Allissa
The longest night of my life had no end that I could find. It simply went on, hour after hour, in the cold ruin of my daughter’s bedroom, until the dark outside her window began to gray and I understood that the world intended to have a morning whether my child was in it or not.
We had not slept. There was no version of the night in which we slept.
I had spent it moving, because moving was the only thing that kept me from coming apart. I checked the twins until Hessa gently took my hands off the cribs. I walked the corridor where the guards had fallen. I went back to Lyra’s room and stood in it and breathed her in, and somewhere past the third or fourth hour, the queen who had held the castle together all evening finally cracked down the middle, and what was left was just Lyra’s
