Chapter 2

'Feu', they called her. Fire, in the old Breton language that some scarce few still spoke on High Rock. Fire for her hair, a vivid ginger colour that she had inherited from the maternal grandmother who had died before she was born. Fire for the way that she had braved the flames with her elder sister Amarie in order to keep her younger brother and sister safe during the great battle for Kvatch. Fire for her temperament.

Eleanor Renault was known for her temper. The place she had inherited that from remained a mystery.

The sky was bleak. It had been like this for some time, she supposed as she stepped from her front door out into the fresh air. Crossing the threshold was like entering a different planet: inside was stuffy, cramped and oppressive, and yet somehow the outdoors managed to be the compete opposite: light, airy, spacious… The Renault family owned one of the largest houses in Kvatch due to their large number – five survivors from one family was unheard of save for them – and still their rooms were too dark, too warm, too crowded. Eleanor hated it.

Still, the sky was bleak, somewhere between rain and sun, covered with clouds from horizon to horizon. A gust of wind scoured her face and blew her hair into her eyes; she cursed vehemently, seizing the offending locks and pulling them tightly back into a ponytail held by a strip of blue cloth she had in a pocket. Sometimes she despised nature, though the Breton girl far preferred that to being cramped inside with her three siblings and her mother. These days her mother did little besides staring forlornly into the small cookfire that she jabbed with a stick from time to time, and sobbing about the loss of her husband so long ago. Sometimes she could go for days at a time without moving a muscle and then suddenly when all her children feared she had passed on from this world they would hear a sniff or see a fat wet tear trailing down her pale cheeks onto the embers beneath her feet. Cybelle Renault had already seen her fiftieth winter, but her small brood knew she would not see many more.

The house they lived in was near the outer wall of Kvatch, cramped in a corner where it had always been. It had not sustained too much damage when the daedra had invaded, save for a small section of rubble causing the roof to cave in, so the townsfolk had opted instead to rebuild it – though it had never been the same since. Eleanor could remember what it had been like before, a small thing with three rooms, brown brick walls and a wooden slat roof, little windows filled with glass and a little door painted green. Now the walls were blackened bricks covered in soot and the roof had been replaced, though some of the boards were broken and burnt, and almost none of them fit together – the gaps had been filled in with some kind of gloopy plaster that stank whenever it rained and still looked as though it hadn't set almost a decade later. There was only one window too, and all of the glass in the town had been shattered save for that which was still in place now, having to be replaced by thick blankets that did little to stop the wind and rain and somehow kept all the heat inside; the door had been pulled from a wreckage and bore its scars proudly, though it looked as though some daedra had had a go at it with an axe, and if one were to place their hand upon it too haphazardly they would come away full of splinters.

She would have left, if not for her mother. She was three-and-twenty, an Associate of the Fighters Guild and had enough money saved to bear herself far away from Kvatch. The city was her world and all she had ever known, but she wished to leave it more than anything. It still carried with it too many fearful memories.

When the daedra had come she had been separated from her parents by a great wall of fire with her elder sister Amarie and her younger brother Yves. They had fought, her and Amarie, to protect the boy who was little more than six, and they had killed for the very first time when they were not even yet grown. Am had been fifteen, and she had fared worst of the three of them when a slash from a clannfear sent a cascade of blood spewing from her right arm. Though Oleta had saved the limb, she had never been able to use it again. Their father had found them and saved them and sent them beyond the city, but he himself had never returned.

Yves and Armynél had been too young to remember much of that day. They were probably lucky.

Slowly, Eleanor walked down the street. She had walked down this street more times than she could count and could have done it blindfolded by now; even the burning and rebuilding had not changed the layout of this road much, and most of the houses here were originals that had only been lightly patched up. This area of Kvatch had barely been hit, save for the odd ember causing an ancient timber roof to ignite, and even then most of the damage had been superficial. Other areas had been razed to the ground.

After the battle, they had told her that her father had saved a whole score of lives from the daedra before he finally fell, and as a result his memorial was somewhat larger than most of the others. She visited it daily, even if it meant venturing out in the dead of night to do so.

"Hello, father," she said to the plaque, kneeling beside it. Even though she had never set foot in High Rock, her voice was still vaguely accented. It was a boring old thing, this slab of tarnished bronze that had been worn down until it was almost flat and the wording was almost completely faded, but it symbolised so much to her. Beneath it they had buried Etienne Renault's silver shortsword, the only recognisable part of him that they had managed to find amid the carnage. "Mother is worse today." It was not an exaggeration; their mother never seemed to get any better, though whether she was worse or not was not within Eleanor's power to gauge. "I think she may be seeing you again before too long." But Feu had been saying that every day for the last six years and nothing had come of it yet. "Pray for us, father."

