Chapter 2

Chapter Two

A fter the blood was cleaned from her skin, I wrapped my mother's body in a fresh white sheet in silence. I was not present in my body or my mind, even as I opened the door for the undertaker and let him take her body. I was still in that room, with my mother as she choked out her last words. I closed my eyes.

Would I always be in that room?

My mother's voice appeared again in my mind, telling me I still needed to burn the linens and scrub what I could of the blood that had stained the floorboards before my brothers came home. My promise to her tasted like ash. I had no time to mourn her, no time to process that the most important person in my life had been ripped away as I held her hand.

Falling to my knees, I began to scrub the floors.

Mourning would come later. I had a promise to keep, and so long as I had breath in my lungs, I would do whatever it took to keep my brothers alive, just as I always had since I was old enough to care for them. They were my mother's pride and joy. In her own way, I knew she was proud of me, but I had always been something different. Her helper, her right hand, not her child.

So I cleaned. Cleaned the stench of blood and the oppressive feeling of death from the house as best as I could. It wasn't enough, though, and the sharp smell of lemon and astringent burned my nose as it mixed with the lingering smell of copper.

A knock on the door told me I was out of time. This would have to do.

The fortifying breath I took was fractured, a shuddering movement that made its way over my tongue before skittering down into my fever-weakened lungs. It had hardly filled me with the strength I so desperately needed it to, but it would have to do. I had to inform my brothers of our mother's passing, and as much as I loathed the task, no one else would do it for me. Not anymore.

As I pulled the door open, my brothers' faces appeared. Apprehension filled me, wondering whether they would be overjoyed to be reunited finally, or whether they would hate my very being for tending to our mother in her last moments. It was hardly a secret that my mother had placed her hopes and dreams on my oldest brother Emyl's shoulders rather than mine.

Dread coiled around the base of my spine, pulling taut as our eyes met. Yet at the same time, hope had my shoulders creeping up towards my ears, eager to pull them both into a hug if they would allow it. They hadn't touched me more than absolutely necessary in a long time, even before I'd caught the blood plague.

Emyl rested his hands on Rhyon's shoulders, his grip tight enough to turn his knuckles white as he kept him firmly in place. "Odyssa."

The hope bled from my shoulders and the gnawing at my spine opened a pit in my heart. It seemed our mother's death had changed nothing here. Just as my mother had never truly seen me as her child, my brothers had never seen me as their sister. To them, I was merely another caretaker, another voice telling them what to do and reprimanding them for doing things they should not do.

I'd hoped it would be different after her death, now that we were all left alone together, but it had been a foolish hope. Gripping the door so tightly both my knuckles and the wood groaned, I opened it wider to allow them to enter.

Emyl had been furious when my mother had begun showing symptoms and she'd banished them from the house, and from the way his shoulder hit into mine as he passed now, that anger had not faded. I bit my tongue to keep my own temper back.

Sometimes, it amazed me that Emyl and Rhyon shared a father. My own had abandoned me while my mother was still pregnant, and later, Emyl and Rhyon's, too, had abandoned us. It had left Emyl an angry child, and the only solace that had come from it was that Rhyon was too young to know better, and he had clung to a playful curiosity of the world rather than unfettered rage.

I wondered if my mother had ever given Emyl the same speech about not letting his emotions show that she had given me so many times. Looking at the back of his head, at the tense lines of his shoulders beneath his jacket, I somehow doubted it.

She'd always held me to higher expectations, a push for perfection that had pulled me constantly throughout my childhood between wanting to be as imperfect as possible and wanting nothing more than to please her.

I'd never found the right balance, and now, I feared I never would.

Only the sound of creaking wood filled the house as we sat around the kitchen table.

Rhyon appeared ready to vibrate out of his skin, chewing on his lower lip with such an intense frown that it created deep furrows between his brows. I wanted to reach out and smooth them with my thumb, but just as I was about to reach for him, his dark eyes snapped towards me.

"Mother is dead, isn't she?"

"She is." My voice cracked on the words. My mother had long tried to train me out of crying in front of others—a sign of weakness, she'd said—but unshed tears burned at the back of my throat. "I am sorry I could not do more to save her, Rhyon."

"She's dead because of you." His words were calm, no trace of anger or even sadness. No trace of the playful child I had sent away just a week prior.

I couldn't stop my sharp intake of breath. His words were sharper than any dagger could ever dream of being, sliding between my ribs and settling deep into my heart. My tongue darted out to wet my lips, trying to string together an answer that would not make them both hate me even more.

"I—" I shook my head, unable to get the words to form.

Rhyon bit down on his lip, worrying it between his teeth as he stared at me. "Will we be next?"

"There is no way to know—" My voice cracked again, the words scratching against my throat. Clearing my throat, I continued, "I did all I could to save her."

