Brella paused for a moment, caught in knit-brow consideration over whether Scratch and James were worth her story. “I was born during a rainstorm,” she began, apparently finding her audience satisfactory. “My parents wanted to name me Rainbow. Vel was sick when my mother was pregnant, and my parents hoped that when I was born, Vel would get better. The rain would stop and everything would be okay.” She squinted up at the sky as a bat swooped above their heads, squeaking in the moonlight. “But it wasn’t. He stayed sick for months, and that rainy season was the heaviest in a generation. Still, I was a happy baby, and I was Vel’s favorite thing. My parents said that I wasn’t able to clear the rain, but I made it easier to bear. Like an umbrella.”

“I’m better now,” Vel offered.

“Yes.” James arched an eyebrow. “We can see that.”

Scratch was stuck inside her own head. There was no Brella without Vel; she was his Umbrella. What was it like, she wondered, to be so connected to someone else? It sounded warm. Safe.

When she had beaten the boy at the Academy, she had beaten him alone.

“We should sleep,” she announced, skin prickling. She had barely touched her portion of rabbit. “I can take first watch.”

No one objected. While James and the Shaes slipped inside their bedrolls (which Scratch had so expertly laid out), she found a good, mossy spot under a thick maple and settled herself. Through the leafy branches she could just make out the stars. They looked strange out here, as if they had scrambled just to unmoor her. Where was the God of Dirt, with his giant feet of mulch twinkling overhead? Where had the God of Stillness run off to? And, horrors upon horrors, where in the infinite hells was the Cheesemonger?

Deep breathing speckled with snores drifted up from the bedrolls. Now she was truly alone.

Her name was Scratch, and she had earned it. She had every reason to be proud of escaping that first fight and every subsequent challenge with her dignity intact. But there was a reason the story made her skin itch tonight, a snag in the fabric of it. Alone, under the stars the gods had abandoned, she opened herself to the why of it: the boy. Pathetic. Ruined. Stripped of his dignity so that she could take her first hard-won step toward a life of her own. To best him had been the only way forward. Now, sitting alone and lost in an unfamiliar wood, with no title to her name and no home to speak of, it felt like a terrible waste. He was destroyed so that she might thrive, and to look directly at the memory of him meant the weight of her victory nearly choked her.