Tell the Wind and Fire (16 page)

“Get out of there. You are not the one who should make this discovery. I’ll handle it. Get out now!”

Ethan had barely been able to look at his father, but now that it was time to leave the room, he hesitated. It must be hard to leave someone knowing it is for the last time: it must be so hard to say goodbye. I had never had the opportunity.

I could not let him linger. I took his hand and laced his fingers with mine. His hand was shaking.

“We have to go.”

“Will you stay with me, Lucie?” Ethan asked quietly. He sounded humble, as if he was beseeching a queen for a favor he knew should not be granted. “I know it’s asking a lot. I know this is bound to bring back bad memories for you and this is all my fault, but I don’t know how to bear it without you.”

“Stay with you?” I said. “Let someone try to part us, now or ever.”

We went stumbling out of the building, almost blinded by tears and terror. I did not see the mirrored hall or the doorman. I could not see anything but the still, white face of Ethan’s father until we burst out into the streets and found them alive with light.

It seemed an optical illusion at first, born of our dazed and dazzled brains. Then we realized what was happening—the setting sun was aligned with the pattern of our city’s streets, turning each one into a comet’s tail. The air above the sun was illuminated, golden crowns on the tops of every tower. Each street became a different glittering ray. Points of light hit window glass and turned into tiny sunbursts themselves, and the whole bustling human city transformed into something glorious.

It seemed as if we could walk up a shining path to the very heart of the sun and be wrapped in warmth so intense, we would forget what it was like to feel the cold of knives or dead hands,
and have our eyes so filled with light that we would never see anything dark again.

Manhattanhenge happened twice a year, once before and once after the summer solstice, the streets aligning perfectly with the rays of the setting sun. It had come even in the old days of our city.

Now that light meant so much to us, an unclouded Manhattanhenge sunset was almost sacred. I saw people wandering out into the orange-painted streets under a honey-bright sky, their rings ablaze and their faces radiant. I wanted to run, to escape by any means necessary, but there was nowhere to run to. Death waited in both the light and the dark.

We stood in the street for a long time. The light drained slowly
out of our city and the night came, and with it Mark Stryker and his guards, attracting attention to us at last. Then came the snapping lights and snapped questions of the press, the throng of people who were curious and surprised and whose murmurs seemed vaguely threatening. I thought I saw a group of people who were armed, but I did not know if the weapons were for attack or defense. The crowd hung back on the other side of the street in a purposeless way that seemed as if it might explode into purposeful violence at any moment, and yet never did. I saw a few people looking from me to Ethan, and their looks were not friendly.

“Maybe we should go to my place,” I whispered to Ethan.

Ethan had seen the glances too. His face was white, but his lips were set in a determined line. “I can’t go. This is all my fault. I have to see them—bring him out. I have to see. You should go, Lucie. I don’t want you involved in this.”

“When will you get it?” I whispered. “If you’re in, I’m in.”

He looked even more distressed by that. I felt as if nothing I could do would comfort him.

A commotion broke out in the back of the crowd: people pushing against guards in a way they would never have done before the cages fell. I saw the Light guards’ flashing swords, and I saw ordinary knives as well. I did not hear the commotion long—the Light guards crushed it efficiently. I wondered how many more people in the crowd might rise up. I wondered how many people were going to die tonight.

I still could not leave Ethan.

We all waited, strangers and family, and at last we saw Ethan’s father brought out. The black car that carried Charles Stryker’s body away drove off with a furious rattle, as if it were charging at an enemy.

There was nobody left alive on earth who loved Ethan but me.

I knew who had reason to hate the Strykers. I knew who could have walked past the doorman without a soul questioning him because he wore Ethan’s face and no collar.

I knew Carwyn had done this, and I was the one who had let him loose.

We were allowed back into the Strykers’ apartment, though Charles Stryker’s room was sealed off. I did not leave Ethan through all that long, dark night. I was with him when the light returned and Mark Stryker with it. The morning dawned pale and sickly. All the faces around me looked the same, worn down by sleeplessness and the camera flashes that felt like tiny strikes of lightning.

