Page 46 of Salt Between the Wolves

Someone spoke to her along the way. Another wolf stepped aside to let her pass. Both moments vanished almost as soon as they happened, leaving no impression behind.

By the time she reached her room, daylight had already begun to fail.

The door closed behind her.

Silence followed.

For a long moment she simply stood there before her gaze finally dropped to her hands.

Blood covered her sleeves, her fingers, and the front of her tunic. The stains had darkened during the journey home, turning nearly black in places where the fabric had absorbed them completely. Other streaks marked her wrists, left behind by repeated attempts to stop bleeding that had never truly slowed.

She stared at them.

The ridge returned immediately.

The arrow.

The snow.

Riven looking down at his chest, trying to understand what had happened.

Eira closed her eyes, but the memory remained exactly where it was.

Slowly, she removed her cloak and let it fall where it landed.

She should have changed her clothes.

Washed.

Done something useful.

Instead she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed while the last traces of daylight faded from the window.

The room grew steadily darker around her.

She never moved.

At some point the evening meal came and went. No one knocked, and no one disturbed her. Beyond the walls, the fortress continued living as it always had, but the sounds reached her only faintly, as though they belonged to another place entirely.

Hours passed.

She found herself thinking about the fire from the night before, about the song drifting through the camp, about sparks rising into the darkness while Riven described the sea with such certainty that it had seemed impossible to imagine him anywhere else.

The memory hurt in a way the death itself still could not.

Death remained unreal.

The fire did not. The laughter did not.

Those things had existed. She had seen them, heard them, shared them.

Now they were gone.

Darkness eventually claimed the room completely, yet Eira remained where she was. Sleep never came. Whenever her eyes closed, she saw blood spreading through snow. Whenever she looked at her hands, she remembered the warmth fading beneath them and the terrible certainty that nothing she had done had been enough.

Sometime during the night the fortress quieted completely. The last voices disappeared. The last footsteps faded. One by one, every sound surrendered to silence until it seemed to settle over the entire mountain.

Eira sat through all of it.