The Embers of Heaven Read Online Free PDF

ghostly, hovering in the air and settling lightly in Amais’s mind and memory: Or mine.
     
    Or mine….
     
    But was it Dan’s name she had wanted made immortal… or that of the strange spirit that had possessed her just before death came to claim her?
     
    “Come on,” Vien said, holding out her hand. “There are things I need to do now. Let’s go home.”
     
    Amais got up obediently, gathering up the thirteen precious notebooks, wrapping them up in a secure little parcel and hugging them to her chest all the way back to Elena’s house.  Somewhere in between those two places, the shrine to Syai where baya- Dan’s spirit now lived and the cheerful green-shuttered house that her still-living grandmother inhabited, walking in the sunshine of Elaas with the treasure of Syai clasped close to her heart, suspended in the empty air between two worlds, Amais realized for the first time in her life that she was no longer sure just where ‘home’ was or how her heart was supposed to find her way there.
     

Three
     
    Amais kept her head down and herself out of the way in the months that followed, months in which everyone around her seemed fractious, annoyed, or outright furious at things that hovered just outside her comprehension. Vien let down her hair and donned the traditional Syai mourning attire for her mother, which led to Elena making acid comments about the propriety of wearing so much white with her mother newly dead and her husband not a year in his grave. Vien cast her eyes down and took the barbed remarks in pious silence, her hands folded before her in gracious eastern position, suddenly prominently and obviously alien in the house where she had tried so hard to fit in and where she had once been wholly accepted.
     
    Amais had been dressed in like manner, and the small knot of village children who were her companions had been curious and blunt, as children often were.
     
    “That’s what we wear in mourning,” Amais had explained, plucking at her white dress with nervous fingers. Out here in the Elaas sunshine, in the bright light of Elaas customs, the white garb did seem outlandish and strange.
     
    “So your people are happy when someone dies?” her friend Ennea asked. “White is a color of joy, you wear it when you marry not when you die.”
     
    “But back in Syai…”
     
    “Is that where you’re really from?” asked Dia, schoolteacher’s daughter, slightly higher social caste than the rest of them and generally given to passing on oracular pronouncements from her exalted parent as though they had been edicts handed down from the Gods on their Mountain. “My Papa says that blood will tell.”
     
    “I was born here,” Amais said fiercely. “I am from here!”
     
    “But your mother wore black like she should when your father died,” said Ennea with a child’s utter disregard for tact or feelings, intent on pursuing some fascinating nugget of information and oblivious to all else.
     
    “That was different,” said Amais, conscious of a sharp pain as the scab over that older wound, unhealed yet, cracked a little to allow a trickle of pain like heart’s blood to escape. “My father was of Elaas, and…”
     
    “But so is your grandmother,” another girl, Evania, pointed out. “ My grandmother says she was born on the mainland, in the city, before she came to live out here—but she was born here. So she was of Elaas, too.”
     
    Amais remembered the silk-swathed rooms of her grandmother’s house, the scrolls of poetry in a foreign tongue, the scent of alien incense.
     
    “I don’t think so,” she said carefully, too young to analyze the thing completely, aware that she could not defend it in the face of her playmate’s practical questions because they simply could not understand it.
     
    “My mother says you’re strange,” Ennea said.
     
    But she had still been willing to stay Amais’s friend and companion for all that, and no more was said on the matter, at least