Tell the Wind and Fire (31 page)

I let myself look up and search for Ethan’s face in the distant window.

I could go home and rest for a moment after a day of standing and fighting. I could put the sword down. I had saved him.

Nobody was home. I hoped blurrily, barely able to think through my exhaustion, that they had not been called back to the hotel for even more questioning.

“Do I need to heal anyone?” Dad asked as I helped him into his room and got him lying down.

Even the confused query made me feel better. He had never implied before that there was a possibility nobody needed healing, that there was a chance we could be all right.

“Nobody needs healing tonight,” I whispered, and I smoothed his pillow like a nurse, but he caught my hand and pressed it as if I was his child.

I staggered out once I was sure he was sleeping. I did not look out the window to see if the city was burning or if Carwyn was outside, watching. I sat down on the sofa and thought that I would stay there for a little while, just until the others came home, so that I knew they were safe.

Sleep hit me like a grandmother’s purse that turned out to have a brick in it. I was out almost as soon as I sat down, and I slept heavily, determinedly, until the door opening pulled me up like a puppet and yanked me back into awareness. There had been too many disasters in too short a time: no sooner were my eyes open than I found myself shaking and sick with tension, as if I was held together with a wire pulled so taut that I could do nothing but shake and hope the wire would not snap.

It was not Penelope, Jarvis, or little Marie. I stared at the hooded figure in the shadows of the doorway. The hood and the shadows did their work—I could not see anything below the hood but a blank to be filled in by fear or hope. He did not move for a moment, and then he did. He took one step forward. I saw the line of his nose and the gleam of his eyes.

I flew into his arms and covered his face with kisses.

“Ethan, Ethan,” I said, pushing back the hood and pushing my fingers through his hair.

I had not doubted for a moment that it was him. I knew the diffident way he moved, never presuming he was welcome. The only thing I did not know was how this had happened.

“Ethan,” I said. “I’m so happy. I’m so sorry.”

His face, uncovered now, was flushed, his eyes slightly dilated. He put a hand on my rib cage as if he had to steady himself, but then his hand moved down, slowly and with more confidence, until he had a sure hold on my waist.

“
I’m
sorry. I lied to you, I got my father killed, I did everything wrong. I’m the one who’s sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for,” he whispered, and his voice sounded as rusty as a prison door that had not been opened in a long, long time.

I clung to his shirt and kissed him again, pressing our foreheads together as much as our mouths. I wanted to be pressed up against him, anchored by him, sure of him.

“There is,” I said, and tasted tears on my lips, on his lips as I kissed him, and realized we were both crying. “I know everything now, Nadiya told me about the resistance. Carwyn told me about you going to find Jarvis. You meant it all for the best. You meant to save people. You’re a hero.”

“Well,” said Ethan, “that makes two of us.”

I smiled so hard that I thought my face would crack.

“I saw you down there, with your sword barring the way,” Ethan told me. “You looked like . . .”
An angel,
I thought. “Like a knight.”

I kissed him for that.

“I’m not a hero,” said Ethan. “I couldn’t let everything stay the way it was, I couldn’t let my family keep doing what they were doing. But this is no better. I ruined everything. My father
and Jim and so many other people are dead, and it was all for nothing.”

“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.”

“What do you mean by that?” I demanded. “What have you done?”

None of us were expecting it when Penelope hurtled
through the open door and straight into Aunt Leila. I barely saw her as she went by, blood gleaming in the tight black curls of her hair, her expression set with fury. She went for Aunt Leila as if there was nobody in the room but her target. She went flying with her against the wall, into a window, and then Penelope smashed Aunt Leila’s head against the glass. More blood spilled then, but it was not Penelope’s, and they slid onto the floor in a tangled, bloody heap, the thud of their bodies on the wood like a clod of earth hitting a coffin. Penelope looked up at me.

She had obviously been taken in by the
sans-merci
again. I had a thousand questions, but they all died in the fire of her gaze.

