Tell the Wind and Fire (28 page)

My aunt’s hair streamed out like a black banner, and she spoke like a bard. I saw that everyone in the crowd believed her story as much as I, who had been the child running through the gate to her arms, who had lived it.

I had dreamed of a day when someone would tell the truth of what had happened to my mother. I had never thought it could really happen. I had never thought that, if it did happen, it would be anything but a triumph.

“My sister went down into the darkest part of the Dark city one night, and she tended to one of the doppelgangers. She often went to heal them. The Light magicians would not lay hands on them, and the way those creatures are treated and the disgusting way they live means they sicken often and die young. I do not know how many doppelgangers Josephine saved, but I know which one killed her.

“I remember she had talked about him to me. He was young, as young as her own daughter, and very sick. He was raving, repeating the same words over and over: his shadow, his mother, his city. He was so sick, he did not even know who she was. He called her ‘Mother,’ as if doppelgangers could have mothers. She thought he would die, and she was so happy when he lived.

“She did not tell me one thing. I could see she was troubled, see she was keeping a secret, but I did not know what it was until months later, when one of the
sans-merci
told me what they had seen down there in the darkest part of the Dark. My sister, Josephine, pushed the doppelganger’s hood back and saw his stolen face. She saw the face of Ethan Stryker, one of the Stryker heirs, a golden child marked to inherit the city and uphold the laws of the Light Council. The laws the Strykers all knew they had broken. The Strykers had everything, and they wanted Dark magic too. Their council killed us for the least infraction, but they could commit an abomination. No laws for them, only for us! Our children die, but theirs could not.”

I remembered my father reacting so violently to the mention of the Strykers, trying to warn me of what he knew.
Josephine always said that. No matter what the danger is, no matter what you might find, you have to go, you have to heal. She had to heal him, Lucie. She told me she had to.

I’d thought I knew the truth, but I had not known anything.

Him
was the doppelganger. My mother had gone into danger to heal Carwyn.

I had not understood. I could not tell if the roar in my ears was the crowd or my own blood rushing to my head. For a moment, I thought I was going to faint, and then I thought that the sheer iron strength of Aunt Leila’s grip would hold me up.

“When we broke their laws, we suffered for it, but when they broke their laws, we suffered for that too. Charles Stryker wanted to protect the doppelganger, and Mark Stryker wanted to control the creature. So the Strykers had spies set on the dirty little house where the doppelganger lived, spies who followed my sister home and worked out that she was secretly living with a Light magician. Mark Stryker knew that a woman linked to a Light citizen would recognize Ethan Stryker’s face. He realized Josephine knew the Stryker family secret, and so she had to be destroyed. Stryker sent his men to kill my sister. They did it one night as she left the doppelganger’s house. They buried her in a shallow grave in the earth beneath another lost soul’s window, as if her dead body was the seeds for a flower bed. When her Light magician husband went searching for her, Stryker’s power made certain he was taken and caged, in the cages we have torn down. When her daughter, our Golden One, spoke up against their cruelty and the people began to listen to her, Stryker’s power carried her and her father away into the captivity of the Light. She was too famous for them to kill, so they tried to force her to become one of their own, when she was always ours. This was the final wrong we had to avenge. This was why we had to sweep into the city and save the Golden One! Little did Stryker think we would come to him and strike him down. Little did Stryker’s hired assassins know, as they tossed black earth onto my sister’s cold face, that she would rise up. That all of us buried would rise up and take our vengeance.”

The hold on my wrist was all I could feel. Otherwise I was numb. I kept thinking of my mother, her always-worried, always-earnest living face, and of Ethan. Ethan was the only person in the world I had ever spoken to of my mother, and he had held me as I cried. I would never have dreamed there was any link between them but me.

I had never dreamed, when I had tried to help Carwyn and thought I was acting like my mother, how right I had been.

Leila shook me. “Speak!” she hissed.

