The memory arrived in the middle of it.
Not at the beginning of the days after the burning. In the middle — the second day after, Katherine read from the light and the specific exhaustion in the faces of the people inside it. A small house on the edge of what had been the village. One that had been left, perhaps overlooked, perhaps too small to warrant the torches.
Inside: a man and a woman.
Katherine knew them immediately. The raven-black hair. The shape of the face. The woman had KaSandra's eyes exactly — the same gold — and looking at her was like looking at what KaSandra would have been if three hundred years had not built what three hundred years built. Open in a way the older version was not. The expression of someone who had not yet needed to become armor.
The man had Kris's amber eyes.
They were doing the thing parents do when they understand something their children do not yet understand. Moving through the house with deliberate quiet purpose, gathering specific things, making specific choices. The behavior of people who have been thinking clearly about an unclear situation and have arrived at the decisions that clarity requires.
The woman was wrapping something in cloth.
The same kind of cloth Katherine had unwrapped in the field. Dense and careful, the wrapping of someone who knows the thing inside it will need to survive beyond the moment of its wrapping.
Young KaSandra came in from the back.
She was not the girl from the hillside. She was a different version of that girl — the days had done something to her that a hillside night could only begin, the specific compression of someone who has been through the burning and the knowing and is now standing in her parents' house with what she knows and what she does not yet know about to collide.
She stopped when she saw what her parents were doing.
She said something.
Her mother looked at her with those gold eyes and said something back, and the exchange was the exchange of a mother and daughter who know each other completely and are in the specific moment when knowledge is insufficient for the size of what is being asked.
Her father came from the back of the house carrying the infant.
Eli.
Seven months old. Dark-haired like both his siblings. The particular uncomprehending clarity of an infant who does not know what is happening around him and is therefore the only person in the room fully present without fear, looking at his father's face with the absolute attention that infants give to the faces of people they trust.
Katherine watched the room and felt something move through her that was not any power she had a name for — something more fundamental than power, the specific human response to watching a family in the last hours of being one.
Niall, beside her, was very still.
She looked at him.
His face was doing the thing it did when something had reached him that he was not going to look away from regardless of what it cost him. His dark blue eyes steady and present and full of the specific quality of a person who had recently stood at a grave and understood certain things about love and loss and was finding that the understanding was not finished, that it kept arriving in new forms.
Kristen had her hand over her mouth.
Not to suppress a sound. Just to have something to hold onto.