Once, as a little girl, I was a target of the older boys and girls who ridiculed my preference for books over outside play. Their antics culminated in a book being snatched from my hands and stomped into the dirt.

I had barely started to cry when Daisy dashed into view, knocking out one boy with a punch to the face before the rest were even aware of her presence. She snatched up a fallen branch and swung at the rest, keeping them at a distance. “You want to hurt my sister?” She had snarled, “You get to go through me first.”

She fended them off long enough for Fox to come running, my brother making short work of the rest. For the next two days, I followed Daisy around like a young duckling trotting after its mother, until she grew irritated and demanded I go away as payment.

I soon lost myself in memories of her. I couldn’t retrieve and store memories in vials the way Khalad could, but had I access to that magic, I could’ve bottled them myself, so vividly I remembered her now that she was gone:

The confident way Daisy had with boys, breaking their hearts when she deemed them unworthy of her affection, and how right her assessments often were.

Her often-successful attempts to play matchmaker for other boys and girls in the village, sometimes more in love with the idea of love than being in love herself.

Her fantastically bad cooking, which did not dim her enthusiasm for it. She had no real aims in life, she used to joke, beyond finding a good man who would tolerate her meals.

The way she curled up with me and my books at bedtime after Fox left for war, asking questions about them, which I’d been so proud to know the answers to.

I wanted to collect every memory I had of Daisy, bundle it in a spell so I could keep her the same way I did Fox. But the elders wouldn’t let me. I was no longer trusted. Not that Daisy wanted to be forever tethered to her killer anyway.

The days blurred with me so caught up in the past that I soon lost track of the present.

Khalad was the last to visit. He sat next to my cell, saying nothing for the longest time. I concentrated on a crack on the wall above his head and thought about the time Daisy had danced at Kingscross’s Heartsrune ceremony. It was the last I’d attended before Fox died and I raised him from the dead. I remembered my jealousy, watching her twirl in the prettiest red dress, knowing I could never be as graceful.

“I want to see your heartsglass,” Khalad said.

I made no response.