I stare down through my lashes at our hands. He’s fidgeting with his ring, twisting it on his finger.

“And I still screwed it up.” He laughs bitterly. “Olani did her best to fix everything, but Leira still blamed me. Screamed at me, and locked me up in my room. That night, Olani somehow managed to unlock the door, apologize for how I was treated. Then she snuck me out of the house for the night.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “We got dumplings.”

I sit with that information for a moment. Leira was Olani’s employer, and she still risked her wrath just to help Raze. I wonder if anyone had ever gone out of their way to be kind to him before that. No wonder he cares about her.

“We snuck out together all the time after that. I felt so free on those nights, like my world was bigger than what Leira could get from me. She acts tough but...”

But she’s only human. She needs someone to protect her now as much as he did then. Just like Isolde needs me. And we’re stuck here, with no way to help them.

Quiet falls again, but I can sense his short, sharp breaths: there’s something else he wants to say, something he’s holding back. I sigh, but my head doesn’t move from his shoulder. “Tell me what else is wrong.”

He struggles to hide the surprise that flickers in the corner of his mouth, the conflicting emotions that run across his face like clouds over the sun. “I thought the losing everything to Leira, hopelessly stranded with nothing to eat and nowhere to go thing was a good-enough excuse.”

“Raze.”

My eyes flick up defiantly to meet his, long enough to let him know I’m serious. Long enough to feel the discomfort of it tickle the back of my neck.

Raze sighs. “Fine. You’re relentless.”

The autumn breeze makes me shiver in my thin shirt, but Raze is warm. I lean in a little closer, waiting for him to speak.

He casts another miserable sideways look at me. “It’s my aunt. Seeing her like that... I should have been prepared for it. But I wasn’t.” He holds his open hand in front of him, watching his fingers squeeze into a fist like it’s suddenly very interesting. “I know how she is when she wants something. But I still—” He cuts himself off abruptly with a strangled sound somewhere between a sob and a chuckle.

I don’t know what to do, so I reach out awkwardly with one hand. It ends up resting at a strange angle on top of one of his wrists. His head bends to study my slender fingers, then twists sideways like a hawk’s to my face again.

“I feel ridiculous,” he says, a hint of bitterness creeping into the edges of his tone. “You don’t have to pretend it isn’t.”

“I’m an expert in ridiculous,” I say without thinking, which is almost definitely the wrong thing.