Burnt (18 page)

They waited until the wind stopped tugging at their hair and the fire of the pyre was nothing more than hot red ash. The flames lasted a long time. Vaughan’s power was great. Great and useless. As the last of the f
ire flickered out the last of Amorette’s bones collapsed in on themselves. Vaughan turned his head away but Kaie watched as the ashes rose up to embrace all the bits of the girl he loved.

There were things to be done. N
ot a one of them felt important but he knew that would pass. If not for him, for Vaughan and Peren. They both suffered enough for the death of this last piece of Kaie’s world. He wouldn’t see them punished more. So, with much effort, he forced his mind to work through those things and come up with a plan.

Unable to shake free of the sense he was wading through water with Kaie led Vaughan back to the
well then left him with the instruction to gather the blankets and bowls from his shack and return to Peren. Vaughan didn’t ask why or what he would do. It was a small favor, one the boy was likely not even aware of, but Kaie was grateful.

He stumbled around for a little while after that, unsure of where he was going. Every time he tried to com
e up with a way to move forward his thoughts would return to that cackling laugh or his eyes would drift down to the blood that coated him. It was useless, he supposed. Even when he was thinking clearly he never sorted out where Josephine was. Things were all messed up now and he was certainly not thinking right. He was stupid to even try finding her.

It didn’t matter. Just as he was ready to give up and collapse in the snow, she found him. Always near. Always watching. He remembered.

Kaie told her what happened, all of it, in a voice flat and alien. Her sneer faltered and vanished as he went. Another time he might find that satisfying. Another time he might lie. When he was finished she was silent for some time. He slumped down against the well, trying to remember how he got back there. He thought about how easy it would be to just fall asleep and let the winter take him. Better than facing what Amorette left behind.

Josephine grabbed his aching shoulder and jerked him back to his feet.
It took a little while for her barked words to sink in, for his mind to make sense of them. She wanted him to take her to the place. No, not where Amorette burned. The place where Peren was attacked. That’s right. That’s why he told her. She was going to take care of Peren and Vaughan, to make sure they didn’t get in trouble for the dead man Samuel.

He blinked
and they were in the other version of his neighborhood. The one with color and flowers. Except the flowers were all buried underneath drifts of snow. Still, he was certain it was the other side. At first he suspected the sudden change in location was due to magic, but Josephine was behaving like nothing happened. After a few seconds of confusion Kaie realized he led her there the normal way. He just didn’t remember the trip.

Disconcerted and struggling to focus, he sorted out which house used to be surrounded by yellow flowers by tracking a set of footprints coming from the same direction they were.
It was more instinct directing him than any conscious realization that the prints belonged to Vaughan.

They were inside the house. The body and the two he was trying to protect. Peren was awake. She looked up at him with those huge eyes, comb pausing halfway down its path through her hair. The corners of her thin lips turned upward,
just the barest hint of a smile and for a second Kaie found an anchor. Whatever she saw, when she looked into him, it wasn’t a monster. His head cleared enough to hear what Josephina was saying.

“… not a favorite. But she will still raise trouble over this.
Gods, you and your bitch picked the worst time for your little melodrama. Mistress won’t be back for another five weeks.” The woman sighed heavily.

“What does that mean?” Kaie
asked, because it felt like he should.

“It means you keep your head down!
Only do it this time!” she snapped. “If we are very lucky and the gods like you very much, Master Peter will find just enough backbone to keep Lady Luna’s fingers off you that long. Chaos’s balls, I will never understand why Mistress is willing to waste such effort keeping your worthless ass safe.”

“Me neither,” Kaie muttered. But Josephin
e wasn’t listening to him. She was tugging and jerking on Samuel’s body. Large as it was, she still managed to get it up and somehow hoist it over her shoulder.

“Can he… can Kaie stay here?”
Peren asked.

He didn’t want to stay. He almost said so. But Peren’
s eyes were locked on him, asking him for something. She was beaten because of him. Because she gave him a puzzle to solve when he needed one. Because she ate lunch with him so that he wouldn’t be alone. He couldn’t deny her this. Not today.

