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“She had wanted to break. She had wanted, for one desperate moment, to let herself shatter into a thousand pieces, to reach out and fall apart. She knew he would have been there, welcomed that. But she was afraid that if she broke, she would not know how to put herself back together. So she had stopped it. When the cracks were spreading just wide enough for everything to crumble, Ari had sealed them back up, pulled herself together, and moved on.”

“She ran her fingers over the smooth stone and then tilted her head to look up at the sky, breathing slowly, as if she could smell and taste the stars in her lungs and on her tongue. They would be cool, she imagined, and crisp before breaking sweet under her teeth, like a honeycomb cracking open to ooze out its golden-yellow syrup. Dav had liked to think of touching the stars, of one day rising to live among them, but never had they considered together how they would taste. She shut her eyes. She wished she could ask him and wondered, like she did every night, what he would think of her now.”

“Three years ago!” he yelled, and all of the emotion seemed to hit at once. “You sent me one letter in four years, Dinar! And I defended you! I defended you to all of them – Mother, Father, Tomaas, even the other families in Parejon that came asking. I told them you were well and happy and doing great, important things. Convinced them it was all for the best. But I have no idea why, because you hurt me worst of all.”

“Odaan sighed, a slow, breathy huff that sent shivers down Ari’s spine. She could feel it all, the pain and the memory and the deep, aching loss that would never, ever be filled. And she felt a twinge of something else too – jealousy that he had been just a bit older, had just a few more years to learn his parents in a way she would never learn hers. Would her memories be crisper now, if she had been eight, ten, twelve when they left her? Would she still see her father’s face and hear her mother’s voice? She couldn’t bring herself to ask him.”

“Ari could feel it in her chest like an unwanted heartbeat, the sound of a broken soul thrumming unevenly, desperately against her own. As they locked in battle, she could hear it all, every beat. It was the same way it felt to have Jagger’s heart in hers, and yet so different. Their soul sounded like stuttering, like something had died and grown back wrong.”

“That ache for Dav’s presence struck her heart again, and she felt it in her whole body, a frantic pulse that nearly over- whelmed her with feeling. It scared her, the way it crashed like a wave, no words to give it shape. If only she could describe it, maybe the dark void would shrink and shift and become something she could hold in her palm. When it was in her fingers, she would study it, and then tuck it away in her pocket, or perhaps toss it out into the Plains and let it disap- pear among the grass. But no – she could not throw it away, not when it was all she had left of her mentor. She needed some piece of him to tell her what to do, to remind her who she was.”

“But this... this was something else, and it burned so deeply that Ely felt it too, the hurt welling up, dark and heavy and suffocating. It felt like his grief from the dragon tunnel, but it was ancient, like the Old Hall, a darkness forged under years of pressure until it had hardened into something sharp, rock- hard, weighted with a feeling of sad, lonely eternity. Stars, it was crushing. He felt it pressing against his heart and it was a vice, a crippling despair that he had to break.”