I am grateful for this, but in the years since, I cannot help but wonder at the sacrifice it required of Liro. It is not easy to hold someone through their grief. It is hard to see someone you love in pain, in irreparable pain. It takes an extraordinary type of kindness, a rare patience, to let the loss run its course. We always want to help, but there are times when there is no help, and the pressure to take help only makes things harder on the ones trapped in mourning. I don’t know what transpired between them. I don’t. But I do know that Dirva left him without explanation, reappeared without warning, and that there was nothing for Liro to do but offer himself up. I never knew Liro well, but he seemed to me a very bright man. Like anyone who scraped a childhood by on the street and survived to adulthood, he had a watchfulness about him and an uncannily honed feel for other people. Liro knew the moment Dirva set foot in the City what he would need, and what he would take, and Liro let him take it anyway.

Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

The weeks after Nuri’s death were steeped in uncertainty. Nuri’s death was an orderly thing, but for those of us left behind it had in its wake a terrible chaos. It is a hard thing for a family to grieve together. Grief marks itself on a person in unique ways, and it grows so total that a person can’t always see past it. One can’t always remember that your mother, your spouse, your sister are grieving the same loss in a different way. Sorcha spent little time with his family in the two or three weeks immediately subsequent to his da’s death. He clung to me like a life raft. I think it was because with me, Sorcha was able to fall into it. He was able to feel the loss. It was not shared with me, and because it wasn’t shared, he could begin to understand what it meant for him. At Prynn’s insistence, he kept playing the morning sets, but he spent the rest of the day in his room with his head on my shoulder telling me stories about Nuri. Anything he could remember about him—things he’d seen himself, things the rest had told him about, the small private moments and the big, grand ones. I have never seen him smoke more pipeherb before or since. I have never smoked more before or since.