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She read the shock on my face.

“Don’t be like that,” she said. “Hear me out. If I could prove myself, maybe I could bring about some kind of change for our clan. I could pave a way for other girls who want the same things.”

My mind was sputtering.

“Like you. With your maps.”

Like me. With my maps.

“They’d have our hides.”

“I don’t care.” She waved me off. “I can’t keep dying the fabric. This clan is stuck in the past, and I’m not going to sit around waiting for the future. In the goddesses clans, the women have choices. It’s time the gods extend the same freedoms to their women.”

Blasphemy.

I liked it, but it scared me all the same.

“I agree,” I confessed. “Of course I do.”

And she nodded. “You’ve been wronged more than any of us.”

But I wasn’t thinking of myself just then. Realization was dawning as I put the pieces together.

“You stole the knife.” Of course it had been her. She’d helped carry them in, and I’d seen her toying with one. “Roan’s hunting knife.”

There was that smile of hers again. “He noticed?”

I gave her my most withering stare. “And blamed me.”

She laughed. “That’s ridiculous,” but she didn’t seem bothered by my marital stress because she breezed over it. “It’s a great knife. Nothing like the fingernail scrapers they give us girls. The blade is—”

But she was cut off when the door opened and her latest victim walked back in.

“Honey rolls?” she asked.

He tossed two across the room and she caught them both.

“I didn’t steal them, just so you know.” He glanced at me and looked away just as quickly. “I asked for them.”

“You’re too good for the likes of we miscreants,” she said with a mock bow. She handed me one and tore into hers, a look of utter satisfaction on her face.

And it dawned on me that this was exactly the outcome she’d been counting on. Roan, who was too honest for his own good, would use the opportunity to teach her that stealing was no way to get what you wanted. In doing so, she would get exactly what she wanted.

Damn, she was clever. It was part of why she was so beloved, despite being an absolute fiend.

I hoped, for her sake, that the streak wasn’t nearing its end. Maybe she could make a change here in this clan. Maybe she could carve out a place for herself and for the girls who came after her.

As much as I wished it, I knew I wouldn’t be here to see it. There might be hope enough for her, but it was too late for me. There was no reconciliation coming that could right the wrongs and clear the way for the kind of life I wanted. I was already in too deep, a thorn in the elder’s heels. I was tolerated, not beloved, and the gap between what I had and what I wanted was too great a chasm to bridge.

I was leaving my clan and heading out on my own.

And I was doing it in just two days.

Chapter Eight

Roan

After ten years away from my home, I’d gotten a lousy handful of days back before we abandoned it for good. It should have been easy for me to leave, and I pretended it was. But the truth was more complicated.