Tell the Wind and Fire(68)

He said “the revolution” instead of “the rebellion.” A rebellion implied something tried, whereas a revolution implied something that had succeeded in turning the whole world upside down. I knew it was true, that our city, my two cities, had now been tipped over into chaos, turned into something entirely new. This was no minor upset that could be made right. This was the ending of a world, and I blamed him for it.

“You show up, you murder Ethan’s father, you take Ethan’s place, you steal his life and do Light knows what to him, and you expect me to believe you have nothing to do with it when disaster comes raining down on all our heads? If you were innocent, you would not be here!”

“I’m very flattered that you think I’m a devious criminal mastermind who comes up with elaborate schemes to topple cities that none can defeat,” said Carwyn, “but you are seriously overestimating me. I’m not part of any revolution. Why would I kill Charles Stryker? He was the one who made sure the law protecting doppelgangers passed. He was protecting me from his brother. He was a lot more use to me alive than dead. The sans-merci killed Charles Stryker, and I am not one of them. Who would trust a doppelganger to be their comrade? I am entirely self-serving and I am entirely alone. I left the Dark city on my own because the place is a deathtrap. Nobody should know that better than you. Your mother died in the Dark, and now someone else you love is lost there.”

We were both panting, and the new suspicion that came to me was just another blow. It did not even surprise me. Carwyn seemed like the avatar of all evil in this moment, as if he was responsible for every wrong that had ever been done to me and mine. My hand trembled, but my sword did not. I knew why people hated doppelgangers. I knew why they killed them.

“Do you know anything about what happened to Jarvis?”

“No! All I know is that he’s gone,” said Carwyn. “And that’s why your precious boyfriend came to find me. That’s why he hunted me down through the back streets of the Light city to offer me enough money to live on for the rest of my life. He wanted to go and save this Jarvis guy, because he’d sent him to the Dark city and he felt responsible, and because he thought you would never forgive him if he did not bring Jarvis back. He knew he couldn’t disappear at a time like this. He knew you and the whole Light city would panic. He knew an election was coming and a scandal would lose his uncle the leadership of the Light Council. He had to go and have nobody miss him. So he came to me and I took his money. I said that I wouldn’t tell anybody the truth, no matter what, and I didn’t, even when you came in and knew who I was right away. I’m not working with the sans-merci. I’m working for Ethan.”

My sword point faltered with my heartbeat as he spoke. When he fell silent, the sword point dropped. We stood facing each other in the moonlight, with no weapons and no lies between us.

Carwyn pushed himself up on the balcony rail, shoulders hunched, and looked at me with his face suddenly open. He was not closed off, and he was not cruelly mimicking Ethan. He looked as weary and wary as I felt.

“None of this was my idea. None of this was what I wanted. And now I’m trapped in this mess,” he said. “Just like you.”

I took a shaky breath.

“Why torture me, then?”

His shadowed, moonlit face changed, amusement overcoming exhaustion, his mouth curling into a sly grin. “I said I wasn’t a criminal mastermind whose devious plans topple cities,” Carwyn told me. “I never said I was nice.”

I didn’t entirely believe him. He might have agreed to Ethan’s plan, but that did not mean he had no plan of his own. Someone had been spreading treason through the Light city: someone had committed the crime Ethan had almost died for.

But I believed him enough for now.

I had given Ethan a mission, and like a knight in a fairy tale he had gone away to accomplish it. He thought he could save Jarvis.

That meant, for a moment, even on this nightmarish night, I could see Carwyn without seeing an impostor who had stolen Ethan’s face and his place in the world, a monster who was made of darkness and evil. I could look at him as I had looked at him on the first night we met, and see a boy who was a jerk but who had done something that made me think there was more to him than that. A boy from the Dark city, who understood that life was cruel and who was not always cruel himself.

A boy I had something in common with.

More in common now.

“So here we are,” I said. “Trapped. You want to get out of here?”

He shrugged. “Well, the party’s pretty dead.”

He smiled at me, a smile that was different from all the smiles of the past terrible weeks, because this was a smile that invited me to share it with him. I thought of the bloodstained ballroom and Jim’s face, how surprised he had been to die, and could not smile back, but I reached out my free hand to him. Carwyn reached back and clasped his hand in mine.