![]() ![]() I hate them with their tutting and their busy fingers and the lazy Ancrath slurring of their words. The ladies sew with their quick clever stitches, line stitch, cross–line, layer–cross. My thoughts jump and my head aches and this quill keeps trembling. Mother gave me that vase when I came away with Sareth. I found a sliver of pottery in the wound even though Friar Glen said he cleaned it. My head aches and wormroot won’t calm it. My sister’s ladies–in–waiting clutter the place, sewing, always sewing, and tutting at me for writing, as if quill ink is a stain that can’t ever be washed off. There’s no fountain, just a font that dribbles rather than sprays. The fountain room is as ugly as every other room in this ugly castle. ![]() And with eyes stinging from the fires, with the wind’s chill in me deep as bones, I read through her memories. The mountains, rising on all sides, made us tiny, made toys of the Haunt and the siege engines strewn about it, their purpose spent. I sat upon the smoke–wreathed ruins of my castle, careless of the heaped and stinking dead. A few dozen ragged pages, weighing nothing in my hand, snowflakes skittering across them, too cold to stick. ![]() Katherine’s story, Aunt Katherine, sister to my step–mother, Katherine who I have wanted every moment of the past four years, Katherine who picks strange paths through my dreams. I chased them though, as if it were my story they told and not hers. Some were too charred to show their words, others fell apart in my hands. I found these pages scattered, teased across the rocks by a fitful wind. ![]()
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