She snatched the pardon from Aunt Leila’s clenched fingers and threw it toward me. The roll of paper tumbled across the floor, and I stooped down, but Ethan got there before me. He knelt down and offered the pardon up, pressing it into my hand.

“Lucie!” Penelope shouted. “Lucie, you have to go now! Get to the cages! Lucie, run!”

I did not ask why, or what was happening. I did not ask what had been done to her, or if Aunt Leila was still breathing.

I ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

From the account of Marie Lorry:

They put us in one of the skinny black cars that important people drive in, and drove us around the city. I saw Ethan’s dad in one once, waving, and everyone watched him and cheered. I thought he seemed to bring a holiday with him.

But it was different when it was me. The car wasn’t as nice as it had looked from the outside. It was ripped up inside. There were no seats, and they put all six of us in standing up. It was like we were bringing a funeral with us.

At first I didn’t notice the people watching, because when they put us in the car I saw Ethan. He was standing up in the car, between two people I did not know. All of them had their arms draped with chains, fastened to the floor of the car. They had only put one restraint on me, and I could move better than any of the others.

“Ethan!” I called out.

I was going to tell him that they had taken me away from Mom and Dad, that Lucie’s aunt had called me her little contingency plan and sent me here. I didn’t know what was happening, and I wanted to go home. I was going to ask him for help. But I remembered that Mom and Dad had said Ethan was in trouble, and I figured that he would not be able to send me home. I thought he might want to go home as well and he couldn’t.

So I didn’t ask him anything, but I edged closer to him. Ethan was always nice to me. The nicest boy I’d ever met, nicer than any of the boys my age, and I always thought I’d like to marry him if he wasn’t going to marry Lucie. I always thought Lucie was lucky.

I thought that if I could be with Ethan, I would feel better, and I would not be so scared.

I pushed past the other people. I didn’t say excuse me. “Ethan,” I said again.

He stared at me and said in a weird voice, “What are you doing here?”

“The lady,” I said, “Lucie’s aunt, she said we were going to be sent to . . . to the cages, to be cleansed and to give power to a beautiful future. My mom and dad always said that things couldn’t go on with the Dark city the way they were, and that . . . that a change was coming. They said it would be good.”

If it was a good thing, I should want to do it. I shouldn’t feel so bad.

“A brave new world,” he said, and there was something funny about his voice, like he wanted to make a mean joke. He didn’t sound at all like Ethan. But then he said, “Maybe it will be, one day. But I’ll never see it.”

I reached out shyly and touched his hand, and he jumped, like people didn’t ever try to take his hand. Ethan held my hand all the time when we went out and had to cross streets.

It was then that I understood. He was the other one. I forgot what Mom had called him. She’d said he wasn’t nice.

But he looked nice. He looked like Ethan. It’s funny, but he looked more like Ethan in the car than he had at home. It seemed to me that he was trying to look like Ethan really hard, and it seemed to me that maybe he was doing it because Ethan was in trouble and the other boy wanted to make sure Ethan wouldn’t be in trouble anymore. Even if he had to be in trouble instead. I thought that was really nice of him. I hate being in trouble.

He could tell that I knew, right away. There was something careful about him, like he was doing a chore, cleaning something maybe, and he was watching out because he didn’t want to miss a spot.

“Hush,” he whispered to me. “Please, it’s a secret.”

I nodded so hard, my head hurt.

“I get it,” I said. “You’re brave. Will you let me hold your hand? Only, I’m scared.”

Don’t tell my mom I said that. Don’t tell her, but I cried.

“Yes,” he said, quite loudly, and he didn’t sound like Ethan again. He sounded mad, but what he said was nice. “I’ll hold your hand until the very end.”

The car was getting pretty close to the big square with the new things in it, like birdcages but huge and horrible somehow. They were like the stuff you see with your eyes closed, when it’s night and you don’t want to open your eyes in case you are all alone and everything you’re scared of is real.

It was daytime, and there were so many people around me. All the people didn’t make me feel better, though. They were watching us, and their eyes went right through me, like the points of scissors into paper.