68. Cassiel
Ihave vastren tattooed into my skin before the next week is out, inside the infinity symbol, surrounded by flowers and birds. I wear the marks she no longer can, across my chest, over my heart.
The needle hurts.
Good. I want it to. By now, the sting of the burn she left behind had faded, and it seems likely that it won’t leave a scar. I am glad of that—I don’t want a reminder of her pain—but I need a physical mark of her against my skin. I want something to hurt in a way that makes sense.
After it is done, I finally find the courage to go into her old room. It is empty, of course. There’s no trace of her anywhere. I curl up on the cot anyway and try to imagine her scent.
It doesn’t work.
The next day, I order the servants to bring me paint, and start with the walls. I don’t plan it. I don’t sketch. I just paint.
Feathers first—layer upon layer, dark and luminous, sweeping across stone in arcs. Fire follows, gold and white and violet, curling through the feathers, threading everything together.
I paint her wings. Her eyes. Her smile. I paint Wren in all her forms, lunging with a sword, shooting the sky, dancing in her butterfly dress. I paint her by the window, light in her hair, perched like a bird in flight. I paint her as a bird. A phoenix. A star.
The walls disappear beneath it, followed by the ceiling and then the floor.
I daub anima onto the stone when I am done, the life-giving rune. I don’t expect anything to happen as none of my other runes have done anything, but the painting starts to move. It makes her hair drift around her face, makes her mouth smile, her eyes blink.
So that is something I can do.
My paintings are alive.
But Wren is dead, and no rune can ever animate her ashes.
Sometimes, I wake in the night and it’s pitch black, and I think that I’m still blind.
There’s fear, at first, but then I learn to prefer those nights, because it is easier to imagine she’s still there, right in the next room, like she told me she was.
I lie awake in the gloom, staring at nothing.
I conjure the noise of her breathing. It rises with my own heartbeat and stays with me until the sun rises, and illuminates all the empty corners in my room. All the places she is not.
When Wren and I were parted following our journey through the Duskfen, I thought to myself that existence without her ought not to be possible. Why do I think that? She is still alive. Her heart is still beating in the same realm as mine. It should be enough. It should be endurable.
Because now I know for certain that life without her is possible, and Saints, how I wish it wasn’t. It is possible. It is unendurable.
And yet I have to endure.
You have the harder job, she told me.
She is right. How easy it would have been, to die in her place. She made the greatest sacrifice, and yet I am the one who has to live with it.
I revisit the Star Gate. I rage to the stars. I beg them to release her, to take my heart, my hands, my sight. To take anything of value, but bring her back.
But nothing I have can measure up to her, and the stars are silent.
My mother, inspired by my artistry, asks if I would like to help design a statue of Wren to sit in the gardens where she fell and a war ended. I am not a sculptor, but I agree immediately.
“You don’t need to do it yourself,” she says. “Maybe just sketch it—”
It would take years to master the art of sculpting, but I am still determined to be part of it. I spend hours, days, weeks with chisels and dust and ruined attempts. My hands blister, split, heal, and split again.
When I finally begin Wren’s sculpture, I blindfold myself. I want this statue to be the first version of her I ever knew, the one I learned by touch.
Cassiel, she whispers into my ear as I chisel, do you want to see what I look like?
So I close my eyes, and I carve every line guided by memory, by the ghost of her beneath my hands. The curve of her jaw. The slope of her shoulders. The exact tilt of her head when she listened.
I know her. All of her. Further and deeper than skin and muscle and bone. There are parts of Wren that cannot be rendered in stone, parts that live somewhere else. If souls are something that can be held…
Then I have held hers. I have felt its shape beneath my hands, cupped like something fragile and infinite all at once. She lives somewhere inside me, in the space beside my ribs. If her heart is ever a tangible thing, they will find it still beating in my chest.
Saints, I wish that were true.
I work until the statue begins to emerge, until she stands half-finished, but already her.
I want it to outlive me, to stand long after I am gone.
I want people—generations from now, when we are nothing but stories—to look at it and know, not just what she was, but what she was to me.
I want them to see the intimacy in every curve, the precision of every line.
I want them to know that the artist knew her not by sight, but by touch.
I press my forehead lightly to the cool stone, blindfold still in place.
I’m right here, Cassiel.
One day, maybe, I will be able to believe that.
I work with a sculptor to finish Wren’s statue. She sits on a pedestal in the grounds, wings behind her, smiling up at the sun. She looks both like she is resting, and also like she is about to take flight. Her braid slips over one shoulder.
She is perfect.
I don’t visit her often, but I hear others do.
