Pamona fidgeted with the hand held inside Terion Iligen’s. Hearing the words something given with heart, she didn’t know what it could be, but her whole body was already tingling and she felt something close to dread.

Something given with heart. Was it all right to receive something like that?

She looked down at his hand wondering what it could be, but there was nothing in it. He had nothing in his hands, so what was he going to give her?

“What is it?”

She asked, but he only met her eyes and smiled. He handed her nothing. Surely not……

‘The two of you are going to get into trouble soon, aren’t you?’

The shoe shop owner’s voice rang in her ears.

Surely not…… surely not, Terion Iligen.

Pamona felt her heartbeat quicken, and her ears burned red.

They were hot enough that she could tell without looking. She was deeply grateful for the hood.

Should I close my eyes?

Her mouth went dry with nerves and her chest felt tight.

“Hey, mister.”

A boy tugged at the hem of Terion Iligen’s cloak.

“Hello.”

“Mister, can you bend down a little?”

He crouched down to meet the boy’s eyes.

“Wow, you’re really pretty…….”

He gave the boy, who stood there wide-eyed and open-mouthed, a gentle smile, then carefully tipped the boy’s chin upward with his hand to close his mouth.

“You have something for me, don’t you?”

“Oh. Um. Huh?”

The boy turned and pointed somewhere behind him, but whatever he had been pointing at seemed to have disappeared, so he lowered his arm and looked around.

“It was right there……. Some other mister said to deliver this to you.”

What the boy held out was a pouch slightly smaller than his own face.

“Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”

When he reached for it, the boy hesitated and pulled the pouch back a little.

“If I give you this, you said the mister would buy me lots of yummy things…….”

Terion Iligen looked up in the direction the boy had pointed and smiled with his eyes, one corner of his mouth curving upward. Pamona followed his gaze, but there was no trace of anyone having been there at all.

“Here you go.”

He held out three gold coins to the boy.

“Whoa!”

“Now, put these in the pouch and take it straight home. Don’t show it to anyone on the way. Understood?”

As he said this, he took something out of the pouch the boy had handed him and kept it, then gave the empty pouch back to the boy. The boy glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then quickly dropped the coins into the pouch and gave a deep bow.

“Thank you! Thank you, mister!”

“All right, be careful on your way.”

He ruffled the boy’s hair, and the boy beamed, looped the pouch string firmly around his wrist, and took off running.

“That must be a lot of money.”

Pamona had no sense of what the coins were worth, but she watched the boy sprint away with a grin, thinking it must be a good sum.

“Look at this, Mona.”

Terion Iligen placed what he had taken from the pouch in her open palm. Pamona, who had been entertaining the shameful thought that he might be about to kiss her, snapped back to her senses.

Far from a kiss, what sat in her palm looked entirely innocent.

It was a conch shell, glowing with a soft, clear light.

“Oh……. A conch shell?”

Pamona let out a sound of wonder just as the boy had.

“Have you seen one before?”

“Only in pictures. It’s so beautiful…….”

It shimmered with something like a lustrous pearl sheen, and when she turned it this way and that, the colors shifted and blended into a rich, varied light. She had seen conch shells no bigger than a pinky nail before, but a shell this large, big enough to fill her palm, was something she had never encountered. The tiny ones had no such beautiful color to them, and they looked ready to crumble at the slightest touch.

“It’s beautiful……. So beautiful. Thank you for the gift, Terion.”

“The gift is this.”

He covered one of Pamona’s ears with his hand while she was still gazing at the shell in a daze. He took the hand holding the shell and brought it up to her ear. Then he said something without making a sound.

He didn’t shape his lips precisely, perhaps not minding whether she understood, so Pamona had to concentrate intensely on the movement of his mouth.

Close your eyes and listen.

She closed her eyes to shift her focus to her ears, as he had said. To block out more of the square’s noise, she pressed her own hand over his where it covered her ear. The small footsteps, someone’s laughter, a shopkeeper’s calls faded away, and from somewhere far off came a sound both familiar and strange.

It sounded like turning pages.

Shhhh……, shhhh……

No.

This isn’t pages turning.

The corners of her mouth were slowly lifting.

The more she listened…… this was……

Whoooosh……

Whoooosh……

She opened her eyes slowly to find a curved smile, blue hair spilling out from under the hood, and blue eyes holding the clear, untroubled color of a lake that had never once frozen over.

“Terion…….”

He spoke again without sound.

It’s the waves.

His eyes curved with a softness that held nothing but affection, so unmistakably, and her heart beat faster for it.

In the eyes that looked at me, in your hair drifting in the wind, I had already seen the sea.

And still you want to show it to me. The very thing I had stopped letting myself want.

Her heart swelled like the sound of waves breaking against her ear, and she couldn’t stop herself from throwing herself into Terion Iligen’s arms. The moment she wrapped her arms around his neck, he pulled her head and back close and buried his face in her hair.

“Terion.”

No one had ever taught her about waves. No one had ever tried to show her the sea. At some point she had come to believe she was simply someone who would never see it. Dreaming of what she could not have only split her chest open. Reaching for what she had no right to want only pulled her deeper into the dark.

The only thing she had ever learned was how to let go of wanting.

This is fine. I can live satisfied with this, she had told herself, deceiving and lying to herself. The less she wondered about anything, the more quietly she went along without question, the more people praised her for it.

Pamona had been hungry even for that much attention, so she had played the gentle child. A princess with no interest in the world and no desires, easy and untroubling. She wrapped herself in a mask of childish indifference.

She never told anyone that there were things she wanted to see, things she wanted to know, a life she wanted to live.

She had lived by killing herself this way. Discarding even the desire to hold on to this life.

Letting go of everything, every longing, and breaking it apart.

Some days she wished she could be reborn as a prince. Some days she wished she were a noble outside the castle walls. Some days she wished she had been born into an ordinary family, a loved child.

Other days she thought she just didn’t want to be a woman. Other days she thought she just didn’t want to be in this country. Other days she wished she could be born as a quiet patch of grass by some seaside. And then some days, she prayed there would be no next life.

“Mona.”

Let it end here. If the blessed day ever came when this dull, exhausting, barely-surviving existence finally reached its end, let that be the true end. She didn’t want a next life. She didn’t want to repeat it even once more. She had had enough of wanting something and breaking under the weight of it. She never wanted to reach for something and be crushed by it again.

“I like you.”

Why did someone like you appear in a life like that, and make me want things again.

“I like you, Mona.”

The things I wanted never once came true……

That hope would trample her was not delusion. It was wisdom learned through experience.

Just as she had always known, in this life too, it seemed nothing she wanted would ever come to be.

She had soothed herself by saying it didn’t matter who she married. But even that, it seemed, she could no longer manage.

She had stepped into what would perhaps be the most painful and most difficult resignation of her life.

“I like you, I…….”

She had no answer she could give him, so she closed her eyes tight. Behind her closed eyes, fierce waves rose and crashed.