“I . . .” I said. “I loved my mother. She was murdered. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t even tell the world she was my mother. But she is not the only person I love. I love—”

Ethan,
I almost said, but then Leila’s hold tightened like a handcuff. It had almost been a relief to look out on a crowd and tell the truth about my mother, but I was not free now any more than I had been before. Neither in the Light nor in the Dark could I speak my whole heart.

“The Golden Thread in the Dark is my young niece, Lucie,” Aunt Leila cried, her voice ringing out. “Her tortured father was my sister’s husband. My father was exiled from the Light city for wielding Dark magic, and he died in the Dark. My sister was killed for wielding Light magic. Those dead are my dead. And their murderers are now at last summoned to answer for their crimes.”

My aunt took a few steps forward, dragging me with her to the edge of the platform. I stumbled and teetered for a moment, the whole world seeming off balance, the sinking in my stomach telling me that I would fall.

I stared from the platform at the terrible new cages suspended against the sky, against the bright towers of the Light city. The bars of the nearest cage were black and stark, like charcoal strokes on a watercolor painting. Inside the cage, hemmed in on all sides by Dark magic and metal spikes, was Mark Stryker.

My aunt’s triumphant voice rose and rose, so high that it almost became a wail.

“These creatures of the Light protect their own, at any cost. But the time has come for them to know that we can protect our own as well as they. Turn your face to me, Stryker!”

Mark Stryker turned his face toward her. It was a face I had feared for so long. It did not look any kinder now that he was in trouble and in pain. He spat at Aunt Leila, but it did not come close to hitting her. His hate was as futile as hers had been for years. The power might have changed sides, but there was hate on both sides, inescapable. I felt like I was choking on it.

Aunt Leila’s voice was a triumphant scream. “Even now, you see we cannot make him sorry. They are more soulless than doppelgangers. We can only make him pay. Mark Stryker, these are the days when all your sins are to be paid for. I summon you and yours, to the last of your evil line, to answer for your crimes. Your blood is ours to be used now, and we will not rest until the last drop of blood is spilled!”

Then I saw how the new cages worked.

The cage closed in on Mark like a dark claw. I saw his body jerk convulsively like a puppet whose strings were being pulled, in what seemed like an inhuman mimicry of human movement, because human bodies did not and could not move so. I saw the burst of Dark magic his death made, like a black supernova within the cage. I saw the Dark magicians in the crowd shudder in an ecstasy of power, and I heard the small animal sound Mark Stryker made as he died.

A terrible noise rose up from the crowd, more like the growl and whine of a hungry beast than words formed by people who could still think, feel pity, or know reason.

“We killed Charles Stryker in his bed for his crimes!” shouted Aunt Leila. “We killed James Stryker when we took this city! Now we have killed Mark Stryker. And we will kill the last of their villainous family soon. We will not let any one of the Light Council live. We will not have peace until we have blood!”

I looked at Ethan’s Uncle Mark swinging in his cage, and I knew that I had been wrong to think of him as the villain in my story, one whose power could crush me. I had been as wrong as Aunt Leila was to think that defeating the Strykers or even bringing down the Light city would change anything.

They brought out more of the Light Council, one after the other, and killed them before our eyes. They brought out the woman they called Bright Mariah in the Light city, and Bitter Mariah in the Dark, and when she was dead, a rebel held her head aloft on one of their spikes, her hair streaming and shining, a symbol the same way I was. The blood fell like rain and caused a joyful riot.

There was no escape from the ugliness in the human heart, the hate that led to this violence and all violence. It had taken my mother, tortured my father, taken my first home and was burning my second. I had struggled to be safe for years, but there was no way to be safe.

There were villains all around me. There was evil in the very air I breathed. There would be no final showdown, no end, no possibility of happiness after evil was vanquished.

The only choice, in the Light city or the Dark, was to be twisted or to break.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I went back with Aunt Leila to the Plaza Hotel, where the
sans-merci
had established their headquarters. She took me into one of the suites, and she washed her hands and face at the sink. I sat on a sofa and looked down at my clenched hands on the blue and white striped silk.

