"What made you agree to it finally?" he asked, taking care to keep his voice level and smooth.
"It is time, Speirr. I want to live my life again. To find all the things I didn't have the last time. Love. Children. Even a job and a mortgage."
He couldn't smile at her attempt at humor, not while the pain inside him was so raw. So debilitating.
But he knew in his heart that she was right. It was time she had the things that had been denied her all those centuries before.
He wanted her to have all that and more. She deserved every happiness life could bring her. "I will miss you."
"And I shall miss you too, my brathair."
He offered her a smile that he knew was hollow. "I wish you all the best, lurach. I send my heart with you."
"I know, Speirr. I love you too, but you have Nynia now. You won't be alone without me."
Yes, I will. Because I can't keep her either.
He nodded stoically. "I'll always remember you, Ceara."
Her eyes sad, she sighed regretfully. "I had best be going. Goodbye, Speirr."
Talon choked on his goodbye. He couldn't say the word. It hurt too much to say it. Saying it would make it real and he desperately didn't want this to be real.
He wanted this to be a bad dream he could wake up from.
But it wasn't. It was real. All of it.
Sunshine was gone.
Ceara was gone.
He had no one.
Feeling forsaken, he watched Ceara fade out of the room.
His heart shattered, he sank to the floor on his knees and did something he hadn't done since the day Nynia had been buried.
He cried.
In his mind, he could see his father cut down by the Saxons while the boy, Speirr, had kept his mother and sisters safe from the murderous warriors.
He saw his mother and sister sick from a ravaging pox. Saw him working for Gara as hard as he could while the old woman took pleasure in making him suffer. At night, he'd cared for his sisters. And during those last few months of his mother's life when she'd been too ill to care for herself, he'd taken care of her too.
He saw Ceara as an infant who had been inconsolable as he tried everything to care for her. He remembered Gara turning them out into the dark night while they had no place to go.
It had been snowing that night too, and all he could think of was keeping his sister alive.
She was all he had.
And so he had carried her through the snowstorm while she screamed and howled. Through the leagues of frostbitten land until he had found his mother's people.
For his sister, he had begged and pleaded and allowed them to beat him until he couldn't stand.
He had never asked anything for himself.
Not until he found Nynia.
He had taken her and made her his, and by his own stupidity he had lost her.