Page 3 of Beyond Those Gilded Walls

My mother wouldn’t be buried; there was no room in the cemeteries any longer. She would be cremated. My eyes squeezed shut at the thought of her body being burned.

Death was a foul, foul creature, and one I hoped to meet one day, if only to scream at them for letting the one good thing in my life be torn away like this. I should have been the one to die, not her.

My mother’s voice in my head reprimanded me, telling me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I had a task to do, one she had assigned to me, and I needed to get it done. So, I pulled back the sheets from her body and threw them into a pile on the floor, followed by her ruined nightgown. Snatching one of the last clean rags in the house, I began to clean her body. Slowly, the ringing in my ears subsided as I focused on my task.

“I am sorry, Mama,” I whispered as I ran the cloth over her chin. “I am sorry I could not save you.”

For the first time since I began to see them, I wanted nothing more than for a Soulshade to appear. Her Soulshade. But there was no flickering mist, no taste of smoke, no droning buzz in my ears. Just silence. Damning, unending silence.

ChapterTwo

After the blood was cleaned from her skin, I wrapped my mother’s body in a fresh white sheet in silence. I was not present in my body or my mind, even as I opened the door for the undertaker and let him take her body. I was still in that room, with my mother as she choked out her last words. I closed my eyes.

Would I always be in that room?

My mother’s voice appeared again in my mind, telling me I still needed to burn the linens and scrub what I could of the blood that had stained the floorboards before my brothers came home. My promise to her tasted like ash. I had no time to mourn her, no time to process that the most important person in my life had been ripped away as I held her hand.

Falling to my knees, I began to scrub the floors.

Mourning would come later. I had a promise to keep, and so long as I had breath in my lungs, I would do whatever it took to keep my brothers alive, just as I always had since I was old enough to care for them. They were my mother’s pride and joy. In her own way, I knew she was proud of me, but I had always been something different. Her helper, her right hand, not her child.

So I cleaned. Cleaned the stench of blood and the oppressive feeling of death from the house as best as I could. It wasn’t enough, though, and the sharp smell of lemon and astringent burned my nose as it mixed with the lingering smell of copper.

A knock on the door told me I was out of time. This would have to do.

The fortifying breath I took was fractured, a shuddering movement that made its way over my tongue before skittering down into my fever-weakened lungs. It had hardly filled me with the strength I so desperately needed it to, but it would have to do. I had to inform my brothers of our mother’s passing, and as much as I loathed the task, no one else would do it for me. Not anymore.

As I pulled the door open, my brothers’ faces appeared. Apprehension filled me, wondering whether they would be overjoyed to be reunited finally, or whether they would hate my very being for tending to our mother in her last moments. It was hardly a secret that my mother had placed her hopes and dreams on my oldest brother Emyl’s shoulders rather than mine.

Dread coiled around the base of my spine, pulling taut as our eyes met. Yet at the same time, hope had my shoulders creeping up towards my ears, eager to pull them both into a hug if they would allow it. They hadn’t touched me more than absolutely necessary in a long time, even before I’d caught the blood plague.

Emyl rested his hands on Rhyon’s shoulders, his grip tight enough to turn his knuckles white as he kept him firmly in place. “Odyssa.”

The hope bled from my shoulders and the gnawing at my spine opened a pit in my heart. It seemed our mother’s death had changed nothing here. Just as my mother had never truly seen me as her child, my brothers had never seen me as their sister. To them, I was merely another caretaker, another voice telling them what to do and reprimanding them for doing things they should not do.

I’d hoped it would be different after her death, now that we were all left alone together, but it had been a foolish hope. Gripping the door so tightly both my knuckles and the wood groaned, I opened it wider to allow them to enter.

Emyl had been furious when my mother had begun showing symptoms and she’d banished them from the house, and from the way his shoulder hit into mine as he passed now, that anger had not faded. I bit my tongue to keep my own temper back.

Sometimes, it amazed me that Emyl and Rhyon shared a father. My own had abandoned me while my mother was still pregnant, and later, Emyl and Rhyon’s, too, had abandoned us. It had left Emyl an angry child, and the only solace that had come from it was that Rhyon was too young to know better, and he had clung to a playful curiosity of the world rather than unfettered rage.

I wondered if my mother had ever given Emyl the same speech about not letting his emotions show that she had given me so many times. Looking at the back of his head, at the tense lines of his shoulders beneath his jacket, I somehow doubted it.

She’d always held me to higher expectations, a push for perfection that had pulled me constantly throughout my childhood between wanting to be as imperfect as possible and wanting nothing more than to please her.

I’d never found the right balance, and now, I feared I never would.

Only the sound of creaking wood filled the house as we sat around the kitchen table.

Rhyon appeared ready to vibrate out of his skin, chewing on his lower lip with such an intense frown that it created deep furrows between his brows. I wanted to reach out and smooth them with my thumb, but just as I was about to reach for him, his dark eyes snapped towards me.

“Mother is dead, isn’t she?”

“She is.” My voice cracked on the words. My mother had long tried to train me out of crying in front of others—a sign of weakness, she’d said—but unshed tears burned at the back of my throat. “I am sorry I could not do more to save her, Rhyon.”

“She’s dead because of you.” His words were calm, no trace of anger or even sadness. No trace of the playful child I had sent away just a week prior.

I couldn’t stop my sharp intake of breath. His words were sharper than any dagger could ever dream of being, sliding between my ribs and settling deep into my heart. My tongue darted out to wet my lips, trying to string together an answer that would not make them both hate me even more.

---