“Are eggs and toast alright for breakfast?”

  Mara stood at the threshold of the kitchen, Nick’s hand clasped in her own. She’d just spent five irritated minutes trying to tame her hair and wrangle her personality into something fit for human consumption. Her hair was in a braid. Her personality…

  “Yes. Please.” She stared at Quint, who labored, back hunched, over a pan on the stove. “You keep chickens?”

  Quint jerked his thumb toward the back of the cabin. “Thirteen of them, until the eggs start hatching.”

  “How do you keep them safe?” She hadn’t seen or heard any dogs, and surely these woods were crawling with predators that would make quick work of a coop of chickens.

  “Same way we keep ourselves safe. Heaps of magic I couldn’t begin to explain. Go ahead and sit. I just put tea on. Do you take honey?”

  Depths, when was the last time she’d had honey with her tea? Tiff had offered it with cream, and there’d been sugar in Cinder but no honey. “Yes. Please.”

  She sat at the table, setting Nick on her lap. A small bowl of brambleberries sat on the table, and her son immediately reached for them.

  “He can have some,” Quint said, having caught her efforts to stay Nick’s exploration from the corner of his eye. “We have too many. The more you eat the less we have to can.”

  “Thank you.” Mara pulled the bowl toward them on the table, and Nick dove in with messy enthusiasm. “And thank you for letting us stay here.”

  “It’s our job. And even if it wasn’t, we’d be happy to have you. It’s just the two of us here, most days. Any company is good company. Toast?”

  “There’s bread?” She sat up straighter. She hadn’t had leavened bread for weeks. Months, maybe. Not since they ate the last of their loaf from Cinder, and that had been crusty, chewy stuff that was made to keep, not to taste. Tiff had served them flatbread and fried dough—delicious but not quite the same as a proper loaf.

  “Sourdough. Vauntner’s an enthusiast.”

  “I need to meet Vauntner properly,” Mara mused. “I wasn’t the most gracious houseguest last night.”

  “You were doing pretty well for a woman who’d survived a Songbird, the Order, and months on the road with Eli for company.”

  If Mara hadn’t seen the two interact, didn’t know for certain that they were friends, she might have pushed back on that a little. Said something about how Eli made for good company, that he’d taken good care of her and of Nick. That if she seemed to be doing pretty well, it was only because he’d sheltered her from the worst of the storm and wedged himself like a prop beneath her constantly sagging mood.

  But she did know for certain that they were friends, and that the joke came from a place of fondness. So she merely smiled.

  “Where’s everybody else?”

  “Vauntner’s on his way back. When he gets here, I’ll be heading out.”

  “Where to? To the falls, where we met?”

  He dipped his chin in a nod. “We do two checks a day. Vauntner takes the morning, I do the afternoons.”

  It was, Mara realized, nearly noon. She and Nick had both slept in. Before she could decide whether to make some kind of excuse for herself, Quint turned and brought a plate to the table, setting it in front of her. Two perfectly crisp slices of toast sat atop it, coated with a thick layer of purple-red jam.

  It took everything in her to set aside the slavering beast inside her and take the time to tear the crust off one of the slices for Nick before she fell upon the remaining slice like she’d never eaten before.

  “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted,” she said, after her first eye-rolling bite. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

  Quint laughed. “You’re easy to please. Eli not been feeding you?”

  Again, a monologue of defense rose up in her mind, about how Eli hunted every day to keep meat in the diet and subtly skipped meals when they started to run low. How he always seemed to know when she was getting too hungry to continue and called a break so she could eat. But again, she heard the affection in Quint’s voice and merely said, “He hasn’t been feeding me toast.”

  Again, Quint laughed. He did that a lot. Often enough, her mind was already starting to release the memory of the conversation she’d overheard the night before. The somber, serious undercurrent in his voice was so at odds with this person before her. If she asked, could she resurrect that side of him? Would he tell her what was going on? From her understanding, he’d been encouraging Eli to start some sort of uprising. Would he admit it to her if she asked outright?

  Likely not.

  “So. You grew up at the Enclave?” she asked, taking another bite of her toast.

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  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did you know my husband?”

  She watched his back carefully, but saw no sign of tension when she asked the question. His posture was unbothered as he scraped eggs about a cast iron pan.

  “Yes, ma’am. We grew up together.”

  “It’s strange,” she admitted. “He’s never told me much about his childhood. I always imagined him sort of popping up overnight, fully formed. Like a mushroom or something.”

  “Ha!” Quint barked. “No, I assure you, he was a snot-nosed little kid once upon a time. Same as the rest of us. Well…” he trailed off, tilting his head at the pan. “Not quite the same. Even as a kid, Davy was something special.”

  Mara’s heart a sad little twirl, like the dancers she’d seen that one time at the theater—graceful and solemn.

  “What do you mean?”

  Quint scooped the eggs onto a plate and brought them to her with a fork and a napkin, then returned to the stove. What she saw of his face told her little of the answer he was brewing. Maybe because he shared Eli’s talent for masking his feelings, maybe because of the beard.

