Wandering around to places of some significance to my childhood with Armin, to spread his ashes?
My brother would have accused me of hiding behind that self-imposed ritual. Of wasting precious time. And he’d have been bored out of his mind.
The school. The pond. And now the balcony where we played and pretended to hide from our parental figures, even though they always knew exactly where we were at all times.
Elias clears his throat gently.
I flinch. The urn, despite its size and weight, wobbles in my hands. I’m gripping it too tightly, even as it feels as though I don’t have a good enough hold on it at all. It feels like it couldtumble over the edge, falling many meters to smash on the stone pathway that meanders through the park below.
Elias lunges forward, but a literal rope of his essence gets to me first, twining around my hands and the urn. Gently cinching my hands in place while steadying the urn. Then the earl is next to me, close enough to brush his chest against my shoulder as he closes his hand over the top of the urn.
“The parapet is lower than I remember,” I say, like an utter idiot.
“It does seem terribly unsafe up here,” Elias murmurs.
I don’t look up at him. I keep my gaze on the urn. On his hand pressed to the lid. We aren’t touching at all now, but we’re close enough to be breathing in each other’s essence.
I take a deep, utterly greedy breath. Then another.
“I’d forgotten this place existed,” Elias says quietly. “I haven’t been up here, not once since …”
“… your father died?”
I catch his nod in my peripheral vision, neither of us looking at the other.
“He’d come up here with a cigar,” Elias says. “Even though he wasn’t supposed to smoke them.” He hesitates. “He died of an essence-wasting sickness.”
“I know,” I say. “He weathered it for years. I could feel it.”
Elias closes his eyes and huffs quietly. Like he thought his father’s condition was a big secret and now feels stupid that it wasn’t. “I had a plan …”
“Lunch?” I say, both a little cool and a little peeved.
He shakes his head, then rubs his free hand across his face. “Yes. Lunch.” He clears his throat, pointedly looking at Armin’s urn.
I sigh. Heavily. Not simply internally as a perfect princess should. “I had a plan.”
“Not lunch.”
I snort, completely unbecomingly. “Not lunch.”
Elias carefully peels his fingers and palm off the urn. “You’re spreading Armin’s ashes in all the places that meant something to the two of you.”
“Silly, right?” I say weakly. “Using Armin’s death as an excuse to avoid my responsibilities.”
Elias is silent for long enough that I feel myself getting all twisted up inside. Again. Then he leans into me, still not quite touching, and brushes a kiss across my temple. “I think …” His voice is husky with contained emotion. “My father would be honored that he … could be a part of …”
“He used to make us these …” I sob, just once. And not just from grief. Because there is joy embedded in this memory. “These little animal figurines, but out of light. He’d line them up …”
Elias places his cupped hand on the balustrade next to the urn. My words catch in my throat as he lifts his hand to reveal a tiny cat figure created from pure light. Then he places his hand down again and manifests a puppy, then a horse, then a songbird.
A few tears snake down my cheeks, though I try to blink the bulk of them back. Maybe I’m mourning more than just Armin.
Maybe I’m mourning, so utterly selfishly, the parts of me that I’ve lost … the part of my soul?
Elias gently brushes his finger along one of the bird’s wings. In a flutter of light, the bird takes flight, flitting around our heads and shoulders.
I laugh, though I’m still crying.
