Chapter 25
Twenty-fourth year in the life of Ilys of the Veil
Death did not return.
Two winters had passed, and still, he remained absent.
But the work continued. Hanna’s small hand trembled around the hilt of the knife, her wide eyes stayed fixed on the rabbit’s blood seeping into the greedy earth.
Morrigan paced nearby, hackles raised, tail stiff with agitation.
He had been like this ever since Hanna came into their keeping, territorial to the point of menace.
The great black dog circled them now, a low whine in his throat.
Ilys knelt beside her, stabilizing Hanna’s hand until the trembling stilled. “You did well,” she affirmed.
It struck her then how quickly the years had passed since the naming, how fully Hanna had lodged herself into her heart.
Two years, and the girl had become a constant at her side, her laughter bright as bells, her trust immediate and unguarded.
Ilys loved her, fiercely and tenderly. She clung to the feeling and fought it all the same.
Love had never been durable in her experience.
Hanna swallowed, still staring at the rabbit. “What now?” she whispered.
“Now,” Ilys directed, “we give it to the Veil.”
Hanna’s fingers tightened around the knife. “Will you say it with me?”
Ilys shifted so they knelt side by side. “Thy thread is cut.”
Hanna’s breath caught before she whispered, “Thy thread is cut.”
“Thy name is lost.”
“Thy name… is lost.”
“The Veil shall hold.”
“The Veil shall hold.”
Finally, Ilys breathed the last word, soft as the wind, “Vasha.” The child shuddered as Ilys gently pried the knife from her grip. “Come.”
The girl stood, smaller than ever beside her. After a heartbeat, her hand slipped into Ilys’s free one. Morrigan fell into step on Hanna’s other side, walking so close his flank brushed her tunic, guarding her from both directions.
As they neared the gates of the Sanctum, the low rattle of wheels reached Ilys first, followed by the whicker of a single horse.
A small carriage waited at the threshold, modest but well-kept, its canvas cover dusted with the red of the road.
A servant held the reins loosely, standing aside as Rowenna descended the step.
Flushed from travel, curls escaping their braid, Rowenna gathered her skirts in one hand to keep them from the mud.
With the other, she steadied a boy not much younger than Hanna; a boy who seemed determined to fling himself back toward the road, all kicking heels and wild energy.
Rowenna caught him against her hip with practiced ease, her breath leaving her in a huff that turned into a laugh.
“No.” Ilys uttered the word under her breath, eyes narrowing as she took in Rowenna.
“What?” Rowenna asked, blowing a stray strand of hair from her face as she wrangled young Beck, who squirmed in her grasp with all the strength of a child determined to escape.
“You’re pregnant.” Ilys nodded, resolutely. “He plopped another in you!”
Rowenna stilled, then cast a wry glance up at Ilys, her expression caught between amusement and exasperation. A child stands betwixt us, her eyes seemed to say, as though Ilys had forgotten the very real, very restless boy in her arms and the young Veilwalker beside her.
Ilys leaned closer, voice low. “Your bosom is unnaturally large. The whole Sanctum knows by now.”
Rowenna snorted softly, shaking her head, but she didn’t deny it.
She settled Beck against her hip with a sigh, patting his back as though to calm both him and herself.
He had grown. Two covenant years had passed since Rowenna had first placed him in Ilys’s arms. He no longer lived as the fragile bundle he had been; sturdy now, full of mischief, his tawny curls wild and his cheeks still round with the remnants of infancy.
Ilys felt Hanna shift against her, peering from beneath the edge of her veil. She kept one small hand curled in the fabric of Ilys’s sleeve.
“This is Beck,” Ilys said at last, nodding toward the boy.
Hanna only gawked, mute behind the soft ebony of her veil. Beck squirmed harder at the sight of her, curious, reaching with grubby fingers as though determined to snatch the veil itself.
“Beck,” Rowenna chided gently, catching his wrist before he could grab it. “Manners.” The boy grinned, utterly unrepentant.
Ilys crouched beside Hanna, her voice even. “You may sit, if you like. He is loud, but harmless.”
After a long hesitation, Hanna’s grip loosened on Ilys’s sleeve.
She let Ilys guide her down to the grass, where she sat stiffly, hands folded in her lap.
Beck plopped down beside her with a thud, immediately offering her a stick as though it were the finest treasure in the kingdom.
Hanna blinked at it. Then, because she was polite to madmen, she took it.
Rowenna crouched nearby, her tone warm and coaxing. “He shares his best sticks only with the most important guests.”
“Just like his father,” Ilys quipped, voice full with innuendo while patting Rowenna’s belly. Rowenna swatted at her hand, laughing. The pair watched the children play, carving lines into the dirt.
“There now,” Rowenna said maternally, amusement glinting in her eye. “Two fine map-makers. Where will this road take them, do you think?”
“Somewhere far from us,” Ilys pouted, melancholy nipping at her mind.
Rowenna’s sharp eyes lingered on Ilys, reading her too well. “What is it?”
Ilys swallowed, her throat tight. “I am terrified,” she admitted, “of what will happen when push comes to shove. When they see how I look at her—how the love pours out of me. We are not to have attachments.”
Rowenna’s expression softened. “She is your successor. It is natural to spend time with her. To tend to her.”
“I hope they see it that way,” Ilys said. Her voice felt like it might splinter. “There is a war I wage with myself every day, to love her or to push her away. I know not which will bring her closer to happiness and safety.”