"You should have done more. You should have taken that food to the couple like you were supposed to. You lived, why not her?" he cried, the tears welling in his eyes and spilling over his cheeks as his lip quivered with anger and sorrow. "I wish you had died instead of her."

The room fell away, black dancing around the edges of my vision. All I could focus on was Rhyon's eyes. I saw Emyl's lips moving, but the only sound was the echoing of Rhyon's words. I wish you had died instead of her.

In his mind, he was stating a fact, something he knew to be true, as if he were telling me my hair was black. It was worse than I'd ever feared, that my youngest brother, the child I had cared for since he was only moments old, now wished me dead.

Oh, how I wished the same. I would have rather endured a thousand days at the hands of the plague than be in this room right now.

Emyl tucked Rhyon into his chest, cooing and rocking him as if he were an infant and not an eight-year-old boy.

"I am sorry, Rhy." I did not dare reach my hand out towards him, trying instead to reach him with my words. Mother would never forgive me if I let him continue to believe this. "That is not?—"

"Do not call me that." His voice was hard as ice as he stood and pulled out of Emyl's arms to glare at me. And with that final stab to my heart, Rhyon turned and stomped to his room. The slamming of the door made me flinch.

The anger that had been building in me since Mother's first cough was quenched by the sorrow in my brother's voice as he'd uttered those words.

Normally, I was quick to defend myself to others, quick to snap, but with my brothers, both of them, I was as confrontational as our front doormat. He was right, after all. I had failed to ensure our mother survived, had failed them both because of it, and I, too, wished I had died instead. I could hardly be angry at Rhyon for speaking my own thoughts aloud.

"Why did you let him do that?" Emyl's voice pulled my gaze up from the pattern of the wood I'd been absentmindedly tracing. "Mother wouldn't have let him."

"He would not have done it if she were here." I shrugged, desperately clinging to the other words that wanted to fall out, the words of anger and spite. Those were not the ones that needed to be spoken now. "He needs the outlet. A target for his anger. I was the same at his age, and it took me long after his birth to learn to hide it. If that is what he needs, to process his feelings about Mother's death, then I am happy to be that for him. I am happy to be anything he needs. Anything you need."

Emyl held my gaze but said nothing.

"You are my brothers. There is nothing I would not do to protect you both. Mother knew that. I can only hope you know that too." I dropped my eyes back to the table.

Silence passed between us for a moment, to the point that it grew uncomfortable. I raised my head just as the chair screeched across the floors as Emyl stood. The look on his face was one I hadn't seen before. He hesitated for a moment, rocking slightly on his feet. "I'm going out. I'll be back later."

That had me on my feet, too. "You shouldn't leave, Emyl. Where are you going?"

Emyl froze where he'd been pulling on his coat, his gaze icy. "Believe it or not, Odyssa, Mother dying does not mean you are to take her place. Where I go and what I do is none of your concern. I need a moment to myself, if you don't mind."

And for the second time in as many moments, my brother closed a door on me. Emyl hadn't slammed it like Rhyon had, but it still brought stinging tears to my eyes regardless. Not even a full day since my mother's last request, and I was already failing at it. Failing her. Whether the tears were those of sorrow or rage, I did not know. Perhaps they were both, a balancing act as it were, with one eye pouring hatred and the other pouring grief.

I wanted to scream at the sky, to rage and yank the portraits of us off the walls and hurl them into the street after Emyl. To shout and yell and convince them that they were both wrong. But it would do no good. And my anger always retreated into this twisted state of subservience with my brothers, subdued until the moment they were out of my sight.

The taste of smoke and ash filled my mouth and a flickering mist hovered in the corner of the entryway.

Wiping at my eyes, I turned back to the kitchen before it could solidify into a Soulshade. I did not have the time nor the inclination to deal with another tortured soul begging for my attention. Not when I had my own soul to attend to.

I needed a distraction, something to keep me from sitting in front of Rhyon's door and begging him to listen to me. Suddenly, I could understand why the king had hurled himself from the towers when his wife had passed from the plague. If we had a tower, I might have done the same.

I'd known we would all mourn differently, and in some way, I'd expected the anger. But I'd not expected them both to abandon me. Perhaps I should have.

Rifling through the cold chest and the pantry, I began pulling out ingredients for a quick soup. At the very least, I could ensure they both had food when they reappeared.

Food set aside for them both, I curled up on the bench in front of the kitchen windows, looking out into the dimming evening sky. Purples and oranges shot across the clouds, dimmed by the blood-red mist that hung over the rooftops, both of them mixing to frame the spires of Castle Auretras.

Tracing my fingers across the spiderweb cracks in the glass, I let my temple rest on the wood frame. The tip of my finger caught on a protruding sliver of glass, blood welling in the small cut left behind.