Page 9 of Spark of the Everflame

His eyes narrowed at my use of his former title. It was always a coinflip whether the term of endearment would soothe or stoke his anger. Today, my odds were not looking good.

“Have you been taking your flameroot powder?”

I fought the urge to cringe.

“Yes,” I said, slowly and carefully.

“Every day?”

I shifted my weight. This was going to be ugly.

“I... may have missed a few days.”

“How many days?”

“Things have been so busy. I’ve had a lot to do around here, the center is a mess and—”

“How many days, Diem.” An order, not a question.

I sighed, then shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

He crossed his arms with a deep-cut frown. Despite the wrinkles mapping their way across his features, he still looked the part of the fearsome warrior—tanned skin leathery from years under the Emarion sun, shoulders thick with muscle. “Well, I’mverysure. Do you know how I’m so sure?”

I swallowed a teasing response, managing instead to hold his gaze while shaking my head.

“Because I found this.” He held up a small, crescent-shaped jar containing a powder the color of warm blood on fresh snow. “It was inside my fishing box. The one that hasn’t been opened since I went out on the waterten days ago.”

For a brief moment, the argument played itself out in the theater of my head. I would complain that I was sick of taking the powder, that it made my brain fuzzy and my emotions dull. He would say those were necessary side effects, that the hallucinations the flameroot prevented—symptoms of a disease I’d inherited from my birth father, the same illness that turned my eyes grey and my hair white at age ten—would be far more severe than a clouded mind. I would let it slip that I had actually stopped taking the flameroot weeks ago, yet the visions hadn’t returned. He would tell me that I was being reckless and immature, that my mother would be disappointed.

My mother.

That was a spiderweb I did not feel like getting snagged in.

Experience told me to cut my losses and give in. But even as I hung my head, working my expression into penitence, a persistentvoicecried out from deep inside of me—the call of my burning temper.

Fight.

“Thank you,” I said with as apologetic a tone as I could muster. “I’ve been looking everywhere for that.” I reached to pluck it from his grasp, but his other hand closed around my wrist.

“Diem, I need to be able to trust you.”

Dueling waves of shame and irritation battled for release. I looked away, shoving them both down.

“I know things have been difficult since your mother...” He trailed off, and I knew he was struggling to choose the right word.Disappeared? Left? Was taken?

We’d never had a funeral service for her. Never even admitted she might be dead.

Out of denial, naivete, or just dumb, blind hope, we’d convinced ourselves that she was justaway. Left on a trip she’d forgotten to mention. Visiting a distant patient who perhaps needed more help than she’d expected. Any day now, we’d get a letter from her, apologizing profusely and explaining. Any day, she’d walk back through the door.

For the first few weeks, I’d almost believed it. But now, after so long...

Now, we didn’t talk about it. Swollen by months of silence, the truth had become too painful to touch.

“It’s been hard for all of us, with her absent,” he said.

Fight.

There it was again, thatvoicethat plagued me. A harsh retort took form in my chest, and my teeth clenched to keep it in.

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