“Hate what, exactly?” Bitterlich asked. She’d become more volatile in the last two days, ever since she learned he was her father. Failures she once would have gritted her teeth at provoked outbursts now. She was trying to get a reaction from him, but he doubted even she knew what she wanted that reaction to be.

“This,” she gestured at herself. “All of this.” She threw her arms out toward the sky.

“It must be hard to hate so much, especially all at once.”

She glowered at him and he expected her to declare her hatred for him most of all. He readied himself for it like he would for a deathblow; it would hurt that much.

“How come you can talk as an animal and I can’t?” she said.

“Because I practiced for about a year,” he said. It wasn’t the first time he’d told her this, but they’d been going over a lot of ground twice or thrice today. “You can make the sounds; you just have to figure out how.”

“You said you’d teach me,” she said. “Not just say ‘again,’ again and again.”

“Sometimes that’s what teaching is,” he said. “Making you keep trying something you don’t want to do.”

“You can’t make me do anything. I don’t have to listen to you.”

Here Bitterlich thought she’d gotten as close to the root of her frustration as she could without exposing her fear.

“Just because I’m your father,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean you own me,” she said.

Bitterlich could only wonder at the dizzying chain of reason that had brought her to that declaration. Take some perfectly ordinary fear and multiply by twelve-year-old.

“Do you want me to go away?” Two days ago she had been keen to find her family, but perhaps wishful-thinking fathers were better than the real thing. They were certainly easier.

Rebecca looked uncertain. “Just so you know, I don’t have to do what you say.”

Bitterlich normally avoided any overt display of emotion, especially ones that could be construed as barbaric or uncivilized, so it was with a very deliberate effort that he drew his hand down his face with frustration. She needed to see it.

“You’re right. Being a daughter is not like being a cabin girl. You never swore an oath to me, but I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, and gestured her to come closer.

Warily she drifted in.

He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper, “I don’t want your obedience.”

She twitched away, surprised. “You don’t, but—”

“I want your trust,” he said. “When I tell you to do something, I want you to do it because you know I’m older and more experienced and have your best interests at heart, not because I might punish you if you don’t.”