“You’re keeping something from me,” Saxony said. “And I won’t just ignore it. I’m tired of lies and secrets.”

Amja nodded.

Her father swallowed.

The silence that gathered around them was strange, and made Saxony almost want to turn and walk away from the conversation, since it clearly wasn’t going to lead to anything good.

Nobody started a conversation with silence if it was going to be good.

What if Wesley was somehow connected to her family’s death?

There would be no going back from that.

“Your mother was a Spiritcrafter,” Bastian said. “And she suffered for it every day.”

He took Saxony’s hands in his and they were so large that she almost felt like a child again as he knelt in front of her.

“Like you, Vea was powerful,” he said. “And sometimes the ghosts of the world were all too real. Their memories would haunt her and stay for weeks at a time. They were violent and desperate, and she couldn’t shut them out. It wasn’t a tap she could turn on and off, but a river that flowed endlessly into her mind. She could never drown out the noise of their sorrow.”

Saxony’s hands shook in her father’s grip.

Weren’t the living supposed to immortalize the dead in overly happy memories? When people were gone, they were supposed to be thought of as invincible and without flaws, as those who were left behind rewrote their histories wherever necessary. So every memory Saxony had of her mother was of a warrior, unfathomable in her grace and unbreakable in her spirit. Try as she did to think back, Saxony couldn’t recall a single moment of her mother’s tears, or when her smile faltered and her hugs weren’t warm and long.

Through the eyes of a child, Vea Akintola had been perfect, and even though Saxony couldn’t have known otherwise—even though her mother had clearly hidden it from her for a reason, because it wasn’t a child’s responsibility to know such things—Saxony felt guilty for it.

“She’d disappear for weeks,” Bastian said. “And once, when you were very young, she was gone for months. The forest gave people peace, but for her the quiet meant that the dead screamed louder. She always fled to cities, where the noise could overthrow them, and I also think her heart craved the adventure.”

“She loved you very much,” Amja said.

She looked to Bastian with a smile, warmer than Saxony had ever seen them share. They enjoyed antagonizing each other like it was a sport, but the tender way Amja looked at her father now told Saxony that she loved him as a son. That perhaps he wasn’t her blood, but he was still her family.

“What happened?” Saxony asked.