Tell the Wind and Fire (30 page)

On the last day of Ethan’s imprisonment, his day of execution, I went to my hiding place in the wall. I slid out the brick, and among the gray ashes I saw the pure, true light of my mother’s diamond. I drew out the necklace, and the sunshine caught the jewel. Sparks were tossed in the air, like confetti made of dancing points of light. The room was suddenly bright, and as I held the diamond, light lanced through its sparkling facets, rose and gold like a fire waking between my palms. I hung the chain around my neck.

When I left the apartment, I took my sword with me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It had been a long, bad time, but I had slept every night when I went home and not lain awake worrying about what I was doing or what I had become. The
sans-merci
had called in every one of us—me, Dad, Penelope, Jarvis, even little Marie—for questioning at the hotel, more than once, but they had let every one of us go. Sometimes, though, Penelope or Jarvis came back bleeding.

Marie woke up screaming every night, knowing the monsters were coming, and we could not tell her they were not.

They had not let Ethan go. They never would. And more and more victims for the cages were being brought in a grotesque parade through the shining streets of the Light city every day: the rich, those from the Light Council’s families, prominent Light magicians and public figures, but also people the
sans-merci
disliked and who could conveniently be accused of collaborating with the Light. A lot of people were being killed. Nobody seemed to have any more to eat in this just new world.

I wore a long, dark coat to hide the sword as I made my way from the Light city to the Dark. The coat’s severe lines and metal buttons made me look like a soldier, and my long, loose, fair hair made me look like a fairy-tale damsel. If people found that incongruous, if they did not know what to make of me, I had not known what to make of myself for a long time either. They could learn.

I was wearing my mother’s necklace outside my coat. It was the first time I had ever seen the jewel in the open light of day.

It was morning, and the air was crisp and golden as a fresh apple. The clock tower was a stark line bisecting the lucent sky: a tower with a hero in it, and perhaps I could be like Ethan now that I finally understood him. Perhaps I could be a hero too. Perhaps I could save him—save someone my way, and no one else’s. I felt as clean and purposeful as the blade I drew as I walked toward the door and the guard standing by it.

He was thin and tall, and his hair stood up in clumps. I had noticed him before, the worried one who would be easy to intimidate. He always took the morning shifts, when there were fewer people.

But quite a few people were already here. They came to watch me.

They could watch this.

“Out of my way,” I said, and brought my sword around in a slow, gleaming arc. “Get help. You’re going to need it.”

He stood there for a moment as if he had been slapped, took a step toward me, and watched the crowd surge restlessly in his direction.

He took a step back. He obviously did not want to be responsible for killing the symbol of the
sans-merci.
He called out, and three guards from inside the tower came streaming out the door to his side, just as I had hoped. I moved in front of the door so they could not get inside the tower again.

“I am Lucie Manette,” I said. “I am the Golden Thread in the Dark. I am the only child of a murdered mother, and I will not let anyone be taken from me again. I am going to stand at this door with a sword all day, and I will fight anyone who tries to take Ethan Stryker away to the cages. That means you can do one of two things. Go convene the Committee of the Free and bring him a pardon, or come and kill me.”

The guards called in reinforcements. With every extra soldier, the mob increased by ten or twenty people. One of the
sans-merci
drew a weapon, and then glanced toward a light—not the light of my rings or my sword, but the light of someone’s camera.

Everyone in the crowd knew that a picture or a video of me being murdered by someone wearing the colors of the city’s liberators would be seen by every soul in both cities within a day.

I lit my sword with fire and struck down the guard’s weapon, and nobody else drew one. I let myself breathe.

I looked up at the tower, at the shining glass and gold. I wondered if Ethan could see me. I had never hoped more that he could.

The mob grew and grew, greedy for a spectacle. I knew how easy it would be for the mob or the rebels to get out of hand, for someone to decide that eliminating me would solve more problems than it caused. I knew that I did not have long before Aunt Leila came.

I was not expecting who came first.

