Ashes at the Grave
It was certainly much faster to travel on horseback than on foot.
The distance that would have taken four straight days to cover on foot was easily manageable in a day and a half on horseback.
The knights with that ridiculous name—Condemnation Division or whatever it was—kept following me.
They said nothing to one another, made no noise at all, and when I stayed at an inn they even took turns standing guard.
I was grateful, in a way, but they felt like friends who had gone rotten in some slightly different manner, so I had no desire to strike up conversation with them.
If I spoke to them, they would answer. If they answered, that would become a conversation.
And then, however slightly, we would grow closer.
Before long, I had reached the grounds surrounding the manor—Arin’s village.
Anyway, I led the horse in slowly and entered the village.
Nothing had changed much.
The stone walls were still low, the roads still narrow, and even the cat stretched out on the roof was exactly the same.
The people who lived here would probably spend their whole lives in the same place, thinking the same thoughts, doing the same work, over and over until they died.
When I passed the bakery, I briefly pulled on the reins, then went on.
The smell of freshly baked bread drifted to me on the wind.
I shouldn’t go there.
Not unless I planned to confess what had happened, and what I had done.
The heart was not such a sturdy thing that it could simply accept its own guilt.
As I passed the edge of the village and turned onto the low stone lane, I heard the sound of running water.
I knew that sound.
Water slipping between the stones.
The stream that stayed cold in summer and froze at the edges in winter.
Memory closed around me again.
When the other children wouldn’t let me join their games, I would crouch by the water with their voices at my back—those same voices calling me delicate, saying I looked ridiculous rolling around alone.
I remembered sitting there, staring blankly at my swollen face reflected in the water after being beaten by the head of the family.
Then Arin would come to me.
She would look at the cuts on my face, pull out chocolate as if it were nothing, and say her mother told her to look after poor kids.
I ought to have hated being called poor, but I don’t think I was hurt by it.
It must have been enough that someone came up to a gloomy little boy who always seemed to be covered in bruises and blood.
Enough that the face of the child sitting beside me felt warmer than my own reflection in the water.
When it was hot, we would play in the stream. When the water got cold, we would pick flowers at the edge of the woods.
I knew the names of the flowers better than she did.
After my mother died, I had memorized the flowers she loved from books until I could recite them by heart.
Yet when she was still alive, I must have known only the most basic names.
When I looked at the sky, I remembered the colors she liked. When I looked at flowers, I sometimes remembered the garden she used to tend herself. That was how it went.
There was nothing one desired more fiercely than what one had lost.
Arin never thought it strange that I gathered up the afterimage of my mother as though I were collecting scraps.
She would just sit beside me, listen earnestly to whatever I rambled on about, braid the flower stems, and keep me company.
We would pick flowers until the sun went down, place them on the child’s head, and laugh as we set the finished wreaths afloat on the water.
None of that belonged entirely to my memory.
And yet those memories, those experiences, had a way of defining me anyway.
If the saying that experience defines a person is true, then I suppose I would become someone who was not really either one thing or the other.
After killing Arin, it felt as though one side of my chest had been hollowed out.
I wasn’t even sure whether pain was the right word for it.
It was just the sensation of wind blowing through an empty place, something I couldn’t fill and couldn’t block.
I didn’t feel empty exactly, nor depressed, nor sad, nor angry. But I knew with certainty that something was missing.
I killed the girl who had left for the capital, saying she would become someone who fit beside me—someone, perhaps, better.
I held a knife to her, struck her, cut her down, and swung my sword just enough to leave suitable wounds across her back as she crawled and clawed for her life.
Just as if I were trying to extract information from a cornered elf I had already subdued.
The motion of those fingers still dragging themselves along the wall when there was nowhere left to go still lingered in me.
Her voice, sobbing as she called my name and begged that she hadn’t lived for this, still echoed in my ears.
Even now, I could still see myself through the window, not lowering my sword as I watched the child slip and fall in the pool of blood.
I must have been soaked in Lihen’s heart to some degree.
No—my heart, I meant.