There was nothing more to say. It was not as if a lump of rock could answer her questions, reply to her words, or feel anguish at her news…

She stood and looked upwards. Her father's plate was just beneath the walls of the chapel and was nearly always in shadow; she had complained about it once upon a time, that she wanted her father to see the morning sun and admire the colours in the sky when night came. Then Savlian Matius had reminded her that her father was dead and where they placed his memorial stone really meant little in the grand scheme of the world. He was not a harsh man, the grizzled old guardsman who sat the town council, but in this case a lie to ease her pain would have made no difference but to make it worse.

"Well met, sister." The voice behind her made her jump until she recognised the voice as that of her sister Amarie. She turned to look at her, taking care not to tread on their father's grave. The girl before her was five-and-twenty and taller than Eleanor by at least three inches; her brown hair – a colour shared by every Renault, it seemed, except Feu herself and this elusive grandmother – reached just below her shoulders and was swept from her face by a band tied around her forehead that was decorated with brown felt shapes, and her dark oily-blue eyes smiled with the rest of her. She was dressed in a simple green tunic trimmed with silvery thread that reached her knees and was gathered in at the waist by a length of hempen cord, and on her feet were basic brown felt shoes. Her right arm hung limply by her side where it had been these past ten years, but she had never once managed to let her disability get the better of her; the town's resident Bosmeri seamstress Emelin had taught her how to use magic to stitch and from that skill she had made her career. "How is mother today?" Amarie lived with Emelin these days.

Eleanor sighed. "I would say she was worse, but it's hard to tell. She's not eating again."

Amarie made a face. "I swear that woman must be so selfish…" Cybelle Renault had disapproved of her daughter's leaving home and as such the girl seldom visited except to see her siblings. "How are Yves and Nel taking it?"

"They've grown to expect it…" At sixteen and fourteen, the two youngest Renault children could not remember a great deal other than their mother being depressed and not eating. Yves had decided that he was grown now and would take responsibility for the house and everyone in it, despite his sisters imploring him to do something of more use with his life. "Listen, Am, about the other day…"

Her sister just smiled knowingly. "Feu, you know I could never blame you for your temper. It's what makes you you!" She embraced the girl with her one good arm. "And for whatever it may be worth, do not feel that you have to stay in Kvatch just because of mother or me or Yves or Armynél… I will take care of them if you really want to go. The whole world is waiting for you!"

"Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me," Amarie replied with a chuckle. "That is merely what sisters are for!" Eleanor had to laugh at that. "Now I must be off… Emelin is expecting me at the house soon. You're welcome to visit whenever you wish."

"I know, sister." She had been extended the same invitation every single time they parted since her sibling had moved away from their home. To this day she had never accepted it.

The sound of feet to her left barely attracted her attention as she gazed across the town square in the direction of the gates. Amarie's promise had been one she so desperately wanted to take her up on, the one that would bear her away from this place where only dreams of fire and blood filled her nights and only sobs and loss filled her days.

The 'square', or so they called it, was hardly square-shaped. It was twenty feet across but stretched all the way from the steps into the chapel to the heavy wooden gates, plaques spreading only about two-thirds of the way and after that bare stone or brick, or whatever material had been to hand. On one side stood an inn that had never existed before the daedra came, The Bleeding Dremora, the sign outside proclaimed proudly, a claim that was strengthened by a simple glossy painting of one of the daedric menaces lying in a blood of glistening scarlet-and-crimson blood. The innkeeper was a Dunmeri man who had lost his wife and almost his small daughter Nalasa in the fires, only for the tiny girl to be found curled up in a cupboard almost two days after they had returned to their city; she had never spoken of her ordeal, though her father liked to boast her bravery to every person who ever stepped through his front door. Across the square, the only building of note was a small shop with soot-blackened windows that had survived the kiss of the flames and half looked as though a gust of wind would knock it down, and yet ten years later it still stood in as rickety a fashion as it had a decade ago; the proprietor had died when his shop had not, and his son had been stolen away by a terrible fever a few years later, leaving only a scarred, niggardly brother from Anvil who drove away any customer who had survived with his sharp tongue and steep prices. Eleanor had all but forgotten his name.

