that Mama never noticed anything. She stole pinches of salt from Old Woman Eyda’s doorstep, because Old Woman Eyda believed that salt would drive spirits and demons and leeches away. The last thing she collected was a pot of honey, or rather the dregs of it, a scraping of honey that Mama had given to her as a rare treat after they used up the rest of their ration. It was so hard to save the honey instead of smashing up the pot and licking the shards clean, but Ayla had willpower.
Flour, salt, honey: she hid it all beneath the loose floorboards under her bed, waiting for the summer air to dry out a little. Every night, she fell asleep picturing the look on her parents’ faces when she presented them with a perfect loaf of sweet brown bread, still steaming from the coals. Her stomach felt so empty, those nights.
One morning, she woke up to a shout.
She jolted awake and leaped out of bed—Is this a raid? Are we being raided? Is this what a raid sounds like?—only to shriek in horror when her foot landed on something soft, something that made a horrible shrieking noise right back and then wriggled out from beneath her foot. Then Ayla saw that her mother was wielding a frying pan, her brother a broom, her father stomping around the floor in his fisherman’s boots—and the floor was moving, it was moving, a writhing dark mass of—
rats.
There must have been a hundred rats swarming the floor, hissing and climbing all over each other, their bony pink tails moving like snakes. They’d gnawed their way through the loose floorboard under her bed. They had eaten the flour, and the salt, had even shoved themselves inside the empty pot of honey and licked it clean.
They had eaten all the salted fish. And the pickled fish.
All of Mama’s flour rations.
All the barley, and the seaweed, and the lard, and the eggs. All of it gone.
“That was years ago,” she said now, shoving the rats and their awful musky rat smell far away, back into a distant corner of her mind. “I was a child. We both were.”
“Yes,” he said. “And I grew up.”
What the hell does that mean, you traitor, you abandoner, you coward, she wanted to say, but swallowed it.
“Yes. You sure did grow up. Somewhere. But where? Where did you even go? After you—after—I thought you were . . . I thought you were dead. Do you even realize what that was like for me?” The words grated up through her throat, and she ground her teeth together to keep from screaming. “Your body. It was all burned up. It was you. I saw it. And, and, and you never came back, Storme. You never came back.”
She couldn’t help it now. Tears were streaking down her face and she swiped angrily at her cheeks, trying to wipe them away, but it was no use. How dare he disappear. How dare he be alive all this time and never reach out, never reassure her, never tell her.
It was a whole new kind of pain, raw and wrenching, one she had been choking down all day, she realized, and now it was erupting uncontrollably.
“Ayla.” His hand was on her arm, and then, gently, he touched the golden chain that was there, always, just beneath the lip of her shirt. “You still wear it,” he whispered.
She trembled. Of course she still wore the necklace. It was her only remnant of her life before. Of him.
It was too much, suddenly. She felt like she was going to shatter. She jolted away from his touch, her back hitting the wall. “Don’t. Touch me.”
“Ayla.” His voice—his whole face—was pained. She remembered that look. Of course she did. She remembered every look. “You know we can’t talk here,” he said. “Not like this. I can tell you—I ran away. That day, after the raids. And I was found by—by a group, who . . . Listen, Ayla, they took me in, they worked me over. They had me believing everything they said. About the leeches. About what we had to do to stop them. I had to vow I could never return to look for you. I had to promise, or else they’d do something terrible. I had to promise, I—Ayla.” He was hissing the words at her now, urgently, and a stroke of fear moved through her.
“What are you talking about, Storme?”
“I thought you had died, too, along with Mother