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Soon enough we heard the shouts and clatter of students coming from the training grounds. The wind gusted over the small courtyard that the stairs opened onto and brought with it the scent of cut grass and mud.

For a while, neither of us said anything. Silence with the right person, I was learning, was not always a thing to be fixed. At home, silence had usually meant a bill nobody wanted to open or a question nobody wanted to answer, and I had spent years filling it so my parents wouldn’t have to.

But this was different.

Kit turned the flame over his knuckles, back and forth, watching it like it might tell him something new.

“My father wasn’t fire,” he said.

I kept my eyes on the flame and not on his face. That felt important, like I was giving him privacy as he spoke even though he was talking to me.

“The Wyndhams are old power, wind, mostly,” he said. “Very elegant. Very boring. Good for ships, storms, dramatic entrances. Making robes billow at exactly the right moment so nobody trips over a hem.” A beat. “You’d have hated us. Fire showed up in me at random. Maybe the universe has a sense of humor or just genuinely poor taste? I don’t know.”

The flame thinned, brightened, pulled itself taller. “I was ten,” he said. “The house went up at night. They got my mother out. Got me out.” He paused, and the flame paused with him. “Didn’t get him.” He said it evenly, too evenly, the way a person said a thing he had said in his own head so many times that the words had gone smooth and worn, like a worry stone.

“And nobody knows,” he went on, “whether I started it, fed it, or simply failed to stop it. That’s the part Sallow’s precious footnotes clean up so nicely. Late manifestation, structural ignition, blah blah tragedy, and everyone can look at the diagram instead of the boy. The truth is, I woke up with fire in my hands and my father dead in a burning house, and everyone I’ve met since has spent years being too well-bred to ask the obvious question.”

The flame vanished. His hand stayed open and empty, with the palm up like he’d forgotten it was there.

Memories about the Walkers’ house filled my mind, everything from the wall of heat of the front hall to Davey’s arms locked around my neck and his face jammed into my shoulder with all of that complete terrible trust. I thought about the fire leaning away from me like it knew something about me I hadn’t been told yet. And there was the sentence, the one I’d handed the fireman on the wet grass because he’d needed one and I’d somehow had one ready.

I’d given the fireman something believable and he’d swallowed it, appreciating it for the out that it was so he didn’t have to question my story. People loved a cause that made sense in their mind, and they loved it almost as much as they loved a survivor. I was one and Kit was the other, and I understood instantly that he’d been carrying the harder side of being a survivor.

My gaze strayed from his hand to the courtyard in front of us as I said, “Would have been better if you did voices.”

For one second nothing happened. The wind moved, and somewhere in the training yards a shield cracked against a blow from force, an audible snap ringing through the air all the way down to where we were sitting.

Then Kit laughed.

This was not the dining-hall laugh, and not the one he tossed into a room like a lit match to watch the reaction catch. This one cracked somewhere on the way out of him, half startled, half pure breath, and he bent forward into it with his elbows on his knees. When he finally looked at me, the expression on his face was stripped of so much performance that it felt almost indecent to be looking at it, like it was too raw.

“You didn’t do the face,” he said after regaining his breath.

“What face?”

“The face. Everyone does it. The ‘oh, Kit’ face. The tragic-child, possible-patricide, poor-dangerous-boy face.”

“I don’t have that face.”

“No.” He was still looking at me. “You really don’t.”

“I have other faces. Most of them hostile.”

“Those are…restful.”

We sat in the cold with that between us. His shoulder was near enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, even with the flame gone. Or maybe that was my imagination, which had become deeply unreliable around him lately, and which I intended to have a serious word with when I got the chance.

“My turn?” he asked.

“For what?”

“One true thing. Fair’s fair.”

I should have said no, because I was good at no. No had carried me through offices and grocery lines and hallways where boys stood too close on purpose, and it was a tool with a handle worn smooth from use. But he’d handed me the worst of himself and hadn’t once asked me to make it prettier or smaller or easier for him to hold. He had trusted me and that counted for something, more than I wanted it to.

“You know how I was selected to come here?”

He nodded. Apparently, everyone had heard about me being first-gen and surviving a burning building that should have killed me. “I went into the Walkers’ house because Davey was in there,” I said.