Page 35 of An Empress of Air & Chaos

Home.

Her stomach squeezed tightly.

Emara didn’t know how to feel about going back to the place where her grandmother had been killed and she had almost died. It was her home, but it was tainted.

“Your girl, Cally, she said she’s not coming and that she will get everything she needs another way—whatever that means,” Marcus advised.

Emara dreaded to think what Cally had planned, or how she could get her things—her essentials—but she was too consumed by the trauma of going home to question it.

“Emara,” his gentle voice gave warning. “She’s not going to be there when you go back. We had to take care of her body that night. We never leave them lying.”

Take care of her body?

Her grandmother’s body. That’s what he was referring to.

A shiver broke over her skin.

“Where is she?” Emara drove her eyes to the scuffed floors of the sparring room, unable to look up as tears swam into her eyes. She gritted her teeth, fighting them back. All this training had distracted her for a few hours. It had taken her mind from the pain of her heart. And she needed that distraction again—soon.

“She’s gone.” Marcus placed a hand on her shoulder. “To a better world than we live in now.” Another shoulder brushed past her, leaving her alone.

She fought hard to control her emotions. She would never have a burial or a service for her grandmother’s passing. There would be no resting place for her body where she could visit or pay tribute to her. Her heart scrunched up painfully. Her grandmother had deserved so much better than to be “taken care of.”

With a shape inhale of breath, she held her head high and walked out of the room, fighting with the overwhelming pain in her chest. That night, she didn’t head down to the dining hall like she had been instructed to. She didn’t even have the notion to see where Cally was or what trouble she was getting herself involved in. She just wanted to be alone until she had to face the space where her grandmother took her last breath. Until she was sent for, she prepared herself to go home.

To a home that she knew, deep down, was no longer her home.

Emara stepped down from the hunting wagon that had taken her back to Mossgrave. It was a rickety thing, rather large and based in a metal that she wasn’t familiar with. She didn’t see very many wagons in Mossgrave. She had only heard of them in the city.

Facing her home, she swallowed.

Her grandmother’s house. A sanctuary of happy memories, tarnished with blood and evil. The giant fir trees that surrounded the backdrop of her home bristled in the wind, their branches feral, sending pine needles in all directions. Her hair whipped wildly around her face and against her shoulders, making it hard for her to see.

But she couldn’t feel the cold.

“You have one hour. Essentials only,” the short haired man instructed. “Someone will wait for you outside and will bring you back to the tower when the hour is up.”

Emara didn’t look back at the hunter who spoke. She simply nodded and the wagon pulled away, the gravel crunching under the weight of its wheels.

She walked up the dark stone steps and halted midway. Looking up, she could see where her grandmother’s room watched over the front garden. She would look out the window and watch Emara play when she was a child. That hideous crack in her heart burst open again as she dipped her head down and climbed the remainder of the stairs. Opening the door, she couldn’t face going to the kitchen where her grandmother had been in the final moments of her life. So, she raced past it and flew up a set of stairs.

The word “essentials” hummed through her mind, keeping her focused on her task. She walked quickly to her room at the back of the house and when she entered, her room was cold—almost too cold—and she pulled the dark cloak that Marcus had given her a little tighter around her shoulders. Her bedsheets were wrinkled; they hadn’t been touched since she had slept there the night of the attack.

It was clear, even just from the sheets, that her grandmother’s presence was no longer inside the house. The sheets were not made-up like Theodora had her do religiously every morning. She moved across her room like it was a foreign place, not wanting to touch anything.

Essentials. Get in and get out.

She pulled out her case from underneath the bed and launched it wide onto the mattress. Dust flew up from the case into the air and fell again like thick snow. She coughed, a hand covering her mouth, a few times before running her fingertips across the case, the soft leather embracing her touch. She picked out some practical clothes and laid them neatly into the case. Hovering over her bedside table, she pulled out her mother’s box. That was an essential; it held more than just her coin…

She opened the box with a tiny piece of hope and thought of them both, her mother and her grandmother. Her hands clutched the box fiercely as she whispered a goodbye, an unsaid message to her grandmother. A message that she hoped so dearly would reach the other side.

Disturbed by an unsettling noise, she looked up, hearing footsteps on creaking wood. No one should be in here but her. Lightning panic struck through her core.

“Emara?”

The call of her name sent her heart into a frenzy. The box tumbled out of her hands and crashed to the hard floor. The hunters weren’t due back, that she knew. It couldn’t be one of them who called her.

“Emara?” the voice called for her.

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