Page 65

Now she’s coming through the passage with leaves in her right hand.

She steps around the bowl of entrails and looks at the fish. Both spits are where she left them, at the cooler edge, and she crouches to turn the nearer one with her left arm tucked against her side.

She came back.

The path was open below her. She could’ve tried it.

Kestria looks up from the fish, past me to the passage, and back at my face.

“Still here.” She puts the leaves on the preparation stone. “Have you got a knife?”

Both my ears have gone back. I look at her hand instead. There’s a broken stem across her palm.

“A small one.” She holds her thumb and forefinger apart. “You’re a brute. Brutes always have weapons.”

“For leaves?”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

I draw a breath through my nose and go into the inner passage.

The hide knife’s too big for her hand. The narrow case is on the shelf beside it, past the pool, and I lift that down instead.

My first talon. A child’s first was always kept and made into something useful, and mine’s a knife, small enough for the hand I had then.

I pull it from the case with my blunt fingers and try the edge. Still sharp. I haven’t used it in years.

She asked for a small one.

When I come back, Kestria’s got the water pot by the coals and two roots on the stone with her leaves. Her hair’s pushed behind her ears, and the right cuff’s rolled farther back.

I hold out the handle with the little case under it.

“Keep it.”

Her fingers close around the wood, and she turns the pale curve of the blade toward the fire, close to her face.

“That’s a talon.”

“Yes.”

She looks up with a grin starting, and I wait with the case still in my hand.

The grin goes, and she closes her mouth. She takes the case from me and lowers the knife.

“Thank you.”

She gathers the leaves onto the stone and starts cutting.

I sit across from her while she scrapes the pieces together with the flat of the blade. It fits her hand, her little finger right at the end of the wood. “Those roots will take longer than the fish.”

“Not if you cut them.”

She pushes one toward me. I take it and split it with my index claw, and she taps the stone beside my hand.

“Thinner.”

I grunt and cut a thinner piece. She picks it up, looks at it, and drops it into the water pot.