“I heard,” Thaelan says absently, rubbing dirt from his boots with a frown.
I bite the inside of my cheek; raids are routine to him. A duty to be performed before dinner. “He was our age,” I say. The teenaged son of a man executed for slander over fifteen years ago. Sin begets sin, Perrote had claimed, and bad blood must be cut off at the root to keep it from spreading. But I walk soft through the streets and I hear the whispers that live in the shadows: The kingdom is overcrowded, and so long as there are Brim rats enough to bite back, Perrote will mask his true intentions beneath a banner of overdue justice.
In reality, he’s just making room.
Thaelan looks up at my tone, eyebrows furrowed. “Did you know him?”
“No,” I say, but I know the warning behind the raid, and the promise it carries for people like me. My mother failed to kill me ten years ago. The king’s executioner will have much better aim. “Let’s leave.”
“Of course,” he says, still focused on his boots.
“Right now. Before the tunnels shift again and the path disappears.”
“That’s only happened once and it was probably just my nerves.” He snorts, shaking his head and sitting back. “Those walls are so full of magic, I swear, sometimes I hear them breathing.”
“I’m serious,” I say.
“Right.” He runs a hand through his hair and gives me a sidelong look.
“Thaelan.” Shifting, I kneel in front of him, resting my hands on his knees, forcing him to look at me. He does so with familiar resignation: We’ve played this scene before, and he already knows how it ends.
But I am brave tonight, a true disciple of Rook. “I’m going to marry you,” I say, and when I kiss him, it’s like drinking too much barleywine: I feel woozy, light headed, completely off balance, and yet, grounded as the mountains themselves with my certainty. “Tonight,” I repeat against his mouth, and it thrills down my spine before guilt seizes it mid-shiver. “Cadence,” I say suddenly, as I should have said from the beginning. She’s only eleven years old and I can’t leave her here, not with a father who often forgets to come home, who forgets to bring food, who forgets to say that he loves her.
Who forgets sometimes if he does.
“She’s coming with us,” Thaelan says without hesitation, and I know he never considered otherwise.
Ignited, I cradle Thaelan’s face between my hands and kiss him the way I’ve never let myself kiss him before: full of hunger and greed and hope, all the virtue in me and all the vice, balanced on my lips.
And he wants both sides of me.
Moments later, we run hand in hand, giddy, laughing our way through the darkened streets of the Brim. When we wake Cadence, her blue eyes flash in the dim gloom of our bedroom, widening as she recognizes the face beside mine.
“Thaelan!” She throws back her blanket and bounds into his arms. “Mother of a sainted virgin, where have you been!?”
“Cadence,” I say, alarmed. Embarrassed. She runs wild when I’m working in the fields, and I can’t cure her of the vulgarities she learns from the other street rats.
But Thaelan laughs and she shoots me a triumphant smirk. “What do you know about sainted virgins?” he teases.
Her eyes flick to the statue of Charity balanced on the windowsill—a patron saint of virtue, and an apparent virgin like so many have been. It’s a cheap reminder to temper the greed that lives inside me, to deny the same vice that sent my mother to her grave.
I stole it, like almost everything else in this room.
“Well, I know they have mothers,” she says, and grins when Thaelan laughs again. “Which means I can’t ever be one.”
“Sweet Saint Cade,” Thaelan says, ruffling her hair.
I don’t laugh with them, annoyed. Wounded. She was too young to remember anyone but me taking care of her, and I know I don’t have soft hands and sweet songs and spools of thread for Cadence to stack in wobbly castles across the floor the way a mother would.
But Cadence doesn’t have nine stitches above her heart, either.
“Look,” she says, launching herself off the bed, wielding an imaginary sword in one hand, her other fisted behind her back for balance, the way Thaelan taught her.
I sidestep her and begin packing our sparse belongings into a canvas bag. Clothes, a handful of coins, a book that once belonged to my mother—the only thing of hers small enough for me to hide from the guards the night they burnt our house to the ground.
“Lunge, parry, block, and thrust!” She grunts as her arm cuts the motions with a hiss, nightgown stretched wide as her legs shift into place.
“You’ve been practicing!” Thaelan grins. “Good girl! I hereby promote you to first mate.”
“Captain,” she corrects, straightening. “First mates are for pirates and I’m going to be a solider. Just like you.”
She used to beg me to buy her pirate stories from a peddler who remembered life before the war, when the oceans surrounding our island continent were filled with merchants and mercenaries. But pirates lost their appeal the same time I did, which is just as well. The peddler and his stories disappeared months ago.
“And then,” Cadence continues, all seriousness, “I’m going to marry you.”
Thaelan arches his eyebrows and meets my eyes over the top of her head.
“Get dressed,” I say, turning her toward our bureau. That’s another conversation for another day.
“Are we moving again?” Cadence tears off her nightgown after confirming Thaelan can’t see her from behind the bedsheet I hold between us—to ensure that I’m not peeking, either. But I do peek as she struggles into her dress, mourning the bones that show through her skin when she bends forward. Like its limes, the Brim grows its children stilted; too much dirt and not enough sunlight.
“Something like that,” I say, buttoning the back of her dress as she holds her tangled curls up and out of the way. I’ve barely finished before she twists out of reach, grabbing Thaelan’s hand instead of my own. She’s too big but he still swings her on his back, leading the charge downstairs, into the night.
Thaelan boldly marches through the street whereas I resist the urge to stick to the shadows as we head into the sleepier merchant neighborhood of the Ridge, to a narrow alley hidden from any shadow crows by the close-knit corners of the buildings that frame its length. Setting Cadence down, Thaelan casts a glance over his shoulder before he pries open a drainage grate. After waiting a beat to ensure no one heard, he turns to me, hand outstretched and an expectant smile on his face.
All at once, I realize what we’re doing. Cadence stands above a sewer drain in the middle of the night while I clutch our entire life in a tattered bag. The giddy haze of Thaelan’s kisses fades, replaced with the reality of the guards I can hear patrolling the streets.
Thaelan’s smile evaporates. He starts to shake his head even before I speak. Standing, he frames my face in his hands. “Don’t you dare change your mind,” he says. “Not now, not after you said yes.”
“But we have nothing—”