The night was long, dreams of the Robber Lord and Fel wings and raspberry tarts knitted into nightmares in Evie’s head. Where had the knife gone? She’d been sitting there with her hands wrapped around it all afternoon. Maybe the brokenheart flowers had eaten it? Or Gisa…?
Evie clenched her eyes tight. Could Gisa have lifted it right out of her pocket? That’s what Pop and everyone said Trouvani troupes used their magic for during performances, though the only coin Gisa’s troupe had taken from Evie she’d handed over fair and square. When her eyes finally cracked open to morning light, she found Gisa sitting on her bed, the patchwork bag in her lap and a paper note in her fingers. Something silver was sticking from the bag’s open mouth.
“What’s that?” Evie asked.
Gisa jerked with surprise, her eyes wide when she looked at Evie. But then she stuffed the bag and the note both under her pillow and found herself a sneer. “Sleeping through the day, now, are we?”
Evie felt again for the knife with her good hand. Her pocket was still empty. “The knife. Did you take it?”
“What kind of blue-treed scarp is that?” Gisa’s voice was an edged whisper. “You’re just like every small-eyed self-centered child born in this awful … Having white hair does not make you into a robber.”
“It’s not here. Wasn’t it you who went through my things looking for it? The knife was in my pocket and now it’s not. That’s … magic, isn’t it? Or really good thieving. And you’re the only person I know who might be able to do a good job at either one.”
“Magic and thieving? That’s what you think—?”
Someone knocked on the door. “Evie?” Roary’s voice rang clear from outside. “Evie, are you awake?”
Terror bloomed across Gisa’s face, her eyes darting from the bed to the window to Evie’s wooden chest as if she were looking for a place to hide.
“Calm down,” Evie whispered, wondering what Gisa could be so frightened of. “Get up against the wall by the door.”
Gisa’s brows came down in a doubtful scowl.
“You asked me to keep her away from you. Let me do it.”
“Evie?” Roary called.
Still scowling, Gisa slipped over to the wall, backing up so she was just next to the door’s hinges. She seemed almost to fold in, even more thin and sticklike than usual, as if Gisa could turn herself into a broom at will.
“Yes, I’m awake,” Evie croaked. The door cracked open, morning light seeping in from the hall. “But don’t come in here!”
The door stopped, Roary’s fingers around the edge of the splintered wood. “Why not? I’ve brought you some tea, and Mother says—”
“It’s just that I’m…” Evie glanced down at her clothes from the day before, rumpled after she’d fallen asleep in them. “I’m naked. I have to get dressed.”
“You’re naked? Why?”
“Would you go ask Courderly to come? I need her help. My wrist really hurts.”
The bright yellow of Roary’s dress showed through the crack between the door and the wall, moving back and forth as if Roary was swinging her skirts. “I suppose I can go find her. Wait a moment.”
As soon as Roary’s footsteps had retreated, Evie nodded to Gisa. “If you really hate her all that much, you can run for it right now. Courderly’s bound to be at the market this time of morning. It’ll take a while before Roary realizes she isn’t in the house and comes back here.”
Gisa pushed the door open again without looking at Evie. She stuck her head outside the room, looked both ways, then slipped out.
Maybe Trouvani were a bit mad.
It was half an hour or more before Roary finally came back with Courderly. Evie was putting on a fresh apron, wondering how her arm could have hurt so much the day before. It hardly ached now.
“Now, now, Evie,” Courderly said as she bustled in, a shopping basket overflowing with green onions and potatoes still over her arm. She threw open the curtain and sunlight flooded the little room. “What’s all this about sleeping in your skivvies?” The cook looked Evie up and down, eyebrow raised. “You seem decent enough now.”
“Yes, well … baker tradition, sleeping naked.” Evie grimaced as she tried to pull her apron strings around her back, but the splint got in the way.
“Bakers do what?” Roary followed Courderly into the room. “Why?”
Courderly looked as if she might scold, but her apple-and-dumpling cheeks trembled instead. She eyed Evie’s sling. “You must be in pain, dear. I’ll get you some of those herbs the doctor mentioned…”
“I’m fine, I don’t want any herbs.” Evie grimaced over her cast. “I’m supposed to be done with half the tarts by now. Will you at least let me out to help someone else do it? Did you get raspberries at the market, Courderly?” Gisa had promised to help, but what could Gisa do? Set something on fire? Lady Hollow couldn’t gorge herself on tarts with her friends if the drapes were burning.
