THE FIRE ALWAYS FINDS ME
The fire always finds me in my sleep. Not the way fire behaves in the waking world, slow and hungry, spreading from the edges in. This fire begins at the center of everything and devours outward, the way grief does, the way I've learned grief does, because I know now that they are the same thing.
In the dream I am seventeen again, standing in the doorway of my mother's kitchen while the southern sky turns orange. The smell reaches me before the sound does. Woodsmoke and something underneath it, something wrong, something that makes the goats in the yard go silent all at once.
Run, my mother says. She doesn't look up from the bread she's wrapping.
Mama...
Run, Seren.
I never do. That's the cruelty of it. Every night I stand in that doorway and I do not run, and the orange becomes red, and the red becomes everything, and I wake up with my hand pressed flat against the stone floor beside my sleeping mat, grounding myself the way the old healer taught me.
Stone. Cold. Real. You are here. You are not there.
Here was a palace in the northern kingdom of Vael.
Here was a handmaiden's room barely wide enough to stretch my arms.
Here was the third year of my captivity, though they did not call it that. They called it service. They called it generous. They called it an opportunity, as though I had applied for the position of scrubbing the floors of the man who burned my home.
I sat up in the dark and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until I saw nothing but black, then stars, then nothing again.
Down the hall, a clock tower rang four times.
Two hours before I was needed. I would not sleep again, I never did, after the dream, so I rose and dressed in the grey uniform that had been assigned to me three years ago, when I was still too hollowed out to feel the indignity of it. I felt it now. I had learned, slowly, to let myself feel things again. Small things, safely. The scratch of wool against my wrists. The cold of the stone floor. The distant, controlled heat of my anger, which I tended the way one tends a coal in a storm, carefully, always carefully, never letting it catch.
The palace was quiet at this hour. That was the one thing I had come to value about the early mornings, the absence of eyes. In the daytime I moved through these halls under constant observation, a southern girl in a northern court, a reminder of the war that everyone pretended was over. The other handmaidens were not unkind, mostly. They had simply learned not to ask me questions, because my answers made them uncomfortable.
Where is your family?
Gone.
Where is your home?
Gone.
I filled a basin from the cold water jug and washed my face and looked at myself in the small square of polished metal that passed for a mirror. Dark eyes. Darker circles beneath them. A mouth my mother used to call stubborn-shaped, which had meant it as a compliment.
I wondered what she would think of what I'd made it into. This pressed, careful, invisible thing.
You are surviving, I told myself. I told myself this every morning. Surviving is enough.
It had been enough, for three years.
I did not know, washing my face in the cold dark of that morning, that by the time the sun rose something in the kingdom would have already begun to rot, and that surviving, from that day forward, was going to require considerably more of me than silence.