"So you're thinking of leaving, Feu?" somebody asked her. She had to cringe at the way they pronounced her nickname; it had begun simply as what her family called her, but had spread like a vicious disease that had infected the whole town. Only those of Breton heritage could say it correctly, or that was what she had come to expect.

"What's it to you?" she demanded, rounding on the owner of the voice. It was that white Nord girl Kolfinna and Tierra's nephew Aden that stood before her, though she didn't know what else she ought to have expected – they were always together, when he was not training and she was not too busy blowing things up in the Mages Guild. Eleanor had heard the reports of the last time they had done destruction training. Apparently it had not been an easy mess to clean up.

The Nord smiled. "Nothing, except that we're leaving too…"

"We're going in search of the Hero of Kvatch," Aden explained.

It was a childish endeavour, to think that they could simply go running off into the wilderness in search of someone who was most likely dead… But Feu could see the appeal in it. The town owed itself to the valour of that woman, even if all and sundry claimed that she was utterly detestable; at the end of the day, she had still closed the Oblivion gate. Whether she had stuck around afterwards or not was of little consequence. "Where would you be going?"

"The most logical place would be the Imperial City," admitted the Redguard. "There would always be Cloud Ruler Temple – because that's where Martin was, so logically where she was – but nobody's seen much of the Blades since the Emperor died. What good is a bodyguard without a body to guard?"

Eleanor raised an eyebrow and laughed. "So you're going to the Imperial City? The centre of the anarchy and possibly the most dangerous place to be at this time?" Aden nodded. "Then you're idiots. You'll be dead before you ever get there. Reports are that banditry is worse than ever before." She had seen that first hand when on one or two contracts with the Fighters Guild, but work was slow and pay was slower right now.

Kolfinna was smirking. That was never a good sign. The girl was known for her eccentricities and obscure sense of logic. "You see, Feu-" The Breton in question winced at that word. "- That is why we asked you along with us! You're in the Fighters Guild, and you're looking to leave here, right?"

"Not as far as the Imperial City. I was thinking more in terms of Anvil or Skingrad."

"And where's the fun in that?" She hated to admit it, but Eleanor almost agreed with this girl. "Work here it slow, and work there wouldn't be any better… And they're more struck by the anarchy, aren't they? They've all got counts and stuff. If you come with us, at least you'll have a goal, right? Aden can fight, and I've got my magic." She had seen Aden's fighting, and it was nothing extraordinary; he was training to be a guard with his aunt who was almost as old as her mother and yet looked half her age. Tierra had fought in the battle all those years ago, and there was no denying that she was an excellent sword; her nephew, on the other hand, was a perfectly mediocre fighter who had been too young when the daedra came and never used real steel or fought a real enemy. And as for Kolfinna's magic… Eleanor preferred not to comment on that. "It'll be an adventure."

The Breton considered their proposal. She had been planning to leave, yes, but not so soon, not while her mother still drew breath, not while her siblings were still young. "When will you be going?" she asked feebly, glancing at her father's memorial. If she left the town, she'd leave him behind as well.

It was Aden who answered: "Tomorrow, maybe the day after. I saw her, the Hero of Kvatch. I spoke to her. You were there, in the chapel, right? You saw her?" There was something almost manic in the way he claimed this fact so urgently.

"Yes," Eleanor admitted. "Though only from afar." She had been a short woman garbed in black, and was the last thing that Feu wanted to see when her sister was so close to dying and her father was lost. These days she saw that they owed the woman a debt of gratitude, but looking back she understood her own reasons all the better. "What will you do if you find her? What will you do if you don't?" That made them pause. They obviously hadn't thought that far ahead.

"Pay her tribute, whether she is dead or alive," was all she extracted from Kolfinna. "And then make our way in life, I guess. There is not a great deal else we could do…" Precisely.

Though she had to agree that the prospect was tempting. The Hero had saved them all and deserved their so-called 'tribute' if nothing else, and after that she would be free to do what she wanted or work for her guild. It would get her away from here, at least. Thoughts of her mother gave her pause, however. "Will you allow me time to think?" she asked them when choicer words failed her. "Meet me here in the morning after first light."

When they left her she sank down next to her father again and prayed silently to the Nine that she might make the right decision. Oft she had been asked why she persisted to worship the gods that had failed her so spectacularly when it came to saving Kvatch, but she told them quite vehemently that faith was of no use unless it was tested. Her family had escaped almost unscathed from the Oblivion Crisis, save for her father and his sister in the Blades who had fallen to the Mythic Dawn protecting the Emperor before his assassination, and Eleanor was beyond sure when she suspected that it was the Nine's way of rewarding her for remaining devout to them. Her aunt and father had not been dealt so bad a hand either, for they had been taken to Aetherius to live alongside the gods who resided there.

