Herlot of Alonia by Maria Rosestone

Author:Maria Rosestone [Rosestone, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A warm, moist breeze stirred Herlot awake just in time to see Oliver close the door behind him. She shot upright—but Enri, Mahtreeh, and the soldier were still asleep. Sighing, she fell back down onto the hay.

The breeze had stirred some of the keepsakes hanging from the ceiling to swing, and her attention was brought to the two clay footprints she had noticed before. “H” and “A” was written underneath the prints. Letters. Only Alonians wrote letters. A for Ambro and H for Herlot. Why were their tablets at Oliver’s? She slowly rose to her feet doing her best not to bump into Enri or Mahtreeh and avoided looking over at the soldier. Just the thought of having slept in his vicinity for the second night made her stomach churn.

When she stepped outside, she approached Oliver to speak with him, but something about the way he stood made her withhold her words. Turned to her, his back was straight, his palms open and hanging at his side. She could hear him take a deep breath through his nose and she noticed the aroma of the rain-drenched soil that lingered heavily in the air. He clasped his hands and stretched them above his head, the sunlight illuminating his face. He turned and smiled at her. “There is never a reason to not appreciate the first breaths of the morning air, no matter what sorrows lie behind or before us.”

“I like this advice,” Herlot said. It reminded her of something her father would have said. Grief flooded her, but she kept her voice from cracking when she spoke. “Oliver, may I ask you why our tablets hang in your home?”

“They were a gift from your mother. I hope you know how much you and Ambro helped my children back then.” He lifted his chin as if he was taking another sip of sunlight. “There was a light in them again after our trip to Alonia, one I didn’t expect to see in them for a long time after my wife passed. Your mother saw it, too, and she wanted them to have a gift to remind them of your time together.”

Herlot swallowed back a lump in her throat. A piece of her mother’s story she hadn’t known about, a fingerprint of her kindness marked into the story of Oliver’s home. She found a piece of her mother after she thought nothing was left of her in the world.

They hadn’t had a private-enough place to talk about Devotio, but Herlot knew that Enri and Mahtreeh would want to spend time with him. Since they knew what he really was, and believed what he really was, she could tell them about the leaf, and she hoped with all of her heart they might be able to help her. This was the last thing she wanted to or could do alone. And Devotio would need them, too. They could feel a pure happiness about him, something she had lost, something that was now in the ashes of Alonia and possibly getting scattered by the wind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.