“Oh, Gisa told me not to bother.” Courderly stepped back into the hallway, clutching her basket. “You’re expected upstairs, if I’m not mistaken, Miss Roary.”
“But what is Evie to do?” Roary butted in before Evie could respond. “Mother’s been in a rage since she found out she can’t bake. She said if Evie didn’t get those tarts finished—I know! I can help! You can tell me how much of all those powdery things go in the bowl, then I’ll stick my hands in and Mother will be so angry…”
“I think we’ve got things well in hand, Miss Roary, though it’s kind of you to want to help.”
Evie followed them toward the kitchen, grateful when Courderly shooed Roary back upstairs. She looked for the smell of smoldering brocade, but instead found flour, yeast, and cinnamon.
The oven was full of oddly shaped rolls, each one topped with a brown sugar glaze Evie had never seen before. Just as she was about to poke one with her finger, someone elbowed her away from the tile opening, brandishing a wooden spoon. “If you ruin those, you can expect nothing less than a death sentence.”
It was Max.
“What are you doing here?” Evie made to poke one of the breads again, earning a rap on the back of her hand.
“Captain Garry and I came early, but you weren’t awake yet. Gisa sort of made me stay.” He peeked in the oven, tapping the spoon thoughtfully against his side. “She said you needed help?”
“What are these?”
“I think they’re Trouvani festival breads. Gisa mixed the first batch to show me how and these have…” He squinted at them. “Another five minutes.”
Evie opened her eyes wide. “She gave you a Trouvani recipe?”
Max sent her a disturbed look. “That’s really all you’re worried about? With Fel on the loose, and Cece, and hartelismi…”
“No, of course not.” Evie grabbed a cloth from the counter and pulled the tray of breads out from under Max’s watchful eye. They were shaped like shells, the brown sugar making ridges and swirls on their surfaces as if they’d just been plucked from a southern trader’s wares, still wet from the ocean. “What’s to worry about with hartelismi? It helps with those Fel doors.” She broke a corner off one of the breads and ate it. It was lovely, like nothing she’d ever made. “I was thinking yesterday that the knife could take me straight to Cece if I thought about her hard enough; then we’d know for sure if she’s all right.”
“You figured that out about hartelismi and Fel doors? Well, jumping clear to Cece wouldn’t work.” Max kept his voice low. “Reinstadt doors only work inside Reinstadt.”
“Really?” Evie thought for a second. “And they can’t get us into the castle, right?”
Max shook his head.
“I didn’t realize everyone knew how the doors worked.” Evie’s cheeks heated. She thought she’d discovered something new. “I guess it makes sense why the queen wants to keep hartelismi all to herself. I was going to bring the knife to the castle gates so they’d let me in to talk to the crown prince about Captain Garry and the robbers.”
“I told you that won’t work. Bringing a knife made of hartelismi would just make it worse.” Max cringed. “They’d probably think you were going to hurt the royal family somehow. There’s more to hartelismi than bending a few Fel doors.”
“What does it do? Captain Garry didn’t seem to think anything of it when he saw me put it in my pocket.”
“Captain Garry saw it and he didn’t say anything?” Max’s nose and cheeks went pink a little, and Evie began to wonder if it was a medical condition of some kind. She would have to ask Gisa. “This isn’t good, Evie. I … I think you might be right about the captain. I asked him this morning about Miss Cecily and he told me not to worry about her—refused to tell me she was safe or even if she’d been heard from. What if she’s not with her aunt, like you said?”
“If she’s not, then how would those letters be getting to me at all?”
“Maybe they’re not from her.” Max shuddered.
“Who would they be from?” But then the hairs on the backs of Evie’s arms stood on end. Could someone else be writing to her? The Robber Lord, to entice her out into the forest? The Fel creature itself? She shook her head. There was too much in the letters that Cece knew and no one else did. “They are from her, I think. They’re just … not right. Like it’s a puzzle. But if Cece really has been taken by robbers, they wouldn’t be giving her ink and paper to write to me, would they?” Evie gasped when she accidentally touched the hot pan. She sat on her stool to suck on her fingers. “I’m worried, though—is there any other way we could check in on her? She’s so far away.”
Max shrugged. “I could write to her aunt.”
“Aunts always write back too. Even when you wish they wouldn’t.” Evie nodded.
Max pulled out the three other pans from the oven, carefully placing them on the kneading table. “That’s a good start, but Evie, you have to give me the knife. I don’t want the guard arresting you for having it. I’ll turn it in.”
