Piper? Screaming about the blast in your sleep doesn’t give you any special insights.” She leaned closer, speaking very slowly and clearly. “You’re pathetic. You think you’re so wise, and so special, so much better than Xander and Lucia. I wish you’d hurry up and lose your mind entirely. You’re harder to be around than Xander—at least he doesn’t think he’s special, and he shuts up sometimes.”
I had to raise my voice to compete with the wind. “Did you hate Lucia as much as you hate me?” I asked. “I bet you were glad when she died. Then you could have your precious Piper to yourself.”
Her hand moved toward her belt, and I wondered whether she would throw a knife, and whether Piper would defend me. If it came to blades and blows, who would he choose?
She turned her back on me and walked away. I watched her go until the night claimed her, and I could see nothing but the fire’s light thrown against the tree trunks.
Piper took a few steps, too, as if to follow her.
“I’m sorry,” I called after him. “Not sorry about what I said to her. She’s had it coming for months. But I’m sorry for you.” I paused. “I know how hard it is. I’m sorry that you lost Lucia.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I lost Kip,” I said. “If you’d told me about Lucia, I would have understood. You act like you want us to be close, but you didn’t even tell me about her. You had to wait for me to work it out.”
Of all the responses I might have expected, his was the last. He looked at me, for a long moment, and then laughed. He arched his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing with each gasp of laughter.
I didn’t know how to respond. Was he mocking Kip? Mocking the comparison I’d drawn, between my loss and his? His laughter echoed back at us from the tree trunks and the fire, until even the flames seemed to be laughing at me.
Finally he lowered his head again, and exhaled deeply.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” he said, wiping his face with his hand. “But there’s not been much to laugh about for a while.”
“And this is funny to you, is it? Kip and Lucia are dead.”
“I know.” The creases around his eyes disappeared when he stopped smiling. “And it’s not funny. But it’s not what you think.”
“Then tell me. Tell me what it is.”
“I can’t speak for Zoe,” he said. “You know what she’s like.”
“Apparently not,” I said, my voice rising again. “Apparently I’m so wrong about everything.”
“I know you meant no harm. But you’ll need to make this right with her.”
He walked to the lookout spot, leaving me alone with the fire.
Ω
We’d rigged a canvas sheet against a tree trunk, to keep the snow off. I crawled into the space beneath, though I didn’t sleep until Zoe came back, after midnight. She slipped, unspeaking, into the cramped space beside me. I felt her shivering as she fell asleep.
She dreamed of the sea. We’d slept apart for weeks, while I was in the holding house; now we had no choice but to sleep close, and I shared again her dreams of the sea, reliable as tides. Perhaps that was what made me realize my mistake. When Piper shook my shoulder to wake me for my lookout shift, I understood the truth about Lucia.
chapter 30
Sitting at the lookout post, while Piper and Zoe slept, I traced each clue that I’d missed, or misinterpreted.
I thought of how Zoe knew how to deal with my visions, better than Piper. She can’t talk yet, she’d said to him, when he tried to badger me about what I’d seen. She’ll stop carrying on in a minute. I’d registered it only as dismissiveness. I hadn’t recognized the confident familiarity of someone who’d seen this many times. Someone who’d passed many nights with a seer.
Her words to me: You’re not the first seer.
Her reluctance to sail, and her clenched hands on the railing of the boat when we’d left the Sunken Shore.
I had taunted her: I bet you were glad when Lucia died. But it was the bones of her own lover that Zoe was searching for every night, when she slept.
I looked over my shoulder to where Piper and Zoe lay, sleeping. The canvas above them was sagging with the weight of snow. They slept back-to-back, just as they’d fought in the battle. In the cold, with