Tell the Wind and Fire(84)

The Dark city was not as different from the Light city as I had recalled. It did not bring back memories of standing with Dad in the cemetery, of crawling home every night too spent even to weep. It felt familiar in a different way. There were streets I knew, and a skyline I had seen from my bedroom every night. There had been more to my life here than the end.

I felt different, though. There was so much to be worried about, but I wasn’t worried. I had a single focus and I was heading toward it.

My aunt and I had walked past the clock tower many times when I was a child. She used to tell me how the windows of the tall gray building had once looked out on another bridge across the river, before the city was torn into Light and Dark and all but one bridge ripped down. We would walk along the wall and listen to the river sighing behind it, and my small, cold hand had felt safe in hers.

The building looked pale and stark by day, but the clocks at the top of the tower were the same as they had been during our evening walks: one of the few mechanisms in the Dark city operated by Light magic, the first tower built when Light magic came. The hands on the clocks had burned gold with magic, cutting the night up into shimmering seconds.

There was a guard at the door, wearing a band of black and scarlet on each arm.

This had been the stronghold of the Light Council’s men in the Dark city, and now the Dark had reclaimed it.

I stood on the dirty corner of the street and remembered what my aunt used to warn me about. She’d said that if you lingered on the corner too long, the Light guards at the top of the tower could see you.

Where else would they keep their prized prisoner, the one they wanted to show off as an example, but at the highest, most conspicuous point of their new fortress?

The guard at the door was young, I thought. The rebels at the hotel and around the cages in Times Square had been older, but of course they sent their most experienced and embittered to do murder. This was a prisoner being kept for display, to show the power of the sans-merci. Nobody in the Light or the Dark city would want to help a Stryker. The sans-merci did not think anybody was coming for Ethan.

I stood on the street corner and stared up at the glass face of a clock, at the lucent hands making their inexorable progress around it. Somewhere behind the gray stone and golden light was Ethan. I squinted until my eyes stung, looking up at the top of the tower, and from high above I thought I saw a pale face looking down.

I wanted so much to believe that he could see me, that he would see a fair head and know that it was me, that I understood everything now, that I had more faith in him than I ever had before and I loved him as much as I ever had. I stood there with my fists clenched and my eyes straining to see the impossible, and I tried to believe.

I had lied and pretended and hated myself for doing it all, thinking it would buy me and the ones I loved safety. I had been a fool.

There were people on the street, and they shot me looks as they walked by. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking that they recognized me, but then I slowly registered the hot slide of tears on my face, the way my eyes and my chest were aching.

They were looking at me because I was making a scene.

I didn’t even care. At least, at last, I was making a scene for myself and no one else. I did not care if they saw, and I did not care what they thought.

I was not going to be strong for anyone any longer.

Not even for Ethan. I had tried too hard to be strong for him when he had asked me to be honest with him instead, when he had offered to be honest with me. I called up that moment again in my mind, how unhappy I had been and he had been, how afraid I had been of incriminating myself and damaging what was between us, when I could have told him all the truth and had him tell me all the truth. I knew everything now, and I thought I could love him better with truth between us.

Whatever dark deeds had been done and dark secrets had been kept when we were children, whatever darkness ran in my blood or his, seemed distant compared with the memory of how he had listened to whatever I let fall, had offered to help me with no thought of return, and all the time had been doing what he thought was right for himself and for our two cities, as well as for me.

Aunt Leila thought that with my mother’s name spoken and her death avenged, justice would be done. But this was not justice, what was being done to Ethan, any more than what had been done to me was.

I could not stop crying at the thought that he might be seeing me right now and I could not see him, that he might never know I was there at all. Both thoughts seemed unbearable, and I would not bear them, would not bear any of this, for a moment longer.

He had known me and loved me and chosen me, out of all others, and I had been so scared he would change his mind that I had not told him I chose and knew him back. I’d learned my lesson. I’d learned to know Ethan better while he was gone than I had ever allowed myself to know him before. I’d had what few people could ever have—the chance to experience how life would be with someone else in the place of the one I loved, someone who came with all the same luxuries, offered the same place in the world, even wore the same face. Carwyn had never been kind like Ethan, never touched me like Ethan had—gently, considerately, and with willingness to let me go if that was what I wanted. That was why I never wanted anyone else but Ethan to touch me, and for him never to stop.