Perhaps he would have been unnerved by the child were he still capable of such dark stirrings.
Unnerved by the way she does not speak, the way she barely smiles.
But he feels nothing but the faintest memory of the things she had shown him. The things that did not belong to him and he felt never would again. Better off without them, he thinks, the things that had carved out his chest and the marrow of his bones. And he had deserved the pain, he knows. He’d known it then, he had condemned himself to carry it the rest of his life and the Mountain had made sure he would never die.
He’d been a coward.
He is a coward.
But the child touches him again. And he sees the blue mare – or, at least the idea of her – and he hears what she says. And he knows.
“Aela,” he says, too. The child’s name. He doesn’t know how he knows. It is a knowledge that is injected straight into his hollow bones. “My name is Kensley.”
Or it had been, once. He had not felt like the name belonged to him in a very long time. Not since he’d watched his sister died and had been powerless to stop it. Not since he’d gone to the Afterlife and she’d forgiven him but it had not been enough to stop the bleeding in his heart.
“Or, it was,” he corrects himself. “A long time ago.”
Perhaps there is some comfort in knowing that she will not ask him why. But when he draws away from her, he feels some phantom stirring in his chest. A sharp, fleeting stab of something forgotten. Pain. Right there in a chamber of his stagnant heart. There and then gone again.
And when he blinks, he’s convinced himself that he’s imagined it.
