Tell the Wind and Fire(90)

“You wanted to help. You tried. I didn’t try.”

“You did better than try,” Ethan said. “You did it. You accomplished something.”

“So did you,” I said. “You saved Jarvis. You saved someone—you did what you did because you believed in change and goodness, and you inspired me.”

You were the light that showed me the way, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t wanted other people to see me that way. He was more than my light.

He’d lied to me, he said, and it was true. He’d done worse than that. He had sent in Carwyn as a replacement for himself and clearly had not realized that if Carwyn had fooled me, every touch I accepted from Carwyn would have been a violation of trust. He’d risked his life for me but had not considered what it would have done to me if he had died. He’d lied to me but meant it for the best.

I’d lied to him, too, and he knew it. We had each thought that we could replace ourselves with perfect facsimiles and fool the other. We had both been wrong. I was glad to be wrong.

I saw how hard he had tried, and it was so easy to forgive him that it felt possible to forgive myself.

“How are you here?” I asked him. “How did it happen?”

“They were letting in people from the Dark city to mock and spit at me. Carwyn came to visit me. He was wearing a doppelganger’s hood, but it wasn’t fastened by a Light magician. He could take it off. He took it off, once we were alone. I thought he was there to laugh at me. I thought . . . Everything I thought about him was wrong.”

Ethan swallowed.

“He . . . he must have just fed from a Light magician, maybe someone he took against their will—”

“No,” I said. “He’s not like that. It was me.”

Ethan looked puzzled to hear me come to Carwyn’s defense and, at the same time, sorry that he had insulted Carwyn.

“I didn’t know. Carwyn must have used Dark magic to confuse my mind. He came in, and I started to feel dizzy and strange. I could barely keep standing. He put the hood on me, and he whispered ‘I remember her’ and everything went black. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t even know who he meant.”

I remembered what Aunt Leila had said, about Carwyn being confused when he was sick and mistaking my mother for someone else. “I think he meant your mother.”

“Our mother?” asked Ethan, instinctively kind.

I smiled at him. “Yeah.”

“Did you two—did you plan this together?” Ethan sounded helpless.

I could never have planned this. It would never have occurred to me that Carwyn would ever do something like this.

“No,” I said again. “It was all him.”

Ethan shook his head, sounding even more helpless. “I came to in the street wearing this hood,” said Ethan. “I didn’t go back to him. I came to you.”

“Let’s take it off now,” I whispered.

I put my hand on the collar. I felt the dip and bob of his throat beneath my ringed fingers, just before Ethan was about to speak.

The door was open. We both heard the steps on the floor of the hall outside. Ethan reached for me but let his hand drop when I shook my head. I went for the kitchen counter, where I had left the sword.

It was my Aunt Leila. She had a furled paper in her hand that must have been the pardon. I did not dare even glance toward Ethan. I looked at the paper and her face, the severe black and white lines of both. Only the paper promised mercy.

I tensed again, my hand touching the edge of the counter but not the sword yet. But I saw Aunt Leila had tensed too. She had not expected anyone else to be there.

She looked at Ethan, and her eyes narrowed. She had seen Carwyn at the hotel, had seen he was not collared, and I did not want her thinking about why the same boy might be collared now. I could not speak. I could not risk her suspecting. I did not know what to do.

“Send him away,” Leila said at last. “Lucie, we need to talk. You need to listen to me.”

“That’s not what ‘We need to talk’ should mean.”

“Look what you accomplished at the clock tower,” Leila said. “Think of how much you could do if you joined our cause properly. You have so much power as a symbol.”

“It’s unlucky that I’m a person too, isn’t it?”

Aunt Leila looked at me. There was so much distance in her gaze: the wall between us could not be broken down, no bridge could be crossed. “It would be a mistake for you to think you have enough power to stand against me. You may be the Golden Thread in the Dark, you may be my niece, but you are not more important than our justice. Every time you stand against me, you will be punished. There is no victory you can win that I cannot take away.”