Chapter 2: The Last Night

Aria's POV

Lyra came as the sun began to set.

She did not knock. She never knocked — not in all the years we had been friends, not once. She simply pushed open the door and walked in and stopped when she saw me still sitting on the floor.

"You have been sitting there all day, haven't you," she said. It was not a question.

"Most of it," I admitted.

She crossed the room, dropped down onto the floor beside me, and leaned her head on my shoulder. For a long moment neither of us spoke. Outside the window the sky was turning shades of amber and rose, the kind of sunset that belonged in a painting, the kind that felt almost cruel in its beauty on a day like today.

"I went to the council," Lyra said finally.

I turned to look at her. "Lyra—"

"I told them it wasn't fair. That the bowl could have been tampered with. That there should be a redraw." Her jaw was tight, her dark eyes bright with something fierce and furious. "Elder Brom told me to go home and mind my place."

"And what did you say?"

A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "Something that will probably get me fined."

Despite everything, I laughed. It came out small and broken but it was real and it surprised us both.

"You are impossible," I told her.

"I know," she said. Then softer, "I'm not going to stop fighting this, Aria. Even after you — even if they take you, I'm going to find a way to—"

"Lyra." I took her hand and held it between both of mine. "Listen to me. I need you to let this go."

"I can't."

"You have to. Your mother needs you. Your brothers need you." I squeezed her fingers. "Promise me you won't do anything reckless after I'm gone."

She was quiet for a long time.

"I'll try," she said finally. Which from Lyra was as close to a promise as I was ever going to get.

We stayed on the floor together as the room grew dark around us. We talked about small things — the kind of things you talk about when the big things are too heavy to carry. The baker's son who had tripped over his own feet at the midsummer festival and knocked an entire table of food to the ground. The way the river looked at first light when the mist sat low on the water. The afternoon when we were seven years old and had decided, with complete seriousness and absolute certainty, that we would be best friends until we were old women with grey hair and bad knees.

We did not talk about tomorrow.

When the candles had burned more than halfway down Lyra finally rose. Her eyes were red at the edges though she had not let a single tear fall in front of me. She pulled me up from the floor and hugged me so tightly I felt my ribs protest.

"You are the bravest person I know," she said into my hair.

"I'm terrified," I told her honestly.

"I know," she said. "That's what makes you brave."

She left without looking back. I understood. Some goodbyes were easier if you did not watch them walk away.

I stood in the middle of my cottage and listened to the sound of her footsteps fade down the lane and then there was nothing — just the ordinary sounds of Stonehaven settling into its evening rhythm and the specific silence of a house that contained only one person and that person's thoughts.

I looked around the room.

The offerings on the table. The bread going cold. The wildflowers beginning to droop. The small carved wooden bird that old Maren had left — the woman who had lived at the end of the lane for nineteen years and had never once spoken directly to me and had chosen today of all days to leave a gift at my door.

People were kind to you when you were dying.

I had learned that when my mother died. The neighbors who had never visited brought food. The women who had never spoken warmly suddenly had gentle words. Kindness arrived with inevitability, with finality, with the specific quality of something that did not cost anything anymore because the person receiving it was not going to be around to require it tomorrow.

I was not dead yet.

But apparently that was close enough.

My father came home close to midnight.

I heard his key in the lock and sat up straighter on the edge of my bed where I had been sitting in the dark, still dressed, unable to bring myself to lie down and pretend that sleep was possible.

He stood in the doorway of my room for a moment. A tall man, broad-shouldered, with dark hair shot through with grey at the temples. People in the village said I had his eyes. I had never been sure whether that was a compliment.

"You should be sleeping," he said.

"So should you," I replied.

He was quiet. In the dim light from the hallway I could see the lines of his face, deeper than usual, carved with something I could not quite name. Not grief. Not guilt. Something older and heavier than either.

He stepped into the room and sat in the chair across from my bed — the old wooden one that had been my mother's reading chair, that he had never once sat in during all the years since she died.

The fact that he sat in it now made my chest ache in a way I had not expected.

"I did not choose your name," he said.

"I know," I said.

"I want you to know that."

"Father." I looked at him steadily. "I know. I have never believed otherwise."

He nodded once. His hands were clasped between his knees and he stared at them for a long moment.

"Your mother," he started. Then stopped.

"What about her?"

He shook his head slowly. "She always said you were protected. That something watched over you." He looked up at me then, and his eyes in the dim light were complicated and tired and so deeply sad that I had to look away. "I told her she was speaking nonsense. I told her there was no such thing as protection in this world. That we are all equally at the mercy of fate."

He stood.

"I am beginning to think," he said quietly, "that your mother knew things I did not."

He walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame.

"She loved you very much, Aria. And so—" He stopped. Cleared his throat. "Be ready at dawn."

He left.

I stared at the empty chair for a long time.

The chair my mother used to sit in every evening with a book in her lap and a candle on the table beside her. The chair that had held the shape of her presence for so long that I had stopped seeing it as a chair and started seeing it as an absence — the specific outline of someone who was no longer there.

My father had never sat in it.

Not once in twelve years.

He had sat in it tonight.

I did not know what that meant. I did not know if it meant anything at all or if I was searching for significance in things that had none because tomorrow I was going to leave this cottage and these walls and this village and the specific ordinary life that had contained me for nineteen years and I needed something — anything — to feel like it mattered.

Like I mattered.

Like my father sitting in my mother's chair in the dark was him saying the thing he had never once said to me in twelve years of raising me at arm's length.

I blew out the candle.

I lay down on my bed still dressed.

And I stared at the ceiling and listened to the village sleep and waited for a dawn that I was not ready for and could not stop from coming.

Just before I closed my eyes, something caught my attention.

The mark on my wrist.

In the complete darkness of my room — with no candle, no moonlight through the window, no source of light of any kind — the small flame-shaped mark on my wrist was glowing.

Faintly. Gold. Flickering.

Like a candle that nobody had lit.

I stared at it.

And for one terrifying, inexplicable, impossible moment I was not afraid of tomorrow at all.-