The door groaned as she pushed against it. Larkin’s father sat at the kitchen hearth, preparing dinner as her mother chatted with Garran and Vania at the worn table.
Garran stood and met Larkin at the door, planting a kiss on Larkin’s forehead. She sensed his relief that she’d made it home safe. “How was the shop?”
She set her bag down. “No cake, but we’ll eat more than broth tonight.” She smiled and forced herself to relax so Garran wouldn’t sense anything strange.
“Angry?” He raised an eyebrow.
She was angry. Still angry. But if she tried explaining this to Garran, he’d be disappointed in her.
“The shopkeeper tried to overcharge me.”
He grimaced. “Some shopkeepers think the luminite’s gone to our heads.”
Thank Ilona, Larkin thought, out of habit.
Vania ran toward them, jumping into Larkin’s arms. Larkin groaned, steadying herself to keep from toppling over. “You’re almost too big for this.”
Vania flashed a grin full of missing teeth, batting away dark, unruly curls. “Maybe.”
Larkin released Vania and approached her father, who was slicing bread near the hearth. She glanced inside the pot, the broth no thicker than brackish water. With a flourish, Larkin pulled the pheasants and the rabbits from her bag, and her father paused mid-slice.
“Did you pinch this?” he asked, much too seriously. Ilona’s breath, everyone was suspicious of her today.
Larkin erupted in laughter. She’d learned from experience that laughter was a good distraction, the easiest way to hide her emotions.
She didn’t exactly have the cleanest slate when it came to theft. As a child, she used to steal bits of fruit and dried meat from the stall vendors after her shift. When her mother found the hidden stash beneath Larkin’s bed, she made Larkin scrub their entire home with a pig-bristle brush the size of her thumb, hoping that would stanch the bad behavior.
It didn’t work.
“She found a luminite vein in the mines,” said Garran.
“See?” Larkin knocked her shoulder against her father’s. “You have no faith in me.”
“It’s Ethera Mine he has no faith in,” her mother chimed in.
“Perhaps it’s less dry than you think.” Larkin knelt and hung the rabbit on a skinning hook near the fire. “You should come back. Mine with me and Garran again.”
Her father frowned. He’d been working in the Vault, a newly dug shaft. Prone to cave-ins and noxious gas, the mine churned out more casualties than any of the others. But the work paid well.
“We don’t need all of this,” he said, examining the pheasant. “Did you spend everything?”
“Oh, Jallus.” Her mother hobbled over. “A nice meal for once won’t kill us. It’s Larkin’s birthday.”
Her father sighed. “Fair enough.” Larkin hid a smirk. He knew better than to try to argue with her mother.
“Garran, help Vania wash up,” said her mother, easing onto a kitchen stool.
Garran swept the young girl off her feet and rushed her to the kitchen basin, Vania giggling as Garran splashed her. Their joy was warm, and Larkin’s muscles relaxed.
“I can heat a blanket for you,” Larkin offered as her mother stretched out her bad leg. She had broken it in the mine years ago. When she didn’t heal properly, Larkin took her place, Garran following suit soon after.
“Oh no.” Her mother lifted Larkin’s hand and examined it. “What did you do?”
“It’s just a scratch,” said Larkin. She felt a flash of disorientation and heaviness, as if she were poisoned. Guilt. “Mum…”
“I only wish I could give you a day,” her mother murmured. “Take your place so you could have one day from that awful hole in the ground.”
“The mines keep me out of trouble.” Larkin hugged her. It wasn’t fair that her mother felt any guilt. None of this was her fault, and Larkin could remind her of that over and over again, but it didn’t matter.
I love you, thought Larkin.
Her mother’s arms tightened around her, returning a love warmer and more familiar than any other emotion Larkin knew.
* * *
After supper, full and drowsy from pheasant-and-rabbit stew, Larkin took Vania by the hand and led her up the narrow stone staircase to the bedroom they shared with Garran.
Larkin lit a candle and helped Vania into bed. She sat behind her, unwinding a matted ribbon from the girl’s dark curls and grabbing a brush from the nightstand.
Vania yawned. “Mum is going to start teaching me how to read tomorrow. Then I can be just like you and Garran.”
Larkin smiled. “You’ll be reading faster than us in no time.” Empaths were banned from formal education, so their mother had taught Larkin and Garran how to read from her small set of heirloom folklore tomes.
Even their mother didn’t know how old the tomes were, or whom they belonged to first. There were no names inscribed, no owners or ancestors listed. Empaths weren’t allowed to have a surname either, and Larkin had little knowledge of her lineage beyond the mysterious books. Books that hinted at a time when Empaths weren’t hated and practiced magic freely. The dynasty erased their names and their stories, stories that had kept her up late, wondering if Empaths once had a goddess of their own. But Larkin knew as little as her mother did, and perhaps as little as her mother’s mother. Their history was gone.
And once Vania learned how to read, she would have the same questions. Knowledge of the magic within these books had given Larkin an itch she was always desperate to scratch, like poison beneath her fingernails. And there was no antidote.
Part of Larkin wished that Vania could stay ignorant of such knowledge forever.
“And then, maybe soon, I can start working too,” said Vania. “Just like you.”
Larkin combed her fingers through Vania’s now-silky strands. “You don’t need to work, sweet girl.”
“But I want to help.” Vania craned her neck to blink at Larkin.
Larkin kissed the top of her sister’s head. “You can help me by staying home with Mum and keeping her company. You can join me and Garran once you’ve grown bigger and stronger. How does that sound?”
Vania sighed reluctantly.
After tucking Vania in, Larkin picked up the threadbare ribbon from the nightstand and brought it to the table in the corner, sitting down. Mending it herself would be simple, and in the privacy of her home, where there was no chance of getting caught, the risk was worth it.
Around the same time Larkin had learned how to read, she’d taught herself how to conjure and destroy. When everyone else was asleep, she worked with odds and ends—nothing that would be sorely missed—crushing clay mugs and iron buckles to create tiny figurines she’d kept beneath the floorboard. She made one for each member of her family, imagining them living on a farm surrounded by miles of forest, in a land without a queen.
The figurines were gone now. She’d destroyed them only a year ago, after the riot, severing herself from such a childish hope. She’d needed to grow up.
Now she tried to be practical and cautious with her magic. But it was her birthday.
Larkin concentrated, sensing her father’s worry bubbling up through the floorboards. She siphoned and projected onto the fringed ribbon, shredding it into a pile of wispy threads. Destruction was the easy part, but she usually had trouble pulling together enough positive emotion to conjure. Tonight, it would be simple.