Jim had come in and gone to sleep on the sofa beside us, while Ethan had sat pale and tense all night, his eyes wide but blank, seeing nothing. The only sign of awareness of the outside world that he gave was the tight grip he kept on my hand.

Ethan grieved, Jim slept, and I waited.

When Mark came in, I was reminded that Charles’s face had looked like a mask, because I saw Mark’s mask slip away. Mark looked tired but noble, grieving but patient, and then the door of his home shut behind him.

The mask dropped. His face fell into a different expression, closed off and betraying nothing but impatience. I did not think there was much else to betray. There were small, straight lines bracketing his mouth, nose, and eyes that told the story of his character to me, that gave an air of cruelty to his stern, handsome face already. But it would be years, I thought, before the lines became so pronounced that nobody would be able to look on his face and find it possible to trust him.

The first thing he said, to everyone’s surprise, was my name.

“Lucie, you know quite a few of this family’s secrets already. Naturally we trust you with them, and naturally we would be deeply wounded if you betrayed them. Now, however, your silence is not going to be enough. If you wish to leave, we will let you. If you stay, I will consider that a promise that you mean to support us in our plans.”

Ethan turned his face toward me for the first time in hours and whispered in my ear so softly that his breath barely stirred my hair. “You should go. I don’t want this for you. All I want to do is protect you from things like this.”

I had told Ethan,
Let someone try to part us,
and I had meant it. I did not answer him with words. I simply tightened my grip on his hand.

“Excellent. Now, Ethan: the doorman has been dealt with. Nobody knows you were the one who found Charles’s body, so nobody can suspect that you let in the rebels or wielded the knife yourself.”

A shudder of horror passed through Ethan. I held his hand as if I could hold him together, as if no matter how he shook I would not let him shake apart.

“In the eyes of the public, you have become a tragic orphan. Here’s how we’re going to use that.”

I wondered if the doorman had been killed or simply bribed.

“We are going to redeem our family’s name and build something from this disaster,” said Mark. “You, Ethan, are going to go to work for the council as a page. I want you in the public eye, serving the Light in small, useful ways, until all doubt of you is slowly removed as sympathy for you rises.”

“I can’t even do magic,” Ethan said.

“Half the council can’t do magic,” Mark told him. “That does not matter. What matters is that you uphold the Light.”

Once, everyone on the council had worn rings of Light, but they had passed power down to sons and daughters who did not. Now some of them wore rings and some did not. Magic was like beauty: you were pleased to be born with it and happy to marry those who had it, and you hoped your children would be blessed with it if you were not. But you could be powerful without it, as long as you were rich and committed to keeping the structure of society exactly as it was.

It made no difference to me. A man was not any better simply because he wore the rings and wielded magic. Mark Stryker was proof enough of that, and Charles Stryker had been too. Was life any fairer back when all the council had magic? Or before the magic came, when power depended on wealth and cruelty alone? Had anything ever been fair, in the history of the world? I didn’t think so.

I knew what Mark intended for Ethan. People would look at him, the orphaned boy in the public eye, and pity him. It was not a glamorous job he was being given, and that was smart, but it was a job that made Ethan’s allegiance clear. The shadow of suspicion that had fallen on him would vanish. Ethan was young and handsome, ten times as charming as Jim, and dating me, Lucie Manette, the Golden Thread in the Dark. He could make the whole Stryker corporation look good. Mark’s plan was for him to be a figurehead, and at the same time to make accusations against Ethan look absurd.

“Uphold the Light,” Ethan said. “What does that mean?”

“It means that you will follow my lead. The filth of the darkest streets are rising up, and they need to be put down and shown their place. Do you want the same thing that happened to Charles to happen to me, and your cousin? Do you think that the people who came for your father’s blood will show any mercy to you? There’s no mercy in them. We stamp them down or they stamp us out.”

