Curses and Will Chapter 17: Chapter 1: A Silence Only the Broken Know

Read chapter 17 of Curses and Will by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Her hand stayed on my chest long after either of us had said anything. Not for comfort, not exactly. Something closer to survival, the kind of contact two people maintain when they're both afraid that letting go might mean coming apart entirely. The silence between us in that cracked little inn room wasn't the uncomfortable kind. It was safe, in its way. The particular sacred quiet that exists only between people who have run out of things worth screaming about. For the first time in days, maybe in my entire life as far back as I could reliably account for, I felt something that resembled warmth. Not the kind that comes from a fire, not the kind battle leaves behind once the adrenaline burns off. The kind that arrives after you've been freezing long enough to forget what warmth even feels like, and then, without announcement, the sun finds a way through anyway. Her fingers trembled faintly against my shirt. She didn't pull them back. I didn't ask her to. Outside the inn's cracked window, the sky was bleeding into the colors of dawn, pale orange bleeding into ash gray. The light didn't clean anything away. It didn't undo what had happened in that village, or on that cliffside, or in the palace that had burned behind us. But it reminded both of us, in its small persistent way, that we were still here. Still breathing. Maybe that counted for something, even now. I told her everything. My voice didn't break this time, which surprised me almost as much as it seemed to surprise her. It came out hollow instead, distant, like I was reading the events back from a book written by someone else, in ink that happened to be blood. I told her about the curse and the rage that had come with it, the voice that had whispered through the blackout I still couldn't fully account for. How it had felt like something else had been wearing my skin for those hours, puppeting my arms and legs, taking the screams of the people I'd killed like something it needed to feed on. I told her about the guilt that had settled in afterward and didn't seem inclined to leave. How every time I closed my eyes I saw pieces of that cliffside again, limbs and fire and faces I refused to let myself remember in any more detail than I already had. Her eyes widened as I spoke, not with the fear I'd half expected, but with something sharper. Something that looked almost like hope, and underneath that, something darker still. Pain. Not only for the people who'd died at my hands. Pain for me, specifically, in a way I didn't fully know what to do with. She didn't interrupt. Didn't pull away from where her hand still rested against my chest. She simply listened, and somewhere behind the flicker of the candle between us and the swelling around her own eyes, I saw the same thing in her that I recognized in myself. There was a child still living somewhere inside her too. Small, frightened, never given the chance to properly grieve anything before the next disaster arrived to demand her attention instead. And inside me, in that same hidden place, there was a screaming child of my own. Not the cursed one. Not the warrior people would eventually come to fear, or the weapon some part of me had apparently become on that cliffside without my permission. Just a boy. Small. Tired in a way that went deeper than sleep could fix. A boy who had seen too much death pile up too quickly to process any single piece of it properly. A boy who simply wanted, more than anything else available to him, for someone to say that he didn't have to carry all of it alone. But I couldn't cry. Not that night. Because if I broke first, I understood with total certainty that Annya would shatter right alongside me. She was barely holding her own pieces together as it was, her grief and her curse and her guilt clinging to her like frostbite that hadn't decided yet whether it intended to spread. So I buried the crying child again, the way I'd learned to bury him a long time before any of this started. And I stood up.