and I can’t breathe in, it’s too big, it’s blocking my lungs.
Then Lirys’s arms are around me and she smells like flour and butter and goodness and I howl, my head thrown back against her shoulder like an animal. Through my raging I hear other footsteps, approaching then retreating, but I cling to my friend and she clings back. Each time my fingers tighten hers do too, until we’re gripping each other hard enough to make bruises.
Eventually the tears stop and I sag in her arms, spent.
For the first time in four moons I can breathe.
“You need a bath and some food,” she says in her lovely lilting voice. “And then bed.”
“I can’t,” I say, harsh as a crow. “I have to go.”
“Errin Vastel, you can’t leave. We have a curfew and the gates are locked. And even if they weren’t, I wouldn’t let you. You’re home.”
And with that the tears come again, but these tears are fat and warm and I can breathe through them.
She sits on a stool beside the bath, watching me with slightly narrowed eyes. In the room next door I can hear the faint murmur of her mother and father eating their supper. Lirys has kept them away from me since my collapse, guiding me through to the warmth of her kitchen, where she dragged the tin bath before the fire and filled it with jug after jug of steaming water. She helped me undress and get into it, tutting softly at the bruises covering me, at my too-thin frame, and then she washed my hair. Finally, she unwrapped my bandaged hand, re-dressing it with real gauze, rubbing an ointment into it that soothed it instantly.
Though it must be killing her, she waits until I’m ready to speak. She doesn’t ask where we’ve been, or why I’ve not written. She accepts it all, patiently and kindly, prattling lightly, deliberately, about Kirin, and the slow, steady dance they’d been performing all autumn, until he finally kissed her and asked her to be his wife. She talks about him being a soldier, and what a shock it was, but how she thinks it will be OK.
She doesn’t think war will come.
I think of the assault in the woods, of the arrow in Kirin’s shoulder. Of the golems in Almwyk, and the camp at Tyrwhitt. Of the mercenaries who hunted me in the night and the soldier who forced me to the ground, then slit another man’s throat open. I think of Lief, never returning from Lormere. War has come. It doesn’t matter whether the Sleeping Prince invades Tregellan or not; it’s already here. The worst part is knowing that if I were in her shoes, here in Tremayne, in the place I’d always lived, I’d doubt it too. I would have continued to think Tregellan was a fair, just and safe paradise.
The innocence of her words, the normalcy of them – no curses, no beasts, no alchemy, no mystery – tighten something inside me and I decide I don’t want her to know anything about my life in Almwyk either, don’t want her to know the worst of what I’ve done – making poisons, punching people and lighting fires. Stealing. Assaulting her fiancé. I don’t want her to see me that way. And I don’t want to scare her; I want her to stay innocent.
But I have to say something, can feel her waiting for me to unburden myself.
I don’t mention the Elixir or Silas at all. I leave out Unwin’s advances, and the men in the woods. I don’t tell her about the golems, or what happened to me on the way here. I keep it simple, telling her about Mama’s breakdown – leaving out the parts about the beast – and how I was trying to treat her. I’m doing well, until I realize I have to tell her that Mama was taken away, and that I wasn’t there to protect her. And that now I’m scrambling to get her back.
“It’s not your fault,” she says immediately, passing me a new block of soap, and I smell it greedily.
“Of course it is. I shouldn’t have left her alone. Gods, Lir, imagine how horrible it must have been. To have soldiers burst in and take her away. She wouldn’t have known what was going on. I did that to her, because I…”
“Because you what?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Errin, don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your apologies,” she snaps, and I’m taken aback. “I wish