Chapter 255: Separate Grief
In one of the many tents in the Vale of Mist that hundreds of refugees had come to call home in the days since Owain Lothian’s massacre, Milo’s wife Juni knelt on the ground beside Old Nan. Juni’s rich brown fur had lost its shine but she still did everything she could to look after herself and her husband’s ailing mother as well.
While their possessions were meager, Juni did her best to keep the small tent tidy, washing blankets and clothing, cleaning up after meals, and turning small pieces of wood into everyday items they’d left behind in the hurry to leave.
At least half of it was simply to help her stay busy in these idle days while they waited to find out what the rulers of the Vale of Mists intended to do with them. The important thing was that she stayed close to her mother-in-law while Milo was away.
"Mother," she said gently, calling out to the woman who had fallen asleep while working on a carving of her lost son, Lako. "Mother, I brought you something to drink," she said, holding up a cup of broth that had been thickened with ground oats. In the days since arriving in the camp, her mother-in-law had barely left the chair she sat in while carving. When Milo was here, he was at least able to encourage her to drink the thickened broth but now...
Everyone in the camp was grieving to different extents. Juni considered herself among the luckiest. She’d lost the home that she and Milo had only just begun to carve for themselves as they prepared to start a family of their own, but a home could be rebuilt. Both her parents escaped along with her brother who was so young that he had yet to start an apprenticeship.
Compared to Old Nan and the other families who had lost husbands, wives or children, Juni’s losses had been so minor that she barely considered them worth dwelling on. The people around her were in much, much more pain than she was.
In some ways, it made it easier for her to care for her husband and mother-in-law. It was easier to be strong when she hadn’t lost as much. In other ways, she felt a wall between herself and the members of her village who had lost more. She was one of the ’lucky ones.’ How could she understand what they were experiencing when she’d lost so little?
It was foolish, but also very, very natural for people to think that way. She could ignore the occasional sideways glance or unkind words uttered by people who were hurting. They didn’t intend to be cruel to her and she knew it. But just because she understood didn’t make the wall between her and her suffering clansmen any thinner, and no one had put up thicker or higher walls against help from others than her own mother-in-law.
"You need to keep your strength up to finish Lako’s carving," Juni told Old Nan, hoping that mentioning the project she’d put so much importance on would give her at least a little motivation to care for herself. After she said it though, a twinge of pain pierced her heart and she cast a guilty look at the other woman in the tent.
After all, Old Nan wasn’t the only person grieving Lako’s death. She’d lost a son, Milo had lost a brother and Cetna... Cetna had lost the man who wanted to become her husband.
Cetna was barely old enough to call herself an adult, but she already possessed more strength than a young woman her age should. Her mother passed not long after giving birth to her, leaving her father to raise her alone. The solitary hunter did his best to raise his daughter but it seemed like she’d taken responsibility for her household as soon as she was old enough to tend to the burrow without supervision.
Her father had taken years to recover from the loss of his wife. As Cetna grew older and came to resemble her mother more and more, the aging hunter felt the pangs of grief that years of time had dulled grow sharp again.