Evie’s hand went to her pocket, but, of course, it was still empty. “They can’t arrest me for having it anymore. The Robber Lord tried to take it and now it’s gone.”
One of the pans clattered as Max set it down too quickly. “He took your hartelismi knife?”
“No, you saw it right after he ran away, remember? He tried to get it away from me, but you and the guards came before he managed it. But after that, the knife disappeared from my pocket. I don’t know who took it.” Evie sighed, slumping on her stool. “I’ve read so many stories, told so many stories about swords and armor and sneaking and hiding and fighting. All I’ve ever wanted to do was something worthy of being in a story myself. But instead I can’t manage to capture even one robber and then I lose my magic knife.”
“You don’t think being hunted down by a robber is worthy of being a story?”
“It won’t be a story with me as the hero unless I do some more hero-ish things. Nobody wants to be in a story where they aren’t the hero.”
“Facing down the Robber Lord in the street seems pretty heroic, Evie.”
“Maybe if I caught him, it would be. Or if I’d managed to steal the Robber Lord’s belt or his handkerchief. Then we’d use magic or smarts or something to track him down. But all I got was a broken wrist.” Evie gave a despairing wave with her good arm and Max had to duck to keep from being hit. “Don’t tell anyone, will you?” she blurted out, looking at her hurt wrist. “At least not about getting knocked over and landing on my own arm. Say I broke it in a knife fight. Winning a knife fight. That’s almost what happened.”
Max grinned. “You can count on me. I’ll tell people you used a knife to pluck out the man’s eyeball and that’s why he ran so fast they couldn’t catch sight of him.”
Would an eyeball pop out in a knife fight? Or would it squish? Evie wondered.
Max’s face went red. “Sorry, sometimes the way you talk makes me forget … I shouldn’t have said that bit about eyeballs.”
“I don’t mind eyeballs.”
“Me neither, but if I don’t…” Max stopped himself, speaking very carefully when he started again. “There are lots of … rules. In the guard. If I want to stay, I have to follow them.”
“Rules are always made by people who don’t know much about having fun. People who get sent to France.”
Max sighed, a gusty one that took all of his ribs. “I wish I could send everyone and all their rules to a mythical country to be eaten by…?” He raised an eyebrow at Evie, waiting.
“They don’t get eaten by anything. That would be too interesting.” Evie had put a lot of thought into France over the last bit, seeing how the Hollows’ entire house belonged there. “They just rot.” She thought Mum would agree.
“Sounds like the worst fate I can think of.” Max sat on the stool next to hers. “If the robber really did come all the way to Reinstadt and tried to take the knife instead of taking you—”
“He did say he wanted to grab me too.”
“But he didn’t try very hard. If he’d really wanted to kidnap you or hurt you, wouldn’t he have just done it? How would he have even known you had the knife?”
“Well, Gisa knew about it, but I don’t think she has anyone to tell. So that just leaves Captain Garry, I guess.”
“Yes.” Max stared down at the bread. “And then he told you it absolutely was not a Fel you saw in the forest. Refused to tell the guard or the queen…”
Evie nodded, her voice getting louder. “And he didn’t post guards to protect me or Cece. Just told us to hide. And he wouldn’t listen about my parents being in danger either. He just grabbed me and hid me, made sure I couldn’t talk to anyone, not even my friends or family, really. Because I knew who the robbers were.”
Max and Evie looked at each other. “What do we do?” she asked. “Storm the guard station?”
“Against the captain of the guard with a Fel in his pocket?”
“We could get help from the prince and the Fel King, like I said before.”
Max’s eyes went wide and he shook his head so hard, Evie wondered if he’d cracked his jaw. “I’m hardly even allowed near the palace. They’re not going to let the two of us nose around looking for the Fel King.”
The terror on his face was enough to make Evie wonder if Max would disappear for days again, as if even the thought of breaking so many rules would be enough to send him off to a cell.
“Is Roary here?” a voice hissed from the back door to outside. Gisa poked her head in, looking this way and that, lurching forward when she saw the pans on the table. “Did you check those before you took them out? Because if they fall in—”
Max’s spine went absolutely straight, as if he expected her to use the towel in her hand as a whip. Evie had never seen Gisa’s chin so high. “Of course I checked them, just the way you said.”
“They look all right, I suppose.” Gisa caught sight of Evie. “You are not supposed to be out here messing about with that broken wrist.”
