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I know the power names hold better than anyone. Yesterday, I was a girl without an identity, someone risen from the ashes of a dead forest. A girl whose only memories were the movements her body made during a slaughter. Now I have a name. And with that comes the expectation that I’m unchanged, still the same Aileana killed by a sword to the chest while she tried to save the world. Derrick believes I can be fixed—and I don’t have the heart to suggest that maybe you can’t fix what’s already dead.
“Honestly, Aileana, everyone ought to dress up like an inebriated pirate at least once. It’s much more fun killing things in costume.”
“What garden?” He gestures around us with the bottle. “We’re in the middle of the damned woods on the brink of an apocalypse.”
Derrick’s halo flashes red. “The garden I intend to make from the corpses of our enemies,” he hisses. “I can’t help it if your human mind lacks vision.”
Even now, after everything she’s gone through, she’s still kind. She still cares. She didn’t lose those she loved and turn to vengeance. Her strength isn’t physical. She wouldn’t go onto the battlefield for a slaughter. She’d go to aid the wounded, the vulnerable. It takes a rare, exceptional sort of bravery to lose everything and still give so much of yourself. That’s the kind of courage most people lose in a war.
“One day I pray I’ll meet a woman who engages me in combat as a way to say, I love you. Be still my heart.”
hate this,” I mutter. “Really? I’m having a grand time,” Aithinne says brightly. “That’s because you’re barmy.” “I believe you just mispronounced magnificent.”
“I have taken your suggestion under consideration and decided to ignore it.”
This is me. Entering a room. About to ask you annoying questions.
“I never had to wear your mark to know that I’ll always be yours.”
Sorcha is looking down at her brother’s body with an unreadable expression. “I know what it’s like to want revenge against the man who hurt me, and you showed him compassion. That was a kinder death than I gave mine.” Then her eyes meet mine, and she murmurs a single word, and I know it’s for me: “Different.”
Maybe the price of saving the world is forgetting how to live in it.
