Free Awaken by Anya Richards Page A

her pillow was wet from a storm of tears passing in the night. At other times she drifted up from sleep with a hollow, tender ache deep inside, as though in the unremembered reaches of the night something precious lay within her grasp, which the rising sun caused to melt away.
    “I wish she would cry, Mam, or get angry.” Elawen’s voice, filled with annoyance, one day drifted to where Myrina stood outside the kitchen. “Anything would be better than seeing her drift about like a ghost.”
    Not waiting to hear the goodwife’s reply, Myrina continued on her way to her mother’s bedside. Indeed she felt as insubstantial as a spirit—or a vessel spun from crystal threads, awaiting the blow that would cause it to shatter.
    Her mother was awake, awareness gleaming in pain-filled eyes, and Myrina forced her lips into the shadow of a smile, knowing it was not what it should be, unable to do any better.
    “Can I get you anything, Mama?”
    “Do you have my ring, darling?” Her mother’s voice was thin, an audible representation of her hold on life. “I miss it.”
    Slipping the simple golden band from her own finger, Myrina placed it back on her mother’s, where it belonged. The skeletal hand closed tight to keep it in place, and a smile of contentment brightened her mother’s face. Placing her other hand protectively over the ring, she closed her eyes once more and slept.
    The trembling began at Myrina’s toes, rising to turn her legs to jelly, her stomach to a writhing mass of pain. When she reached out to grasp the nearby chair, it was with a hand as palsied as that of a woman twice, thrice her age.
    Agony clasped her in unrelenting arms, stopping her breathing. Nausea churned, threatening to bear her down to her knees.
    All her life she had seen the love between her parents—never overt or demonstrative, but subtle—in the sharing of a glance, a passing touch, a small thoughtful gesture. The simple motion of her mother’s hand, guarding the symbol of their life together, revealed the essential, eternal connection between them—something her daughter craved beyond all desire and would now never know.
    Lowering her body to sit, Myrina finally faced the extent of her loss, and it was all she could do not to wail, to howl like a dying beast. When her father died, taking with him the security and safety of her world, she had been too busy to mourn. Perhaps in time she would have done so, but then her mother became ill and it was all she could do to cope, hold their lives together as best she could. There had been no one to share her pain, no time to truly feel the sorrow growing stronger and stronger each day.
    In Ryllio she had sought and found solace, understanding, belonging. That fleeting taste of love had lifted her beyond the present pain, giving a teasing foretaste of what could be. To have known him—his passion and tenderness—to have been accepted, desired, needed, just as she was, and then to feel him fade once more to stone was more than she could stand.
    Covering her eyes with shaking hands, tears seeping out between her fingers, she rocked back and forth against the onslaught of anguish. All the losses in her life were too much to bear—the torment tearing at her heart would surely lead to madness or death.
    “Come with me, little one.” Myrina only dimly heard the goodwife’s soft voice in her ear, hardly felt the gentle hands urging her to rise. “Come away where you can cry in peace.”
    And wrapped in the goodwife’s tender care, Myrina cried and cried until she felt there were no more tears left in the world.
    “I was wondering when this would happen,” the older woman murmured, stroking Myrina’s hair. “Even the strongest of us must give in to the tears sometime, and you have more reason than most to cry.”
    “I want to die too.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but the words burst from her throat, bringing a fresh paroxysm of weeping.
    “I know,” Goodwife Harbottle soothed.