The Bloodwood Board by Erica Lyn Burden

Author:Erica Lyn Burden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Erica Lyn Burden
Published: 2019-10-15T09:24:54+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The Man Under The Veil

The sun was setting, finally, a sweet breeze arrived, and the sky was blue and purple and orange and pink. All the deep colors of the sunset seemed fitting for the kind man with the rainbow eyes. This wasn’t the funeral Zinovia had wanted for him. Where were they all? The faces she’d seen every day of her life were missing, and she was told they were going to intercept Ithos’ evacuations. Even Genev and his wife and son were gone. But some stayed. And some new faces were here, though they all looked as beat up and tired as Auryn and Vesper.

Most of them had to be boarders.

Twelve boards, of all cuts and sizes and woods, with some from Earth wood, as Frey’s had been, were stacked across the perimeter of the gates. There was no clergy left here; nobody to take charge and say the meaningful things that they were supposed to say. So instead they let the ten candles, all they had left in the funeral supplies, burn, and took turns to dig out one patch of earth with a planting shovel until the hole was big enough for his body to be placed in it.

She dug as deeply as she could each time it was her turn, shocked at how hard it really was to bury the dead. This was the only body, the only one she could even remember, that was not given either before or after death to the spiders.

Zin wondered if Frey knew how amazing that was, or how amazing he was. This was the day the sacrifice was broken for good.

Six people lifted Frey, Vesper was one of them. As they lifted him, you could tell how delicate his flesh was, the venom still dissolving him. Where their hands gently touched him, blood gathered on the sheer yellow veil. Zinovia saw bloody tears fall from his closed eyes. She looked away.

“Don’t do that,” Auryn said, standing behind her. “You won’t get this moment back,” he said. Tears were falling from his bloodshot rainbow eyes, but he was stifled, too. She cried into his shoulder and she could hear his ragged, fast breathing through his tears, like he’d been waiting for her to unlock this wave for him, too. Once Frey was lowered into the ground, the candles were blown out. And they took turns placing the dirt they’d all upturned in groups of three until it looked like a proper burial mound at the edge of their gates.

Without warning, a much younger man with white-blonde hair down to his waist stood up and held a tattered book, something likely from Earth. “My name is Chaunsey Tanaquil. Frey taught me how to ride from the time I was a toddler. He gave me hope, and even now that he is gone, he still does. I wanted to read something he said to probably all of us pretty often. “They will tell you that you can’t run away from

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