
I shake my head, glad I don’t need my voice to tell her no. I’m worried it might break.
“Ru asked after you, you know.”
I nod.
“She’s probably asleep now.”
It’s hard to swallow, or even speak, but I mutter a few words about checking in with her. It’s easier when she’s asleep, when I don’t have to say anything, when I don’t have to think.
I shuffle away from my mother’s bedside and head to Runara’s room.
I find it hard to speak to my aunt, but I’m glad she’s here.
She arrived not long after the attack, and she hasn’t left.
For the first few days, she helped with running the country until I stepped up to the task.
Now, she helps run the castle, and sees to Ru’s needs.
I don’t know what I’d do without her, and I don’t know how to say that.
Ru’s room is next to mother’s. It always has been. Although the royal nursery is in a separate wing (so as not to disturb the monarch’s much-needed rest) my mother insisted Ru be close to her from the moment she was born. They’ve barely ever passed a night without each other.
Until the day Evander died.
I step into Ru’s room. There’s a soft heat to it, like a lantern is still burning somewhere.
I turn towards it, but before I can, there’s a sharp intake of breath and a little body charges across the room and launches into my arms. I hold on to her because what else am I going to do, and lift her easily into my arms.
Probably asleep, hmm?
“You’re back,” she breathes into my neck.
“You should be in bed,” I tell her. “Why are you still awake?”
“I was drawing,” she explains.
“Drawing what?”
Ru goes quiet, and I don’t press. She slides out of my arms and scurries back to her desk as though to conceal her work from me.
“Can you read me a story?” she asks.
Another night—another time—I might laugh, or make a joke. Not tonight.
“No,” I say. “But I will tell you one.”
I want to go, but I don’t want to leave her. I want to stay, but I don’t want to talk. Not with my own words, anyway. I can borrow someone else’s, just for a little while.
We walk towards the bed. I peel back the covers, gesturing for her to get in. She jumps into place, seizing my arm and squirming under the blankets.
“Do you have a preference?”
She shakes her head against my arm. I swallow a sigh.
I don’t want to have to think of one, to mentally try and remember all the details and wonder if this is the right story, one free of anything that might upset her.
I skim through my memories, wishing I could just grab a book and select something, anything, at random.
Finally, one comes to me.
“Did I ever tell you the story of the Rabbit and the Moon?” I ask.
Ru rustles in the bedsheets.
“You need to tell me,” I remind her.
“Yes,” she says quietly, “but I would like to hear it again.”
I smile, and she wriggles in the bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin. Her fingers still cling to my sleeve, though, harder than ever. She’s clung to me before—I have dozens of memories of her latching onto me and refusing to let me leave—but rarely this tightly.
I settle beside her, lowering my voice. “Once upon a time,” I begin, “there was a little rabbit who lived in a field of silver grass. She was very small, and very lonely, and every night she looked up at the moon and wished she could visit it. She thought the moon must be the safest, gentlest place in the sky.”
Ru makes a soft, sleepy hum of approval.
“One night,” I continue, “the moon heard her wish. ‘If you want to come to me,’ said the moon, ‘you must bring me a gift. Something that proves your heart is brave.’ So the rabbit looked and looked. She tried to carry a flower, but it wilted. She tried to catch a songbird, but it flew away. At last, she sat down under the stars and thought very hard.”
I pause. Ru’s breathing is already slower, her grip on my sleeve loosening.
“Then,” I whisper, “she realised that the only thing she had worth giving was herself. So she built a little fire and said, ‘If you want me, moon, I’m yours.’ And before she could change her mind, she leapt into the flames.”
Ru shifts faintly, but she’s not afraid. She’s heard this one before.
“The moon was so moved by her courage that she reached down and gathered the rabbit’s spirit into her arms. And when people look up at the sky, they say they can still see her there—the rabbit, resting in the moonlight. Safe forever. Brave forever.”
The room is very still. I hover my hand over Ru’s face, brushing over her features. Her eyes are closed, her mouth half-open in that small, trusting way she used to sleep as a baby. Her hand still rests on my sleeve.
I brush a stray curl from her forehead. “Goodnight, little rabbit,” I whisper.
She doesn’t stir.
The heat of her room, the faint scent of ink and lavender and child—everything feels fragile. For a moment, I sit there, listening to the even rhythm of her breathing, the heartbeat of a world I can’t afford to break.
I can’t believe how quiet she is. Not just now that she’s asleep, but how quiet she was during the story and when I came into the room. I can count the words she uttered, and Runara has never exactly been described as succinct. She’s never used one word when twelve were available.
Runara came into the world loud. Evander and I were sitting on the steps outside our mother’s chambers when she was being born, trying to stay out of the way but unable to do anything else while the fate of our remaining parent hung in the balance.
By the end of the day, we might have a new family member, or we might have lost the only one we had left that mattered.
Except each other, of course. For a moment, it felt like it was just the two of us, like our family had gone from four to two in an instant.
Evander clenched my hand through it all.
I was not accustomed to seeing him afraid, but he was that night.
He said nothing, but his face was pale and grey, like he wanted to be sick.
He held my hand so hard that his nails bit into my palm.
It must be bad, if Evander’s worried, I thought. I was eleven at the time, but Evander’s extra three years made him seem like an adult in that moment, a person who ordinary fears didn’t touch.
All those fears immediately dissipated the moment a sharp cry punched through the air. His face broke into a smile, a smile that grew wider when people started to cheer, when a voice cried out “well done, Your Majesty!”
The cheer might as well have been a fanfare.
Shortly afterwards, we were ushered into the room by beaming servants, clapping our backs and laughing with us. They drew us towards Mother’s bedside. Her face was red, hair plastered to her temple, but she wore the biggest smile of them all.