Rowenna hummed, gazing at Hanna where she sat beside Beck. The girl had begun to tap the stick lightly against the ground, the rhythm of it coaxing Beck into fits of giggles.
“You are already giving her what she needs,” Rowenna said at last. Then, after a pause, “I see Grim in you, clear as day.” The words landed like an arrow loosed straight through Ilys’s center.
They lingered long after, the conversation winding as the light thinned to gold, then to violet.
Beck eventually grew drowsy, nodding against Rowenna’s shoulder, and even Hanna’s stick tapping slowed to a soft, absent rhythm.
“How did you know I needed you so dearly?” Ilys asked at last, her voice somber in the growing dusk.
Rowenna smiled and pressed a kiss to each of Ilys’s cheeks. “Your last letter was painfully dull. I thought I’d save you from yourself.”
Ilys let out a breath of a laugh. “Then I promise to send nothing but dry, dowdy content from here on out.”
Rowenna’s answering grin arrived leisurely and sure. “I’ll visit again in the spring, Veilwalker. I promise.”
Rowenna lifted Beck into the carriage, the boy already half-asleep against her shoulder, the rattle of wheels fading down the road. Dusk settled fully by the time Ilys and Hanna turned back toward the Sanctum.
“Will you sit with me tonight?” Hanna queried.
Ilys glanced down at her, noting the way her fingers curled tight in her sleeve, braced for refusal. Hanna, over the course of months, had begun to learn all the ways in which the world withdrew.
“Of course,” she reassured.
Relief softened Hanna’s face and Morrigan huffed beside them, pressing his massive head briefly against her small hand, urging her forward.
At the Sanctum gates, priestesses reached out their hands for the child. Ilys spared the lot a bare glance. “I will take her,” she directed, her tone brooking no argument.
The women faltered, but stepped aside. Ilys rested her hand on Hanna’s narrow shoulder and guided her through the shadowed halls, torches guttering in their sconces, Morrigan padding after them.
In the sleeping quarters, Hanna curled onto the cot, hands tucked beneath her chin, small enough to vanish beneath the blanket.
Ilys brushed her hair back, her voice low and maternal. “Would you like a story?”
Hanna nodded eagerly.
So Ilys began one, begging the words from Grim’s book into her mind. A boy traveling alone, speaking to the stars. Hanna hushed Ilys.
“Not one of those,” she whined. Ilys’s ego bristled.
Hanna untucked herself from the bed, throwing her legs to the ground. She padded over to the table across from her bed, unearthing Ilys’s sketchbook from the pile of paper. She delivered the sketchbook with an earnest invitation.
“One of these,” she requested.
Ilys observed the cool hoarding of breath in her chest. Her mind sought for an appropriate denial, but scoured without reward. These were not stories. They were nightmares. They were sins. They were dreams unsung.
Swallowing thickly, Ilys picked up the bound leather. Fumbling hesitation wreaked havoc on her grasp. Turn the page, she urged. Make the darling girl happy. Meet her needs, make her smile.
Morrigan. Grim. Baron. It depicted Ilys’s last drawing before the day she had lost it all.
“Who is that?” Hanna pointed, smudging the lines of Grim’s veiled face. The charcoal streaked the girl’s hand. Ilys wiped it gently, tenderly transferring the charcoal to her own palm.
“Careful,” Ilys noted. “The drawings like to bite.” Hanna eyed the medium suspiciously, now clearly avoiding contact with the dark art.
“His name is Grim,” Ilys explained.
“Who is he?” Ilys should have known a name is not enough. We deem the silly monikers so important, yet Grim was not a standalone adjective. It could not capture his gruff adoration. His careful self-hatred. His scattered love.
“You know Otris?” Ilys mentioned the cook’s son, seeking to illustrate the role in the words she could find. Hanna nodded in response. “And you know Ostris’s father? The lumbering man always toting him about?” Hanna affirmed through her dainty headshake.
“Grim was much like that to me as I grew. He touted me and taught me right from wrong. Much of what I teach you.”
“He was your father?” Asked Hanna.
“Not quite, no,” Ilys corrected. Gods, she longed for the words.
Predecessor? Should that be the title she names Grim?
The title felt hollow and sparse. No title could not convey the adolescent mourning his name evoked for Ilys.
The way she wobbled and the world shook before her, unfamiliar in her place in the face of his absence.
Ilys pictured the waves she’d witnessed at the coast. She imagined them churning, swallowing the grief and the confusion. Taking it back out to sea. She gathered her composure, allowing the waves to toil and do the work she could not.
“I will tell you a story of the whole,” Ilys unfolded, her smile soft as balm.
“Perhaps it will answer where my words fail.” She began, voice laced with veneration, “There once was a girl, and the world stole her name.
She was given to a storm of a man: old, gruff, and called Grim.
He taught her to wield a blade and to stare so fiercely into the darkness that even the shadows would blink first. But though the girl grew fierce, her heart grew soft.
Each day she ran to the birds and begged them to take her with them, to teach her how to fly.
“‘You must stay,’ they told her. ‘You are not made to be like us.’ She begged again and again, but still they could not see the bird inside her.”
As it is with all young children, sleep crept in and quietly stole Hanna away. Ilys thought it a rather plain place for the story to end, but supposed the girl satisfied enough to dream. Ilys snuck from the room, pinching the small candle flame til it bled darkness.
Stumbling back to her chamber, she fought to ignore the bird in her own heart.