“Someone’s got to.” He glanced at her from under his hair, and there was something gentle in the way he did it, like he already knew what she needed and was just waiting for her to ask.
She didn’t. She let the conversation die, watching as Finn kept fiddling with the guitar, coaxing it into tune. After a minute, he started playing—not a song, exactly, but a wandering line of notes that circled and crossed, sometimes stumbling, sometimes soaring. It was rough at first, the sound jarring against the perfect silence, but after a while the melody found itself. It was a song Alina half-recognized, though she couldn’t place the memory.
It made her chest ache. She swallowed, hard, and focused on the ground.
Finn watched her, still playing. “You all right?” he asked, after a minute.
She didn’t answer. Surprisingly, Finn teased real music out of the haphazardly built instrument. He let it speak for both of them, and in the glade the two of them sat, one playing, one listening, until the sun finally clawed its way through the fog and made the dew on the grass burn like tears.
It was all she needed right now. Just to sit and to listen and to remember what it was to be something other than afraid.
The music Finn played worked its way under Alina's skin. At first it was just a wandering thing, picking over old, half-forgotten melodies the way a crow picks at pebbles. But then it snagged on a certain sequence of notes, low and slow and warm, and it sank itself into Alina’s mind until it dragged up a memory, buried deeply in her heart.
She was in a kitchen, hazy sunlight streaming through old glass. The smell of vanilla hung so thick and cloying in the air it made her drowsy. There was a rhythm there, too: the creak of wood underfoot, the scratch and sigh of flour sifted into a bowl. Marta’s voice, rough at the edges from years of laughter and hollering at the scullions, hummed under it all. A song with no words, just a tune she carried from morning to night, changing pace with the work, sometimes quick and sharp for stirring soup, sometimes slow and rich for shaping dough.
Alina remembered watching from the doorway, her hands wrapped in her shawl and her face flushed from sneaking out of lessons. She remembered the way Marta would slide a plate of something sweet across the table—almond cake, maybe, or honeyed rolls still warm from the oven—and pat the bench beside her. “Eat,” she’d say, voice gentler to her than to the rest of the world. “You’re not much use to anyone on an empty stomach.”
The melody Finn coaxed from his battered guitar was that same tune, slow and round as honey. Alina’s throat closed, her eyes prickling before she could bite back the feeling. She blinked, hard, and tried to swallow it down, but the ache only spread wider, a hollow at the center of her.
She didn’t realize she was crying again until Finn’s voice floated across the glade, as careful as the music. “Sorry,” he said, fingers pausing just enough to let the last notes hang. “Didn’t mean to butcher it. I’m more of a spoons man, really.”
“You didn’t butcher it,” she said, her voice sharp as the edge of a snapped bone. She wiped roughly at her eyes, refusing to let the tears count for anything. “That’s exactly how it should sound.” For some reason, her anger flickered to life—not at Finn, but at herself, for being so easily undone by a few notes and a memory.
Finn’s eyes flicked up, and for a heartbeat the easy jester’s mask fell away. There was something unguarded in the way he looked at her, as if she’d said something important by accident, and he was weighing what it might cost to believe her.
“Where’d you learn it?” he asked, quieter than before, all the bravado washed out by the mist.
“Marta.” Alina felt the syllables click against her teeth. It was the first time she’d said the cook’s name out loud in months, and it cut her in a way she’d almost forgotten was possible. “The palace cook. She’d hum it every morning, before the fires were up. Sometimes she’d let me help in the kitchen, on the rare occasions my mother or my tutors or my guards wouldn’t notice.” She tried to make a joke of it, let the bitterness smooth itself into something lighter, but the memory betrayed her. “Usually she just let me lick the bowl,” she finished, and realized her mouth was trembling with the effort to keep her face straight.
Finn grinned, the kind of grin that made it impossible not to like him, even when you wanted to keep your distance. “That explains a lot,” he said, and Alina wondered if he meant her being spoiled, or the way she always sought out warmth. Maybe it wasjust the fact that she was sitting here with him instead of alone in her bunk, as she knew she should.
They let the memory hang between them, suspended and fragile as a blown-glass ornament. The wind came up, rattling the last of the dew from the trees, and Alina scrubbed her palms together, trying to hide the way her hands shook. She glanced at Finn, surprised to see that he was doing the same, rubbing at his own wrists as if trying to scrub away the cold—or maybe the past.
“Where do you know that song from?” she asked.
“My grandmother,” he answered. “She told me it’s an old folk song, once known in every village.”
The silence that followed was softer, less like a blade and more like a well-worn blanket, faded and patched but still capable of warmth. Alina counted the spaces between the clouds, the hush as the sun tried to claw its way past the fog, the slow, careful way Finn flexed his fingers over the guitar as if he didn’t trust his muscles to obey him.
“Do you ever miss it?” Finn asked, voice muffled by the collar of his jacket. “Your old life?”
The question was so gentle it made her want to scream, because it was both a mercy and a cruelty, and she couldn’t decide which burned more. Alina hesitated, tracing the rim of her memory for safe ground.
“I miss the easy parts,” she said slowly, afraid the words would shatter if she rushed them. “The food. The books. I miss knowing what would happen next. I never had to wonder if there’d be a bed, or if I’d wake up with all my teeth.”
Finn snorted. “Teeth are overrated. Half the fun’s in the gums, you know.” He smiled sideways at her, and she could see the place where one of his incisors was chipped, the product of a brawl ora bad landing perhaps, and she wondered how many bones he’d broken before learning to joke about pain instead of letting it eat him alive.
Alina almost smiled, but it twisted at the last second, a muscle spasm of grief. “I miss knowing who I was supposed to be. Now I’m just—” Her hands fluttered, as if they could catch the right word out of the air, but all that came was, “Not a princess. Not a rebel, not really. I’m nothing that makes sense anymore.”
Wordless, Finn came over to her, set the guitar down as if it were made of glass, and sat down beside her. He let his palms rest on his knees, steady and open, and for a moment Alina wondered if he would reach for her. But he didn’t move. He just looked at her, full-on, no jokes or cleverness to shield them both.
“You don’t have to be anything,” he said, and the words felt like a slap or a hug or kind of both. “That’s the secret. No one ever knows who they’re supposed to be. Most of us are just faking it and hoping we don’t get caught.”
Alina inhaled sharply. She wanted to believe him, desperately so. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to imagine a world where that was true, where she could just exist without being weighed and measured and found wanting. Her whole life had been a series of auditions, each one more punishing than the last, and here was Finn, offering her a role with no lines and no costume. Just the chance to be herself, whatever that meant.
But the old habits were hard to break. Alina heard herself laugh, but it was so thin and brittle that it sounded like the shatter of an icicle. “You’re good at it,” she said, meaning the pretending, the way he seemed to float above it all even when she could see bruises blooming on his skin and the sadness lurking behind his eyes.
Finn shrugged, a gesture that in anyone else would have looked careless, but on him was an armor of sorts. “I’ve had a lot of practice,” he said. “You learn to keep moving, or the world catches up.”
