– 3 –

Edmund doesn’t know his heart doesn’t belong to him. He doesn’t know his father sold it to a dwarf-smith long ago.

So it means something, I think, that he’d probably have just given it to Bethany — if she’d asked him — on that day, when the two of them encountered in the quad.

It doesn’t mean much —

I mean, they’re not a romantic story. They’re not even an unromantic story. They’re more like a light that blew out.

But it means something.

At the very least he’d have been nicer, if he could have — to her, I mean, not to the people that he slaughtered and ate. He might have wanted to fight her, well, you know, less hard, or maybe even, eventually, not at all.

He doesn’t get the chance. Not then.

In November she takes his heart from him, he Edmund of the House of Hunger; she steals his heart in its cold stone box.

She tosses it into the air while he is recovering.

She draws back her fist for a stone-shattering punch.

And neither of them knows that it’s not even his property! Although, well.

I mean, Joffun’s a convict, and the Gulleys have money and power.

It might not have been a legitimate sale.

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