Page 3 of Cinder
“If you’d stop squirming...”
“I’m not. You’re yanking,” Emma snapped back, and squirmed again. The little jut of her lip was preposterous.
Sometimes Cin thought he hated her most of all, if only because he was afraid he also loved her. He slowed his motions, managing to smooth out the last of the curls in time for a knock on the side of Emma’s open door. Their father stood there, one hand behind his back, looking vaguely down the hall instead of at either Cin or Emma.
“Szule, is breakfast not ready?” he asked. “I should leave for Falchovari soon, if I’m to make it through the deepest parts of the border forest by noon.”
How was Cin meant to know his father was leaving again if no one had told him? He reassessed his plans; if Father was going to Falchovari, he’d take the better of their two horses, and Mother would want to keep the other home for emergencies, meaning all of Cin’s excursions for the next month would be on foot. Or in the dead of night.
His father was still standing there, visibly uncomfortable.
Right, breakfast. “Can Mother start it?”
“You know we all prefer your cooking. And she has the finances to attend to.”
The finances that were drowning them.
It’s just water in a pot, Cin wanted to protest, but his father was already halfway down the hall, slipping away like a ghost from the home he claimed to work so hard to support. So hard that he was barely there anymore—always off on some business venture or another. Cin didn’t have the heart to follow him, to catch him drinking or fucking or—worst perhaps—truly striving and failing out there much the way he failed at everything he’d ever attempted at home.
“I could help?” Emma asked, and the offer made Cin cringe, because it was everything their father had once been: willing to try, even when everyone knew how likely it was that he’d blunder the whole thing.
Cin sighed. “No, no, I’ve got it. Finish with your hair.”
He patted his stepsister’s head and left. As he walked through the halls echoing with Floy’s piano music, he tried to simply enjoy the sweet melody, ignoring the spark of jealousy it stirred. If he had been better at an instrument, at a science, born first or last, more beautiful or less practical, would he have been the middle child who Louise and Penrod pushed toward arts and intellect instead of the house-keeping?
He was good at this, and there was little else he could do well that didn’t involve sliding knives into unsuspecting backs, he reminded himself as he started yet another fire, placing a pot atop it.
He was good at this, and none of them were.
And he hated them for that too.
An hour later, and the food was done and served, Floy off to their painting, Emma to her daydreaming, both heads of home to the business of losing their little remaining money, and—with Manfred still gloriously asleep—Cin had a moment to breathe forthe first time since sneaking out of the house late the previous night.
Reaching up under his shirt, he untied the knot on the tight wrappings around his chest. The first few loops of the bandage-like fabric loosened, but he had to work the slack through the rest of the binding until he could finally draw in the first deep lungful he'd taken in nearly a day. His ribs screamed as they shifted. The release barely felt worth the sudden feeling of his breasts slumping back into place, spilling out of him like two traitorous flaps of someone else's body.
Arms wrapped over his awkward, aching chest, Cin curled against the still-warm stones of the hearth, fighting to find a position that didn’t just create more pain between his ribs. He stared into the tiny flame, imagining it spiraling upward, past the brick, into the wood of the house. In his dreams, it consumed them all.
Two
Cin’s nap was fitful, haunted by dreams of the crown’s watch bursting down the back door in their green and gold uniforms, the undead form of Dorthe’s husband leering behind them. He woke to a pinch in his back almost as sharp as the usual ones in his sides. It was followed swiftly by a kick to the stomach. Cin winced, hissing out the pain—more severe by way of its suddenness than any actual damage.
“Cinder-whore,” Manfred spat.
Cin forced himself to roll into a half-sitting position, rubbing the grit out of one eye. He instinctively checked his hands for ash. Nothing. No smears, no smudges. No outward signifier of some internal sin.
His unbound breasts hung beneath his shirt though, adding a very different kind of discomfort to his body.
“You have a fucking bed, you know,” Manfred said. In his voice, it sounded like a snarl. Everything did, where Cin was concerned—Cin, or Emma, or Floy, or Father, or anyone in townhe didn’t deem fuckable. Not that most of them would fuck withhimat this point. They knew him too well.
Cin stretched out the unfortunate kink in his spine, grimacing as his loosened binding slid further out of place and— Oh, he still had the knife strapped back there. No wonder it hurt. He scowled at Manfred. “I prefer to sleep somewhere it’s not freezing.”
It seemed as though every fall the entire family forgot how drafty Cin’s room became the moment the chill set in. And every fall, Father promised he’d fix it if they got the wood, and Louise that she’d budget for supplies if someone would go to the mill two towns over with the wagon, and Manfred that he’d pick up whatever they all wanted if he got to go gambling first, and then Floy would argue that he’d only lose and if anyone were to gamble it should be someone with the intelligence to count cards. By then Cin would drag a blanket back to the kitchen hearth, where things were warm and convenient, and the whole matter was dropped in favor of just waiting for spring.
Spring came and went.
Now it was, again, fall, and just the same as everyone else in Cin’s family, Manfred had forgotten Cin’s original complaint.
He sneered. “That’s what you always say, Cinder-whore.”
