Page 262 of The Sun He Buried

“You made a noise.”

“I can feel you trying to escape.”

“I haven’t moved.”

“You’re doing both.”

This arrangement has flaws.

I turn around, pick her up off the bad ankle, and put her back in the chair. She keeps a fistful of my shirt the whole way and doesn’t look remotely sorry about it.

“I spent your whole life keeping this on one side,” I say.

“I know.”

“You’ve had it for less than two days.”

“Yup.”

“You nearly died during one of them.”

Her guilt cuts through the warmth.

“I thought if I just told him,” she says. “Baldr. That if I got to him first and said it to his face—that I’d chosen you—the two of you would stop using me to cut at each other.”

“So you went out to do it alone.”

“I was only going to find him in the Hall. How was I suppose to know there were bad people here.”

“You didn’t take the Sanguir.”

“I shut her in.” Her voice goes thin. “I finally won that argument, the one morning I never should have.”

Snowpetal, who put her nose down in a foot of snow and came after her anyway, opens one eye at her name and bites a fold of skirt.

“She still got to you. The rest of us were slower.”

I kneel in front of her.

“You decided the whole thing was yours to fix,” I say. “Alone.”

“I was trying—”

“So was I. For years. It went about as well.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“Correct.”

Snowpetal lifts her head as I lean in, dried blood still on the small muzzle, one horn resting against Solveih’s bandaged wrist.

“Three of us made this,” I say. “You’re the only one who bled for it. You left Asta staring at an empty room. You handed Baldr one more thing to hate himself for. And you spent the worst hour of your life screaming down the bond for me while a man wrapped silver around her horns.”

Solveih’s tears fall faster.

“I know.”

“Look at me.”