Josephin
e eyed them all with clear irritation. “Keep him from making this worse.”

Peren nodded, her eyes never leaving his.

“Fine.”

The second the woman was out of the room, Kaie dropped to the dirt. He was stuck. Anything he did now would be Peren’s fault.
He couldn’t finish his plan. Without it there wasn’t anything holding him up.

Kaie ran his thumb over the edge of the glass, mindless of the cut it made or the way his blood mingled with Amorette’s. He lost himself in the past. What he saw was too vivid, too solid, to be memories. It was a vision and he embraced it.

Two boys were racing. They were young. Six. With a start, he recognized the children he was watching. Sojun, towheaded back then, and his own auburn curls bobbing along ahead. He was always ahead. The kids were heading for their hill. Even back then, it was theirs.

They skidded to a halt, their twin expressions of shock so similar it was comical. There
, on their hill, was a stranger, a tiny girl with a burst of strawberry hair that caught the light and made a fiery halo around her delicate features. Which were, at that particular moment, twisted into an expression of angry determination.

“You’re going to fly!”
she announced to her feet. He concentrated on the image. That wasn’t right. As he focused, the blurry shape on the ground fleshed out. It was a sparrow,
the
sparrow, just a baby and all alone.

“Kosa take you, you stupid bird, fly!”

The boys’ mouths dropped open so in sync with each other it almost looked rehearsed. Little girls didn’t speak that way. No one but adults said the Destroyer’s name out loud. Everyone knew it was bad luck.

She spat more curses at it, not one less shocking than the first. Then she began stomping her feet and screaming at
it. Both boys watched the scene, neither sure what to do about this tiny terror losing her mind because a baby bird wasn’t flying.

The red-haired boy was always the more daring of the two.
He was the one who cautiously approached. Before he made it three whole steps, the girl spun on him, sticking out her finger in such a convincing imitation of an angry adult that the boy’s face paled. “You stay right there! This stupid sparrow is going to fly, and I will not let you scare him before he does!”

Sojun was the first one to laugh, but it didn’t take the other boy long to follow. Soon both of them were rolling on the ground, laughing so hard they could barely breathe. The girl grew increasingly
angrier, until she finally came over and started kicking them both.

Sojun grabbed her foot, tugging her down
, too. In short order, all three of them were entrenched in their very first wrestling match. He knew what came after that. Both boys were entranced with the screaming, swearing, spitting girl who lost her temper at a baby sparrow. She resisted their overtures at friendship for a while, but they were accustomed to getting their way.

He blinked again and the room was dark. The fire, still burning in the middle of the
shack, was the only light left. He rubbed his eyes, making sure the sudden change was not a mistake of his vision. But the darkness stayed.

There was a blanket around his shoulders. Kaie was afraid it was one from his home, one that would still smell of Amorette. But it wasn’t. It was newer, thicker. And it didn’t smell like bread
. His shoulders slumped with relief.

A bowl dropped down in front of him. He couldn’t tell if it was one that Amorette used.
There was salted pork inside. He couldn’t remember the last meal he ate without any pork. There were vegetables, too. That was new. And… fruit?

A soft noise came from the back of his
throat at the sight of the orange in the bowl. Gods. Fruit! His fingers were in the bowl, fishing out the soft, fleshy substance and popping it in his mouth before he even finished processing this impossibility. Sweet juice exploded on his tongue, and for one blissful second, Kaie didn’t think about anything else.

“
It’s called tangerine.” Peren was hovering over his shoulder. For some reason, Kaie expected her to be sitting across the fire. “Vaughan brought it to me for my Birthing Day yesterday.”

“Your birthday?”
It was hard to focus on now, when the past was so close. But he felt like he should, for her. She got hurt because of him.

Peren nodded and plopped down beside him. She hit him twice in the process, but it didn’t bother him as much as usual. “Yup.”

“How old are you?” She must be young. Twelve, maybe. Just a girl. All sharp angles and awkward movements. Except she seemed so old when she talked. Wise. Like his mother, before the fire. And the way she looked at him…

Peren chuckled. “You got my name. You haven’t earned that one yet.”