Mark took a deep breath and gave us the smile he usually saved for the cameras.

“Stop being a child, Ethan. Start being your father’s son.”

He stood at the glass window overlooking the city, framed against a new day and a brightening morning. He looked supremely confident. I knew Ethan would join the council: I knew none of us had any choice but to do what Mark wanted. What else could we do? Ethan’s father had been murdered, Ethan was under a cloud of suspicion, his doppelganger was wandering the streets of the city, and ultimate power lay in Mark Stryker’s hands.

I took a deep breath. “What can I do to help?”

“I’m glad you asked me that question,” Mark Stryker said. “I do think you owe us, Lucie. All this nastiness is being done in your name, and it reflects very badly on us. You must want to make up for that. Don’t you?”

“She doesn’t have to make up for anything,” Ethan said loudly.

“I’ll do whatever I can,” I said, even more loudly.

“I thought about you making a public statement,” Mark said. “But considering how the interview went, that might not be the wisest course of action at this time. We do not want anything to seem coerced. What we want is to see you by Ethan’s side, serving willingly as his partner. What do you think might accomplish that, Lucie?”

“She doesn’t have to do anything!” Ethan shouted.

“I’ll do it with Ethan,” I said. “I’ll serve as a page as well.”

Mark Stryker smiled. I feared him and hated him so much, I would have done anything he wanted.

Even then, even when I had seen Charles Stryker lying in his own blood less than a day ago, I believed the Light Council was too strong for their power to ever be broken.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mark told me to be quiet when we served the council, and I did what he said. Ethan was just as quiet as I was.

The meetings were held in Stryker Tower. It made sense to gather there. The tower was one of the most notable buildings in the city, a column of steel and glass that people could look toward as they had once looked toward old idols, pyramids, the sun itself.

And any foes, no matter how powerful, would be less able to fight the Strykers on their own turf. The very people who served the coffee were Stryker employees. Now the people making copies and taking minutes were one of the Stryker heirs and his girlfriend. Mark had everybody at a psycho- logical disadvantage.

At the head of the table sat Anton Lewis, the abbot of Light, with his brilliant rings casting light upward onto his soft, jowled jaw and his wet, trembling mouth. He was said to be the most powerful Light magician in the city and to act as a channel between the people and the Light. Years ago, he had tried to enact reforms of the treatment of those in the Dark city, laws that would abolish the cages and allow Dark and Light citizens to travel more freely between cities.

The rest of the council had made sure those laws did not pass, and Anton Lewis’s failed attempt had only made the Dark city more discontent. They hated him for trying and failing more than they hated anyone else. My Aunt Leila had despised Anton Lewis more than all the other members of the council combined, unless you counted his wife. She was a former supermodel who had been known as Bright Mariah and whom the Dark city called Bitter Mariah.

She sat at the council table, her silver-fair hair and makeup always impeccable and her clothing as clearly expensive as if it had been made with gold thread. I had seen pictures of her when I lived in the Dark city, and had hated her shining face and all the useless finery she was draped with, as if she was more a mantelpiece full of baubles than a woman.

Aunt Leila thought that Anton was a coward and Bitter Mariah was worse than that. I’d agreed with her, once, because I’d agreed with her about everything.

I’d seen a lot of women dressed expensively since those days, and I did not think finery made Bitter Mariah guilty. Then again, I did not think she was innocent. She supported and upheld the Light Council and all their cruel laws: she was just as guilty of murder and callous indifference as the rest.

There were many other faces, among them David Brin, who administered the city finances, and Gabrielle Mirren, the moderate of the council who was kept on for her popularity and whom Mark did not allow to speak often.

I had seen these people, mostly old men with expensive suits that were sleekly smooth at the shoulders and straining at the stomachs, on television many times while I was flicking through channels. It was strange to be in their immediate presence, to hear the small bad jokes they told and the way they grunted, or scratched at their heads. Brin peeled and ate oranges throughout the council sessions, leaving spirals of orange skin in a heap at his place every time.