what Piper had said: Lucia was good with weather. It was the first time he’d willingly raised the subject of the dead seer. Usually, he and Zoe edged around Lucia’s name as though it were a thornbush. When Piper had spoken of her, back in the tithe collector’s office, Zoe had snapped at him. I remembered the loaded glances he and Zoe exchanged, whenever Lucia was mentioned. When Xander had asked after Lucia, Zoe had stiffened, while Piper’s voice had been thick with grief. She’s gone, he’d said.
It was like the Ark: it had been there the whole time, beneath the surface. And now I understood it, it changed everything. Now that I’d realized how Piper had felt about Lucia, so many things fell into place. How quickly he’d warmed to me on the island. His willingness to free me, against the will of the Assembly. It wasn’t me who he’d warmed to: it was his memories of Lucia.
It explained, too, so much about Zoe. Her hostility to me, and her frustration with my visions. Even with Xander, she had been silent and brittle in the face of his brokenness.
All their lives it had been just the two of them: Zoe and Piper. I knew that bond, because I’d lived it myself, with Zach, before we were split. How much more intense the bond must have been for Zoe and Piper, who had chosen to stay together, even after he’d been branded and sent away. For Zoe, especially, who had made that choice, leaving her parents, and the ease of an Alpha life, to follow him. Choosing him, even though it meant a lifetime as a fugitive. And then he’d left her. He’d not only gone to the island, where she could never follow, but had also found a closer bond with somebody else. I understood how Zoe might still feel unmoored by this. I knew from experience that there were different kinds of intimacy, no less binding than the kind shared by lovers. I remembered Zoe’s face when I’d come across her at the spring, listening to the bards’ music with her eyes closed. It was the only time I’d caught her looking so unguarded. Her face had been turned upward, showing her loneliness to the sky. Before she’d snapped at me and stormed away, she’d told me about how she and Piper used to sneak out together, as children, to hear a bard play.
When the dark came, we stopped in a copse through which a stream ran, frozen at the edges. We tethered the horses downstream and managed to get a fire started, though winter had stripped the trees and they gave little cover from the snow.
I waited until we’d eaten before I broached the subject. Zoe was sitting beside me, reaching her gloved hands so close to the fire that I could smell the singed wool. Piper sat with his back to us, looking out between the trees.
“I know what it’s like to be close to your twin,” I said to Zoe. “And I know you two are closest of all, sticking together the way you did.”
“What are you going on about?” She poked the fire with a long stick. Sparks darted upward and were snuffed out by the darkness.
“I understand that it wasn’t easy for you,” I went on. “How the two of you must always have depended on each other.”
“Is there a point to this little monologue?” She still grasped the stick. The end had caught fire, and she held it upright, like a torch.
“I understand, now, about Lucia.”
She raised an eyebrow. Piper had turned so quickly that the knives on his belt clattered. I waited. The words I was about to speak were stones, and I tested their weight before I dropped them into the pool.
“You’re jealous,” I said to Zoe. “Because Piper loved her. You didn’t want to share him then, and you don’t want to share him now. Piper and I aren’t even lovers, but having another seer around is too much for you, isn’t it? That’s why you always snap at me, always criticize me.”
“Cass,” said Piper, his voice measured as he stood and stepped toward us. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Zoe had dropped the flaming stick. It glowed, half an inch from my foot. Piper bent and tossed it back onto the fire.
I’d thought that Zoe might hit me, but she just shook her head slowly. “You think you understand my life? You think you understand me and