Nana rose, holding knitting in her gnarled hand. A long scarf with shifting patterns trailed from two golden needles to the wooden floor. In the yarn Scratch could make out the images of four people, three tall, one short, traipsing through a tree-thick wood.

“Now that we’ve all eaten,” Nana declared with a satisfied grin, “I should go take care of your friends. It seems as though I have a great deal of mending to do.”

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

“He’ll be okay, right?” Scratch asked, watching Nana disappear behind a closed door. “James. She’s not going to hurt him?”

“No.” Vel fell back against the couch and closed his swollen eyes. “She’ll help him. For now.”

“For now?”

“She has his name.” Brella took another scone—it must have been her third—and chomped into it. She wasn’t looking at Scratch. “She knows him. And now he owes her.”

“Owes her what?”

Vel shrugged. “It varies. After she rescued me from a pack of bandits, I had to give her a phial of my blood.”

Scratch recoiled. “For what?”

He shrugged again, absently fingering the tan skin of his elbow pit. “Not sure. Time works differently with her. Maybe she’ll use it after I’m dead.”

“How old is she?”

“Time. It’s . . . weird.” He fluttered his hands around as demonstration. “I don’t think even she knows.”

Scratch ran out of questions after that, so she let her mouth fall shut, her eyes closed. She was wrecked, battle-fatigued and mentally sluggish. She wanted to sleep, but feared missing any information, any bit of truth that could get her back to her feet.

Brella cleared her throat. “Scratch, can I talk to you?”

She opened her eyes. Brella was staring at her warily, with defensiveness writ across her set jaw. “Uh, sure.”

“Alone?”

Vel scowled. “I’m comfortable. And I’m sad. You can go elsewhere.”

“Fine. We’ll go to the lavender room.”

“Where is—oh.” As Scratch spoke, a new door appeared in the far wall. Or maybe it had been there all along and she hadn’t noticed it before. Actually, come to think of it, she had seen it before. In fact, it was the first thing she had noticed about the room: a wooden door decorated with a painted sprig of lavender. And, gods, it was beautiful.

“Oh,” she cried. “Of course. The lavender room.”

Brella’s melancholy cracked, letting a smile shine through. “You’ll get used to that. You can only find things in here you know about. But once you know, it feels like—”

“A treat.”

“Yes, Scratch. A treat.” Her smile broadened, then fell. “Come on.”