Aunt Leila seemed happy, as if the obscene show on the platform had been her notion of an ideal family outing. She was talking about the way the
sans-merci
intended to run the city they had taken: the Committee of the Free, set up to judge and punish the members of the Light regime, and how she thought Dad and I should be on it.

She wanted Ethan to be one of the first victims judged and condemned by the new committee. She wanted Ethan as her example of how life would be from now on. She thought I would actually support that.

“I’ll pass,” I said.

Aunt Leila looked up from the sink and frowned, sparkling drops caught in her long black hair. “It would not be any work. You would only have to make appearances. Of course you would not make decisions about what is best for the city. It would simply be good for you to be viewed as supporting us.”

She did not want real support or the real me.

I looked at her, and I remembered loving her, remembered eating cookies and learning the sword at her house, remembered her being all I had when my father was caged. I looked at her, and I could only see Mark Stryker, who had loved Ethan and still been ready to commit any atrocity. Now here was my aunt, and she loved me. I had not known two years ago that love was not enough to keep people from becoming monsters.

“I know how it would be,” I told Aunt Leila. “I attended meetings of the Light Council.”

“It is not the same thing at all!”

“Being your decoration instead of someone else’s?” I said. “Would I not be sitting and listening to new rules that kill new people? I’d be your golden-haired doll instead of Mark Stryker’s. No, thanks. I’ll pass. Unless—”

Aunt Leila laughed, the sound old and wise. “I will not spare any Stryker.”

And I, I found slowly, discovering the truth as if it was something I had found under dust in the attic of my own home, I did not want to join the committee. Not even to save Ethan. I was so tired of compromises and cowardice.

Aunt Leila looked at my face and sighed.

“Did you hear nothing of what I told you? Did you understand nothing of my story? That Ethan Stryker’s blood tortured your father and murdered your mother, my sister, and exiled you, my niece as dear as a daughter. That I have seen them do the same to countless families, and I will not stop until every drop of his blood has answered for mine. Doesn’t it matter, what they did?”

My mother gone, my father wrecked, my aunt twisted, my life ruined. If I thought about it too long, I felt the same consuming rage that Aunt Leila must have felt. If I had stayed with her instead of meeting Ethan, revenge might have been all I wanted as well. Rage might have consumed me until it was all there was left of me.

Mark Stryker had not suffered as Aunt Leila had suffered. Mark had no excuse for all he had done. But when you were making other people suffer, no excuse was good enough.

Ethan had known nothing, had done nothing but try to help me and try to save the city. Aunt Leila was murdering people, but Ethan had given himself up to save someone. I had already underestimated him, and I would not let him be condemned.

“It matters. Something else matters more. I love him.”

“Love?” said Aunt Leila. “What of it? I loved my sister, more than you ever loved her, you who denied her to the whole Light city. Do you think any force in the world cares about who you love? Love never saved a single human soul. I have seen so many suffer, so many children and women and men die of neglect or brutality or starvation. Do you think any one of that crowd cares about your trouble? Did you care about theirs?”

“Not as much as I should have.”

Aunt Leila nodded, watching me with intent eyes, pitiless as a wolf. I did not know what had changed her, what had made her someone who prized revenge above love. I did not know if she had always been like this, for as long as I had lived and loved her.

Ethan cares about the crowd’s trouble,
I thought.
Ethan does.

“You can have the doppelganger,” Aunt Leila said at last.

“What?”

“The doppelganger,” Aunt Leila elucidated, saying the words with a certain malice, as if she wanted to take love as well as my beloved from me. “He’s the one you were with at this hotel, isn’t he? He’s found some way to take his collar off. When we found Ethan Stryker in the Dark city, I thought he might be the doppelganger, but we tested him—he’s the real thing. But you seem to like the imitation well enough. You can keep the doppelganger, and we will kill Ethan Stryker in two weeks, in a festival nobody will ever forget, in a purge of all his kind.” She licked her lips, like a wolf after a meal, and I felt sick watching her. “We have to have the real one. He’s the one I want.”