Ru talks about stopping by to see her, as does Dain.
Sometimes, little gifts of flowers and moonberries are left behind.
I think they are from Zephyr. I haven’t seen him since Wren’s death, but I hear he comes to the palace every now and again, assuring my mother that no one in the Moonhollow has any desire to move against her.
Vows are made, and laws written. The fey can wander freely. Erelis is theirs, too. All those executed by the Crown are posthumously pardoned.
Including Wren’s father.
The fey, in turn, offer their support in terms of magic, fixing what is broken, supplying healing potions and their own services. They apologise for my father’s death, and others. Even Fellwood, it is said, starts to come around to the idea, after tasting faerie mead for the first time.
“You’re joking,” I express to Dain, when he relays this story to me.
Dain just shrugs. He has been reinstated, of course, though most of his duties seem to revolve around me and making sure I look after myself.
“What could I say?” he says. “It’s really good mead.”
I suspect that his change of heart is likely more to do with Wren’s miracle and my mother’s new laws, but I don’t question it.
I like the mead, too.
The first winter comes like a slow closing fist, shrivelling up the ivy Wren left in my room and dissolving all of the rock cress. I know it will bloom again in the spring, but never like this. Never so wild.
The castle grows quieter and colder. Even with the fires lit, even with thick furs and heavy doors, the chill finds its way in—through stone, through bone, through the hollow space she has left behind.
I feel it most at night.
I lie awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the wind scrape against the walls like something trying to get in. Sleep doesn’t come easily. When it does, it isn’t kind.
Fire follows me there. Not warm or steady, no comforting burn of hearthlight, but the kind that consumes.
I see her again, over and over.
Cracking. Burning. Turning to light in front of me while I stand there, useless, with my hands empty and my eyes closed.
Sometimes I wake with my hand outstretched, reaching for something that isn’t there.
Sometimes I don’t remember falling asleep at all. On the worst nights, I don’t even try. I just sit by the fire and watch it burn.
Hours pass like that—silent, unmoving, my gaze fixed on the shifting flames. They mesmerise me in a way I don’t understand and don’t want to.
I hate them.
I can’t look away.
Wren burned in more ways than one. She was a star, after all. She blazed through my life like a meteor—brief, brilliant, impossible to hold.
I stare at the thirteenth wandering star in the sky.
“I’m your ashes,” I whisper one night, the words slipping out before I can stop them.
The fire flickers.
“I am all the debris you left behind.”
I wonder, sometimes, if this is it. If this is what the rest of my life will be—haunted by fire, drawn to it, unable to escape the shape she has left carved into me, a life measured in absence and echoes, in all the ways she isn’t there.
I don’t realise how bad it has become until my mother finds me like that, sitting on the floor, the fire long since burned low, the room cold again.
“Cassiel.” Her voice is soft. It is the same painfully gentle voice everyone used with me when I first lost my sight, like any noise could shatter me.
I don’t turn at first.
“I can’t stay here,” I admit.
The words come out flat. It is a realisation I came to some time ago, but have been too scared to voice it. I can’t stay in all the places Wren isn’t. I need to go somewhere new and fresh, learn how to be myself again, see if there is something left of me worth salvaging.
Silence stretches behind me. I brace for my mother’s response, for the insistence that this is my home, that grief is something to be endured, not fled from.
She stayed here, after all, after my father died, sleeping in the bed she once shared with him.
She knows what it is like to live with a ghost.
“I understand,” she says.
I turn. There is no judgement in her face, no disappointment.
“You do?” I ask, because I don’t quite believe it.
She nods. “I stayed because I needed to,” she says. “Because I was the queen, and I didn’t have a choice, and I had three children who needed their home, and their mother. You do not have that. It is different.”
I swallow, trying and failing not to think of the children I saw in the dreamscape, the children that will never come to be. I’m too afraid to ask Mother if she remembers them too.
“I… I don’t know what to do without her,” I admit. It feels like failure, saying it out loud.
“Do you not?” She smiles at me, cupping my face, her voice steady in a way mine hasn’t been for months. “I sharpened my grief. Turned it into a sword. But you…” She studies me for a moment, thoughtful. “But you are not a blade, Cassiel. You are a creator. You need to build something with yours.”
Build.
The word settles somewhere deep in me, and for some reason, I remember Wren’s words to me.
You have the harder job.
At the time, I thought she was just talking about living without her, but I begin to wonder if there was something else she was trying to tell me.
All at once, an idea forms in my head.
For the first time in a long while, the future doesn’t feel like an endless stretch of empty space.
A slow breath leaves me, and I smile for the first time in months.
“I have the perfect idea.”