Evie’s blood bubbled with excitement and fear all mixed up together. If Captain Garry really was a robber, then …
Then what? He’d just left her here, hoping she wouldn’t tell anyone about what she’d seen. She tried to think through what a hero in a story would do, but she couldn’t remember a single story about a baker or a messenger boy at all, much less what they could do to stop a man like Captain Garry. She picked up the bit of bread she’d snuck a bite from and tried to find a smile for Gisa. “I’ve never had anything like these, and they’re just different enough I think Lady Hollow won’t mind that they aren’t tarts. Will you teach me your recipe?”
Gisa’s nose wrinkled. “Fat chance of that! You try to figure out what goes in the bowl and I’ll lop off both your hands!”
It was Evie who started to laugh first, then Max; then Gisa joined the both of them. Evie took another bite of the bread. “I’d do the same to you if you tried to steal one of my secret recipes, only worse. I’d send a Fel to gobble you down.”
Gisa stopped laughing with a shudder. “That’s not funny.”
“Every hero knows to deal with Fel, you must do everything backward.”
“Backward, Gisa? Do you have to walk backward? Speak backward?”
“This is why you would not make a good hero, Evie Baker. Don’t touch the dough, I’ll punch it down the way you showed me once the story is done.”
“Why backward?”
“Well, Max, you have to decide what you don’t want first. My greatest grandmother—”
“You like one of your grandmothers more than the other? Wait, how many grandmothers do you have?”
“Greatest. My ancestor, great-great-great I don’t know how far back. She was the best dancer east of the Tershan border—Evie, don’t use that hand, I don’t care how much better you’re feeling.”
“Ouch! No need to slap me, Gisa. Fine. Do it all yourself.”
“I’ll roll them out while I tell the story. My greatest grandmother went to the Old Forest to sing with the crows and learn their dance.”
“So, your greatest grandmother went to the Fel?”
“Yes. She asked them to teach her backward, though. She said she did not want to steal anything for them, did not want to live in the forest forever, did not want anyone to die, until there were so many rules, the Fel had no choice but to give her exactly what she wanted. It took time. Her father burned the meat skewers he sold at market during the day, then cried into his pillow every night, worried she had been eaten or tricked or that she wasn’t a girl at all anymore, that she’d been changed into something else. And when his daughter returned, she did look different, her hair white, her hands holding stars and the great sky trailing in her shadow.”
“Why does your face look all squished, Max?”
“What? Why would you say that, Evie?”
“Because your face is all—”
“Even with all her rules, she had paid a price, but it was one that made her almost as happy as learning to dance. At her side there was a man no one had seen before. He spoke words no one knew and could sing sweeter than any bird.”
“Sweeter than a bird, or actually like a bird? Was he a Fel?”
“Fel can’t come out of the forest, Evie. There are rules.”
“Well, he wasn’t a Fel anymore, was he, Max? He was a man. Let her tell the story.”
“Together with the girl’s father, they left Reinstadt and the meat skewers and the wet pillow and danced into the sky. Their children fell from the clouds to the forest floor and made their way through the whole kingdom, dancing to a tune no one else could hear.”
“They didn’t fight anyone or build a ship or ride horses or wear masks and slay dragons?”
“They sang to the sky and spoke to the trees and didn’t care for horses or dragons or ships or fighting. They made their own world and lived in it same as my grandmother, my mother and father.”
“Those rolls look perfect.”
“Thank you.”
Though Max had been sure Evie would need to move to a new place, no one from the guard came to speak to her about it, most especially not Captain Garry. By the time Lady Hollow’s party started in the evening, no one had even looked twice at Evie except to grimace sympathetically over her splint. Once the breads were served and Lady Hollow hadn’t come tearing down the stairs to drag Evie away by the braids, Gisa came into their room holding a bowl of soup still steaming from the pot.
“I thought you might be a little hungry.” Gisa held it out.
“Thank you, I was worried Courderly would yell at me if I left the room.” Evie reached out with both hands and took it.
Gisa’s brow furrowed, looking at Evie’s splinted arm. “Doesn’t that hurt?
Evie dug the spoon into the bowl and shoved some of the soup into her mouth with a shrug. “No.” The soup was light and creamy, tasting of herbs Evie knew were only used in food meant for the upstairs dining room. “You didn’t put anything extra into this before you brought it to me, did you? Rat tails, perhaps?”
Gisa said something in Trouvani that sounded rougher than a wagon with one broken wheel. “Let me look at your wrist.”
