Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy

Amara

"His feet are cold," my mother said from the doorway. "Build the fire up."

I had my hands in the dishwater, and it had gone cold an hour ago, but I didn't say so. I dried them on my skirt and crossed to the fireplace and knelt on the stone where I had knelt a hundred times before.

I could have built this fire in the dark. I broke the kindling small, the way it liked, fed it slow, and I didn't mention the cold coming up through my knees, because mentioning it wouldn't my mother attitude towards me.

Behind me the chair creaked as she settled in beside him. Gareth murmured something I couldn't catch, and she laughed, soft.

The fire caught. I stayed there a second longer with the heat on my face, and I let myself have that one warm thing.

"Amara." Gareth, from his chair. I didn't turn around.

"Yes."

"Sweep the hall when you're done. And don't use the good broom. Make use of the other one."

There were two brooms in the corner. They were the same broom. They had always been the same broom. I'd asked once, years back, which one was good, and he'd looked at me like I was slow, so I never asked again. I took the one on the left, swept the hall, and said nothing.

I made dinner after, and I set two places, because it was always two.

"This is cold in the middle," Gareth said when I brought it out.

"I'll warm it."

"Don't bother. Just don't do it again."

It wasn't cold. I'd tasted it. But there was no use saying so, so I went back to the kitchen and ate standing up at the basin, out of the pot, with the spoon I'd cooked with. In the other room they talked about people I'd never meet and money I'd never see, and nobody called me in.

Here's the thing you need to know, and I need you to hear it right.

I am nineteen years old. But I am not nineteen.

I've done this before. Not this kitchen, not this floor, but a house like it, and a family like this one, in a life that ended badly. And before that, another. I remember all of it... the good parts, which were small, and the rest, which was not.

In my first life I still believed that if I was quiet enough and useful enough, someone would choose to keep me. I was wrong, and I learned it slowly, and then all at once. In my second life I was harder. I had a father who taught me how to read a room before I walked in, how to find the door before I sat down. Then he died, and there was no one, and then there was a man.

His name is Corvus.

He's the reason both of those lives ended. He found me the first time and he found me the second, and both times he looked at me. He didn't hate me. That was the part I couldn't make sense of for the longest while.

Now I'm here again. Same world. Same name... the one my mothers keep giving me without knowing why. Same Corvus, somewhere out in the dark, doing whatever it is he does.

I'm not trying to be good enough this time. I learned how that ends. Twice.

This time I have a plan.

I lay awake most of that night fitting the pieces against each other, looking for the version that didn't get me killed. By my count I had three days. Three days to finish it and be gone.

I was wrong about that, too.

I heard the voices before I reached the kitchen the next morning, and I went still in the hall the way my body had learned to go still, before my mind even caught up.

Gareth first. Low and careful. Then a stranger. A man, older, his voice gone flat.

"The day's been moved up," the stranger said. "He wants her this week."

"This week." Gareth said it slowly, like he was weighing it. He wasn't. I knew that voice. He'd already decided. "And the rest stands? Everything we talked about?"

"Everything you were promised comes when she does. Not before."

There was a pause, and then Gareth again, careful, like he was picking the word up off the floor to look at it. "She won't give you any trouble. She's manageable."

Manageable.

I stood in the hall and let the word settle on me, and I waited for it to hurt, and it didn't.

"This week," the stranger said again. "Have her ready."

I went back to my room without a sound and sat on the edge of the bed and held what I'd heard, turning it over. He hadn't even come himself this time. He'd sent a man with a flat voice to strike a deal with my stepfather, and my stepfather had said manageable, and whatever small thing Corvus had offered for me, it was worth more to Gareth than I was.

That evening I did everything that was demanded of me, slow and easy, like a girl who knew nothing.

My mother found me banking the kitchen fire for the night.

"You'll do the door?" she said.

"Yes."

"Make sure to latch it twice. There's been wolves at the Harrow place."

I looked at her. There were always wolves. We were wolves. But I knew which kind she meant.

"I'll latch it twice," I said.

She nodded and went to bed without saying goodnight.

I latched the door. I checked it. I checked it again, because she'd said twice.

Then I lay down on top of my blankets with my boots still on, in the dark, and I did not close my eyes.

Three days. I didn't have three days. I had this week, and this week had already started, and somewhere out past the cold fields the man who had killed me twice was coming to do it a third time.

So I would move first. An hour before light, while the house was deepest asleep.

I had it all laid out behind my eyes, every step of it, and I was halfway through running it for the last time when I stopped.

Because I'd checked that door twice. I knew I had.

And I had just heard it open.