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“Yes,” he said again, putting up no fight and looking almost… crestfallen.
And it was ridiculous, but his defenselessness was only making her angrier. She wanted to argue. She wanted to yell at him.
“You’re responsible for the curses,” she croaked out instead.
“No,” Penbrook insisted, and though he stood before the fireplace, it looked more like he was drowning. That damp hair. Those turbulent eyes.
Fia hardly took in his answer. “Why did you stay?”
Here.
With me.
In the heavy pause that followed, Andromeda nibbled on her bread, watching the two of them with widened eyes. Finnick rolled over, exposing his belly to the fire—or maybe to Penbrook—always the traitor.
“I… wanted to. This is maybe the only place I’ve ever wanted to be,” he said, imploring her to understand. “And I needed to know more—”
But Fia didn’t want to hear any more. “Give me the grimoire.” She didn’t trust him with it.
“I don’t think I should. I’m sorry, I never meant for this to become your trouble.” He’d said something similar only that morning, but she hadn’t understood then. “I’ll return The Book of Ribs to Thistledown.” His voice grew even more solemn now, woven in with the crackling of the fire. “If it’s the last thing I do.”
Fia bit her lip to keep herself from objecting to his fate, a small war battling in her head and heart, much like the formation of a spell. But he didn’t deserve a reply, so she just continued glaring at him.
Penbrook accepted Fia’s silence, pushing off from the mantel to stand unsteadily before her. The corner of his mouth curved fatalistically. “And then I’ll slink off to die.”
At the gates of Fortune’s End, Penbrook had admitted, I’d rather not go off alone.
You won’t have to, Fia had said, and it felt like a promise, one she couldn’t go back on even now—but that didn’t mean things were the same between them.
“You can have the sofa again tonight,” she said coolly, leaving Penbrook in the parlor looking lost, then helped Andromeda up the stairs to her mother’s room, where she hurriedly remade the bed with fresh sheets.
With a mumble of thanks, Andromeda crawled beneath the blanket, her eyes already closing as she said, “Shame he’s such a fool.” Flopping onto her stomach, her face mashed into the pillow, and her next words came muffled—but they sounded an awful lot like “Don’t be a fool too.”
CHAPTER 29
The sun rose in streaks of violet and orange, casting the alley in a wavering light. Bumped up against Fia’s side, Andromeda watched without a word, without blinking, a faraway look on her face. They stood here instead of on Carrow Lane, though it might have given them a better view of the horizon, because Fia couldn’t bear walking through the spellshop and seeing its ruin again.
She’d gone down last night, leaving Andromeda for only a moment so she could grab paper, ink, and a pen to work on the spell she’d promised, and the bleakness of the room, the acrid scent of the ash, had hit her even harder, standing in the destruction alone. Fia had hardly recognized the place that had always been familiar and full of memories.
Usually, if she looked from the corner of her eye, she could almost see her mother behind the counter, foot tapping as she worked. If she listened, she could almost hear her calm voice giving reasonable expectations for her spells. But with the shop covered in ash, and with last night’s revelation that her mother wrote curses, it was like every last trace of the Sable that Fia had known was gone. So Fia had taken the items she needed, dusting them off as best she could, and fled right up the stairs again.
Well, she hadn’t gone right up. She’d checked on Penbrook first—just to be certain he wasn’t lying dead on her burgundy sofa. Breathing soft but sure, he’d looked unfairly vulnerable in sleep, and she’d left him there again with Finnick, who refused to leave his side.
And then the whole long night she’d tried to think of some way to slow his curse, and all she’d ended up with was a scattering of incomplete spells discarded at her feet.
“The sky should always be this color,” Andromeda said now as a blush of pink blurred through the clouds. “Then I wouldn’t have to wake up so early to see it.”
“That’s what sunsets are for,” Fia teased, though her heart wasn’t in it.
“But they feel different, don’t they?”
“Like the ending of something instead of the beginning?”
“Yes, exactly, and I don’t want to talk about endings,” Andromeda pleaded.
And so they discussed other things, like what they might wear for Montrose’s birthday party, which was only a few hours away, glossing over their worries even though they’d only have to face them later.
When they eventually came back into the kitchen, Penbrook was waiting for them, startling up from the table. He stood near enough that Fia couldn’t help noticing the narrow scratch along his jawline that hadn’t been there the night before. Apparently, Finnick had once again woken him, although instead of chest-sitting and persistent mewling, the cat had been forced to take more aggressive methods—swiping Penbrook with a sharpened claw.