  “Davy was born a leader. He invented all the games, picked all the teams. And he was good at it, too. As a boy, I never noticed it. But looking back, our little troop never had the squabbles and falling-outs that other kids seem to have. Davy was always there to mend things, you know?”

  “How many of you were there? In your little troop?”

  Returning to the table with two mugs of tea, he sank into the chair across from her and leaned back, eyes drifting behind her, to the past.

  “Six. Me, Davy and Eli, Bri, Sara, and Damon.”

  Mara thought of her own childhood gang. All girls, of course. Otherwise wouldn’t have been acceptable on the Order’s streets–boys and girls weren’t permitted to play together after the age of three. There’d been four of them in her little group. Her, Delia, Lil, and Selise. They’d had their squabbles, but she’d loved those girls like sisters.

  She’d lost track of Delia first, when she earned herself a place at the Academy when they were twelve, and started turning a suspicious eye on Mara’s budding interest in plant medicine. Then Lil, when they were eighteen, whose father married her off to a farmer north of Bedford. Finally, she’d lost touch with Selise. Selise, who knew so many of her secrets. Who knew and proudly kept the greatest secret that was hers to keep—her work as a physik.

  Selise, who wasn’t allowed to know the greatest secret that she’d been given to keep, who had looked at her with disgust when she announced her betrothal to Davy. An Order officer. The enemy.

  Where was Selise now? Where were any of them?

  “Mrs. Linhart?” Mara blinked and looked at Quint, who frowned at her from across the table. “You alright?”

  “Yes. Sorry.” She blinked again and took a sip of the tea. “I’m sorry. This is delicious, by the way.”

  The tea wasn’t delicious. It was too strong after so many weeks spent rationing their dwindling supply, and it tasted not at all of campfire smoke–a background note that had come to be more essential to her than honey had ever been.

  “You looked a bit distracted.”

  Mara took another sip of tea. “I’m sorry. I think all this time on the road, I’ve lost my social skills. You mentioned your childhood friends and I wandered off and started thinking about my own, and how I don’t know where any of them are.” That was how she and Eli conversed, after all. Occasionally they came together for a brief spat of meaningful conversation, but mostly they drifted in and out of each other’s attention, exchanging little snippets of information and then wandering off to process it.

  Quint offered a rumble of sympathetic understanding. “I know what you mean, in a sense. About both things. This assignment is famous for turning normal, well-adjusted socialites into hermits. It’s just the two of us down here, for the most part. As for old friends, I’ve still got Bri around, but Sara’s off to gods know where and Damon’s too busy for old friends. And… well, Davy and Eli left so long ago.”

  Mara understood a little better, now, Quint’s reaction at the falls, when he’d grabbed hold of Eli and studied him as if he might not be real. She’d do the same, if any of her lost friends turned up, ready to settle back into her life. Especially during this time of life when her world had shrunk so drastically to such a cherished few close connections.

  “You must be happy to have Eli back, then.”

  Quint snorted and took another long sip of his tea, eyes flicking up over her left shoulder, to the loft. “You’d really have to search to find someone who wasn’t.”

  That was an opening, right? He was edging toward the information she wanted.

  Mara lowered her voice, wondering if Eli was still up in the loft, sleeping. Surely not. At this hour he’d already be up and off, checking the wards or scouting or some utilitarian nonsense like that. “I’ve noticed that, actually. Everyone we meet seems to love him.”

  Quint grunted, eyes finding hers amid the tangle of his hair and the bushy invasion of his beard.

  “You say that like it surprises you, Mrs. Linhart.”

  His voice had changed, somehow. The timbre was the same, the pitch, the rhythm. But the affable lift to the words had given way to the weight of conviction.

  There was more than simple inquiry in Quint’s question. He was testing her loyalty, if only in a small way. And though it would be easy to say the words he was looking for–Of course not–she was not an adept enough liar to conceal the hint of unease underlying the honest truth.

  She liked Eli. She trusted him. But clearly she knew nothing of the way he moved through the gray moral areas in which the rebellion operated. It didn’t surprise her that people liked him, or even that they loved him. But it unsettled her, this realization that they would apparently follow him into an act of sedition. She wasn’t quite ready to declare her allegiance to him in a political sense. Not when it was Davy’s parents against whom he might stand.

  Before she could formulate an answer sufficient both to mollify Quint’s regard for his friend and conceal her own uncertainty, the ladder creaked. Mara twisted in her seat to see Eli descending from the loft.

  Apparently not out doing utilitarian nonsense, then, but sleeping. They’d probably woken him with their chatter. Embarrassment, guilt, and ironic relief fizzed through her taut muscles. Rescued by the source of the conflict.

  Surely it was her imagination, but his footsteps sounded different to her ears. Heavier, now, with this dawning realization of the weight he carried with him.

  She’d always considered Davy to be the center of most things that moved. Her own life, the rebellion, his Order unit, even this journey they were on revolved around his wishes, his family, his past, his power, his purpose. Davy at the center, and all the world rotating around him, in life and in death.

  Maybe she was wrong.