Page 57

I nodded. “I don’t know how to tell you this, so I’m just going to say it.” That got her attention. She looked at me for the first time since I’d joined her. “I told Baer about your mapping. I was trying to help, but—but I made a terrible mistake.”

She stared—not saying a word—for too many agonizing moments. I waited for the floodgates to break. I braced myself for it. But then her eyes slid away, back to the sea, and she sighed.

“Why in the world would you think that was helpful?”

“I—” I faltered. “I don’t know. I was trying to tell Baer that he was wrong about you, about more than just you, but…,”

I trailed off, and Fenli didn’t fill the space.

“I made things worse.” I thought about what would happen next. They’d come for her things. All her materials, her maps, taken away. Rumors would spread. Life for her would be even harder. “Gods, Fen. I’m so sorry.”

She rose to her feet and dusted the dirt from her palms, wincing. I snatched her wrist and held her injured hand between us.

“You got your stitches out?”

“This morning.”

“Damn, I meant to be there with you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Fen, I’m sorry. I’ve ruined everything.”

She pulled her hand away.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said again, and then she turned, heading back toward the village.

“How can you say that?” I scrambled after her, trying to glimpse her face as I drew up beside her. “It matters.”

She smiled. It was a small, sad thing, and I couldn’t understand it. Where was her rage? Her ire?

Where was Fenli?

“Fine, it matters.” She looked at me. “But I don’t care anymore, Roan. Don’t worry. I know you meant no harm. You were trying to help.”

I stopped in my tracks, but she kept right on ahead. “Why are you not angry?” I called out over the wind.

She turned and walked backwards, her hair flying around her face, lashing her cheeks. “Anger is exhausting,” she said, “and I’m tired. Will you do me a favor, though?”

“Anything.”

“Don’t hunt the wolves. I couldn’t bear it—you, being a wolf hunter.”

Then she turned back and left me there with nothing but her words.

I wasn’t even sure I’d heard her right. Nothing made sense to me, not her request for me to bow out from the wolf hunt and not her detached reaction to the secret I’d told. I thought back to the first time I’d met her, how mere moments in her hut had prompted her to hide every scrap of paper and drawing nub from sight. She’d been desperate to keep her things, keep the private life she’d made for herself. And now, she wasn’t.

She acted like she didn’t care at all.

It would have been better if she had yelled, I realized. I wished she’d raged and fought and swore. What did it mean that she hadn’t?

I glanced at my feet and startled. There, by the tip of my boot, was a long bone. It was the femur of a deer, broken cleanly into two halves.

It signified an ending.

And it was a bad omen.

Chapter Twenty-Five