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“It’s good.” Naia punctuated this by taking another bite.

Akane beamed. “You think so?”

Her mismatched socks in the open-toed pair of slippers she wore caught Naia’s eye. They were similar to Ronin’s. “How old are you? Children rarely know how to cook.”

A sad smile moved over her lips. “My grandma taught me how to make them. I’m not as good as she was, but I hope to one day be.”

There was mourning in her words. One Naia recognized all too well.

“I believe you will be,” Naia murmured. “You already make them quite deliciously.”

“I can make you more whenever. We still have some left over from the wake.”

Naia recognized the term from her studies of mortals. A wake was a ceremony of the dead. Depending on the culture, wake ceremonies were different, but there was typically food.

“Your grandmother passed away?” The question slipped out of Naia before she could swallow it back.

“A year ago.” Akane frowned, fidgeting with her fingers again. “My papa passed last week.”

Grief left a bone-deep sorrow in Naia she could never quite run far enough away from. Over the years, she’d learned the sorrow of grief was a grim price to pay for the expense of love. It never truly left a person, only diminished in size.

She wanted to offer Akane a hug, or some encouraging words.

Time will heal and the heaviness you feel will?—

What are you doing?

She looked down at the rice ball in her hand.

Do not care for another.

It would only make the heartbreak more crippling in the end.

Naia swallowed the bite in her mouth and sat the rice ball on the bedside table.

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d prefer to get some rest before the festival.”

“Oh, all right,” Akane said. “I’ll come get you when lunch is?—”

“Leave me,” Naia snapped.

Akane winced.

Naia cast her gaze out the window, afraid if she saw the crumpling of Akane’s expression, it would shatter her resolve.

“Let me know if you need anything.” Akane’s voice was much smaller than before.

The door clicked shut.

All the times when Mira had made her feel as irrefutably small prodded in Naia’s mind. Along with the memories came a sourness in her gut. But Naia could not afford to allow the little girl’s kindness to mean anything. Kindness did not exist in her world. Not by the greater good. Definitely not from the heart. From a child or a deity.

The Kahale family was nothing but a stepping stone in her journey to Finnian, and she would not allow them to become significant to her by any means.

In the end, they would die—by the hands of the deities Mira sent for her, or by the fragility of their mortality.

Naia squared her shoulders and peered across the sea once more.

Only, this time, the view hardened her.