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CHAPTER FIVE ❦
THEON RETURNED WITH ROBB THE next morn, just as the sun rose high in the sky. Malaena hid her irritation with him, she had just arrived here and he had took off without really spending anytime with his younger sister.
They strolled through a beaten path, the sky blocked by overhung branches, decorated with evergreen leaves. Jon had been right when he said the snow would melt; the grass had now returned to its rightful colour, the only indication that the snow had been there at all were the drops of dew, dripping off each blade.
"Have they treated you well here?" Malaena asked quietly. "I assume they have."
"They have," her brother replied, not glancing up from the ground. He had been kicking a heavy stone with the tip of his boot for what seemed like a mile. "They always have. Maybe they've treated me too well."
Her lips pursed. "Have you been avoiding me?"
Finally, Theon tipped his head upward and away from the stone at his feet. "Possibly. Sort of. Robb had planned that trip for awhile but I didn't have to go."
"Why?" She shook her head. "Should I not have come?"
Theon's brows pulled together and he narrowed his eyes on the rock, kicking it again—hard this time. The stone caught air and then disappeared, entangled in the grass far away. Theon was silent the whole time.
Her turned to her, his blue eyes draping over her, his expression stoic. He wasn't looking at her in any wrong way but as if he was trying to figure out an equation in arithmetic and it didn't quite add up. She felt small under his scrutiny, a part of her felt his mouth would part and the words that would escape them would be harsh, cold, just as their father always was—he would inform her she was indeed unwanted and then she would have nowhere to go, abandoned by all the men that shared her blood.
"You look like mother." His words were not harsh or biting, but pained. "Just like her. It's hard knowing she's dead and I never..."
"Said goodbye?" Malaena finished for him. She gently placed her fingertips underneath her brother's chin, lifting it so he would be forced to meet her eye. "None of us did, really. I found her, you know?"
Theon swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing, and he shook his head. "Didn't even know she was dead until you got here."
Malaena nodded and took a step ahead of her brother and perched on a trunk of a tree that had tumbled to the ground.
"She was ill for some time, I think it was over a year," Theon sat beside her. "We had all gotten used to her not be able to leave her room. Each morning I brought her tea, after she finished her breakfast.
