Page 130 of Ash and Feather

She walked inside without saying a word, pausing in front of the table and kneeling as Mother used to do.

She wasn’t praying. She never prayed. She only ran her hands over the faded, stained wood, tapping thoughtfully in the places where the burn marks bled through.

Finally, she glanced at me and said, “Sorry I was gone so long. Have you eaten dinner?”

I shook my head.

I didn’t protest when she led me to the kitchen, sat me at the table, and plopped a plate of food down in front of me. I picked at piles of vegetables and the heavily-spiced and roasted meat. My sister was an excellent cook—naturally gifted in ways I could only mimic after years of practice—but mortal food didn’t taste as good as it once had to me. Not even hers.

Or maybe it was just this house, its wards, this whole situation making everything unappetizing.

Savna settled down in the chair across from me, carrying a plate of her own. “How are you feeling?”

My head felt the clearest it had since my arrival…and the downside of this was that it left too much room for anger to fester and turn my tone venomous.

“Relatively healthy,” I spat, “for a prisoner on her—what is this, the fourth day?—of being tortured by the remnants of her past.”

She arched a brow. “Well, I pride myself on pristine prison conditions and relatively healthy torture practices. I’m glad you approve of my methods.”

I bit back a laugh, hating that we still shared the same sense of humor.

The next few minutes passed in silence, but we eventually found a way to maneuver around the tense and sharp uncertainties, making more small talk and the occasional sarcastic jab at one another.

Jabs that soon led to glimmers of real laughter.

I was falling for her. Again. I could feel myself tumbling down, and I again hated myself for it, but I felt powerless to stop.

I stared at my hands as she chattered on about some game we used to play as children. I was half-expecting to find that she’d carved runes into my palms like she had in the ground outside—proof of whatever strange spell she’d woven over me. Because surely that was the only explanation for why I kept getting caught up in the possibility of us again and again and again.

The spell broke several minutes later, but only because she released it; she fell silent, the laughter fading from her eyes as her mouth pressed into a thin line. The abrupt shift in tone was jarring.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

A long pause.

A chill of uncertainty swept over me, raising bumps along my arms.

Savna gripped her drink more tightly and said, “I need to tell you something.”

She was silent for such a long time after that I began to think she’d forgotten what thatsomethingwas. Maybe she was trying to forget it.

“Well?” I prompted.

She looked up, gaze focusing on the wall behind me—on a peeling painting of our family’s ancient coat-of-arms—rather than on my face as she said, “Andrel is coming here later tonight.”

I put my fork down. “Why?”

“Because I asked him to.”

I dug my fingers into the edge of the table. There were already scratch marks in the wood from heated dinner conversations of the past, back when I was still a child and my claws were harder to control.

I kept those claws retracted, now.

At least for the moment.

Savna abandoned her food, her hands moving instead to her napkin, which she continuously twisted and untwisted as she spoke. “I knew you would be upset.”

“Then why did you arrange it?”

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