Maple had never meant for her life to end up like this. In all honesty, she hadn’t expected her life to go anywhere, out in the forest and strung out, only interacting with others as a shapeshifted kitten, where the villagers would pity her and leave out scraps and saucers of milk.

The road was darkening, sky bruised and beginning to weep starlight onto the path ahead. Maple had tied up the horses by the wayside, started a fire, stomped out the fire, and climbed back into the caravan all before Lizabekt had even registered their stopping.

“Hey, robin. You hungry from all that napping?” She smiled, watching Liz rise from the Murphy bed. “I made soup.” She placed the second mug on the table, sitting on the floor beside her wife’s bed.

“You know I’m not used to the horses, sparrow. It’s the only way to make my head stop hurting.”

Maple smiled. “You’ll get used to it.”

”We’ve been on the road for a week.”

“City girls,” Maple made a show of rolling her eyes.

Liz scoffed and sat up, if only to bat at Maple half-heartedly. “Oh come on, you love the city.”

Maple smiled. She did love Etterdatch, with its noise and rooftops, and colour and sound. She loved it even more with Liz, firecracker-red, charged with gunpowder and wheatpaste and cheap liquor. But she would be lying if she said she didn’t miss the forest, with its own chatter, and canopies, and smell.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss Violet.

“Do you ever miss him?” She asked finally, breaking the silence.

“Jared?” Liz echoed. She had never spoken about her brother, not since that day. “I think about him a lot.”

“What was he like?”

“Sweet. Quiet. A reader.” Liz had gone quiet again, sipping her mug with the same measured steadiness one might smoke a cigarette. “How about you?”

“I didn’t think she survived.”

Liz laughed then, sharp and bright with a timbre that exploded all the joy from the sky out into their small caravan. “At least one of us gets to meet the family, then.”

Maple drank to that.

The fire Maple had stomped out was still breathing faintly, a thread of smoke rising from the stones she'd ringed it with. She watched it through the small window above the bed until it gave up entirely.

"Tell me something about him," Maple said. "Something small."

Liz considered this the way she considered most things: sideways, unhurried. "He used to put barley sweets in my mouth to shut me up during sermons. Worked every time."

Maple smiled at the window.

"Your turn," said Liz.

"She used to steal my shoes." It surprised her, how easily it came out. "Every time I shifted back she'd have moved them somewhere completely different. Said I didn't need them, living in a tree. She wasn't wrong, technically."

"A reasonable defence."

"An infuriating one." But her voice was warm with it. She turned the mug in both hands. "She had this way of appearing, like she'd always been there and you'd only just noticed."

Liz was quiet for a moment. Then: "Jared used to do that. Come and find me without making a thing of it. Just there. Sitting outside my room."

The horses shifted outside. Rain had begun at some point without either of them marking it, soft and directionless.

"Do you think they'd have liked each other?" Maple asked.

Liz made a sound that was halfway to a laugh. "God, no. Your Violet would've led him directly into every kind of trouble he spent his whole life trying to keep me out of."

"She really would've."

"And he'd have followed, because she sounds like exactly the sort of person he couldn't say no to."

"She was."

The past tense settled between them without snagging. Maple had learned, these past months, that there was a way to speak the dead that wasn't the same as burying them again. It had taken Liz longer to find it. She wasn't sure she had, entirely. But she was here, in a caravan on a darkening road, drinking soup out of a mug, and she had said his name twice now without flinching.

Maple counted that.

"Come here," said Liz, and shifted on the Murphy bed to make room. Not much, the thing was barely wide enough for one of them, but enough, which had always been the way of it between them. Maple climbed up and fitted herself in beside her wife, rain on the roof, the horses settled, the road going nowhere in particular until morning.

"We could stop somewhere," Maple said into her hair. "If you want. Proper stop. A few days."

"No." Liz's hand found hers in the dark. "I think I like moving."

Maple thought of the forest. The way stillness had started to feel like dying, and then the road had started to feel like something else entirely.

"Yeah," she said. "Me too."