“I’m proud of you, Fi.”
She fell still.
Fi had spent so many years honing defenses. All bristles and barbs, all snarling in the face of any challenge. Her first instinct was to fight, at odds with the crushing comfort of her brother’s arm holding her to his coat. His familiar smell of hay and aurorabeasts.
“It’s the least I could do,” she muttered.
“What’s that mean?”
“I told you, Boden. I’m not leaving you this time.”
He shifted her in front of him, gloves heavy on either shoulder. Fi met his eyes with scrunched nose and puffed lips, a slippery defense against that too-earnest gaze.
“Fi-Fi,” he chided.
Her nose wrinkled fiercer.
“That’s all in the past,” Boden said. “You know that… don’t you?”
It wasn’t.
Just a few days ago, when he wasn’t padding his punches, he’d told her it wasn’t in the past, that she was still clinging to old ghosts. And he was right. Fi had spent seven years building walls around her coward’s heart, but never daring to inspect the cracked foundations.
“But I don’t want—” she began.
“We don’t need to talk about—” he said at the same time.
He stopped. Like he always did. A thousand words hung unsaid on the air between them, but he avoided every single one of them.
So did Fi.
She wanted everything to be fine between her and Boden. But by the merciless Void, had she ever actually apologized? Fi raked her memory, searching for a single time she’d swallowed her shattered-glass pride and said sorry for running, sorry for leaving him, sorry for making him wrangle her like a beast who’d broken out of pasture. She’d been too terrified of what he’d say. She’d survived this long by deflecting, never strong enough to ask the true depth of his disappointment in her.
That wasn’t enough.
She’d never told Astrid she was sorry, either. Fi saw now how that hurt had swollen. Festered to something irreparable.
Boden deserved better. She wanted to do better.
She almost fucking said it.
“We’re going to fight,” she told him. “We’re going to win.” A shrug. “That, or we all end up Void ghosts and have to haunt Antal when he reincarnates as a dumb little antler seal.”
Boden laughed. Too easy.
Could she tell him sorry, if she hadn’t earned it yet?
All Fi had now were promises made, none yet fulfilled. But she would. Once Verne was gone, and they had their home back, and she’d unknotted this mess she’d helped create, Fi would finally have a victory to hold up and say, “look, I’m better now, I didn’t run away this time.”
Boden hugged her. She was glad for his silence, space for her to wrap her arms around his back and smile into his sleeve, a tiny thing, safe and hidden from the cold, the prospect of finallyworking toward a future rather than merely fleeing the past.
As night fell in earnest, Kashvi dismissed her archers. Volunteer fighters trickled back toward the windows and hearths of Nyskya. Savo, the energy foreman, stopped by to update Boden on conduit repairs. While they spoke, his daughter swayed at his heels, her hair a puff of black against the fur ruff of her coat.
When her father wasn’t looking, she inched closer to Antal.
Stealthy, an inquisitive hand reached for his tail.
When the tail flicked away, she puffed her cheeks. Fi stifled a laugh, noting Antal’s sly grin as he watched the small human with one eye.