He blinked. Another puzzle. He tried to sort out if he liked it this time. “Where’s Vaughan?”

She pointed to the rest of the food in his bowl.
Not seeing any reason to do otherwise, Kaie obeyed her unspoken order and continued to eat his food.

“He doesn’t stay here.”

“Isn’t this his house?” He asked around a bite of pork.

She nodded. “Since we were children.”

It was like pulling out fingernails. “So why doesn’t he stay here?”

She tilted her head, the way she did whenever he asked something she didn’t expect. “Because he stays with Master Peter.”

Kaie blinked. “Uh…oh. I didn’t know.”

“It’s not like that,” she said quietly. “Well, it is. But not really.
It’s how he protects me. That’s why I don’t share this house, and how he gets me fruit for special days.”

He grimaced. “Vaughan’s a whore.”
It was just a word before, one he heard others bandy about but one that meant little to him. Now it was more.

“No.” Peren pulled away from him. She wrapped her arms around her kn
ees. She should be angry at him but she wasn’t. Somehow, Kaie knew she wasn’t. “There are only two ways to survive this life. Either you’re important to someone with power, or you are invisible. I’m invisible. Vaughan tried to be invisible, but that didn’t keep me safe. So he found a way to be important. He’s not a whore, Kaie. He’s a survivor. Just like you. Just like me.”

“Amorette…”

“She wasn’t,” Peren answered before he could finish his thought. “She cared about the wrong things. You have power. She was important to you. But she wasted that on things that don’t matter. Things that aren’t real.”

“She was trying to hurt me. Because I hurt her.”

Peren shook her head. “No. Life hurt her. It wasn’t your fault.”

Kaie laughed. It sounded brittle. Like Amorette’s laugh, at the end. He dropped the bowl and shrunk down into the blan
ket. “It was. Just like the man, Samuel, and Keegan before that. I killed them all.”

Her arms were around him. He wasn’t sure when that happened. He didn’t want to need it.
After a minute of trying not to, though, his eyes pressed closed and he leaned into the comfort she was offering. “No.”

“I said I didn’t care. When Vaughan asked. When she did. I told her I didn’t care about her.”

“But you loved her.”

“Not all the time.
” He let out a long breath. “Gods, I killed her. If I loved her like I used to, like Sojun loves her…”

“Then she would still be dead.” Peren’s fingers were in his hair. She stroked his head, the way his mother did when he was small and sick. “What she did, it wasn’t something you could stop. You need to know that. The man who hurt me, your Amorette, those deaths are because of her. Not you. Never you.”

He was lying down. When did that happen? His head was in her lap and she was still stroking his hair. Just like when he was little. He didn’t want to need it. “I’m alone. I’m going to wake up and be all alone. Every day.”

“No,” Peren murmured. “I’ll be here when you wake up. I’ll always be here. I promise.”

She was there when he woke up.
With breakfast in another bowl. Not a bowl Amorette ate out of. It was a different colored wood. He ate the tangerine first. Then she peeled off his clothing, stiff with dried blood. She cleaned him with a cloth and water from another bowl. One that Amorette ate out of. She wiped a patch of his body, dropped the cloth into the bowl, wrung it out, and then wiped another patch, until he was clean. He was naked and her beautiful, intense eyes took in every bit of him. But there was no sexual element to it. She was taking care of him because he needed it, even if he wished he didn’t.

When he was clean
she dressed him in new clothes. They weren’t the same as his old ones. They weren’t made out of the same soft material. They were thicker and itchier. Made for winter weather. But his right shoulder was still uncovered. She draped the blanket over him again. Kaie laid back. After a while she climbed under the blanket with him. She pressed up against his back, wrapping her arms around him. He didn’t want to need her there. But he did.

The days bled into each other.
He spent most of them locked in the past, losing himself in one vision after another. All of them were of Amorette. Most were of himself and Sojun too. The worst ones were of her and Jun alone. Their moments together were nothing like what he imagined.

