Over the next weeks, some people went on like it never happened, but there were rumors of people sleeping in the market field or destroying everything in their homes. Others supposedly didn’t leave their houses for weeks at a time.
I went back to my lessons—what lessons were still being offered—and tried to find happiness with my friends and music, but the strangeness of the community’s behavior smothered me. No one seemed to heal.
As summer hurtled toward autumn, the mood sagged from melancholy to disconsolate, and the pulse in the walls grew unbearable. The city wall. The Councilhouse walls. Even the exterior walls of everyone’s homes. The slow throb of life inside stone made my skin try to crawl off.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“I have to get out,” I told Sam. “I need to get away. Will you go with me?”
“Anywhere,” he said, and kissed me.
We left Heart just before summer faded into memory.
“You’ve been quiet,” Sam said as we left behind the geysers and mud pits, the fumaroles and rime-whitened trees.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Oops. We hadn’t gotten to that part of his questioning yet.
He snorted. “Okay. What’s on your mind?”
I lengthened my strides to keep up with Sam and Not as Shaggy as His Father, the pony that bore most of our bags. We called him Shaggy for short. My backpack straps dug into my shoulders, but I carried only a few essentials—in case we somehow got separated—plus the temple door device, and my notebook. Sam had taken to calling it my diary, but I didn’t keep track of my days in there.
“Nothing in particular, I guess.” I glanced back at Heart, from here just a seemingly endless expanse of white ripples and curves over the plateau. The immense central tower stood partially obscured by late-summer foliage. The city looked peaceful from far away. “I feel better getting out of there.”
“The walls?” He said it like he understood, but the walls didn’t feel bad to anyone but me.
“Yeah.” I slipped my thumbs beneath my backpack straps, relieving some of the pressure on my shoulders. “Did you see Corin when we went through the guard station?”
“Corin?” Sam raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t do anything.”
“No, he didn’t.” I kicked a fallen branch off the road. Pine needles scraped the cobblestone. “He just sat there at his desk. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t acknowledge us. He barely moved.”
“He’s grieving,” Sam said gently. “He lost souls very close to him.”
“Then why does he go to the guard station every day?”
“What else should he be doing?”
“I don’t know. Staying home? Staying with a friend?”
Sam’s eyes were dark as dusk, and his voice deep with a hundred lifetimes. “It doesn’t always make sense, the way others grieve. I can’t imagine what I’d be like if I’d lost you, but it would probably seem very strange to others.”
Because I was the newsoul, and why would anyone grieve that much over me?
Then again, I knew how I’d behaved during Templedark. Fearing for Sam’s life, I’d hurtled through fields of dragon acid, dodging sylph and laser fire. I’d felt like someone other than myself, like I might do something crazy if I didn’t find Sam, because how could my world be right without him?
“I don’t like the way grief feels,” I said at last. “And I don’t like the way it feels when other people grieve.” Which sounded like I thought they should avoid the emotion because it made me uncomfortable. No, what did I really mean? “After the dragons attacked the market, I wanted you to feel better. I wanted to do anything I could to help, to make you stop hurting, but I didn’t know how. I tried and…”
Sam nodded. “It makes you feel helpless.”
“I don’t like that.”
“Me neither.” He pushed a strand of black hair from his eyes. “I’ve felt like that about you, helpless to make you feel better.”
“Really?”
He flashed a strained smile. “When we first met. You trapped the sylph in an egg, letting your hands get burned so you could rescue me.”
Sylph. Just the word made me shudder and check the woods for unnatural shadows. Too easily, I could remember the inferno racing through my hands, up my forearms, and the red-and-black skin all bubbling with blisters.
“You tried to be so strong after that,” Sam said. “And you were strong, but I knew how much it must have hurt. I wanted to take the pain from you, but I couldn’t. I felt helpless.”
“Even though we’d just met?”
Sam only smiled and touched my hand, and we shifted to the safer topics of music he wanted me to learn, and debating whether or not Sarit would actually make good on her threat to come after us if we didn’t return to Heart before winter.