EMBER’S POV

I don’t trust the tea.

That is the first thing I want on record. A woman who shoots fragile things out of the air for sport, who looks at a dying animal and feels absolutely nothing, is not someone I am ever going to trust.

Hale presses a warm cup into my hands and steers me to a chair by the fire, clucking over the blood on my face like a woman who actually cares. I sit, and I hold the cup, and I watch her over the rim of it the way you watch a snake.

“You don’t have to drink it,” she says. “I can see...