Chapter 219: Not One Tear

The morning they buried his mother, it did not rain.

Jin remembered thinking that it should have. In stories, it always rained at funerals.

Instead, the sky was flat, pale white.

The wind came down off the hill and moved the long grass between the graves, and somewhere a bird was singing as if nothing had happened at all.

He was nine years old.

He stood at the bottom of the hill, by the gate, where his aunt had told him to wait. The grave was at the top. He could see it from where he stood. A rectangle of fresh brown earth, a pile of soil beside it, and a long wooden box resting on two planks across the hole.

Around it stood his mother’s family.

He did not know most of them. He had seen some of them once or twice, at a wedding or a New Year, always from across a room. They were tall people in dark clothes, and they stood close together around the box with their backs to him.

Not one of them had looked at him since they arrived.

Jin looked for his father.

He had been looking for him all morning. At the house. On the road. Along the cemetery wall. He looked again now, at every dark coat on the hill, at the gate, at the road behind him going back toward town.

His father was not there.

He had not been there yesterday, or the day before. He had gone out the night it happened and had not come back, and nobody would tell Jin where he was. When Jin asked, the grown-ups looked at each other over his head and said nothing.

His aunt came down the hill.

She was his mother’s younger sister. A thin woman with tired eyes, and the only one of them who had ever crouched down to talk to Jin at his own height. She crouched down now.

"They’re going to close it," she said quietly. "Do you want to see her? One last time?"

Jin nodded.

His aunt took his hand and walked him up the hill.

The family stepped aside to let them through. Jin felt their eyes on him now. All of them, all at once, the way you feel cold water on your skin.

The lid of the box had been set to one side. His aunt lifted him under the arms so that he could see over the edge.

His mother was inside.

She was wrapped in white cloth up to her chin. Her hands were folded. Someone had combed her hair the way she never wore it.

He looked at her face. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

He looked for a long time. He tried very hard to keep it. He told himself, the way children do, that he would remember it forever.

But even as he looked, it would not stay. It was like trying to hold water in his hands. The harder he held, the faster it ran out.

His aunt set him down.

He did not cry.

He did not know why. He wanted to. There was something enormous in his chest, pushing upward, but it would not rise into his eyes. It only sat there, heavy and cold, like a stone.

Behind him, a woman spoke. Low, but not low enough.

"Look at him. Not one tear."

"For his own mother."

"That’s his father’s blood. Cold, the pair of them."

"And where is the father? Where is he today?"

"Gone. Ran off. What does that tell you?"

His aunt’s hand tightened on his shoulder. "That’s enough."

It was not enough. The voices went on, quieter now, from behind him and from both sides, so that he could not tell who was speaking.

"Cruel little thing."

"Put him in there with her, then. Let him keep her company, since he doesn’t care."

Someone laughed. Someone else said hush.

Nobody said no.

The men picked up the ropes. The box went down into the hole slowly, tilting, and bumped against the bottom. Somebody threw the first handful of earth.

It struck the lid with a sound like a knock on a door.

’Why am I not crying?’

Another handful. Another knock.

’Is something wrong with me?’

’Where is Father?’

’Did he go because of me?’

Knock.

’Will they really put me in there?’

He tried to remember her voice. He could not find it. He tried to remember her face. He had seen it a moment ago. It was already gone.

Knock.

The only thing left was the warmth. Her arms around him whenever he would fall asleep in her embrace. His face pressed into her shoulder. The close, warm smell of her.

That was all. Just that.

Knock.

Not one tear.

Cold, like his father.

Put him in there with her.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

The earth was falling faster now. The voices were louder. The stone in his chest was growing, pushing up against his ribs and his throat and the back of his eyes, and he could not breathe around it. He opened his mouth to scream, and nothing came out, and the earth kept falling, and the knocking would not stop, and-

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Encrid woke up gasping.

For a moment, he could still hear it. The soft, steady knock of earth on wood.

Then it was gone, and there was a ceiling above him. Pale wood, old and smooth, with a crack running across one corner. Sunlight lay on it in a soft yellow square.

He lay still and waited for his heart to slow.

His face was wet.

He did not remember crying.

He could hear birds. Not the sharp cries of the northern crows that had circled the Wall every morning for a year and a half. Small birds. Garden birds, arguing in a tree outside a window he could not see.

He tried to turn his head but immediately regretted doing so.

Pain went from the base of his skull all the way down his spine. He stopped and lay still until it faded.

His arms were wrapped in bandages from the wrists to the shoulders. So was his chest. Under the cloth there was a deep, dull ache, as if something heavy had been sitting on him for a long time and had only just stood up.

’Where am I?’

He tried to remember.

The Span. The Elder. The light coming out of a small dark shape at the edge of the chasm. The stone of the Span against his cheek.

Then claws. Breath on his neck.

Then a hand on his shoulder, gentle, like a father checking on a child who had fallen asleep at the table.

Before he could process any of that, he heard it.

Somewhere in the garden, a girl laughed. It was a bright, careless sound. She scolded something, the way people scold a dog that has done something stupid, and laughed again.

He did not know her voice.

But he knew, all at once, whose voice he had heard last before the dark.

He turned his eyes toward the side of the bed.

There was a chair there. In the chair, a man in a plain grey coat sat with his hands resting on his knees, as if he had been sitting there for a very long time and did not mind at all.

"Good morning," said the Reaper of the Blue Moon. "Benefactor."

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Volume 02 - The Bloody Crown