"What would you do, father?" she asked in a voice barely louder than the quietest of whispers, placing a palm against the bronze of his memorial and searching deep within herself for the answer. In her mind's eye, a sudden flash brought to light her father's silver shortsword a millisecond before it was gone again into the darkness followed by her mother's face, and then Amarie and Yves and Armynél, before it settled on the broken bodies of Aden and Kolfinna lying by the side of the Gold Road with blood pooling around them in violent crimson, staining the white girl pink. What would you do, father? She asked again, but this time her lips made no sound. The pictures followed again, more slowly, round and round and round all the while she was trying to think, to decide. Clearly, her father was as conflicted about this as she was.

Rising, Eleanor looked back up at the chapel again. The building had been here as long as the town had, she was sure, and with its sharp sandstone walls it looked so regal that she felt almost inadequate in its presence. During the great battle, the steeple had been sheared off by that hideous pincer-covered machine that had smashed through their gates like a knife might slide through a lump of butter – though with decidedly more noise and destructive power – and crashed down on the buildings and people below. After ten years, the tower had been rebuilt using the same old stone, but it was cracked and broken, black and bloody. It did not fit well.

She walked through the heavy oak doors as calmly as she could manage while another score of images more vivid than the last pierced her mind. Through some miracle a few of the stained glass windows had survived, though the main one above the altar had been blown out when the steeple went down; if glass was too expensive, stained glass was a thousand times worse, so the window frames had been left empty with boards in them, something Feu considered to be an absolute travesty and verging on sacrilegious. The town could not justify the expenditure though. When I have enough money, I will buy them one, she vowed, walking between the nine altars that lined the main knave of the chapel that looked emptier than usual. There were always some people here praying for lost loved ones, but Eleanor had never seen quite this small a number of them. A tall, thin Imperial guardsman was beseeching Talos to make his sword swift and strong, and on the other side a beautiful Altmeri woman was praying that Mara would send her love home from his merchant travels unharmed. Otherwise the place was empty, save for the priestess Weedum-Ja who had been here since before the city was destroyed and claimed that nothing would ever drive her away; she knelt in silent prayer before the main altar.

The Breton lit a candle to Julianos, for wisdom, before she sat in an aisle to think, closing her eyes. Staying here to care for her mother and siblings and to mourn for her dead was a prospect that she had no problem with. She had been doing the same for the past ten years without complaining and she could continue doing so for another ten… And yet the prospect of adventure and of living her life called to her. She wanted nothing more than to leave and never set another foot in this scarred, broken town, but she wanted nothing more than to stay here forever at the same time and to the same extent.

"What troubles you, child?" The priestess slipped onto a bench beside her and pressed a cold scaled hand to her heart. The Argonian woman was wiser than she let on to those who did not share her faith, and older than she would seem to look at her.

"Just a proposition I have had," Eleanor murmured. "I can leave Kvatch for good or stay here forever… I don't quite know what to do." Being in the holy presence tended to calm her temper to a degree where she did not snap at people, though many years ago she had realised that she would never find it within herself to even raise her voice to Weedum-Ja, such had the priestess helped her in the past.

"And were those the exact terms of the proposition? That you might leave forever or stay forever?"

Considering, Feu shook her head.

The Argonian smiled wryly. "Then why is it that you speak of forever? You may leave and then return or stay and then leave. You must follow your heart; Julianos will guide you." She gestured to the window of the god of wisdom and logic – it was one of only three that had survived, and depicted an aging man with hair turning grey and a long flowing beard, a robe in red and blue that was flecked with dirt from before and ash from after.

"I looked to my father for guidance," she admitted. She often did when she was confused. "But he seemed as baffled as I am."

For a long time, Weedum-Ja said nothing. The doors opened and shut as the guardsman left to go to his duty, and across the room the Altmer rose to leave now that her prayers were spoken. Soon the place was as empty as a tomb and just as quiet, except for a fiery-haired Breton and an old Argonian priestess. It was a cavernous space, terrifying, and the silence seemed to echo loudly, drowning out all other sounds.

