Jade Fern Grove everything costs

It should have been you.

Heat flustered through the base of Everett’s ears. Burning, like the fire that had taken her, taken their Rose. But was she wrong? I know, I know.

He lowered his eyes.

But Ophelia didn’t mean him.

Well, she should have.

Everett watched the ground as she parsed her accusations. All proper, all just. All weight upon the barbed crown that broke with every blow, the one his parents had deemed too heavy for themselves to carry. The one he’d willingly broken others beneath.

It was right that she should hate him.

Even as she sat crying, he couldn’t find his voice. No better than when he’d simply watched, back in the Gilded Sea. The shots echoing. Reverberating. Shutting him to silence. And for what? Another moment in fear? He had seen what they had done to Evander when he’d challenged father’s will. He had watched then, too, until he had forced his brother away. He had watched disgrace spill over him, crown knocked from his head. The feet to push the fires away bowed low and shamed.

And then, Rose had died.

Then, Rose had died.

Died.

And somewhere in the sorrows, they all had died, too.

She pushed him away, and he finally looked to her. She of gilded threads, tattered and bruised and clinging to her frail body like pine needles after the fire. He could not linger on the scars that marred her, but he saw their shadows, knew that they were there.

Silence. And then, a choked whisper.

They were wrong. I was wrong. It should have been me.

He remembered when Ophelia would talk with, walk with him, in ways no one else ever did. No one else, beyond Evander. Those broken days, breaking more, now that everything else had crumbled.

She would not listen to him. Surely not. But he would try.

Tybault is here, too. Evander, he knew they had done far better to her, we came for you, not to bring you back, the ocean broke through him, please, let me take you to them.