I saw her coming from far away, the saffron yellow of today’s hijab like a small sun, and her eyes sparkling beneath it. I expected her to stay a discreet distance away, but she kept moving closer. I thought she had come to watch, but she had come to speak.

Others made the same mistake I did, and they let her push to the front of the crowd. She did not stop there. She only stopped when she was standing beside me with her feet planted and her chin up.

“I am Nadiya Zamani,” said Nadiya. “The Golden Thread in the Dark is my friend. And Ethan Stryker was my comrade in arms. We were the ones who passed out pamphlets against the rule of Light in the Village, who discovered where the Esmond girl was being kept, who helped the Robesons get to the Light city when the guards were after them. Ethan Stryker is our ally.”

She glanced at me, her eyes glinting in the afternoon sun, and she grinned. I saw brown-brick buildings in the distance, saw the glitter of sunshine on the tin warehouse roofs, but mostly what I saw was a sea of people, and the tide turning our way.

Nadiya knew how to work the crowd as well as I ever had. She made it sound as if we had been a pair, me and Ethan, comrades in arms as well as lovers, fighting for fraternity, liberty, and equality.

It made for a beautiful love story, the idea of us working together smoothly, instead of all the jagged misunderstandings that made up the truth of our lives.

Approving murmurs rippled through the crowd, like we were being surrounded by a sea turning calm.

A voice burst out. “Is that how it was?”

I could not finesse them the way Nadiya did or command them the way Aunt Leila did. I had tried that. I was trying something else now.

I took a deep breath and decided to be brave and stupid. I said, “No.”

And around me the sounds of a storm rose.

“She’s lying to spare Stryker.”

“They’re all liars, and worse.”

They wanted it to have been as clear-cut as heroism, or as straightforward as villainy. Anyone who said that it was not simple branded themselves a villain, guilty of not telling people what they wanted to hear.

“No, but it isn’t what you think,” I shouted. “He’s not what you think.
Listen.
”

“Why don’t you shut up instead?” a man’s voice asked.

“Don’t tell the Golden Thread in the Dark to shut up!”

A woman snapped, her voice as sweetly sympathetic as a blade, “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

“Make way,” called a voice in the teeming, jostling crowd, over the shouts of reprimand and support, “for the hero of Green-Wood, for the man escaped from the cages!”

I caught my breath as I saw the stooped shoulders and silver head I loved. I had forgotten that when my Aunt Leila made me a hero and a symbol of revolution the day Mark Stryker had died, I had not been the only one up there on that stage.

“There, girl,” said the nervous-looking guard, “maybe you’ll listen to your father.”

I’d had enough staying quiet at the Light Council and quiet on the platform with Aunt Leila’s hand on my wrist. The only thing I had ever truly regretted was submitting.

“Why should I?” I said.

“There’s no reason in the world for you to listen to me,” said Dad in his soft voice. “It’s my turn to listen to you.”

The guard looked at Dad the same way he had looked at me, shocked and angry, as if Dad was a child the guard had expected obedience from. “You ungrateful creature of the Light,” he said under his breath.

“I’m very grateful,” Dad told him. “I’m grateful to Lucie.”

He stepped toward me and then behind me, his hands on my waist, anchoring me, making himself another target but not making himself so vulnerable that I would have to worry about him. His whisper stirred my hair.

“Take courage.”

“Already got it,” I said, and heard my father laugh behind me.

“Yes, you do. I’m so sorry, Lucie.”

“What for?”

“I’m so sorry for all my bad days,” he said. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t be stronger for you, that I didn’t see when you were hurting. I didn’t see a way to do it, I couldn’t think of how to make it work—to make our family work without her.” His eyes dropped to the diamond shining around my neck, and I felt his fingers tremble. “I knew how much I owed you,” he said. “I tried to tell you that, and I’m sorry if I made it another burden for you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, even softer, “that I am a burden to you.”

I bit my tongue before I could tell him that he was not a burden, and said instead, blood in my mouth and truth on my lips, “It doesn’t matter. I was always so glad you were there. I was so glad I saved you.”

I had always been glad, and always thought he was worth everything I had done for him.

