“You owe me one. I ought to make you go get your own now.”

I sighed, finally looking up. “Etan, I don’t . . .”

My words were stolen by the sight of something so both foreign and familiar, it brought tears to my eyes.

On the wall, mounted just above Etan’s fireplace, was a sword with a large V-shaped chip in the blade.

“What?” Etan demanded.

I said nothing, passing him to get closer to the sword.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he demanded, trailing behind me.

I stopped in front of the fireplace, looking up at it. It was almost like I could feel Silas here.

“What are you doing?” he asked rather loudly. “Need I remind you, this is my room?”

“Do you know the first time I heard your name, Etan?” I asked in a whisper. “Silas was telling me about how he started working with metal, and he told me about a sword he made for his cousin. He said that even though he did a terrible job, you used it the entire tournament.”

I managed to tear my eyes away long enough to look at him. His eyes were cautious as we both turned and stared up at the battered metal on the wall.

“It’s all but unusable,” he replied, his voice soft. “If I hit that chip again, it’ll break, and the handle is so unreliable. But I can’t get rid of it. Even before everything happened, I couldn’t have parted with it. He was very proud.”

I nodded. “I admired that, his pride.” I kept my eyes up, staring at Silas’s work, trying to breathe through the tightness in my chest. “My first impression of you, from that stolen conversation with a boy I was never supposed to know, was of someone with integrity, someone who was gracious.” I looked over to him again. “You are unrecognizable in comparison to the person Silas told me about. Or even the person Scarlet tells me about. You’re some stranger in that man’s place. Why?”

There was a long breath of silence.

“Get out of my room.”

“I really want to understand. What is it that makes you so cold when your family has told me you’re not like that at all?”

“I said, get out.” He pointed to the door, and after a moment, I obeyed. In the hallway, I turned back to look at him. His eyes were now both ice and fire. “Don’t you think you’ve taken enough from me?” he asked. “Go home.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how else to show you, Etan. I’m here for my family. And I won’t leave them.”

The slamming door I’d been expecting earlier finally came, and I hated that I wanted him to open the door again, just so I could look at Silas’s terrible sword. I went back to my room and used my candle to start a fire.

I sat as close to it as I could, toying with my wedding ring on its chain and crying. And seeing as I could hear Etan huffing around his room in anger, I was sure he could hear me, too.