Evie held it out, letting Gisa take the wrappings and the splint from her arm. She flexed her fingers and nothing hurt. Dropping the dressings on the floor, Gisa folded her arms with a fierce look that said something was amiss and that it was definitely Evie’s fault. “It’s healed.”
“Really?” Evie ate another bite. “That’s wonderful! That means I can help—”
“No, that’s impossible. That’s magic. When did you start feeling better?”
“You must have done it. Can’t Trouvani do some kind of magic?” Evie slurped down another mouthful of soup, glancing at the flowers in the corner that had already lost their petals, shriveled, then grown up and bloomed once more. Like magic.
“No, I am not a magical fairy creature who appeared to fix your stupid hollow bones or a little kitchen witch who grows flowers up by magic rather than letting their roots settle in the ground.” Gisa flicked Evie’s wrist with a bit more force than necessary, narrowing her eyes when Evie didn’t flinch. “This is impossible.”
“Wait, you never told me if it was rat tails in the soup or not.”
“Why would I put rats in your soup?” Gisa scowled. “Night follows the blaze of day.”
“Is that supposed to be a poem? Poetry is just a way to say nothing over and over again, and badly.”
“It means…” Gisa touched her maid’s cap, pulling at the edges. “You did something nice for me getting me away from Roary in the market, so I set your arm. You promised to keep Roary away from me, so I helped bake your bread. I brought you soup with no rat tails because it’s better to be ahead. Night follows the blaze of day, and the night can be cold.” She shuddered.
“I guess I don’t see things as owing back and forth. Doing nice things is just doing nice things.”
“Not everyone feels that way.”
“Well, I hope you feel that way and don’t decide I haven’t done anything nice enough back so you have to set my bed on fire.” Evie held up her wrist, examining it. “You should tell your teachers at the school that you fixed me. Everything else Trouvani do seems to be special, so why would healing be any different?” She ignored Gisa’s eye roll, wondering why she hadn’t ever thought of it before. Evie hadn’t been allowed to talk to Trouvani people, and for some reason she’d thought all they did was thieve and dance and play and tumble. She supposed it made sense that maybe some Trouvani people did some of those things, but that there were Trouvani healers, cooks, and bankers too. It was like all those storytellers forgetting that sometimes it was the pretty girl like Cece who wanted to hold a sword or the baker who wanted to become a pirate, not just the strapping young man with dimples who already had a pair of tall leather boots in his closet.
But Gisa was in a big fight with her family over all the healing stuff, according to Roary. So maybe it wasn’t that simple. Though Gisa didn’t seem to like Roary much, so maybe Roary had gotten it wrong.
Honestly, Evie wasn’t so sure she liked Roary either. But she wasn’t afraid of her. And it had definitely been fear pinching Gisa’s face when Roary had appeared at their door the day before.
Once she’d swallowed the soup, Evie set the bowl in her lap. “Even the doctor who came from the school said you’re a really good healer. If you’re so good at healing, then why do you live down here underground like a worm waiting for its head to be chopped off?”
“Worms don’t have heads.” Gisa grabbed the bowl back, but then a bit of an apology crept into her expression. “Are you finished?”
Evie eyed the spoon. “Was it worms in the soup?”
Sighing, Gisa sat back. “I’m here because I wanted more than I was supposed to have.”
“What do you mean?”
Gisa licked her lips, taking Evie’s spoon and setting it carefully in the bowl. “You always talk about Trouvani as if they’re some other kind of creature, like we’re made of magic and secrets not flesh and bones. Well, you’re right about one thing: My family did come from the Old Forest long, long ago, just like I told you. And we came with just … a little magic. Specks on our fingertips.”
Evie sat up straighter. “I knew it.”
“You don’t know it. It’s not like what you think of as magic. I can see when our brother Fel are messing about but not much more—like with that robber. You could see him. I could see him. But Roary and the guards couldn’t see a thing. That’s a Fel’s doing.”
“Max could see him too. And neither of us have any magic in us at all. Are you really related to Fel, like in the story?” Evie glanced toward the orange flower.
“Of course. I can feel them when they’re close, like their thoughts are touching mine. They like to dance and play and sing just like my family.” Gisa closed her eyes. “But that’s not what I wanted.”
Magic? Touching thoughts? Evie’s chest burned with the questions she wanted to ask, but she was only friends enough with Gisa to know that she’d clam right up if Evie said something she didn’t like, whether Evie understood why or not. The idea of Trouvani and Fel growing from the same roots made her want to go read through all those old books in Dr. Cleat’s library—though most stories she heard about Trouvani were more about stealing and doing bad magic and kidnapping people.