I had tried not to blame him when his pain had kept him from being there for me. All the resentment I had hidden and could not help did not seem to matter now, when I could feel his warmth at my back and I knew that he loved me. My pain must have stopped me being there for him sometimes too.

It did not mean that pain did not matter. But there was something besides pain between us.

I would not have done anything differently, so perhaps it was time to stop regretting what I had done.

“I can stand with you now,” said my father. “I can do that.”

The pain of it all had seemed such a waste, once. Now it seemed like the sharp fire that had forged me into a weapon, into a sword, into a battering ram that could break through the prison door.

“We can stand together,” I said.

I had spent so long trying to be something I was not. I knew I was something quite different from what I had been: innocent, unformed, terrified, the girl who was lovingly overprotected by both her parents and who wanted to be just like her aunt.

I was not like those polar opposites who had somehow circled around to the same savage place, Aunt Leila and Mark Stryker. I was not like Ethan, always trying to be good, or Carwyn, who believed he was bad. I did not feel as though I would ever have any of their conviction in the rightness or wrongness of their actions. All I knew was who I loved and what I wanted. I did not feel good or bad, and I did not feel guilty anymore. I felt strong enough to do what needed to be done.

I felt that sometime while I was trying to shield others and trying to shield myself, I had become all that I ever needed to be.

The
sans
-
merci
guards looked dumbfounded that my father had not stopped me. I saw their hands go to their weapons again, heard the crowd hum, torn between approval and condemnation.

None of the guards dared to strike me down. But then my Aunt Leila arrived to deal with the Golden Thread in the Dark, shoving through the crowd with her hair flying like a preemptive flag of mourning, and I knew she would dare to do anything. She came striding toward me, and I saw her draw a long knife from her belt, its blade edged with wavering Dark magic.

My rings sizzled and shone with power. Our blades leaped to meet each other.

“Why are you doing this?” Aunt Leila hissed.

“Why don’t you even recognize me?” I hissed back. “You think I’m a child or a doll and you are unstoppable? I’m a force of nature too. You thought you were teaching me something else, to be something lesser. Try teaching fire to do anything but burn. It’s time for you to learn better.”

The crowd could not hear us, but I could hear it, drawing in closer as people strained to hear what we were saying. The sound of their muttering was like a storm building, far off out to sea but coming closer.

For the first time, I saw fear on Aunt Leila’s face. She knew the mob was a beast, and it might turn and go for her throat as easily as anyone else’s.

“Let Ethan Stryker go,” I continued, “or cut down the Golden Thread in the Dark in front of everybody. You said you came to the city on a mission to free me. Go ahead—kill me. Show everybody you were lying.”

None of us were safe. But Aunt Leila had taught me how to appear in front of the media and the crowds. I had to believe that she cared more about how things looked than I did.

“What will it take for you to stop this mad defiance?” she snapped.

I held Aunt Leila’s gaze. “Oh, tell the wind and fire where to stop,” I said softly. “But don’t tell me.”

“Go to your committee,” said Dad. “Grant him a pardon or cut us both down.”

As Dad spoke, I could feel him shaking at my back, feel the scrape of his rings against my skin. I had to take him home and make sure he rested. I could not let him break down in front of all these people.

I held my breath, and held my sword locked with Aunt Leila’s blade, and I waited.

“We will delay our procession of revenge until tomorrow!” Aunt Leila called out to the crowd.

“And Ethan won’t be in it,” I said in a low voice.

“Very well,” Aunt Leila said at last, in a voice as low as mine. “You’ll have your pardon.”

“By tomorrow morning, before the executions,” I said. “I’ll have his pardon by tomorrow morning. I have your word?”

“By tomorrow morning,” Aunt Leila spat, spinning on her heel and turning her back on me. “You have my word, and my curse.”

I could trust her word. Aunt Leila and the committee would never make anything less than a public spectacle of Ethan’s death. They wouldn’t kill him in the dead of night, in any secret hole or hidden corner. My wrists ached: I had been holding my sword for too long. But my mother’s diamond was shining.