Yet was it already too late?
Because Da did nothing but run the last years of his life, he had taught Liath to run, to turn away, to hide herself. She couldn’t even truly love the ones she wanted to love, because she could not reach out to them, not with her heart entire. She had taken the key and thrown it away long ago, escaping from Hugh, but she hadn’t understood then that she had also walled herself away, that the city of memory Da had taught her to build in her mind’s eye was another barrier against those who sought to embrace her with friendship and love.
Ivar had never threatened her. But she had seen his infatuation as a threat. She had disdained him because she did not know how to be his friend.
Hanna had given her friendship without asking anything in return, but Liath had walked away from her to go with Sanglant.
Yet she had not even been able to love Sanglant with a whole heart. She had loved him for his body and his charisma, but she had never truly known him. He remained a mystery; despite his protestation that he was no onion with layers of complexity and meaning to be uncovered, he was not as simple as all that. No one ever is. She had never looked to see what lay beneath the surface, because the surface was easy enough to polish and keep bright.
Ai, God, even Blessing. She had watched Sanglant love the baby unreservedly. But she had always held a part of herself back, the crippled part, the part that had never learned to trust.
The part that was afraid of being vulnerable, killed by love, and by hope, and by trust again, and again. And again.
“No,” she said, from this height looking down over the glorious palaces and the river of fire, looking down at her kinsfolk gathered in a flock beneath, hovering halfway between the heavy silver sheet of the sky and the river’s flashing, molten surface. “I’m not ready to leave them behind because I don’t even know them yet.”
She opened herself to the measure of their wings and let them see into her heart, into the burning bright soul that was the gift her mother had given her. “Maybe this will be my home one day,” she added, “but it can’t be now.”
“Child,” they said, in love and as a farewell.
What need had they to mourn her leaving? The span of one mortal’s years on Earth might pass in the same span it took to cross one of those shimmering bridges that linked the golden palaces: a thousand steps, or a song. Her soul was immortal, after all, and half her substance was fire.