Tell the Wind and Fire (26 page)

Perhaps Carwyn had not slept well in whatever hideaway in the Light city he had managed to find, or in Ethan’s bed with the Strykers. Perhaps he had not slept well in the Dark city either.

I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered when the last time he had felt safe enough to sleep peacefully had been.

As soon as I had decided not to wake him, he woke. I felt the bed move as he stirred.

“Where’s my collar?” Carwyn asked suddenly.

I looked at him. He lay back on the bed, one arm behind his head, and he looked sullen but defiant. He tilted his chin to stare back at me.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

Carwyn waggled his eyebrows, and his sly expression made him look, briefly and utterly, nothing like Ethan. “I might want it for reasons.”

“I might stop talking to you altogether because I am a hundred percent done with your crap.”

Carwyn’s eyebrows drew together, serious now, as if he was annoyed or as if I had forced sincerity out of him against his will. “I might need it so that I can survive, all right? I think it’s going to be open season on Strykers in the Light city, and I should run away to be an anonymous doppelganger instead. Does that make you happy?”

“You surviving?” I asked. “I don’t care that much either way.”

“Oh, c’mon, baby, you know you don’t mean that,” said Carwyn.

“Try to remember what I just said about your crap.”

“I am remembering, and I’m absolutely serious,” said Carwyn. “You don’t care much about whether I survive or not?
You,
of all people. Who got me out of the hotel where everyone was dying? Who took me out on the town because she felt sorry for me, and felt even sorrier for me just seeing me treated like any doppelganger would be? Who took off my collar in the first place? Who didn’t turn me in when I came back pretending to be Ethan, even though you knew as soon as you saw me? You could have done it. You didn’t have to go to the guards. You could have gone to Ethan’s Uncle Mark—he knows all about me. He wanted me dead from the first moment he laid eyes on me: he wanted me quietly and cleanly erased out of existence, as if I was a stain on the family silver. If I had done anything to Ethan, he would have tortured the information out of me and made sure I disappeared.”

The litany of what I had done hung in the air like an accusation.

I had not done any of it because I wanted him to be grateful. I did not think I deserved gratitude: I had done the wrong thing, made so many mistakes, and so much of what I had done was because I loved Ethan, because Carwyn had saved Ethan, and because he looked like Ethan. Even though I had not wanted gratitude, I had not deserved Carwyn hurting me while he pretended to be Ethan. He had hurt me anyway.

“I was doing it because it was the right thing to do,” I said slowly. “None of it was for you. I don’t even like you.”

Carwyn blinked, then winked. Every small moment where he betrayed any uncertainty or seemed a little human, he covered over by acting worse than ever. “You sure about that?”

There was another silence. This one hung in the air like a question, rather than an accusation. I only had one answer.

“Yeah,” I said at last. “I’m really sure.”

Carwyn sat up now. He shoved himself lightly to the end of the bed, where I was sitting, and sat a careful distance away from me. I glanced over at him and wondered if I should tell him that Ethan had been the one working with the
sans-merci.
I figured that it wasn’t necessary. Carwyn must have always known Ethan had done it, because he knew he himself was innocent of the charges.

He had known Ethan had done it, and still he had spoken up for him and saved him. It had been too easy for me to forget, all this time, that the first thing I had ever seen Carwyn do was commit an act of mercy.

“What was it you said to me, the first day you met me?” Carwyn asked suddenly, as if he could read the beginning of my thoughts on my face but not the end. “‘I’ll collar you . . . And then I’ll hurt you’? Maybe I’ll let you. Maybe, for once, just for a change, it’s safer to be me than it is to be Ethan Stryker.”

When I opened the bedroom door, Marie and Penelope were gone, I presumed on an errand. We still needed to eat, even if the city was in chaos. I walked out of Penelope’s room and into the main room, then through the doorway into mine and Dad’s room. I heard Carwyn softly following me, but I did not look back at him.

I had thought I would have to be very quiet, that Dad would still be asleep, but the beds were all empty. Penelope must have taken him out with her. I hoped she knew what she was doing. I hoped nothing out there was disturbing or frightening him.

I knelt down on the worn wood floor. I found that the knowledge of which precise brick I had hidden the collar under had slipped my mind, something I’d thought would be branded forever in my memory as a guilty secret, lost with the rush of everything else that had happened, like the sea chasing away words written in the sand.

If even I couldn’t remember where it was, it had to be a pretty good hiding place. I put my hands flat against the wall and felt along the bricks, feeling the sharp indents on the ones that I had scraped at with a fork, and finally the real loose brick. I slid it out of the wall and put my hand into the hollow.

The first thing I touched was the chain of my mother’s necklace. I did not draw that out. I did not want Carwyn to see it.

My fingers came away gray with ash, with the bag in my palm. I unwrapped the collar from its material. I had forgotten exactly what it looked like: the shining metal divots where my rings would fit in, to bind him and hurt him if he disobeyed.

Carwyn’s breath drew in sharply at the sight of it.

I held the collar out to him.

