Page 2 of Cinder
Dorthe snatched her fallen kitchen knife and fled.
Cin’s hands shook as he watched her go, tearing back down the street in the direction of the Earharts’ small town home.
Did she know? She couldn’t have seen his face—not well, certainly. But maybe she didn’t need to. Any little information she could give the crown’s watch would be more than they had now—and someday that more would become enough.
A terrible, monstrous little voice in the back of his mind chided: he could have just killed her. But as damned as Cin was, he didn’t think he had it in him to take an innocent life, even to save himself. He could live under the weight of a great deal of sin, but not that. He’d choose to face the crown’s wrath first. Or, he liked to think he would. Cin was never quite sure what lengths his body would go to when push came to shove.
It carried him forward like a thing possessed now, following his original plan to go up and over the wall into the farmland. As he walked, it became harder and harder to ignore the sharp pain between his ribs. It had started when he was young, brought on by the same endless, hacking cough that had eventually killed hisbirth mother, but now the ribbons of flesh ached all the deeper where his tight binding held his chest flat.
He kept each breath small and short, putting one foot in front of the other. Something on the side of his boot began to flap, peeling a little back from the shoe’s sole. His ribs, at least, would feel better if he was willing to give them a week’s rest, but a break in his only pair of shoes worried him. Climbing walls and creeping up behind his victims was hard enough as things stood. He did not need a broken shoe to alert the world to his presence. Or to connect his daily life to his nighttime antics.
If what Dorthe might have seen didn’t ruin that for him.
Cin tried not to let his focus spiral—there was still a day ahead of him. Still a house to tend, a family to feed, a thousand things that had nothing to do with violence or justice, only stupid, ruthless monotony. His ribs would keep hurting through it all, his newly broken shoe keep catching as he went about his chores. That was where he needed his attention to rest now.
He could feel his three-pigeon flock turning to five, then ten, then dozens as the sky began to lighten.
Tucking the bloody inner fold of his threadbare cloak closer to his waistline, Cin pushed the knife strapped to his belt around to the back and slipped through the gate at the back of his family’s estate. He crushed the dew-laden garden grass as he walked, mist curling around his legs. Cin’s flock gave a scattered call from where they roosted in the tree that marked the grave of Cin’s birth mother.
He lifted a hand to them in farewell—a thank you for being there, regardless of his deeds. The pigeons cooed, and a few of them descended to drop apples into Cin’s arms. He thanked each in turn. Not a gift for him, but to cover his hide. That meant his family was awake. He had to hurry.
Cin glanced up at the back windows—curtains all drawn still. He swore though, that as he slipped into the house, one of themrustled, a dark silhouette peering down. He tucked the bloody stain on his cloak a little tighter to himself. The oversight with Dorthe was just making him nervous. His identity was safe, at least for that very moment, and that meant he had a different life to live still: one where his blade stayed locked away in its sheath at his back.
For the twenty-third time, Cin hoped to God that the Plumed Menace had killed his last.
The Reinholzes’ small estate had sturdy bones and more rooms than the family should have afforded themselves when they were wealthier, much less now, with coffers waning and no marriage prospects in sight.
The wrapping hallways barely echoed from the rising of the family. Father and stepmother prepared for the morning in separate but joined rooms, ignoring each other with each grumbled breath. The eldest of Cin’s siblings and their only one by blood still snored in his silken pajamas, Cin’s mending of the moth-eaten fabric always far gentler than his brother’s hands had ever lain on anything, or anyone. Cin could hear the apple of their Father’s eye, the elder of his stepsiblings, already settling in at the upstairs piano, likely just as alert and brilliant and meticulously put-together as they had been when they finished their extensive hours of study last night. The baby of the house, as empty-headed as the clouds gathering above, shouted down the hall for Cin’s help.
Cin hated them all, and hated himself for it.
He slid his muddy boots off at the door, set the apples into their bowl, and tiptoed across the cold kitchen floor, out to the main hall of the old house.
“The hearth, Cinder!” came a cry from his stepmother, her voice raised to echo down through the space.
Cin tried to make himself smaller as he walked. He collected the logs he’d stacked against the wall, ignoring the deepening ache in his side as he carried them, and spilled them into the hearth in Louise’s room as quickly as he could. The ground there was just as swept of the previous night’s ash as every fireplace Cin tended, yet this long-established cleanliness couldn’t stop the barreling reminder of his nickname—“Covered in it! You’d think Szule slept there; the little Cinder-whore.”—so firmly embedded in his family’s vocabulary now.
“Cinder, child! Why are you damp?” Louise shouted from her bathing-chamber as Cin lit the hearth flame.
“I’ve been collecting apples, Mother!” Cin shouted back, wielding the feminine lilt of his voice to its most docile advantage. “I thought a cobbler would be nice for breakfast.”
“You know that we used the last of the sugar,” Louise snapped back. A grammatical inaccuracy, Cin thought—the we should have been singular.
“Yes, Mother, sorry, Mother,” Cin replied, the words as familiar as the back of his own hand and as meaningless as a slap. He kept moving, up the stairs and away from his step-mother.
“Go to town for it!” Louise called.
Town. Cin tried not to let his mind flee back to the moment he’d locked eyes with Dorthe in the darkness. If she’d seen him, this way at least he’d find out sooner than later. Cin ignored the flutter of anxiety in his gut as he shouted back, “Yes, Mother.”
“You can retrieve Manfred’s new shoes from the cobbler while you do!” She was all but screeching now to ensure Cin heard.
He rolled his eyes as he passed Manfred’s closed door—there was no use trying to get him to actually do his own chores. He wouldn’t be up for hours yet, and once he was, he’d be in a foul mood until at least mid-afternoon.
“Cin-Szule!” Emma wailed from her room in a tone much too childish for a woman of nearly sixteen. “My hair’s all knotty again!”
“I’m here,” Cin grumbled. He paused to relight her hearth too, before taking a seat on the bed behind her. “I thought you were braiding it before you sleep, not waiting for your tossing and turning to do the job for you.”
Emma made a sound of protest. “Well, you were too busy to help m— Ouch!”
