POV: Liora
Moonlight poured through the window and turned everything silver, and I sat on my bed with my knees pulled to my chest and the medallion between my palms. The metal held no warmth of its own, but my fingers remembered hers.
Four days. She had been dead for four days, and Jorin had stood at my father's door and asked for Calla, and I had watched the only two things I held slip through my fingers in the same week.
I curled my forehead to my knees and breathed until the shaking stopped. The house was quiet around me, but the silence was not restful. It was the silence of people who had gotten what they wanted.
"You should eat." Calla's voice came from the doorway, soft and sweet, the tone she used when she wanted witnesses to her kindness. "You have not come down all evening."
"I am not hungry." I did not lift my head. "Close the door."
"Mother is worried about you." Calla stepped inside, and I could hear the lie in her footsteps, too light and careful. "She says you have been up here since the ceremony."
"Mother has never worried about me." I raised my face and found Calla framed in the doorway, candlelight catching the gold in her hair. "Say what you came to say and leave."
"I came to check on my sister." Her eyes dropped to the medallion in my hands, and calculation moved behind her sympathy the way a current moves beneath still water. "You are clutching that thing as though it will bring her back."
"Get out, Calla." My tone was steady but my knuckles were white around the chain. "I will not ask again."
"Jorin asked about you today," she said, and the words landed precisely where she aimed them. "He wanted to know if you were all right. I told him you were fine."
"You told him." The heat climbed through my chest. "You told him I was fine."
"Was I wrong?" Calla tilted her head, and the performance of innocence was so polished I could see my own reflection in it. "You seemed so composed at the matchmaking. I assumed you had made your peace."
"You assumed nothing." I stood, and the medallion swung against my chest. "You knew exactly what you were doing when you took him."
"Took him?" Calla's laugh was light and musical and wrong. "Liora, he came to our door on his own. He chose me. No one forced his hand."
I stared at her. Two nights ago, in the square, her exact words had been that Father and the blacksmith settled it days before. That Jorin agreed before matchmaking day was even announced. Now he came on his own. She did not even bother keeping her lies consistent — she simply picked whichever version cut deepest and served it warm.
"He promised me." My throat tightened around the words. "He stood on that beach and promised me."
"Then he changed his mind." Calla's smile thinned into the first honest expression she had worn all evening. "People do that, Liora. Especially when they find better."
She left before I could answer, her footsteps retreating down the corridor with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had delivered every wound she intended. I lowered myself to the bed and held the medallion to my mouth and tasted salt.
The house settled into its nighttime sounds — boards shifting, wind at the shutters, the low murmur from my parents' room. I should have slept. Instead I crept down the darkened hallway, drawn by a pull in my chest that said listen.
Their door was cracked open. Candlelight spilled across the floor in a thin line, and my mother's words carried through the gap.
"The timing worked out well," she was saying. "The old woman is gone, the boy is settled with Calla. One less complication."
"You make it sound tidy." My father's tone was flat and measured. "It was not tidy."
"You spoke with his father because Calla needed a perfect match. The boy needed encouragement." My mother paused. "That is all it was."
"That is all," my father repeated, and I could not tell if he believed it.
"Liora will recover," my mother continued. "She always does. She is stubborn enough for that."
"Liora is a problem." My father's chair creaked. "She has always been a problem. Her grandmother fed that defiance, and now the old woman is dead, and the girl has nothing to anchor her."
"Good." My mother's tone dropped. "A girl with no anchor drifts. And a girl who drifts takes up no space at all."
I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. My hands were shaking, and every word I had just heard rearranged the shape of my life into a picture I did not want to see clearly.
They had spoken to the blacksmith. My father had spoken to Jorin's father at the right moment. Whether that meant they had orchestrated all of it or simply nudged a boy who was already wavering, I could not tell, and the not knowing was its own kind of wound.
I went back to my room and sat in the dark and thought about leaving. Not the way I had thought about it before — a fantasy, a daydream to survive the dinner table. I thought about it with my hands and my feet and my blood. Where I would go. What I would carry. How far I could walk before daylight caught me.
But the sea closed off half the horizon, and every road bent back toward the same coast. There was nowhere to go that this village would not reach first.
Tomorrow was the Offering. The drawing, the bonfire, the shaman with her painted mask. Every unmarried girl who had not been chosen on matchmaking day would stand in the line and reach into the bag and pull a stone. Most would pull blank ones and collapse into their mothers' arms with relief.
One would not.
I was unmarried. Unchosen. Unclaimed. Tomorrow I would stand in that line with the other girls no one had wanted, and the village would look at me and see exactly what my family saw — a problem without a solution.
I held the medallion to my lips and hummed the three notes, and the sound filled the dark room and came back empty. My grandmother was not here to finish the melody.
"I am not staying," I whispered to the silence. "I do not know how yet, but I am not staying here."
Outside the window the sea moved black and vast and patient beneath the moon.