Blacktail Deer Plateau cruel to be kind

I hate you.

She looked up, but it wasn't Peregrine's voice she heard. It was Potema's. Generations linked together in mutual disgust of this girl, the one born into and named after pestilence.

Nothing changed.

Yes, she said, her voice lifeless. There was nothing else to say. She didn't hate him back; she couldn't even fake it.

But she couldn't very well say she loved him, either. She felt it, deeply. But she also knew her failure to mother—the latest in a string of failures—eclipsed that love.

What good was love when she couldn't keep it together?

Vesper came, but her words were drowned out by those three uttered syllables of Peregrine's. Maegi resumed staring at the water, unmoving, save for a flick of one ear at a nagging fly.