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“Did you have a mother?” Waysa studies Rowena in the firelight, his voice too soft for what he just told her. Butchered, the whole lot of them, by her father’s hand, wings dipped in blood, talons slick with ashes. She shouldn’t trust it, shouldn’t trust him. Beautiful things were never what they seemed, people were always out to die or leave or betray you, even her, especially her — promise me you won’t go to him, you’re scaring the other children, I’m the only who will ever love you, we’re friends, I made you for one reason and you’re a failure at it, please, let me save you — but, oh, how she ached to.
He glowed in the fire and stone and smoke, thin and lithe and muscular, tall and sharp-faced, with eyes of topaz and skin the color of petrified wood and a mane of hair almost longer than hers, tangled and wild and everything she was taught not to be. Wild, dark, free. Here was a creature of the night, even as he sat in front of her cross-legged in leather trousers and a white cotton shirt, here was a boy who was almost like her — I’m the only one who will ever understand you — who hadn’t needed to file his claws down to fit under silk gloves and feathered hats and practiced smiles and the steps of the waltz. Here was what she should have been, here was what she needed to be, here was what she was afraid of becoming.
He glowed—
He reached for her hand.
Rowena lingered for a moment, hungering and aching for this, for the way his fingers slowly brushed the lines of her life and love and death. Slow, soft, gentle. She lingered, selfishly, weakly, then pulled away abruptly without explanation, tightening the shawl slung around her bandaged shoulders as her eyes dropped back to the flames. They were easier to look at, even if they hurt. She almost thought she wanted to cry, but she couldn’t remember how to.
—And she burned.
“Of course, I did. Doesn’t everyone?”
Waysa didn’t try to touch her again. She was grateful for that, even if she hated him for her father, even if she was starting to look at her father and hate him for herself, for what she could have been, even if she couldn’t really hate him at all after what he did (she could hate herself easily enough for the both of them, for that and everything else).
“What was her name?” Ayita. First to dance, and true to it. Bold, and brave, and beautiful, with her son’s strong nose and thick, dark brows and fingers that could weave the most delicate of baskets perfectly every time and a mouth that was always smiling, laughter lines carved into her face like rivers slicing through the countryside. Bold, and brave, and beautiful, and dead, maggots worming their way through her skin from beneath the surface of her shallow grave. She had been a winner of the first war, and a loser of the second, and a dancer in between it all, but now she was dead. She would dance for no one any longer, and it was only mostly Rowena’s fault.
“Delilah.”
“What was she like?”
Weak, like your mother. “Kind.”
“Did see look like you?”
“Yes.”
“She must have been beautiful.”
“She was.” He wasn’t looking at her this time, stoking the fire with a stick with a burnt end. It was better this way, but she still couldn’t help a twinge of disappointment. It was weak of her, but she did not want to be alone, not now when she was so vulnerable and damaged. She wanted him to look at her. She wanted him see her, in the way only he could, let in at her lowest moment and now unable to get out of the maze that was her, although sometimes she wondered, when he showed he was kind and good and nothing like her, whether he wanted to be trapped in this cave with her. She wondered if he pitied her. Or forgave her, as he said. Rowena couldn’t stomach pity, but forgiveness made her sick. She wanted him to look at her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to bear what he saw.
“Will you ever go back? To England? To London?”
“If I ever turn back, I will be lost.”
There were no more words spoken into that night, silence had descended, and it was not to be broken.