"Your father left this place when he was about your age," the woman said eventually. Her words cut through every thought that had been in Eleanor's head at that moment and planted themselves deeply in her mind. The Argonian beamed again. "He came back a few months later with a bride and a renewed faith. He died for this town, and told me once that truly he had always known that it was his one true home, but he would have given up an eternity here for those few months away if given the choice. If it is your mother's deteriorating health you fear for, it is clear to me that her spirit has been walking in Aetherius for these past ten years, even if her body has remained anchored firmly to Nirn, and your siblings are strong, they will not be alone when surrounded by a community as is found these days, I fear, only in Kvatch. When you return, the city will welcome you back with the same open arms they welcomed your father back with; though I cannot say you will find the world as good a place as he did."

Feu paused and then nodded. "Thank you," she said, as though the words of the priestess would somehow along her to make up her mind, as though being told that her mother was all but dead was an easy thing to digest. She had known it for a long time, in her heart of hearts, but denial is often the main cause of blindness and she had so wanted her mother to live, to get better. She had known, though, she had always known. "I should be getting back…" She stood, and Weedum-Ja did the same. "Really. Thank you."

The Argonian's scaly lips curled upwards. "I am just a mouthpiece of the Nine," she said. "I pray that they will guide you on your journey."

I haven't even decided to go yet. When she arrived back outside, Eleanor was shocked to find that darkness was already clawing at the horizon. How long was I even in there? Long shadows stretched out to the east like dark fingers reaching for some unseen goal, engulfing half of the plaques and making the other half glow in the dimming light. They twinkled, the few that still had their shine after all these years, and the sparkles looked like tiny starlets stuck too close to the ground, struggling to rise into the sky where they belonged. She hurried home.

The room was much the same as she had left it when she had stepped outside to visit her father, save for the black pot that her little sister had hung over the fire. Armynél tended it diligently, and barely even looked up to acknowledge her coming as she sat across from their mother who was swathed in a blanket like a baby. The fire-pit was in the centre of the room, and a wave of warmth struck Eleanor as she stepped through the door, even though one of her siblings had taken down some of the cloths from the windows in order to cool the place. It was not a big house, though what had once been three rooms were now two – a partition wall had collapsed along with the roof, allowing them the liberty of having a battered old table at one end where they might take their meals. The girls slept in the back room, while Yves insisted on keeping their mother company as she gazed longingly into the flames, searching for truth.

Cybelle Renault had been beautiful, once. Her hair had been brown, reaching the small of her back in gentle ripples. Her eyes had been blue as the sky when the sun was high and the clouds had been banished from sight, smiling and laughing along with her youthful face. Until the day the daedra came. People who knew her from before would not recognise her now; she had aged almost forty years in the space of just ten, and her body was stooped and bent like some old crone. Her hair was ragged and grey, and fell out in clumps whenever one tried to lay a hand upon it to the extent that her daughters had taken to wrapping it in a scarf. Her face was lined and wrinkled and she was thinner than she had been, her lips moving wordlessly for most of the day and all of the night; even when she slept she could not find her peace. Even her eyes had been ravaged; in one the pupil had turned milky and dim, while the other was so shot with red from years of crying that it looked as though she had been stabbed. She huddled now beneath piles of furs as if she was cold, though she was less than a metre from a roaring fire, and rocked herself back and forth, interacting with nothing save her own insanity.

"What are you cooking there?" Feu asked her sister. In the firelight, her hair looked as though it too were ablaze.

Armynél shrugged. She was not the most talkative of girls, though her heart was in the right place; she had given up a decade of her life to care for the mother whom she had barely known. At fourteen she was a pretty child, though she still had largely the physique of a small boy, and both of her elder sisters agreed that she should be running about in the streets making friends before she fully became a woman. She left this building about as regularly as their mother did.

Eleanor squatted next to her. Nel was kneeling on the floor, stirring something that looked like stew, though she couldn't be sure of exactly what it was. "How can you be cooking something you don't know about?" she asked gently.

It was Yves who answered, their brother, a boy who thought himself a man because he had seen his sixteenth winter. He was a scrawny thing with elbows like knifes if you let him poke you with them. "Sigrid gave it to us." Sigrid and Emelin had been the only survivors from the Kvatch Mages Guild, only these days Emelin had given it up and Sigrid had not spoken a word in ten years, which did not bode well for her magical ability. Every now and again she would drop off a stew or meal of some description for the Renault children, as though they were still too small to cook for themselves; she had never told them why.

"Hmm…" Eleanor mused. "Fair enough."

"Hey Feu," Yves piped up again. He was sitting at the table with a lump of wood in one had and a blunt knife in the other, no doubt trying to create some amazing piece of sculpture. His sister looked up. "I heard that Finny and Aden asked you to go with them to the Imperial City."

Armynél said nothing.

