Donnally gazed down on his sister with a kind of maddening sympathy. “Caledonia.” He said her name and stopped, biting down on whatever he’d meant to say next.

She held firm to his hands and forced herself to be calm when she spoke again. “I lost you once long ago and once again in Cloudbreak. I don’t want to lose you again. Do you remember how Mom taught us to find lost things? To retrace our steps until something reminded us where we’d lost it, or we just got lucky. You were better at it than me. You always remembered and I only ever got lucky. I just promised never to lose anything I’d need to find again. I didn’t realize I’d lost you at first and I’m so sorry it took me this long to figure it out.”

The knot of his throat plunged as he swallowed some strong emotion. His eyes lost the lines of tension around the corners and he seemed to remember the children they’d been. At least, that’s what she wanted to believe. “I thought you were dead.”

“I know.” A sudden pang of loss crashed over her, along with the sharpest edge of memory, of waking up the morning after she’d spotted his gray coat flapping at the top of a Bullet pike, unable to decide if the wound in her gut was worse than the one in her heart. She knew the pain he’d felt, but she also knew the joy of discovering her brother was alive. “But I wasn’t. I’m not. I’m here. Go with me.”

“Lir—” He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could not bear to see her face when he said, “He’s my brother.”

Those words. They fell around Caledonia’s wrists like manacles, making her as much a prisoner as he was. It was what he’d said in Cloudbreak and what he said so often in her dreams. Always in them, he was just out of reach or moving away, his sorrow at leaving her never enough.

She felt the tears on her cheeks before she could do anything to stop them. “No,” she said. “He’s not, but I am still your sister and I know that has to mean something to you.”

“Caledonia.” He exhaled slowly. “Lir saved me. He plucked me out of all the other children coming into the family and gave me the strength I needed to survive. I wouldn’t be here if not for him.”