Her mother's hands smelled like bread and dried lavender.

  That was the first thing. Always the first thing, in the way that certain details lodged themselves into memory not because they were important but because they were *present* — fully, completely present in that last moment before everything changed, so that afterward they became the thing you returned to, the fixed point, the proof that it had been real.

  Elia had been standing in the doorway with her shawl half-on, the morning light coming in low and gold across the kitchen floor, and her mother had been at the table with her back turned, and that was the smell. Bread from the morning's baking still warm on the counter. Lavender from the sachets her mother kept in her apron pockets because she said it helped her think.

  *"The Maren village isn't far if you take the hill path,"* her mother had said, not turning around, hands busy with something on the table. *"Ask for the woman with the blue door. She'll have what I need. Don't dawdle."*

  *"I won't."*

  *"And take your heavier cloak. It'll be cold coming back."*

  *"Mama, it's nearly midday —"*

  *"Elia."*

  She had taken the heavier cloak.

  She remembered pausing in the doorway — not for any reason, not because something warned her, not because she felt anything prescient or significant. She had paused simply because the light was nice and she was not in a hurry yet and she had looked at her mother's back, the familiar set of her shoulders, the way her hair was pinned up with two escaping pieces at the nape of her neck the way it always was.

  She had not said anything.

  She had turned and gone.

  ---

  The hill path had taken her longer than expected. The woman with the blue door had been kind and talkative, and Elia had sat with her longer than she should have because she was lonely and the tea was warm and there had been a cat sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the windowsill and it had been — easy, in the way that ordinary afternoons were easy, unweighted by anything.

  She had not dawdled, exactly.

  But she had not hurried either.

  The light was already changing when she started back, dropping toward the flat amber of late afternoon, and she had walked quickly on the hill path and told herself it was fine, she would be home before dark, her mother would say something and she would apologize and they would eat dinner and her younger brother would talk too much at the table the way he always did.

  She had been thinking about dinner.

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  Specifically about whether her mother had made the soup with the root vegetables, the one that was too thick and tasted like the end of winter, the one Elia had always pretended not to like and had always eaten two bowls of because it was that kind of soup.

  She had been thinking about that.

  And then she had come over the last rise in the hill path and seen the village below, and for a moment she hadn't understood what she was seeing because her mind had not had the vocabulary for it yet — the smoke was wrong, the light was wrong, the silence from a place that was never silent was wrong in a way that bypassed thought entirely and went straight into the body as a single sustained note of *no.*

  Her feet had stopped moving.

  She hadn't told them to.

  *No,* she had thought, clearly and simply, the way you thought words when the alternative was too large. *No.*

  And then she had run toward it — toward the smoke, toward the silence, toward home — because what else do you do, where else do you go, when the place you are running toward is the only place that has ever existed for you.

  ---

  She found them the way you find things in nightmares — not by searching but by arriving, suddenly, without transition, at the thing you most did not want to find.

  Her brother first. He was at the edge of the village, near the well.

  She did not look for long.

  She could not.

  She kept moving because stopping was not something she could do yet, her body still running the instruction from before — *go home, get home, get there* — and so she went further in, through the smoke and the silence and the ruin of it, and she found what remained of her home and she stood at the threshold and she looked.

  Her mother's apron was on the floor just inside the door.

  Two lavender sachets had spilled out of the pocket.

  Elia stood there.

  She stood there for what might have been a long time.

  The smell of smoke was very strong. The light was almost gone. Somewhere behind her, deeper in the ruins of the village, something moved — not human, she knew that without turning around, her body knew that before her mind confirmed it — and she heard a sound, low and patient, that she did not have words for yet but that her blood translated without difficulty.

  *Run.*

  She ran.

  ---

  Elia woke with her hand pressed flat to her sternum, as if she could hold something in.

  The sound she made was very small. Not a scream — nothing so large as that. Just a breath that came out broken, that couldn't complete itself, that kept catching on something in the middle. She sat in the dark with her knees drawn up and her hand over her heart and she cried in the way she'd taught herself to cry when she was young and didn't want anyone to hear — almost silently, the tears coming steadily but without drama, her face doing nothing theatrical, just wet and still and very tired.

  She didn't wipe them for a while.

  She just sat with them.

  The room was dark except for the low ember-glow of the small brazier in the corner that someone had kept going through the night. The Stronghold around her was quiet — or as quiet as a place like this ever got, which was a specific kind of quiet, full of distant sounds that were just far enough away to be texture rather than intrusion.

  Her ribs hurt when she breathed too deeply. She breathed shallowly and sat with the dark and let the crying finish itself out the way it needed to.

  The lavender sachets. That was what had done it. In the dream they had been so real — the colour of them, the small embroidered edge her mother had put on each one, the way they had scattered across the floor like they were nothing, like they were just ordinary objects in an ordinary moment, which was exactly what they had been that morning and exactly what they would never be again.

  She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye.

  Breathed.

  Outside the narrow window the sky was still dark but differently dark than it had been — the particular darkness of very early morning, the hour that was neither night nor day, that existed in a kind of suspension between what had been and what was coming.

  She looked at it for a long time.

  She thought about her mother's voice. *Don't dawdle.* The specific, fond exasperation of it. The way she had said it without turning around, hands busy, presuming Elia would go and come back because that was what Elia did — she went, and she came back, and there was always something there to come back to.

  *I took the heavier cloak,* she thought, as if this were important. As if this were something she needed her mother to know. *I took it. I listened.*

  She pressed her lips together.

  The crying had stopped. She was just wet-faced now and very still and very awake in the way that followed nightmares — that particular, exhausted alertness where sleep felt both necessary and completely impossible.

  She reached up and carefully touched the bandage at her temple.

  She thought about what was left.

  Not much. That was the honest answer. She had the cloak she'd taken that morning, her own clothing, the injuries being knitted back together by time and warmth and whatever the medic had done while she was unconscious. She had no home, no family, no village to return to. She had the heavier cloak and two hands and whatever it was that had kept putting her back on her feet in the snow when everything in her wanted to stop.

  She didn't know if that was enough.

  She looked at the narrow window and the dark sky beginning, somewhere beyond it, to consider the possibility of light.

  She thought: *it will have to be.*