“I don’t want to be poor again, Brella,” she said, the thought crashing down on her, chilling despite the bath’s calming heat. Her hands tangled together in her lap. “If Frances decides to, I don’t know, throw me back into the forest as a traitor. I don’t want to be poor like I was.”

“You won’t be.” Brella wedged her fingers into the nervous ball of Scratch’s hands. “Or maybe you will be, I don’t know. I’m not a seer.” Scratch snorted. “It broke my heart, you know.” Brella’s voice dropped to a low murmur. “Seeing you so desperate and hungry. So young and alone.”

She bristled. “Mm, lovely. Any more words to describe how pathetic I was? Scrawny? Abandoned? Pitiful?”

“Hush. No, Scratch. I mean . . . I wish I could take that little part of you, the part that’s still that girl, and feed her up. Keep her warm, you know?”

Scratch curled over herself because this was too much. “That’s not me. That’s before. I wasn’t Scratch.”

“You dream about her, though.”

For a moment, she couldn’t speak. When she finally opened her mouth, her voice was faint and rasping. “Well, as you’ve seen.”

“It’s not embarrassing, I think, to still have a bit of her with you. She’s the one who learned how to butcher meat, after all.”

“Mm. My most useful skill.”

“I don’t think,” Brella whispered, each word carefully placed, “that we can get rid of our past so completely. The most difficult bits of us are the hardest to shake. I think the best we can do is reckon with the pain.”

“And what child lives inside you?” Scratch asked, wilting under the weight of being so completely seen, desperate to look elsewhere.

Brella leaned back on her hands, the muscles in her arms standing out. “Oh, an angry one. Who shouts at her lover in the forest when she knows that lover is scared and alone. Someone who wants a just world, but wouldn’t know what to do with that justice if she got it. Someone with too many siblings she resents and a code of ethics that gets in her way more than it doesn’t. Someone who wants to start a revolution, but can’t stomach the idea of bloodshed.” She shrugged. “That sort of child.”

“Wow.” Scratch leaned against her shoulder. “Complicated kid.”

“Oh, stuff it.”

“What do you want, Brella?”

“Now?” She smiled, luxuriously slow, letting her eyes flicker shut. “A bath.”

They stripped themselves silently and slid into the tub. Scratch was grateful she didn’t get a good look at the pair of them naked in the mirror. She expected she’d spot a scrawny, childish shrimp, literally paling in comparison to Brella’s broad, womanly shape. Perhaps once she’d had a few more meals and lifted a weight or two she could stomach it.