As I kneel before the hearth with an armful of wood, a thick, black spider scuttles out and over my hand. I shriek before I know it. I catch a motion from the side of my eye and brace myself for a cuff from the Sin Eater, but it’s the spider she’s after with her heel. She grinds it into the floorboards. Later, after the fire has gone cold, I feel her cradle around me again. It feels good.

See, it’s not the worst of the worst, I tell the deadness still lodged in my heart. I have a roof over my head. A fire to keep me warm.

And us. Against the grief and the loneliness and the sins heaped upon our souls, I remind myself, we have us.

Even though I’m not crying, she shushes me softly. Mayhap it’s more for her than me.

4. POMEGRANATE

DAYS JOIN TOGETHER into weeks. Early spring becomes late spring. The Sin Eater’s nothing like my mother. The Sin Eater is silent and steady and ready with a slap if I, say, sleep past dawn or don’t do the words right at the end of a Recitation. But when she holds me sometimes at night, it feels like I belong. Her house becomes our house. Our house becomes home. Me on my rug by the hearth. Her in the loft I’ve still never ventured into. She’s not my kin, and I’m not hers, but we’re something to each other. We are us.

Light comes through the edges of the shutters, and there’s a sloshing sound. She’s gulping down water. I roll away from the sound, sorting dream from waking. She’s on to tying back her hair, readying to leave.

I sit up. I should comb my hair, I think, suddenly sure that this is what should happen. But then she pulls open the door, and I’m running after, my unkempt black hair bobbing along with me.

I pat it down as the boys call out today’s Eatings and Recitations. I’m accustomed to at least a splash of water on my face, some marker between day and night. But in this new world there’s scarcely any.

One of the messengers, I notice, is not a boy at all but a proper servant wearing the Queen’s badge, a falcon and a rose.