Meadow Faeoria's Arc

Chapter 10 of 12

Meadow lay in the grass until her hands stopped shaking. The iron cottage stood across the field, small and lit from inside. Cinder was behind that door. Meadow had to see it with her own eyes before she could leave. She rolled onto her knees, used the dead wand as a cane, and started walking. The cottage door was warm to the touch. Meadow did not knock. She pressed her ear to the wood and listened. Inside, someone was moving. A chair scraped. Water poured. Then a voice, low and even, speaking to no one Meadow could hear. "Bread. Salt. A knife by the door." A pause. "One shoe. Keep the shoe." Cinder, taking inventory. Meadow closed her eyes. That was the voice of a girl who had landed. Not safe, not warm, but standing. Counting what she had. Meadow eased back from the door. She could go in. She could sit at that table and tell Cinder everything — the huntress, the debt, the brother now awake in her head. Cinder would listen. Cinder would file it under leverage and go quieter. She left the door alone. At the edge of the field she stopped and lifted the wand. The star at the tip was still dark. Her own magic was gone. But her sister's was not. Melinoe's magic sat in the wand like a coin she had never spent. Meadow had been afraid of it since the night it was given. Melinoe worked in watching. In dreams and thresholds. Open her magic and Melinoe would see through it the way Zagreus now heard through his. Meadow thought of Zagreus, already listening. One sibling awake through her was a mistake. Two was a household. She did it anyway. She touched the wand to her forehead and named what she wanted. Not a spell for Cinder. A thread. A window she could look through from home. Just the cottage. Just the girl inside. The wand went cold in her hand. Something behind her eyes opened like a second lid. She saw the cottage from above, then from the hearth, then from the corner where Cinder had set the single glass slipper on the table beside a heel of bread. Cinder sat down. She did not cry. She began to eat. Meadow felt her sister stir at the far end of the thread. Not words. A slow, curious attention turning toward her, the way a cat notices a moth. "Just watch with me," Meadow whispered. "Don't touch her." The attention did not answer. It settled in and stayed. Meadow lowered the wand. She turned toward the dark seam in the field where the road down began. The cottage light stayed lit behind her, and inside her head it stayed lit too, steady as a lamp she had hung in her own skull. She walked home with her sister watching through her eyes.