![]() ![]() Her face, blood-streaked too, was blanched with numb endurance. Whatever life might force on them, and however it might fail them, they knew they had each other. They stood side by side, braced together against the future. They didn’t need magic to read each other’s thoughts, only glances, and their hopes were twins, even if they were not. They were each other’s person, each other’s place. Their names might as well have been one name- Koraandnova-so seldom were they spoken separately, and when they were, they sounded incomplete, like one half of a mussel shell, cracked open and ripped in two. They were indivisible, like the lines of a couplet that would lose their meaning out of context. It wasn’t much, letters in the place of a mother-and they only had the memory of the letters now, since Skoyë had thrown them in the fire “by accident”-but they had each other too. Someone loves us, their faces said, when they stared down Skoyë, or refused to cringe before their father. ![]() Well, those five words were like heated stones that never lost their warmth or bruised your flesh, and Kora and Nova carried them everywhere. In winter, in Rieva, they heated flat stones in the fire to tuck into their sleeping furs at night, though they cooled off fast and were hard under your ribs when you woke. ![]()
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