Page 5 of Dark Mate

I sit with that. The wordfilleddrops into my chest and presses on something. Filling a scratch means somebody admits a thing made it. Filling it fast means somebody doesn’t want it seen. The sisters never do anything fast unless the fastness is the whole point.

“What made it?” I ask.

Neve picks the crown back up. Goes on braiding. Her eyes stay on her hands, but I can feel the attention she’s giving me, sideways, the attention of someone who learned a long time ago to look without being caught looking.

“You already know,” she says.

I do. The Cage is here because of the Nethershades. The lessons teach what they are—the claiming, the sacred bond, the divine union. The sisters talk about them like a purpose: instruments of the new world, its will made into flesh. What the sisters never talk about is the size of them. The reach. The scratch on the wall is the Ordained’s pretty careful words turned into stone.

Something came to the wall. Something with claws.

“Are you scared?” I ask.

“Of the scratch?”

“Of what made it.”

Neve ties off the crown. Turns it in her hands. The petals are starting to bruise where the stems bent, little brown shadows creeping into the white. She runs her thumb along one bruised edge and the petal tears, a wet sound so small I nearly miss it.

“They presented me six months ago,” she says. “Took me out to a clearing in the canopy. Two miles past the walls, maybemore. Dressed me in white, put flowers in my hair, and stood me in a gap in the trees where the light came down.”

She says it the way she says everything—flat, careful, each word picked like a foothold on bad ground.

“I waited. The sun moved. The clearing smelled like wet bark and something sharp under it, like metal left out in the rain. My arms were heavy. The preparation tea—the special one, the one they give you the morning of—it makes your whole body feel like it’s underwater. I could hear my own pulse in my ears and nothing else. The canopy had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when somebody important walks in.”

She turns the crown over in her lap, studying the weave like it’s the most interesting thing in the courtyard.

"He came. The Shade. I heard him before I saw him—branches shifting overhead, the weight of something big moving the canopy around. Then he was at the edge of the clearing. Crimson. Not as big as the Apex they whisper about, but big enough that the trees looked wrong next to him, like the size of the world had been rewritten and nobody told the trees.

“He looked at me.”

She turns the crown over. A petal falls.

“Looked at me the way you look at a door that opens on the wrong room. Curious for a second, then nothing. He turned around and walked back into the canopy. The whole thing took less time than this conversation. The Ordained came and collected me half an hour later. I stood in that clearing thirty minutes, alone, in a white dress with the flowers rotting in my hair, waiting on people to come pick me up like a parcel that got dropped at the wrong house.”

There’s a bitterness in her voice, folded up small, but I hear it. I’ve never once heard Neve sound bitter about anything. She sounds bitter about this.

“Wrong scent,” I say. The lessons cover it—the claiming is particular, driven by a pull in the blood the Ordained call divine selection. Not every woman matches every Shade. The bond’s meant for one.

“Wrong scent,” she agrees. “Wrong everything. He knew it in one breath. One breath, and I wasn’t what he’d come for.”

She stops. Looks at the crown like it might break in her hands.

“He was gentle when he turned away,” she says finally. “The lessons leave that part out. When the scent’s wrong, they don’t—” She stops again. Picks at a stem. “Mine wasn’t dosed. I think they try it clean the first time. A real match, or the hope of one. But when the scent’s wrong and the male just walks off, they don’t let it go at that.” Her jaw tightens. “The other clearings—the ones nobody talks about—they dose the males beforehand. Something to make them go along with it. Because without the right scent the body doesn’t want it, the bond doesn’t catch. So they make it happen anyway.”

She puts the crown on her own head. The jasmine’s already wilting. She wears it like a girl who doesn’t care.

“When I came back, things looked different. The Cage looked different. Not worse, not better—justvisible,in a way it hadn’t been before. Like I’d been looking at a painting my whole life and somebody finally told me it was a window.” She tilts her head and the crown slides. “The sisters were so gentle with me. That was the worst part. Gentleness with a shape to it—the kind you give a disappointment. Fewer grooming sessions. Less notice from Brother Cassian. Like the whole place had quietly sorted me into a different column.”

“Neve—”

“Lissa didn’t come back from preparation the same,” she says, not answering me, following her own thread. “She used to argue. At meals, in theology, over the embroidery—opinionsabout everything. The thread tension was off. The soup was bland. Brother Cassian’s stories didn’t add up.” A flicker of something that isn’t quite a smile. “She went into preparation and came out humming. She hums while she eats now. She hums while she braids. She hums like Ireth, except Ireth was born quiet and Lissa was made quiet. There’s a difference.”

The words sit between us. I don’t push. The olive tree shifts overhead, the coins of light rearranging themselves on the stone.

A breeze moves through the courtyard. The leaves shuffle, dry and papery, almost like whispering. The fountain catches the wind and throws a fine mist that lands on my bare arms. Cool. I didn’t expect it.

“The tea tastes wrong some mornings,” Neve says.