How did they find out so quickly? "Who told you that?"

"They did. I went to see Am earlier… You were in the chapel or something. I dunno."

"Yes, they asked."

He leant forward, dark blue eyes shimmering. "And what did you tell them?"

"That I would think about it and answer tomorrow."

The boy rose and crossed the room; Eleanor noticed immediately that his feet were bare and bloody, as though he had been running through the streets without shoes again. He had a curious manner, her brother. "And what are you going to answer them?" Sinking down next to her, Yves dropped his chunk of wood into the fire and watched in awe as the flames licked at it hungrily.

"What would you do?"

He smirked. "Go. Make myself rich and famous. Come back with a wife and seven children, and have everyone hail me as amazing." Beside her Nel scoffed, stirring the mystery stew again.

"That stuff only happens in story books, you know…"

"That's the thing, Feu," Armynél replied, speaking for the first time in a hushed whisper. "Your life is a story book, and you are the author. Don't stay here for our sakes." It wasn't a plea. It was an order.

The older girl frowned. "I'm still thinking about it," she told them stiffly so that they said nothing more on the matter.

When it came, the food was nothing particularly special – a simple lamb stew accompanied by chunks of blackened flatbread torn from a loaf that Amarie had given to Yves earlier that day. Eleanor barely tasted it, so perplexed was she by the question as to whether she ought to leave with Aden and Kolfinna or stay; everyone had told her to go and live her life and yet something was holding her back, a niggling sense of guilt at abandoning everybody and everything that she had ever known. While they ate, their brother regaled them with a story about how he had managed to save a man's life with nothing more than a burlap sack and a rotten apple; it was a tale that he had told many a time before, though each time it seemed to grow more and more unbelievable and less and less close to the truth. The man's life had never even been in danger, though his purse had been about to be cut by some sneaky thief from Bravil, and all Yves had done was throw the apple at the thief – he missed and hit the victim – before tripping him over with some sacking. Sometimes he told it that the man had been at knife point, and sometimes there were five or six (and once even ten) thugs, all intent on bloody murder and armed to the teeth. His sisters had given up listening to him long ago.

"- and then this man had this wolf, right? And it jumped at me, gnashing it's teeth together and like… foaming at the mouth… And I fought it off, punching and kicking it and all that before strangling it with a sack. Then I used that same sack to pull the robber off of the man, who he was like… trying to kill with a knife or a club or something-"

Armynel sighed at that and, pushing a lump of potato around her wooden bowl with the end of her cracked spoon, dared to ask a question. "How can you not tell if it was a knife or a club? They're pretty different, you know."

Yves was indignant. "Yeah, but it all happened so fast," he countered, as he almost always did. "Anyway, I jumped on him with nothing more than this sack in my hands, and he was fighting me and all, and he was huge, but I didn't give in, even when he hit me with his weapon. See?" He showed them the scar that they both knew he had got when he was trying to skin a rabbit for their evening meal and his knife had slipped, slicing the palm of his right hand open from just beneath his thumb to a little below his ring finger. They chose not to argue this time. "And then the guards showed up and killed him right there and then, and they said I was a hero and everything!" The man had been jailed and then sent back to Bravil in fetters, though Yves liked the story better when it ended with blood and gore. "Then I skinned that wolf. See? It's that one that mother's got round her today." They turned to look at her, though it was just something that they had pulled from the wreckage of their house after the fires were put out – not that her brother was old enough to remember that happening. "They wanted to give me a reward and all, but I just said that the ability to do some good in this world was enough and went home."

"How humble of you," Eleanor breathed sarcastically, mopping up the last dregs of her stew with the bread. "Has mother eaten today?"

"She had a crumb of cheese earlier," Nel replied impassively. "Though that's more than she had yesterday," she admitted, frowning. "I even managed to get her to drink a sip of water, though you would have thought I was trying to poison her, the amount of fuss she made."

"That's good. It's better than nothing, at least." Eleanor rose. "I'm going to sleep," she announced, leaving the table and walking towards the back room.

"Feu," Yves called after her, jumping up from his own place in case she failed to acknowledge him. She turned back and blinked at him. "We won't mind if you're gone tomorrow," he said. "Will we, Nel?" Their sister shook her head, gathering up the dishes so that she could wash them before she went to sleep; sometimes it did not show that she was only fourteen. "And Am won't either. At least one of us should do something half decent with their life…"


Author Note: Thanks to those of you who reviewed the last chapter. This one's quite long, considering that it's only from one POV, I guess... What do you think of my characters so far?