Page 54 of Cinder
“Now,” Louise said, pressing her shoulders back, her chin up. A serene expression cloaked her previous rage. “You will proceed to the kitchen for dinner, as all of us have yet to eat for the evening.”
“The fire—” Manfred protested, but Louise cut him off with a hard look that made Cin wonder if this wasn’t the first time someone had been slapped that night.
“There will be a fire in everyone’s hearth by the end of the night,” she said, soft but unwavering. “You can have patience.” She took one look around the room, at the staring eyes of herfamily, and clapped her hands. “Now!” she shouted, as though she’d given anyone a task to do but Cin.
As though the last twenty-four hours hadn’t made it clear that no one but Cin was capable of any reasonable household task anyway.
He took a step back, but drew a breath, and before he could stop himself, he said, “They could come help me in the kitchen. Maybe if they were taught—”
“Then what?” Louise snapped. “We suffer through their incompetence in the meantime? Do youwantus to starve tonight?” She snorted. “You had your magic adventure; you’re done. There’s no reason you’ll need to go tromping through the woods again.”
Cin’s hand went to his chest—his perfect, flat chest. The magic that had gone on there seemed like anything but some “tromp through the woods”. Anything but worthy of dismissal. Anything butthis. “Mother,” Cin started to say, and he didn’t know where the sentence was going—to beg, to plead, or to demand—but then it didn’t matter.
Louise hit him again.
This time, Cin lost his balance entirely. The jolt, the pain—fresh on old—sent him stumbling to his hands and knees, his palms on the cold, hard wood of the parlor where its ruined rugs had been pulled back. He inhaled, half sob, half something worse. His fingers gripped at the floor, and the first two of his right hand dug in. The wood there was gritty. Dark. Ashen.
It must have been where Manfred had dropped the ember earlier. And now it was Cin whose skin it stained.
He could hear Louise hovering over him, her voice so low it seemed meant only for him.
“I should think now, of all times, you’d be inclined to listen more than you speak,” she hissed. “You have no marriagearrangements, no apprenticeships, no money, no skill outside this house. There is nowhere for you to go but here.”
Cin could not bear to lift his face toward her, lest he see something worse than his stepmother’s wrath—his father, standing silently behind her, confused and disappointed.
Louise was right. Cin had no job or income, no offers of marriage—save for Dorthe’s, and it did not feel right to bind her to himself merely to be free from his family. But he had one thing she still knew nothing about. He had the friendship of Prince Lorenz. And for one fiery second he almost spat that fact into her face.
But even if he stayed the prince’s friend, that relationship would eventually be eclipsed by Lorenz’s future partnership, his co-leader.
So Cin drew himself quietly to his feet, his head bowed, his eyes pressed closed to keep the misery from seeping out of them in liquid form. Tight and low he said, “I’ll get the food ready.”
His body strained with so much tension that he felt like one wrong move would snap him in half as he made his way back through the house. He seemed to have stood in the center of the dark kitchen for a thousand heartbeats before his mind flew back to him at the sound of timid footsteps behind him. For a second, his heart twisted—Father? But he knew it wasn’t before he even turned.
Emma stood before him, her body so slight in the beam of moonlight that spilled in through the single kitchen window behind her. She stared at Cin, and he thought her throat bobbed, her eyes almost glistening. Waiting forhimto reach out toher?
When Cin couldn’t muster up the nerve, his baby sister shrugged, her lips twisting.
“You have a little...” She bundled the edge of her sleeve over her hand and wiped at the slapped side of Cin’s face. A long smudge of darkness came off.
Cin shivered. So many years since he’d been the Cinder-child, covered in ash, made to do the same chores until he could show he was capable, responsible, only to have that responsibility trap him into them, and here he was, still stained in the soot of the hearths that kept him warm.
Still just Cinder-Szule.
He wanted to cry.
He wanted to watch his knife slip, unhindered, into flesh.
He wanted his only friend there with him as he did both.
He wanted...
Hewanted.
Twenty-Three
Despite Cin’s anger and grief, the grumbling in his stomach pushed him to keep moving. He stoked a fire in the hearth. As he waited for the stove coals to heat, he peeled the final bundle of potatoes he’d harvested from the fading garden a few days prior, pulling them up by their black, frost-bitten stems to find barely-edible tubers beneath. When they were cooked through, he fed a few of the pieces to Perdition, who cooed her thanks before letting him tuck her back against his heart. It was still a wonder not to feel the sharp pain shooting through his ribs at every turn.
His chest: it washischest, and there was not a moment since he’d taken his first breath against it that he worried it wouldn’t be there for the next. But the lack of ache in his sides felt different. Like his body still expected to hurt, every motion prepared for a compromise with the pain.
