Ash and Ember

CHAPTER THREE What Grandmothers Know

Sophie thinks the problem is that I keep it in. My grandmother thinks the problem is that I don't know what I'm keeping.

Nara's cottage is at the edge of the settlement, past the woodstore and the broken fence nobody's fixed in six years, close enough to the treeline that in winter the shadows fall across her doorstep by mid-afternoon. I come here most nights. I have come here most nights since I was eleven, when I figured out that it was the only place in the Blackrock settlement where I could put my face down.

She doesn't ask me to perform. That's the whole of it, really. The whole reason.

She's already got the fire going when I push open the door. Two cups on the table , the bitter tea she makes from something she grows in the side garden and refuses to name, because she says if I knew what it was I'd refuse to drink it. She's probably right. I sit. I wrap my hands around the cup. The warmth moves through my palms and I let out a breath I've been holding since approximately the moment Leon smiled at me across the training ground this morning.

Nara is small and precise, the kind of old that is made entirely of intention. She moves around her kitchen like it's an extension of her body , fifty years of arrangement, not taking suggestions from anyone. She sits across from me and looks at me the way she always looks at me, which is directly, without flinching, like there's something written in my face that she's been reading for years and finds genuinely interesting.

Nobody else in my family looks at me like that.

"Training," she says. Not a question , an invitation. She always asks about training. Specifically. Times, techniques, what isn't working and why. She wants the real answers, not the managed ones, and after years of practice I still find myself caught off-guard by it , the simple experience of someone taking what I say seriously. It lands somewhere tender every time, no matter how I brace for it.

I tell her about the morning. The circuits. Leon cutting the third post. My own times, which I've committed to memory the way other people memorise prayers.

She listens. She asks two follow-up questions about my sprint stance. I answer them.

Then she sets her cup down and says, carefully , the way she says things she's been deciding whether to say , "Your fire is getting stronger."

I go still.

It's not that the words surprise me. It's that she's said them out loud. I have spent three years not saying them out loud, not even in my own head if I could help it , the warmth under my sternum, the way the air around my hands gets hot when I'm frightened or furious, the pan that rattled in the kitchen while Selena was laughing. I have kept all of it in the same box as the record book under the floorboard: real, documented, mine, not for anyone else.

"It's nothing," I say.

Nara looks at me with the patience of someone who has been waiting for this conversation for a very long time. "It's not nothing, little ember. It's never been nothing. I've been watching it since you were four years old."

Four. I file that away without letting it show on my face.

She tells me in pieces, the way you tell someone something they need but aren't ready for all at once. The Phoenix-Wolf line. Old , older than the Blackrock pack's recorded history, older than the territory maps, surfacing rarely and without warning in bloodlines that carry the right combination of something Nara describes as heat and hunger. Red hair is one of the signs. The warmth under the sternum is another. The power itself, when it fully wakes, is significant in ways she doesn't detail yet , just says significant and lets that word sit between us.

I think about the ruins at the edge of the territory. Phoenix-era structures, she'd called them once, her voice going careful. The warmth I always feel there.

"They call it a defect," Nara says. Her voice is quiet but her jaw is tight. "Because they don't understand it. Because it frightens them. Your father has known since you were small , he recognised it, or had it confirmed, I'm not certain which. That's why he," She stops. Something moves behind her eyes. "That's why he does what he does."

I sit with this.

I sit with it for long enough that the fire shifts and Nara doesn't speak and the tea goes from hot to warm in my hands. I'm rearranging things. Several things I thought I understood about my life are turning themselves over, showing different surfaces.

"So it's not that I'm less," I say. Slowly. Checking the shape of it. "He's not hiding me because there's something wrong with me. He's hiding me because,"

"Because you are more," Nara says. Simple. Firm. The way you say a thing that's been true for a long time and is tired of being kept quiet. "You have always been more. The defect was never yours, Mona. It was theirs. The failure of imagination. The fear."

I don't cry. I notice the impulse , it moves through me like a wave that doesn't quite break , and then it passes, and what's left underneath it is something I don't immediately have a name for. Not relief. Not grief.

Quieter than either of those.

I stay until the fire burns low. Then I walk home through the dark.

The great hall is still lit from the gathering , the last of it, the stragglers, voices carrying in the cold. I take the long way around, past the eastern wall, and I end up where I always end up when I take the long way: outside the main window, where the family portrait hangs.

Three years ago my father commissioned it from a painter who came through from the southern territories. He is in the centre. Leon and Selena flank him. My mother stands slightly behind, her hand on Leon's shoulder. It's a good painting , technically skilled, well-composed. Everyone in it looks like a family.

There is a space to the left of Selena where someone my height might have stood.

I have looked at this portrait many times. I have always expected the looking to feel like something specific , grief, maybe, or the flat settled feeling from the ruins, that stone-hitting-water quiet. Tonight it doesn't feel like either.

Tonight, with Nara's words still rearranging things inside me, it feels like evidence.

Like something I'm going to use.

I hear footsteps before I hear her voice , heels on packed earth, a laugh she's wearing like an accessory. Selena comes around the corner wrapped in a beautiful coat, a private smile on her face from the end of a good evening. She sees me and stops.

Her eyes go from me to the portrait in the window. Then back.

Something flickers in her expression. Not guilt , Selena doesn't do guilt, not the real kind, not the kind that costs you anything. Something colder than guilt. Something that knows.

"You should go to bed," she says pleasantly. "Big day tomorrow. Father wants us all at the eastern trail by dawn."

"Will I be counted this time," I say, "or will you lose me in the ruins again?"

The pleasant expression doesn't move. But something behind her eyes does , a very small adjustment, like a door opening just enough to show what's behind it and then closing again. "That was an accident."

"You remembered it immediately. Seven years ago and you knew exactly what I meant. How long have you been,"

"Mona." Her voice goes smooth and cool, the register she uses when she's decided a conversation is over. "Don't make things complicated. It's exhausting when you do. The pack functions better when everyone understands their place, and your place is,"

"Careful," I say.

She blinks. I don't think I've ever interrupted her before.

The warmth is moving through my sternum again , steady, awake, the coal that doesn't go out. I feel it in my palms the way I felt the cup of tea: real and warm and mine. I look at my sister in her beautiful coat in front of the portrait that doesn't have my face in it, and I think about Nara saying more, and the word sits in my chest like a key I've just been handed for a lock I've been staring at for seventeen years.

"Finish that sentence," I say quietly, "and I want you to think very carefully about what you're going to say next."

Selena stares at me.

For the first time in my life, she looks uncertain.