Kalyn Josephson

this ride depended on trust and mutual respect

Let the crow do the work; it knows what it’s doing.

It’d taken me months to confide in her, convinced the moment I told someone how I felt, as if the world had split apart and swallowed me whole, they’d call me ridiculous. Dramatic. Weak. Instead, she’d listened, and then she’d held me while I cried until my throat turned raw.

“You’re seventeen; you’re an adult,” she said. “You have to pull yourself together. You can’t spend the rest of your life in your room.”

“Pull myself together?” My voice broke. How could three simple words make me feel so small?

Her hand fell atop my unscarred one. I stared at it, feeling as though mine were someone else’s hand. “You’re alive, Anthia. Be thankful. Move forward.”

I flinched, jerking my hand away. “You don’t understand. I can’t—I don’t—” My throat tightened, locking the words inside. How did I explain something I didn’t even understand myself? This was just like Caliza, to think a problem could be solved with only logic.

This was why I’d hidden in my room, why I wanted to run there now. Alone, no one could make me feel like an ungrateful little girl, rejected and inferior. No one could look at me like Caliza was now: disappointed, impatient, accusatory. As if this were all in my head and it’d go away if only I tried hard enough.

Didn’t she understand that I would if I could?

But it was like fighting against the wind; the feeling refused to come.

Kiva had been there every minute to say what a bad idea it was, but she had always stayed. She was always there for me, like she had been for every day of the exhausting cycle of despair that had imprisoned me since Ronoch.

Yet even as I had the thought, it felt distant and detached, as if it’d come from another person. Trying to hold on to it was like trying to hold smoke with my bare hands. I knew what I needed to do, but working up the will to do it felt like trying to fight my way above water in a depthless ocean.

It was so hard not to drown.

A fire kindled in my chest, but it wasn’t the first time I had lain there and let it die.

Problem was, the feeling inside me didn’t care about what I had to do. It didn’t care that I wanted to help Rhodaire, that I wanted to restore normalcy and peace and happiness.

I imagined us from Ericen’s perspective, two storm clouds drifted down from the sky, and my confidence surged.

This was my territory, my home. Whoever Ericen was, I could handle him.