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Trying to quell her disappointment, Thea palmed the sleep from her eyes. ‘Come in.’
The fabric shifted and Anya ducked inside, looking around, her gait slightly awkward. Her wings weren’t visible, and as she spoke with a note of self-consciousness, she looked more like Wren than Thea had realised. ‘Wasn’t sure you’d be alone… You’ve got that Warsword in pieces.’
‘He’s not here,’ Thea said, watching as Anya paced across the width of the tent, running her hand over her shaved head, as restless as a storm out to sea.
Thea herself didn’t know what to do with her hands, didn’t know what to say. This stranger before her was hersister,bound to her by blood, and yet… she knew nothing about her beyond her shadows and wings.
Luckily, Anya spoke first. ‘I’m sorry I walked off before.’ She paused her pacing, only to trace a circle in the dirt with the tip of her boot. She looked as uncomfortable as Thea felt. Whatwasthe protocol for talking to a long-lost sister who’d been deemed an enemy for the better part of a year?
‘It’s alright,’ Thea ventured. ‘I can’t imagine it was easy, watching all that again…’
Anya shrugged casually, still toeing the dirt. ‘No worse than the nightmares I have every night.’
‘I’m sorry you went through that. That you go through it still.’
Anya dipped her head. ‘Thank you.’
Thea gestured to the table and chairs. ‘Do you want to sit?’ Wren would have offered the moment Anya had walked in.
Anya hesitated, those sharp features softened with uncertainty for the first time.
Thea dropped into a seat without ceremony. ‘Third time’s the charm,’ she tried to joke.
Her shadow-touched sister gave a sheepish half-smile at that and sat down in the chair beside her. She rummaged through her pockets and produced a lump of something wrapped in cloth.
‘Thought you might need something to eat,’ she said. ‘It’s just bread. There’ll be porridge in the morning.’
‘Thanks.’ Thea’s fingers touched Anya’s as she accepted the food, and a burst of electric current made her jump.
‘Sorry,’ Anya muttered. ‘I usually have it well under control, but… it’s been an emotional day.’
‘It used to be like that for me too,’ Thea admitted, unwrapping the bread and holding back a moan as she took a bite. It was fresh sourdough, still warm.
‘Not anymore, huh?’
‘Not anymore.’
Anya nodded to herself and leant back in her chair, unsheathing a dagger from her boot and twirling it between herfingers. ‘So you don’t remember me at all, do you?’ she asked, voice soft, attention fixed on the blade.
Thea grimaced. ‘Not clearly… but there are little things.’
Anya glanced up.
‘Some things came to me when Wilder and I visited Delmira over a year ago. There were flowers… I remember braiding necklaces with someone… At first I thought it was Wren, but she would have been too young. It was you, wasn’t it?’
Anya nodded. ‘Our mother taught me. I used to make them for everyone. I did nothing else for two summers.’
‘I don’t remember her either,’ Thea said. ‘Or him – our father.’
‘I feared that for the longest time – forgetting them,’ Anya told her. ‘Especially without you and Wren. Every now and then, there will come a day where I realise I don’t remember the exact sound of Mama’s laugh, or the way the sunlight caught in Pa’s hair. But I remember the important things. That they were good and kind rulers. That they were good and kind parents.’
‘We were told they were tyrants.’
Anya shook her head. ‘There wasn’t a bone like that in either of their bodies.’
‘They left us on Thezmarr’s doorstep…’
‘Toprotectus.’
