Her father would have loved this. He’d have reveled in her triumph. He would have had so many ideas for the Festival, so many more than she had—

The brief respite she’d had was just that—a moment of forgetfulness, nothing more. And now, with nothing but day after day of gray sameness stretching ahead of her, she missed him so much she thought she was going to break beneath the weight of grief.

So she sobbed into her pillow, inconsolable. How could anyone console her for this? She and her father should have had years and years together; she should have had him to cast stern eyes over would-be suitors, to advise her how to deal with the Council, to scold her for working too hard and send her to read a book or ride. And if she ever married—he should have been there to see it, to see his grandchildren, to spoil them as he’d often threatened to do. All of that was gone, taken from her before it ever had a chance to happen.

She didn’t want anyone to hear her crying; they wouldn’t understand. They’d tell her stupid things—that it had been long enough, that she needed to “pull herself together,” that it was “time to move on.”

How could they know? How many of them had a beloved father cut down in front of their eyes? How many of them were facing what she faced, the rest of her life without the man who had been father and mother to her, and friend, and counselor? None of them understood. None of them could. None of them wanted to. What they wanted, was for her to be something else, some biddable creature they called “Selenay” that had no feelings but the shallowest, and no thoughts of her own. Her feelings were an inconvenient obstacle to that.

Or worse than telling her to “get over this,” they’d spew some kind of platitude about how he was surely watching her from somewhere and was proud of her, but would be unhappy that she was still mourning for him. How could they know? How could anyone know?

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. Sendar had been good; he’d given up so much, he’d always done so much for others—it wasn’t fair! She’d always thought that when you did good, good came to you. What kind of a cruel god would do this to her, and to him?

For that matter, she wasn’t entirely certain that there were any gods out there, not after this. And if there weren’t any gods, then that meant that when you died, you just died, and her father wasn’t “out there,” looking after her. He was just gone, and all those platitudes were nothing but empty lies…