He crouched so his face was level with mine. “You will eat what I make, and you will not complain.”
“She was my friend?—”
“She waslivestock. You ruined her with your coddling, and she wasn’t worth a damn for anything but eating.” He pushed the bucket closer. “Clean. Now.”
This was life, and I was still trying to be a good boy. So I did what I was told.
For weeks afterwards, he cooked up another cut of goat meat each day and berated me for not eating it, then sent me to bed without supper. I went entire days without eating because I couldn’t trust that he wasn’t trying to feed me my friend.
When I told the Yost twins what happened, Vi laughed and told me I was being a baby. But when she was gone, Levitt hugged me and let me cry until I’d worn myself out. He found ways to sneak me food every time he saw me after that.
I set aside the journal and shook out my trembling hands. I didn’t need to read any more. I’d found the first bit of proof I’d been looking for, and I had no desire to see how my father gloated over his attempt to toughen me up.
That hadn’t been the last time he took away something I loved. If he was still around to see the way I looked at Penny, he would have found a way to take him away, too. But my father was dead, his ashes scattered far from Ashpoint. The only part of him remaining here was the right hand he sacrificed to the Vessel.
If my mental math was correct, he’d set his plans for that in motion when he took his place as Hugo Morin’s Shroud Warden in the year he wrote the journal Penny was currently drooling on.
I brushed a hand through Penny’s hair and couldn’t help a small smile. I wasn’t a helpless little boy anymore, no longer a victim of my father's violent whims, and no one would take anything from me now. No matter how selfish it was, Penny was the one thing I planned to keep for myself.
He looked so peaceful that I hated to wake him, but as soon I got what I needed from that book, I could take it to Levitt and we could put the rest of them away for a while. We’d both be glad for the reprieve.
I gave Penny a shake, and his head jerked up. His bleary green eyes blinked against the light of the fire.
“Oh,” he mumbled, looking sheepish. “I fellasleep again, didn’t I?”
“Not sure how. That didn’t look very comfortable.” I grinned as he swiped his sleeve over his damp cheek.
“It wasn’t.” He pushed himself to sitting, then hid a yawn behind his hand.
“You’ll be glad to know that we’re about done with these.” I tugged over the journal he’d been using as a pillow and skimmed the page. “I found where my father mentioned becoming a Sentinel. Now I just need to find where he mentions becoming the Shroud Warden. I think that happened the year he wrote this one.”
“Thank the gods,” Penny groaned, sagging over so he was leaning against my shoulder. “Mother’s grammar primers were more interesting than these. Less disturbing too.”
I freed my arm from between us and slid it around his back. He nestled in, and his eyes were closing again before I started reading in earnest.
“I don’t like how sad reading these makes you,” he mumbled, more asleep than awake. “Should burn them like you burned the rest.”
A few days before when Merrick raided the forge looking for the weapons I was supposedly stockpiling, Reimond had remarked about how protective Penny was of me. As much as I wanted to shield him from everything we faced in Ashpoint, he wanted to shield me, too: from his brother’s scorn, my father’s judgment, and my own self-loathing. I could count on one hand the number of people in my life who had cared enough to think I was worth protecting. It felt foreign and new, and I was done trying to pretend I didn’t enjoy it.
It was difficult to focus on reading when all I wanted to do was bury my face in his hair and fall asleep too. But getting this out of the way would mean having the rest ofthe day to curl up together on the couch and enjoy the closeness without echoes of the past haunting us both.
Penny hadn’t gotten far in his reading before dozing off, but it didn’t take me long to track down what I was looking for. About midway through, several pages were taken up with sketches of the ceremonial garb of the Shroud Warden, carefully rendered but not half as skillfully as any of Penny’s art. My father only drew things he found powerful, putting them down in clinical detail for the sake of posterity, but Penny saw the beauty in things. His work was full of light and life, and he had a fondness for the small, transient things. His sketches of the little brown moths that had flocked to our lantern each night on our way from Forstford to Eastcliff were my favorites.
Tucked between various drawings of the finger bone necklace Merrick now wore were the first musings of my father’s plan to take over as Right Hand. Two years after he put that nefarious plot in writing, he successfully took his place as the head of the Bone Men.
I folded down the corner of the page and closed the book, then did the same with the journal I’d set aside before.
Giving Penny’s side a squeeze, I pressed a kiss in his hair. “Time to wake up, Pen.”
He grumbled, turning his face to hide it in my neck. His breath tickled.
“Thought you wanted to be done with these,” I said with a chuckle.
He leaned back enough to peek up at me. “You found it?”
“Found everything I need. All that’s left is to take it to Levitt and see what he thinks.”
He cast a glance at the window beside the door. “You’re going out inthat?”
