Page 43 of Last Rites

For the fourth Oath, I could help someone in need. There were plenty of folks around Ashpoint who may have need of me. Even Rosie’s family, which brought me to the fifth ritual about spreading abundance. If Rosie and I made an extra-large batch of pastries, we could share them… abundantly.

The sixth and seventh rites weren’t quite as clear, but I had a start. And a prayer. And I hoped that would be enough to see me through.

16

Kit

The two weeks after the incident in Millfield felt like an eternity. I was lucky to get two or three hours of fitful, interrupted sleep a night and spent most of the long stretches of dark feigning unconsciousness. Penny tried to offer comfort, but I rarely accepted it. My head was too loud and scattered to be soothed.

Frankly, comfort felt undeserved. A man was dead. My actions were necessary, but that knowledge failed to ease my conscience. Penny and I lived on, but that didn’t diminish what I’d done. Just… made it slightly more palatable.

My days in the caverns were endless, too. Almost from sunup to sundown, I fought revulsion and nausea as I worked alongside the others to finish the final pieces of the Vessel, and I tried in vain to find ways to slow the progress. Thankfully, Philippa handled most of the hands-on work and allowed me to largely supervise. She did her best to engage me in conversation while we worked, though I couldn’t muster responses of more than a few words at a time.

She still managed to drag enough out of me to learn a fair bit about Penny and our relationship. Some days, it was all she could get me to talk about. He was the best part of my life.

I’d almost lost him, and I couldn’t forget that.

Couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep going before I no longer had the strength to stave off collapse. I wouldn’t be able to avoid letting Penny fuss over me if I ended up needing him to look after me because I ran myself into the ground. Somehow, that felt like it would be another failing.

That afternoon, everyone broke for lunch around midday and dispersed outside to enjoy the clear skies and warm sunshine. I lingered in the main cavern, crouched at the edge of the pool and scrubbing at my hands and arms. I didn’t have an appetite to begin with, but the thought of eating with bone dust on my skin, of it ending up in my food, turned my stomach even more.

This had become somewhat of an unintentional ritual: I scrubbed until my skin hurt, and then by the time I deemed myself clean enough, I was so thoroughly nauseous that I didn’t eat, anyway. But Penny was starting to notice that I was bringing home most of what he packed for my lunch, and that I hadn’t the stomach for dinner more often than not. He brought it up gently several times in the last week, and again the night before, so I resigned myself to making an effort to eat something.

When I finally finished, my skin a stinging pink all the way up to my elbows, I pushed to my feet and shook the water off my hands. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Philippa peel out of the shadow of the doorway and head toward me with a towel. We met in the middle of the room where she held it out to me.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, blotting away the last of the moisture on my arms.

“Of course.” Her head tilted slightly to the left as she studied my face. “You haven’t been joining us for lunch. I’m starting to get worried.”

I lowered my eyes to the towel now clutched between my hands like it was the only thing keeping me together. There was a part of me that appreciated her concern, but a bigger one still that wished everyone would leave me alone for a while. Let me run my thoughts in circles until the guilt and the horror dulled enough that I could tuck them away in the back of my mind with the rest of the awful things I’d seen and done. Let Anders’s ghost fade into the ranks that lingered there until I someday forgot his face.

“I haven’t had much of an appetite lately.”

Philippa hummed and tucked her hand into the crook of my elbow. “I can see that.”

She led me back through the caverns, quiet until we reached the entry chamber where we stopped in front of my lunch pail. Hers sat beside it. She took the towel from my hands, dropped it on a pile of used rags awaiting laundering, then bent to retrieve my lunch.

“Come sit with me,” she said when she offered it to me. When I didn’t immediately take it, she hooked the handle over my palm, then stooped to gather her own. “You look like you have some things you need to get off your chest.”

I didn’t want to tell her anything. Merrick had, wisely, disseminated our fabricated version of events from our sixth Oath to the rest of Ashpoint. As far as anyone knew, Anders had been executed by the militia, and that was that. So, how could I explain what haunted me if I couldn’t be honest?

Still, there was no escaping Philippa. She kept a solid grip on my arm the whole way outside. We bypassed the others all gathered in a loose knot in the sunshine and settled instead against the cliff wall in the shade of an outcropping of stone. Only once we’d both settled onto the rocky dirt did she release me.

She spread a cloth napkin on the ground and pulled a dark rye roll from her pail. She split the bread, and then set about stuffing it with thick sliced salted pork. With her sandwich made, she looked over at me expectantly.

I peered into my own pail. One of Rosie’s soft bread rolls, pickled onions and a small hunk of cheese wrapped together in waxed paper, several slices of dry sausage, and a small pouch of whatever dried fruit and nuts we had left in the pantry. Just the thought of putting food in my stomach made bile rise in my throat, but I plucked the roll out and pinched off a bit of the crust.

When my eyes met Philippa’s again, her brows were knit together and her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Now, that lovely man of yours goes to the trouble to pack this food for you, and that’s all you’re going to eat?” She looked pointedly at the contents of my lunch pail, and then back up.

I relented and followed her example, spreading the rest of the food on the napkin tucked in alongside the nuts and assembling my own sandwich.

She gave a satisfied nod, and once I’d forced a few meager mouthfuls down, she started in on her lunch.

We ate in companionable quiet for several long minutes before she spoke again.