I look behind me. The blue flames have reached the pantry door.
Some distant part of me lurches at that—there are over a dozen children, Gisele, Umayya, and Joniza, what will theyeatif all the food burns—and then a passionless calculation clicks into place.
Joniza’s collecting most of the children in the street outside, Umayya and Gisele bringing down the last stragglers. I rush up the stairs, twisted ankle be damned, and grab Gisele’s arm as smoke begins pooling on the ceiling. “The money,” I hiss, “the donation I left last week, where is it?”
“Now?” she shoots back, bewildered. The sobbing toddler she’s carrying yanks a handful of her hair.
I don’t have time for this. “I know you didn’t spend it! Where is it?”
She frees a hand to point down the hall. “Last bedroom, under the mattress on the left—”
I don’t wait to hear the rest. I hear her shouting after me as I stagger toward the end of the hall, covering my face with my apron. More smoke leaks between the floorboards, the heat like a knife in my lungs.
I burst into Gisele’s room, where two plain beds are tucked in opposite corners. Left, she saidleft, didn’t she? I try that bed first. The mattress is heavy, stuffed with straw and rag with more hay beneath it, and it’s a struggle to keep it lifted as I run my free hand through the stalks. It’s getting even hotter, the air curdling with smoke.
Finally my fingers catch on soft leather. Gisele hasn’t even emptied the pennies from the purse. I seize it and crawl from the bedroom, staying low, where the air is clearer.
I’m still racked with coughs by the time I make it to the landing. The downstairs is almost entirely blue flames, the gap of the ruined front door a dimming target. Faintly, I hear Umayya shouting, “No, stop!”
Then a silhouette darkens the doorway. I hear the steps creaking in agony as the figure takes them two at a time, and then Emeric’s face swims out of the choking shadows, becauseof course. Of course it’s him. Who else would believe the absolute worst of me and still run into a burning house to save my life?
He wraps one arm around my shoulders, the other around my waist, and we half stagger, half tumble down the stairs, out into the shocking savage cold. People are yelling, throwing handfuls of snow and buckets of water, but there’s no point. Between the lantern oil and themahr, it’ll take the Yssar itself to put it out. At least the snow-banked neighboring rooftops won’t catch a spark.
I drag in breath after breath of clean air. Emeric’s still holding me steady, and half of me wants to stay this way, pretend everything’s fine now, we can go back to how it was before this morning.
But I have not survived this long by listening to that part of me. I shove him off.
Immediately hands wrap around my elbows—Gisele, this time. She’s wet-eyed and livid. “Vanja, what were youthinking? It’s just money! You could have gotten yourself and Emeric killed!”
“Justmoney?” I gasp through the cacophony, and sweep a hand at the children watching flames devour the Gänslinghaus. Only some of them even have coats on. “How are you going to feed them? Where are you going to stay?” I shake the purse at her. “How are you going to buy a newhouse, Gisele? How can you live like this for a year, and still say it’sjust money?”
“Who’s Gisele?” one of the orphans whispers.
“We’re going to have another problem,” Joniza says, smoke roughening her voice. “The inns are filling up. Between Winterfast and the wedding, there’s hardly an empty bed in Minkja.”
“No one has family here to help?” Ragne asks, now a wolfhound, tail wagging as a few younger children cling to her sides.
Gisele shakes her head. “It’s an orphanage. None of us do.”
I stare at the dirty snow in the street, at the purse in my hand.
That’s not exactly true.
At the edge of the crowd, I see Wolfhünden lingering, eyes sharp as hunger. There are too many witnesses for them to trample over a bunch of orphans in plain view, but we can’t stay here. There is only one place to go.
Scheit, I’m going to hate this.
“I have an idea,” I say shortly. “Follow me. And don’t ask questions.”
We wind up flagging down a passing farmer for a ride along the Hoenstratz viaduct, because it’s a long way to go with over a dozen children, and even longer when many need to be carried or kept warm. She’s more than happy to pack them into her haycart. The rest of us walk alongside it, an awful, sick silence weighing every step. Ragne sticks close by me but doesn’t say a word, only steadies me as the limp from my ankle gets worse.
I don’t even try to look at Emeric. It’s not out of spite or chill, but self-preservation. If I think about it, about him, if I even pick at the loose ends of that knot, I’m going to start crying again.
We leave the viaduct and the friendly farmer just north of the Göttermarkt. Mercifully, it’s not the same staircase I came up earlier, so we don’t have to worry about the children tramping through Emeric’s blood or my vomit. A few of the younger ones start to whine as we wind through the lanes, but it’s not long before I see the telltale spires.
We’ve come to my mother’s house. At least, one of them.
Fortune’s cathedral stands large, gaudy, and lined in actual coal dust. Great urns bracket each side of the brass-wrought door. There are four, one for each type of hasty help a passerby might want: gold coins for one’s own good fortune, silver for another’s, copper coins to relieve one’s bad fortune, and coal bits to wish it on another.
