The dust tasted of crushed lead and old bone.
Ren Vale knelt on the shattered flat stone slabs of the dark rock ledge. His forehead was pressed against the cold stone, his breath catching in his throat in ragged, stuttering hitches. In his ears, the echo of her voice still screamed—Ren! Ren!—bouncing off the cave walls like a trapped bird beating its wings against iron bars.
His hands clawed at the dust where she had fallen. He found her boxwood thimble, half-buried beneath a pile of crushed amethyst shale.
He pressed the tiny piece of carved wood against his lips, his shoulders heaving with silent, choking sobs.
Sick loss aversion was not a flaw that made a man weak. It was a madness that made him refuse to accept the reality of an empty room. Ren was seven years old. Then, he had spent four days mending a shattered fine china teacup that his mother had dropped before she died, gluing eighty-two tiny fragments together with animal resin until his fingers were raw, refusing to let the cup go to the ash-heap. Now, the ash-heap had reached into the dark and taken his sister.
“Get up, boy.”
A rough, callused hand seized the collar of Ren’s gambeson. He hauled him backward onto his haunches with unbending force.
