Page 4 of Cinder
Or perhaps not forgotten. He just didn’t care.
“Where’s breakfast?”
“Eaten by people who woke up at reasonable times,” Cin responded, despite knowing he was antagonizing his brother for little gain, particularly when Cin had saved him a bowl of porridge anyway.
Manfred threw one of the leftover apples at him.
He ducked, hearing the splat of it against the hearth above his head—what a waste during yet another year of crop failures. But then, Manfred had always been a better shot with his fists than his long-throw. When he took a taunting step forward, Cinscrambled up, swiping the half-mushed apple in defense. “Check behind you, numbskull.”
Manfred didn’t thank him, but he turned back toward the kitchen’s long wooden counters, sized for a hired cook and three maids to tend. Instead of paid hands at work, there sat one bowl with a cloth over it. Manfred sniffed its contents like they might be poisoned, before scooping out a glop on his first two fingers. He sucked on them afterwards in a way that made Cin almost wish the porridgewastainted.
But he knew he’d never have the stomach to follow through on that.
Manfred was a bully, not a true villain. Not worth coating the blade pressed to Cin’s back with yet another layer of blood.
Cin could not seem to free himself of the knife’s pressure for the rest of the day, a sickly discomfort trailing after him like the cloak that swirled in his wake. The weapon’s presence was the brand of his failure to live a truly pious life; the sins that no amount of bending over backward, or forcing himself to love his family in action, if not emotion, could make up for.
Which was why, despite his family’s faults, he had to support them, protect them, provide where they couldn’t. He could be good and pious in that, at least. It was what his birth mother would have wanted of him—what she’d offered herself, when she’d died of the very fever she’d tended Manfred and Cin through.
It was already a mark against Cin that he wasn’t sure he was prepared to actually die for them.
When Cin figured he’d delayed all he could, he forced himself to set off for the town despite the bundle of nerves he couldn’t seem to tamp down on. If Dorthehadseen enough of him for the crown’s watch to come anywhere near the truth, it was better to learn that news in town, firsthand, than when the guards finally appeared at his door. And if they didn’t have enough to ultimately trace back to him, staying away would only look suspicious.
Besides, Louise would be on him for weeks about it, no matter what excuse he gave.
On his way, Cin stopped by the creek to wash the blood from inside his cloak. He really had to stop wiping his blades there. They had enough scraps of cloth for the menstruation cycles he and Emma underwent that bloodying one of those would cause few questions, but it wasn’t as though he’d beenplanningto use his knife on Aldous Earhart, even if hehadbrought one. Watching, yes, waiting, perhaps, but not anticipating. If anything, he’d hoped for the opposite. He always hoped.
Before venturing back to the road, he stripped out of his shirt, his well-loosened bindings beginning to spiral off his chest as he did so. The deep breaths he took against the ache in his ribs felt fragile and greedy as he collected the wide strip of fabric back into a roll for reapplication. His left side was yellow and green, and he tried to ignore the curving slump of his breast as he touched the area with two fingers. A sharp pain speared deep into his chest.
Cin made a face and slowly, carefully, retied the fabric back against his ribs, tight as he could stand, before looping it around his breasts, pulling more with each wrap of the binding. As he did, he felt his inhales shift from his chest to his stomach, until his torso felt stiff and wrong. And yet right—the rightshape,anyway.
The more he wore it, the more the pain had begun spreading between his ribs. But to allow the flesh to heal meant denying any form of tight undergarment—even those made for people who cherished their breasts. When he tried to go without the binding, much less any pressure or support, a fresh kind of distress crept into his bones, until he wanted to tear his own skin apart and become merely the bones underneath, genderless and nebulous. It felt like there was no way to skip the pain. Cin could only trade a worse evil for a lesser one.
Just like he was doing out in the world, where every salvation he offered came with a murder.
There were those, he knew, who could fix his dilemma altogether, but they traded in misery just the same as him: people in the deep parts of the woods who were more monster than human, offering magic in dark exchanges, too costly for most who sought them out. If they could be found at all. That was a path better left for the brave and the desperate; those who could throw themselves at their desires in ways that Cin’s life would never allow.
His chest successfully wrapped back up, he continued on toward town, feeling far heavier than the pigeons who meandered at his side, flying from tree to barn to fence to house and back with each small estate and farm Cin passed. The closer they came to the town, the less land stretched between each home, until the gentle sounds of the outskirts became a clatter of irreverent noises.
The town center was alive—though not in a good way. Five years ago, the shops would have been crowded with wares, merchants hawking and customers laughing, children tumbling through the streets as music played from one of the pubs. Now, Cin dodged to the other side of the lane as one of those same children begged at a corner. The baker seemed to stand guard over her tired supply, and the people who could still afford topurchase daily fresh bread looked both ways when they passed an alley. Even non-food goods had begun to suffer, with stores no longer boasting the best and newest, but rather the cheap and practical, as fewer and fewer villagers could afford anything else.
The famine might have started across the forest in Falchovari, its people already strangled beneath its seemingly immortal Queen’s vile hold, but it had settled in the quiet and peaceful kingdom of Hallin soon after, one crop failing, then another. Next spring, things would change, everyone said. Next spring, the fields would be full, and bellies soon after. Cin feared that would be the samenext springduring which his father finally entered his room with a shoulder of fresh lumber to repair the drafts.
He tried not to think about his father’s upcoming trip, or the way Louise had looked at Cin when she’d handed over the money for sugar, butter, and flour—like it was his fault that he couldn’t make the leaves crisping to brown on the garden trees worth eating—or how, based on the sign outside the general shop, those coins would buy even less than they had last month. Cin kept his wits about him and his head down as he passed a group of the crown’s watch out front, their green tunics and bright gold banding unmistakable, gave the shop’s teller the little courtesies due them, and ducked aside as quickly as possible.
No one narrowed their gazes at him. No one stopped him. No one even seemed to see beyond his mask of deference to the real, living person that wore it. This was the way it always had been for him—as much a ghost in the day as in the night, ignored as thoroughly as the pigeons who surrounded him—but it felt all the weirder knowing that there was one person in town who had seen that ghost, if only in the shadows.
Cin slowed as he passed a pair of customers near the shop’s door, his mind fastening onto their hushed whispers as he gave one subtle glance their way. They were Josua, the goat herderfrom the farm down South Hill Street, and Amelina, of all people, who had flirted unrepentantly with Josua's late aunt’s husband despite his very public disinterest. Cin had watched Amelina for a week three summers ago before realizing it was all a show and the two were avidly fucking in the Muller's barn most Sundays after church.
It was a rare break from the myriad of far more distressing one-sided relationships he normally uncovered.
The knife strapped to Cin’s back felt all the heavier, but neither Josua nor Amelina looked his way.
“—stabbed between the shoulder blades," Josua was saying. “They found three pigeon feathers stuffed into the wound!”
Amelina’s brow went up. “That would make him the Plumed Menace’s third victim this fall.”
Three in the same season, when that was as many as he’d extinguish during the first three years he slid steel into flesh. With each escalation, Cin had been certain someone would catch him, even if he couldn’t seem to catch himself in time to stop the killing. Now, perhaps someone finally had, though by the sound of it, that word hadn’t gotten out yet.
