The pillow beneath my head is still damp from where she missed. My throat is no longer dry and raw, and if I focus, I have a hazy memory of Artemisia pouring water into my open mouth. The pounding in my head is still there, but it’s dull and faraway now. They are so cold, they raise goose bumps on my skin. Hands touch my skin-my wrists, the pulse point behind my ear. I flinch away from the sound, curling tighter into myself. A thousand footsteps beat against the ground, each one making my head throb. “Theo,” a voice calls, familiar but so far away. My memories are a desert-I remember stepping into the cave, remember hearing my friends’ voices begging me to come back. Distantly I realize that it’s mine, but I can’t say where it came from. There is caked blood on my fingers, on my arms, in my hair. My throat is so dry, it hurts to even breathe. It hurts, but oh, it feels so good to lie down, to have fresh air in my lungs, to have light, even if it is too much all at once. My knees buckle and the ground comes up to meet me, hard and sharp with rocks. I lift a heavy, aching arm to shield my eyes, but the effort of even that small gesture makes the world around me spin. T HE SUN IS BLINDING WHEN I step out of the mouth of the cave on weak legs. Usually, my mother belonged only to me when she sat on that throne, she belonged to everyone. She was never quite the same person on that throne that she was off it. But I also understand that in some way, I was right. I know that when she sat on that throne, she was still herself.

I know that it didn’t have a physical hold on my mother. Now that I’m older, I know that the throne wasn’t a monster in the way I believed. When the throne finally released her, she was exhausted. She spoke carefully and authoritatively without a hint of a smile in her voice. In the throne, a stranger took over her body-her voice boomed, her back was ramrod straight. Gone was the woman at the center of my world, the soft-spoken mother who would kiss my forehead and hold me on her lap, who would sing me to sleep every night. I watched it transform her into someone else, someone I didn’t recognize. Every day, I would see my mother sit upon that throne, and I believed that it held her there, its obsidian fingers digging into her skin. I remember the bonedeep certainty that touching it would burn.

It was a terrifying thing to behold: tall and shadowy black, sharp-edged, carved to look like dark flames. I SPENT MUCH OF MY FIRST six years afraid of my mother’s throne the way most children are afraid of monsters lurking under their beds.

Lady smoke laura sebastian