Vastala settled down beside him. ‘Many dreams are forgotten upon awakening, yes?’
He glanced away from her appallingly open expression. ‘But not memories,’ he said. ‘They just rise up, like the sun. Each morning, after a moment’s bliss, they return. Like ghosts. Demons. They return, Vastala, with all the fangs and claws of the truth. We awaken to what’s real, what was and can’t be taken back.’
She reached out with a tanned, blunted hand and touched his cheek. ‘There is no real, Punished Man. Only dreams.’
‘It feels otherwise.’
‘There is fear in awakening,’ she replied, ‘even when the dream displeases. In the voice in your head, even as it cries out, begs to wake up, another voice warns you. You awaken to a world unknown. This is cause for fear.’
‘We need our guilt, Vastala Trembler. Without it, all conscience dies. Is that what you would do to me? To us? Take away our conscience? Our guilt?’
‘No,’ answered Hataras, who now crouched opposite him, her eyes bright and wet. ‘There is another path.’
‘What is it?’
‘Only what must be felt, in the heart of the ritual. Shall we ease you now?’
He shook his head and swiftly began packing up the leavings of his meal. ‘No. I am a Hust soldier now. I will stand with my comrades.’
‘Your fear speaks.’
He paused. ‘Fear? More like terror.’
‘If you are made to surrender the lie of your crime of murder,’ said Vastala, ‘you will face the crime of your innocence.’
‘For which,’ Hataras said, ‘you feel greater guilt than could any bloodied blade in your hand.’
‘She killed herself,’ Listar whispered, ‘out of spite. She arranged it to make it seem her death was by my hand.’ Shivers rippled through him, and he sank back down, bringing his hands to his face. ‘I don’t know what I did to earn that … but it must have been something. Something.’ Abyss below, something …
Their hands were upon him now, surprisingly soft and warm. They left heat wherever they touched.
‘Punished Man,’ said Hataras, ‘there was nothing.’
‘You can’t know that!’
‘Her ghost is chained. You drag it behind you. You have always done.’
‘This was what she wanted,’ said Vastala. ‘At first.’
‘It was madness, Punished Man. Her madness. A spirit broken, a dream lost in the mists.’
‘We will wait,’ said Vastala. ‘But for her, we cannot.’
‘Her dream is a nightmare, Punished Man. She begs like a child. She wants to go home.’
‘But no home waits for her. The hut where you lived – with all its rooms – still screams with her crime. To send her there is to send her to a prison, a pit, the very fate of your punishment – but an eternal one.’
‘No,’ he begged. ‘Don’t do that to her. I tell you – she had a reason! There must have been – something I did, or didn’t do!’
‘Be at ease, Punished Man,’ said Hataras. ‘We will make her a new home. A place of rest. Peace.’
‘And love.’
‘You will feel her from there. Feel her anew. Her ghost will touch you again, but with tender hands. As the dead owe to the living, no matter their state. The dead owe it, Punished Man, to salve your grief, and to take from you the grief you feel for yourself.’
He wept, while their hands slipped from him, and their voices fell into a cadence, making sounds that seemed less than words, yet truer somehow, as if they spoke the language of the souls.
After a time he thought he heard her then. His wife. The sounds of weeping to answer his own. He felt their shared grief washing back and forth, cool and impossibly bittersweet. The madness of long ago, the endless torment of uncertainty each time he stepped into a room where she waited, the dread of what might come the instant he looked into her wild, panicked eyes.