What if all those stories had started because they weren’t told by Trouvani? If Gisa’s family claimed Fel as kin, was that why other people assumed they were mischievous and sometimes outright evil? Everyone knew Fel were tricky, as likely to steal your life as a bag of dried apricots. It wasn’t far from what people said of Trouvani. “You didn’t want to dance and sing because you wanted to be a doctor?”
“There are doctors and healers and every other thing you might want to do among Trouvani. I thought I could add what I already knew to what they taught at the fancy healer school. My grandmother had already taught me Trouvani healing, and that school wanted lots of money before they’d even test me to see if I could be a student. I wanted to try anyway. Right about the same time Roary started watching our shows in the square, I started trying to persuade my grandmother to send me.”
“What does Roary have to do with it?”
“It made her mother angry to see her watching us and clapping along, so she’d come every day.”
“Why didn’t her mother want her to come?”
“You know the stories they tell about us. You’ve told a few of them yourself since you came to live here.”
Evie flushed, remembering how only the day before she’d asked again if Gisa had taken the knife.
“One afternoon I was telling my grandmother that going to school might teach me something I didn’t know yet and that maybe I could teach the doctors something they didn’t know. I’d be able to take even better care of our family, they’d be better at healing, and they’d have Trouvani to thank for it. But she got angry at me for wanting to leave the family. And … I guess Roary overheard.”
Evie thought of Dr. Cleat, starting at his doctor school when he was younger than she was—apprenticing and studying and writing and becoming odd as a pair of squirrels tied at the tail without so much as a whisper in his way. It wasn’t a matter of being something he wasn’t. Dr. Cleat was determined to be exactly what he wanted to be—and it seemed Gisa was the same. Odd in different ways, thank the saints, but determined.
“Roary told me she wanted to help,” Gisa continued. “She said if I worked as a maid here, she’d introduce me to the right people to become an apprentice, and the job would help pay my way.”
“And … she did?” Evie waited, the room feeling cold around her. Roary’s wicked eyes hovered in her mind, as if she was just outside, watching them. “But … black … follows the bright … whatever it was you said.”
Gisa looked up, blinking rapidly as if she’d just tripped over her own thoughts. “Night follows the blaze of day. My father always says it whenever an outsider is kind. I don’t like it because I want to believe people are better than that, but I’m not sure they are.” She reached out to touch the orange flower’s brokenhearted petals. “This is from the forest. It reminds me of home. They’re supposed to mend hearts, or maybe break them.”
“Wait, what did Roary do? If she’s doing something bad to you, then couldn’t you leave? You’d make as much singing and dancing as washing Lady Hollow’s underpants. Your family is still down in the square—why can’t you go back to them?”
“They won’t be here much longer. Thank the night sky for that.” Gisa’s face hardened. Her hand dropped from the orange petals and she stood up, taking the bowl with her. She went to her own trunk at the foot of her bed, kneeling by the little patchwork bag that Evie had wanted to look into so many times. She didn’t open it, taking a little box from the trunk instead. She brought it to Evie, giving the box a shake so it rattled. “Maybe they’ll mend your heart. I know how much you miss your family and that friend of yours, Cece. There’s not much hope of mending mine.”
Evie peeked inside the box to find round white seeds, each marked with a perfect black heart as if it had been drawn on. “What is Roary doing? If you’ve got bits of magic, why can’t you use it to stop her?”
Gisa blinked, furiously throwing the box down onto Evie’s bed, a few seeds scattering across her blankets. “There’s no need to make fun.”
The look on Gisa’s face made Evie’s insides feel like stone. “I didn’t mean to be rude—”
“I’m not a storybook waiting to be read to you. You see me; I’m true. I’ve two eyes, a nose, and a mouth just like you.” Gisa shook her head. “I’m glad that knife is gone. You are too silly to keep such a thing safe.”
“You know what it is?”
“The queen’s steel.” Gisa went to the door, the empty soup bowl and spoon balanced in her hands. “Cursed.”
“Cursed?” Evie thought back to the saint-queen’s black blade. The sword Saint Hart had used to catch her Fel had been made from black metal just the same. Hartelismi. “Saint Hart seemed to do all right.”
“Did she?” Gisa raised an eyebrow. “I thought your saint-queen died.”