Prologue
The restless ocean battered the cliffs far beneath the white palace. The wind carried salt and spray high enough to scatter in the air, catching the light before falling back toward the sea.
Once, I would have felt the cold mist against my face.
Now it passed through me.
There were many things I no longer felt.
My love stood on the terrace, as beautiful and perfect as the first day we met. His garments were immaculate, the white feathers of his gleaming wings trembling in the wind.
Time had been kinder to him than it had any right to be.
To living eyes, he hadn't changed at all.
But I knew him. I could see every year that had carved itself into him since we were torn apart. They lived in the stillness of his face, in the way he watched the horizon without truly seeing it, in the silence he carried around himself as though it were just another garment resting upon his shoulders.
His endless eyes were filled with sorrow.
The sorrow that I had brought to him, and the world had delivered.
I moved closer. Old habit. Death had taught me many things, but not how to stop reaching for him.
"Eirran..." I whispered, and the wind swallowed the soundless word.
He turned his face toward the sea.
I remembered the first time I had seen his wings close enough to touch. I remembered being afraid. I remembered doing it anyway, once, while he was asleep, because it was a sin, and I wanted it to be only mine.
I should not have done it.
I should not have done many of the things that I did. Loved many things I had been taught were not mine to love. Wanted things the world had never intended to give me.
And lied.
Oh, how I had lied.
I, who had been born of the earth and deemed unworthy. I, who now existed in the great beyond, where days were moments and moments eternity, where distances meant nothing. I, whose name was Noemi.
There had been a time when I hated everything he represented. His kind, his wings, his voice, his wealth, the impossible white towers rising above a world built for creatures who believed the sky itself belonged to them.
And Eirran...
I had wanted to hate him most of all.
Perhaps I had, in the beginning. That would make a simpler story.
Even now, I could not tell precisely when that hatred had ended. Perhaps love had simply grown beside it until there was no room left inside me to hate.
He had belonged to a world that considered me lesser. For far too long, he had not understood why loving me was not enough to absolve him of that world.
Until, eventually, he did.
I smiled. "You were always a slow learner."
He looked through me for a moment that would have made my breath catch if I still possessed it. Then he looked back toward the ocean.
It made something inside me ache, inside this stubborn remnant of a woman too restless to leave the living alone.
Time had carried Eirran forward. It had not carried me anywhere.
I remained in love. I remained dead.
And somewhere beneath all of it lived the final memory I could never escape. Pain. Fear. A cell that smelled of mold and blood. My strength leaving me. His name on my lips.
Our daughter in my arms.
I closed my eyes, though I no longer needed to.
I had screamed at Eirran for so long, my screams drowned by tide and thunder, while I watched him carry all that grief inside. There were moments when I wanted to rage at him, to yell at him to forgive himself because I had forgiven him long ago. To live. To find our daughter.
The sea roared below.
Eirran straightened.
Something had changed. So slight another person might never have noticed it, a tension across his shoulders, a sudden alertness beneath the sorrow. His gaze shifted from the horizon toward the doors behind him.
A moment later, they opened.
A servant stepped onto the terrace.
He hesitated just beyond the threshold, as though uncertain whether whatever message had brought him there was important enough to disturb a prince who had spent so long making solitude look like peace.
"My lord?"
Eirran turned.
I watched the servant take a step forward, taking out a scroll.
"A messenger from Win'Tarra," he said, offering the scroll. "It bears the seal of the Fifth House."
Eirran's fingers tightened. His wings gave a faint, involuntary shudder. He took the scroll.
For a moment he seemed hesitant. Then he broke the seal.
I did not know what words were written there.
Death had freed me from many things, but not from ignorance. There were still doors through which I could not follow him, thoughts I could not hear, roads whose endings remained hidden even from the dead.
Perhaps that was why I returned so often to the past.
There, Eirran was not yet standing on a terrace carrying years of grief in the set of his shoulders. There, I still had hands that could bleed and lungs that could ache and a heart foolish enough to believe it had power over itself.
When the pain became too much, I returned to those days and found what comfort I could in knowing that, for a little while, none of it had happened yet.
He had not lost me.
I had not lost him.
I looked at Eirran one last time, at my great, impossible love standing beneath a white sky while a servant waited to speak.
Then I closed my eyes, and the years fell away.
Because some griefs survived the body.
And some loves did too.