Because of all those warm memories that came flooding in every time I died.
Not the painful ones. The warm ones.
Wasn’t that what I said? To dig them out.
And I really did dig them out, didn’t I.
Once they were gone, all that remained was the hole.
And after doing that, what more was there to say when I was still trying to dig deeper?
I urged the horse on faster.
I felt like I couldn’t stay here any longer.
If I remained too long, the things I thought I’d dug out would start growing back, inch by inch, until they claimed my mind again.
Once I left the village, the Grian manor came into view.
The stone building stood on the hill.
The gatekeepers were still in the same place.
Only this time, they recognized me.
They gave the knights following behind me a glance, and I told them not to worry—those were my own men. Then I told them to open the gate.
The gatekeeper said he welcomed my return, sent one of the servants toward the manor, and slowly opened the doors.
Returned, was I? I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t feel as though this was my home, and if I had come to visit, it wasn’t because someone I wanted to see was here.
Still, I had come to see the thing buried there.
I rode into the garden.
I did not follow the path, letting the horse’s hooves trample the flowers beneath us.
We cut across the neatly tended flowerbeds.
I stopped the horse in front of the manor. I did not go inside. I spoke to the butler who had come out.
“Give my guests rooms to stay in. They are men under my command, so treat them well.”
When I turned the horse around, the knights seemed about to follow, but I stopped them with a look.
We had traveled together for only a few days, yet even that was enough for them to understand.
The knight nodded and dismounted.
I would see the head of the family later.
I passed along the side of the building and took the narrow path leading toward the mountain behind the manor.
Then I dismounted slowly and walked on.
The road was overgrown with grass, which meant few people traveled this way.
The path had been maintained, but it did not seem to see much traffic.
This was how the dead were forgotten.
They drifted farther from the footsteps of the living, grass grew over them, and in time even the road itself disappeared.
And yet the gravestone was clean.
Someone must have come by recently to polish it, because it still shone, and flowers had been laid in front of it.
The flowers from her hometown she had said she loved so much.
The petals were still beaded with dew, so perhaps they had been placed here this morning.
I picked one up for a moment, then set it back down gently.
I brushed the stone with my fingertips.
The surface was far colder than I had expected.
Was it because this place never saw sunlight? Or was it simply that the dead were cold by nature?
She would have preferred somewhere warm and bright, wouldn’t she.
Or maybe not. Maybe she would have preferred this after all, since she had always liked drawing the curtains and staying indoors.
I didn’t feel anything in particular.
I was just blank.
The person I had watched die so many times was buried here, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel about that.
The warm hand that brushed my forehead every time I was dying belonged to someone beneath this stone.
Only a vague, indefinable emotion kept rising up inside me.
I couldn’t call it sadness, because she wasn’t my mother. But I couldn’t call it nothing either, because memory was still tightening its grip around my body.
With one hand resting on the gravestone, I stared down at the name carved there.
My mother’s name.
And beneath it, in tiny, elegant letters, were the words: The one who brought happiness to Grian. She passed away in peace.
Happiness. Had she truly been happy in this family?
In a family that only watched the sword? Beside a husband who, after losing his wife, beat his son? Had that woman really been happy?
It was hard to believe the part about passing away in peace, too.
I had never seen a peaceful death, not even once.
And I had seen so very many deaths.
I took the bottle from my coat and slowly poured the liquor over the gravestone.
The clear liquid ran down across the carved letters.
It moistened the word happiness, then the word peace.
Then I raised the bottle and took a swig myself.
The liquor sliding down my throat spread warmth through my belly.
I knew that kind of warmth did not last.
Still, for now, it was enough.
Honestly, it had always been enough to have warmth of this degree.
“You came all the way to Grian with a whole pack of Church dogs in tow... and now what in the hell are you doing to that gravestone?”
A voice came from behind me.
“Who do you think you are, daring to—”
Crk.
“Head of the family.”
“......Head of the family?”
“Your mouth is the problem. What kind of tone is that to use toward someone sent directly by His Holiness...”