The first time was right after Sojun’s mother left. That day was burned into his memory as intensely as if it were his own family that fell apart. He recognized the clothing they wore, the colorful ribbons decorating
the village for Spring Festival and the panicked animal look in his best friend’s eyes. He didn’t know they met on the hill, though, after he went home to bed.

They spoke for a while. Or, rather, Amorette talked. Jun sat there, staring off into space. It was all the boy did that whole day. He and Ams spent hours trying to coax a word, but Sojun was somewhere else. Right up until the kiss.

He wanted to pull away from the vision then. Watching her tenderness for his heart’s brother was like a knife shoved through his gut. But that was good. He was supposed to hurt. So he forced himself to watch.

The kiss brought Jun back to the world with a visible start. “What was that for?”

“Because you were hurting,” Amorette murmured shyly. “And because I am sorry.”

Sojun shook his head. “I don’t have anything to give you tonight, Ams.”

“I’m not asking you for anything, Sojun. Not tonight. Tonight I just want to be a girl and a boy on a hill.”

The words burned like ice pressed against his flesh. He knew everything between himself and Amorette was a lie. She told him so. But knowing that even the words she used belonged to another time, another boy…

An
d they worked as well on Jun as they did on Kaie. The two were kissing again.

“I love you Amorette.” Sojun seemed surprised by the words. Kaie wasn’t. He knew his heart’s brother was in love with her just as long as he was. Amorette wasn’t either. She smiled knowingly and slid her long fingers through light brown hair.

“Do you love me best?” she asked at last.

“Best?” He was as confused by this question as Jun looked to be.

“If you had to pick, if it were me or Kaie, would you chose me?” She slid her hands into Jun’s pants as she asked. By the groan that came from his friend, Kaie didn’t need to guess what was going on.

“Yes,” Sojun rasp
ed. Amorette beamed. After that they lost their clothing the way snakes shed their skins. Kaie forced himself to watch. Every kiss, every thrust, sent ripples of icy agony through him but he wouldn’t turn away.

When that was done
he pressed the glass against his thumb again, seeking another vision. Over and over, he found them. He watched Amorette tease her sisters until Esme ran crying to their mother. He watched the girls fight over their interest in him and Sojun. He learned how territorial Amorette was over the both of them, and how dogged Esme was in her crush on Jun.

He watched the three of them – Kaie, Sojun and Amorette –
on their hill. So many hours spent up there, talking and wrestling, coming up with pranks and plans, scaring each other with stories about the vault behind them. Imagining what it would be like when they were adults.

He watched her hunt. Beauty and grace suffused everything she did in the woods. Even her kills were
elegant. Anything she set her sights on inevitably fell. She was relentless and skilled, the best hunter of their generation. Maybe of the tribe. And she didn’t shy away from cleaning the kills, the way some of the other girls did. She dove into it with the same enthusiasm she did everything.

And he watched her and Sojun. So many times, they snuck back up to the hill
after the village was asleep, more times than he could count. It didn’t matter to them, that sex was supposed to wait until they were adults. Or maybe it did. Maybe it made it more exciting. He couldn’t tell and they never said.

Sometimes they fought. That surprised him. They argued in public, of course, but this was different. These were real arguments. The kind that loosed Amorette’s temper and often resulted in a flurry of fists pounded against Jun’s chest. More often than not, they were about him. Over and over, she asked those same questions:

“Do you love me best? Would you choose me?”

When he answered at all, Jun always assured her that he would. That he did. But as the visions grew closer to the night of the soldiers, Kaie couldn’t help but notice that Sojun answered less often. Sometimes his friend would stop the questioning by pulling her in f
or a kiss that started up another painful scene. Other times his friend would just walk away, leaving Amorette sputtering and fuming.

It was, none of it, how he imagined. She wasn’t perfect. But she was so terribly real. Living and breathing in his visions, more vital than anyone he knew before or would again. It hurt, watch
ing her. Hurt more than any physical pain he experienced. And he drank it all in like a man dying of thirst. Because he deserved it.