Page 61 of Mother of Death and Dawn

Once there had beenlights in the black stone walls, like stars over the night sky. Now, they were dim and dusky. With every step through these halls, the past surrounded me.

I walked up and up through spiral staircases of mosaic glass, all the way to the private quarters of the royal family. The damage was worse up here. Some cracks in the ground were impassable. I barely noticed them. I saw only this place as it had existed half a millennium ago.

Here was the throne room where I would kneel before my own family, begging them to love me.

Here I saw the banquet hall where I would sit with the Blades, in the position I earned, not the one I was born into.

Here I saw my childhood bedroom, where my father tried to kill me. Where my mother, my poor, mad mother, saved my life.

And here…

I stopped at this door. It was closed, the mosaic tiles adorning it crooked and broken.

Orscheid. My lovely, beautiful, sweet sister, who was everything I was not, and who still loved me for all that I was.

I threw open the door. A bedchamber had been here, once. Now there was crumbling stone, shattered glass, the sun-bleached remains of a bed, and a chasm in the floor that revealed the distant forest, dizzyingly far below.

I could throw myself over it. Rot in the dust of my old home. The earth called to me, so far below.

You will never escape this place.

“I thought you might come here.”

I had not heard Caduan approach.

“Orscheid,” I choked out.

Silence. Perhaps I was growing better at understanding all the things living beings did not say. Because I knew, even in his wordlessness, that he did not want to give me an answer to the question I did not ask.

Gone. She was gone.

“Come back, Aefe,” he said, softly. But I remained there, gripping the doorframe. Specks of silver fell to the abyss below—tears I didn’t realize I was shedding.

No one could survive this. How could anyone, human or Fey, live this way?Feelingso much?

I just wanted to rest.

“Even then I was nothing,” I said. “My father wanted to kill me because I did not deserve to live. I was nothing but what I stole from others.”

“Youalwaysdeserved to live,” Caduan murmured.

When I was Reshaye, living a thousand lives inside a thousand strangers, I could dream that I was once something more. I was envious of the lives I invaded. I squeezed myself inside their minds and marveled at the depth of everything that thrived there.

I did not know what I was, but I could dream that perhaps once I’d had those things, too. Now, the truth came crashing down around me like these shattered cliffs. Even then, it had been the same.

“Aefe,” he said, again. Was that fear I heard in his voice?

I turned away from the door, and, at last, I faced him.

“I need to know what happened here.”

I thought he would argue with me. Instead, he said, “I will show you if you want to see. But know that it will be difficult.”

The past was jagged glass. But I was drunk on the way it tore me up.

“Show me,” I said, and Caduan gave me a strange look. This, I understood now, was tenderness.

“As you wish,” he said.

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