Page 12 of Feralheart

The communal water barrel sat at the intersection of three lanes, fed by a pipe that ran down from the higher district’s runoff. The water was clean enough if you didn’t think too hard about where it came from. I set my bundles on the barrel’s edge and plunged my hands into the water.

A stamped tin notice above the barrel read: RATION SCHEDULE ENFORCED. WASTE IS THEFT. THEFT IS TREASON. Someone had scratched a laughing mouth under the words, and someone else had scrubbed it off to a blur.

The cold shocked through me. I scrubbed, working under my nails, checking for blood I’d already checked for twice. My palms stung where I’d touched the wild dragon’s scales, a heat that had only recently started to fade.

After splashing my face, I dried my hands on my pants and picked up my bundles. One for us. One for Silvie.

Outside our door, I stopped and made myself breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my mother had taught me when I was small.

The door on the cottage to the left of ours opened before I could open our own. Silvie stepped out, a knitted wrap around her frail shoulders, her pale blue eyes sweeping across the alley. She tucked her wrap tighter around her neck, the purple-black stains on her fingers standing out starkly in the dimming light. She sold dyed things at the market seven days a week, and the stains would never come out.

Hos, her orange cat, wound between our ankles, purring loud enough to make his chest rattle.

I bent and scratched behind his ears, and he butted his head against my palm. Silvie called him her best friend. I called him a too-sweet menace with good timing.

“You’re late, little bird,” Silvie said, her voice gone raspy over the years, worn away by the air down here. “The wind’s got teeth today. How’s our boy?”

“Counting his breaths and my nags,” I said.

Her soft laugh bubbled up while her gaze moved over me, taking in the scratch on my forearm.

I held out one of the bundles. “For you.”

Her face creased. “Eradin, no.”

“Take it before Hos steals it.”

The cat stood on his hind legs and batted at the paper. Silvie caught the bundle before he could claw through it, her mouth pulling into a frown.

“You don’t need to feed me,” she said.

“I’m not. I’m feeding Hos. You’re just the middleman.”

She unwrapped the paper enough to see the thin slice of meat inside, then wrapped it again and held it to her chest.

“I heard him last night,” she said quietly. “Through the wall. His cough turned.”

I nodded as a dull ache spread under my skin.

“Here.” Silvie disappeared into her cottage and came back with a small jar. “Boiled onion with honey. It’ll help.”

I took it and slipped it into my pocket. “Thank you.”

She waved me off. “Just keep him warm. And yourself too. You look half-frozen.”

“I will.”

I stepped inside our three-room cottage, heeled off my boots and settled them on the mat, then hung my jacket on the peg by the door.

The first room was the largest, a kitchen and living area combined. Curtains hung across the doorways to tiny bedrooms on the opposite side. The whitewash Mother had used on the living area walls had thinned, but I didn’t have the heart to cover over what she’d done. The table had been worn smooth by use and oiled enough to make the wood gleam dark gold.

A shelf ran along the far-right wall, lined with jars Mother had labeled in careful script. Thyme. Willowbark. Chamomile. Feverfew. The silverleaf and graymallow jars sat bone-dry, their glass catching the light from the kitchen window.

My mother’s paintings hung above the shelf, wildflowers in frames my father had made from scrap wood. She’d studied art once, before she fell in love with a castle guard and her family disowned her for it.

She rarely talked about her past, but she’d kept painting, small bright things that would make you stop and stare and smile.

Tolross had inherited her gift. He painted suns on clay cups and drew birds in the margins of his poems. I’d inherited her hands, the ones that knew how to coax a wound closed and a fever down, the ones that carried the thing we didn’t name.