“Requested?” I echoed as tension crept up from my feet. “Or required?”
“Requested,” the second sentinel confirmed in a harsher tone. “By the Right Hand.”
My hands curled into fists, and the anxious feeling that had plagued me as we approached Ashpoint’s gate returned in force. The Ossuary had guards and prison cells and people who wouldthink we were villains if they knew of our intentions—if they heard the news Thoma and Rosie had been spreading.
Kit didn't question or argue. He merely took his cloak from the hook on the wall and slung it around his shoulders.
I hated to see what looked like defeat in his posture. I knew him well enough to recognize it wasn't as simple as that, but he was always more inclined to relent than resist. He believed things went more smoothly that way. I didn't doubt it, but one could very smoothly slide into an early grave if they simply laid down and let it happen.
“Suppose he should refuse,” I called over while Kit was fastening the collar of his cloak. “What would happen then?”
Kit shot me an exasperated look, then turned toward the sentinels. “I'm not refusing,” he told them.
Their grizzled faces bent in twin frowns as Kit looked at me again.
“I'm sure it's nothing, Pen,” he said. “And, on the subject of nothing, the cabinets are all but bare. Take Thoma and get something to eat at the tavern. I'll join you in a bit.”
Thoma’s hand rested heavily on my shoulder. I hadn’t even noticed him standing. I was inclined to shrug him off and pursue when the Sentinels swiveled out into the snowy dusk and Kit dutifully followed. Instead, I stayed where I was put and rubbed my hand over the leather cord tied around my wrist. It felt fragile somehow. Everything did, including the silence that shattered when the front door swung shut.
I stared at it and twisted the cord around my arm, reeling with the rapid shift from the waking dream that was Stagcross to this. A joyful return interrupted. It felt like I’d fallen through a cloud and hit the ground hard. It knocked the air out of me.
“Do you want to go to the tavern?” Thoma asked. “No sense waiting here.”
“What if it’s Merrick?” The question tumbled out of me, riding on the realization of the way I’d left things a few days earlier. Bolting out of the city after confronting my half-brother in his home. Giving him the same treatment his wife had given Kit.
Merrick was prone to stewing, calculating, and he’d had time to bide during our absence. Ample opportunity to bend Levitt’s ear and fill his head with lies. Or truths.
Thoma’s forehead creased. “What about Merrick?”
I spun toward him as nausea added to the breathless clench in my chest. “I did something. Kit doesn’t know about it…” I grimaced. “Though he may be about to find out.”
Thoma didn’t press while I considered my parting words to Merrick, then ground my teeth at the knowledge that my reluctant sibling would never let me be the one to finish a fight. Everything began and ended with him; it always had. Growing up, I’d been constantly pinned under his thumb, but here, in a city he seemed to own, it felt more like being ground under his heel.
Recounting the story of my pre-dawn raid on Merrick’s house made me sound a bit like a madman. Thoma’s face went slack and pale as he listened, offering infrequent nods as I grew more and more aggravated. At Merrick, then at myself because if Kit was being dragged before the Right Hand to answer for my behavior, I had no one else to blame.
I spoke quickly to get through it and found myself struggling to string words together by the end. Flushed and furious, I wrenched my hand around my wrist until it was nearly rubbed raw, and when the last bit of honesty trickled out, it left me feeling drained.
“One of these times I'm afraid they'll take him from me, and I'll never get him back.” I glanced over at Thoma and receivedanother halting nod in response. But he must have understood that better than most, so I turned and grabbed him by the arms.
“Ineedhim back, Thoma,” I insisted. “I need him out of here so he can be with me. So we can run the farm together and have a real life away from this awful place.” All my plans and hopes and dreams felt like they were falling, too. Fledgling things that had barely taken off.
I tightened my grip on Thoma’s biceps and fixed my gaze on his. “I want to end it now. End it all. I?—”
“Penny?” Thoma laid one of his hands on mine.
The touch, or maybe the sudden hardness in his expression, stopped me.
“Wh-what?” I sputtered.
“Let's go.”
I blinked, fighting the slide down the slope of panic. “Go where?”
He took a step back to free himself from my grasp, then took my hand in his. It didn’t feel like Kit’s. It wasn’t as tender or affectionate or warm, but it was welcome, and I tightened my grip.
“They aren't taking Kit away from you,” Thoma said. “Not tonight and not for good. Now, let's go to the Ossuary and get some answers.”
26
