The Embers of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

for the time being.
     
    Dan had been cremated, on Vien’s insistence, and with considerable trouble—since the body had to be removed from the island in order for this to be accomplished, and getting the necessary permits was not straightforward. In this, the established Syai community in Elaas offered help—and that might have compensated for much, being welcomed back into her own world after choosing to step out of it for Nikos’s sake. But the relations between Vien and her own people remained formal, and a little cool. It was as though Amais’s own dilemmas were projected onto her mother, written much larger than those plaguing her own small self. Amais was still a child, and therefore obliged only to obey the instructions of those older and wiser than her—but Vien was an adult. Her choices would affect not only her own life but those of the people who depended on her—her two daughters.
     
    And, it soon became apparent, the insistent ghost of her mother.
     
    When Vien first said the word ‘home’ and meant something other than the small cottage by the sea where she lived with Elena and the children, Amais almost missed it—but there was something in Vien’s face, a soft and yet steely determination, that frightened her into paying much closer attention.
     
    The change came quite softly, nearly imperceptibly.
     
    “I must take Mother home.”
     
    That innocuous sentence let the first breath of moving air into the little house’s cold, stagnant air which was demoted, without ceremony, into a temporary dwelling. No longer the ‘home’ that Amais had known; the only home that she had ever known.
     
    Elena did miss it the first time. She simply ignored it, like she ignored so many things in those days. She ignored Vien’s views on how her younger daughter should be dressed, fed, disciplined. She ignored Vien’s older daughter altogether. She tried hard to ignore Vien’s white clothes and the white ribbon Vien wore woven into that incongruous glossy smooth black hair that now hung long and loose down her back.
     
    But it quickly became too big to ignore. Mysterious people with inscrutable faces and round dark eyes called on Vien at Elena’s cottage, treating Elena herself with scrupulously correct if icy politeness; Vien herself would disappear for several days at a time, to the mainland, her only word on her absence that she had ‘arrangements’ to make. When she returned to the island after her final visit to the mainland, she carried something in a large envelope, clutched to her breast as though the contents were more precious than jewels.
     
    That time even Elena had to notice.
     
    “What do you have there?” she asked in the voice she now customarily used with Vien when she spoke to her at all, clipped and brusque, as though she had judged her daughter-in-law of some crime and found her unforgivably guilty.
     
    “Tickets,” Vien said. “We’re going home, the three of us and Mother. Back to Syai.”
     
    Everyone looked up at that, Amais in stark astonishment and Elena with something indefinable that was equal parts fury and fear.
     
    “It’s a long, wasted journey for a baby to make,” Elena said at last, after a moment of silence, riding her emotions on a tight rein. “Really, Vien. Your mother lived on these shores all of her life. She can hardly object being buried in those hills now.”
     
    “Did she?” Vien questioned softly, and Amais began to pay much closer attention. This was starting to sound a lot like the frustrating conversations she had with her friends at the rock pools, dressed in her incongruous and inconvenient white ‘mourning’ garb. “I don’t think she ever quite lived here. Not really.”
     
    “She was born here,” Elena snapped. “As far as I know she had never set foot in Syai.”
     
    “Her body, no,” Vien said. “But her spirit… I do not think her spirit ever left Syai. She was half a woman all of her days, yearning back to the things