Lovisa suspected there was no angry, twisted feeling of which Ferla was incapable. But Ferla was a different kind of northerner; she was rich. “Probably.”

“Well,” said Nev, her voice still frosty. “It’s true that the people I know from home might have some different attitudes. For example, we’d never pay a fortune for a month’s worth of preventative tea. We’d never buy cut flowers when they grow beside our roads.”

She thinks she’s superior, thought Lovisa.

“But we have normal feelings,” she said. “Including jealousy.”

“Do you get jealous?” Lovisa asked.

“Sometimes,” Nev said, then added, almost indignantly, “Of course I do.”

The tea was bubbling in earnest now. With an expression of disgust, Nev got up and leaned over the pot, stirred it, then mixed a spoonful of some congealed amber thing from a glass jar into the concoction. She pulled two cups from a shelf and carefully poured. She handed one to Lovisa.

Lovisa sipped cautiously, her stomach still roiling. “It tastes different from what I’m used to,” she said. Much less disgusting, she didn’t say aloud.

“I added some honey for sweetness, and some ginger syrup so it’s not as hard on an empty stomach. The chemicals that prevent pregnancy can hurt the stomach wall.”

“Oh,” said Lovisa, then cursed herself for sounding interested. You make me feel like a child, she thought, still jumpy from the strange pressure of Nev’s purring fox against her leg.

The two girls sipped their drinks, not looking at each other. Lovisa didn’t know why Nev should matter to her—when Pari was dead and her parents were monsters; when the Queen of Monsea was imprisoned in the attic; when she didn’t know how to think, or what to do, or why she was always such a consummate coward. Nor did she know why she cared whether Nev minded about Mari. And why I’m always crying, she thought, furiously blinking back tears.

“What makes you jealous?” she asked.

Nev sighed. “I can get jealous if I have feelings for someone.”

“So, if you’re sleeping with someone but you don’t have feelings, you don’t get jealous?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had sex with anyone I didn’t have feelings for.”

“Do you have feelings for Nori Orfa?” Lovisa asked, suddenly concerned.

“Nori Orfa,” Nev repeated, as if she didn’t understand the name.

“I heard a rumor,” Lovisa said, not mentioning that she herself had seen Nori leaving Nev’s room. “That you have a thing with him.”

“With Nori Orfa,” Nev said flatly.

“Yes,” said Lovisa, growing impatient. “That’s his family name. The tea manor boy from your own province up north. I mean, you’re drinking that tea for some reason, aren’t you?”

Nev’s head went back and her shoulders straightened, almost imperceptibly. “That’s a nosy question,” Nev said.

“True,” said Lovisa.