“Here it is,” I said. “It’s yours. I’ll put it on for you if you want, if you think people might check whether it’s sealed. Or you can take the chance, and be able to take it off. Put it on right now, put it on later, don’t ever wear it again. Do what you want with it.”

Carwyn stared at the collar but made no move to touch it. “What do you think I should do?”

“Like I said,” I answered, “it’s yours. I don’t think anyone should ever have put it on you against your will. But if you can use it to protect yourself, to make sure people won’t think you’re Ethan, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. This collar’s brought you enough trouble. If it buys you safety, I think that’s fair.”

It only occurred to me then that it might have kept Ethan safe in the Dark city, having Carwyn here in his place. But I could not snatch back the collar and hide it away again.

I didn’t really want to. Ethan would not have wanted his safety bought at the price of a lie. I had already lied and lied, and nobody was safe. I was so tired of lying.

Carwyn did touch the collar at last, running his fingers lightly over the leather and metal. His fingers brushed my hand, and he looked away from the collar and at me.

“What would you do?”

“How should I know?” I asked. “It’s not my collar. It was never my life. It’s not my call. I guess think about who you want to be, and how you want people to see you.”

Carwyn touched my rings, and then his collar. It was odd that his fingers on the metal encircling mine felt more intimate than when he touched my skin. My rings were as much a part of me as his collar had been part of him: identifying me, grounding me, branding me, anchoring me. They had kept me safe, and perhaps now they would put me in danger. And yet I knew I would never take them off.

“I think you’d use the collar to keep someone else safe,” he said. “If you could.”

I swallowed down a noise—even I did not know if it was going to be a laugh or a sob, and I was too scared of letting it be born to find out.

“I don’t think either of us knows how to keep someone else safe.”

Carwyn nodded, and took the collar from my hand. We turned and left the bedroom.

He was holding the collar awkwardly, as if he still was not sure what to do with it and would have put it in his pocket if he could. I went toward the old red sofa, meaning to sit down, but instead I stopped at the window through which I had once found Carwyn looking up at me.

Sunlight was streaming in through my little window. The street outside was quieter than it should have been. I could see blinds drawn in the windows of the buildings opposite, suggesting that people were hiding instead of going to work.

Down the street and over the faraway stretch of gray buildings was the horizon, and for a confused instant I thought I was seeing the sunset. But it was much too early for the sun to go down. The red fire lapping between the sky and earth was something else.

The wall between the Dark and Light cities was down, torn down, and on either side of the rubble I saw fire. Both of my cities were burning.

I was not feeling very steady, so I grabbed hold of the windowsill and let out the sound I had suppressed before: everything was coming out now, and there was no way to hide how scared I was. The sound was a laugh after all. I laughed at myself for ever thinking I could hide.

“Before I go . . .” said Carwyn. “You’re not well. You’ve used too much magic, and that means you cannot protect yourself or anybody else.”

I stopped leaning against the sill—it had been a mistake to let myself look weak in front of Carwyn—and turned to face him. Unbelievably, he was serious.

“And you think I’d let you do something about it?” I snapped. “Not likely.”

“I owe you,” said Carwyn. “You know I do. I know it as well. I’d appreciate the chance to settle some of my debt. And do you know any Dark magicians you can trust to take out the poison at a time like this?” He mimicked my cool tone. “Not likely.”

“You think I’d trust
you
to drain my power?” The further retort was on my lips: my Aunt Leila was a Dark magician. She could do it. She wouldn’t hurt me. She would help me, like she always had.

I did not say it. I did not, I realized, want her help.

I looked at Carwyn. He did owe me, but I did not trust him. I had always had this done by Aunt Leila, or my grandfather when I was very young, or in a clinic where I could be certain the Dark magician would be entirely professional and I would be entirely safe.

I was weak and shaking with the effects of magic in my blood, though, and I could not afford to be sick or lacking in Light power. I did need help.

“All right,” I said, speaking low. “But don’t . . . don’t touch me.”

I didn’t know why I’d said it. He’d touched me plenty before, and this was a normal procedure. It wasn’t a big deal.

Carwyn nodded, head bowed as he searched in his pockets. Eventually he produced a small metal object, like an elaborately carved thimble that came to a point as sharp as a claw. I saw the shine of a tiny glass vial set behind the claw, bright as a teardrop in sunlight. The carvings on the metal were shadowy in contrast, with the strange shadows of the new cages. He fitted it on his thumb and took a step forward.

I took a step back and hit the window. “Do you normally use that?” I demanded.

“For private drainings, yeah,” said Carwyn.

I frowned. “So—you do this for your Light magician friends?”

Carwyn laughed. “I’ve never had a Light magician friend. But there are Light magicians who take quick, nasty trips to the Dark city. They will pay extra for a Dark magician to come and drain them in private.”

I remembered how the woman at the restaurant and some of the people on the train had looked at him when he was wearing the doppelganger’s collar, the mixture of contempt and desire.

“You don’t . . . have to drain me.”

Carwyn glanced up at me, puzzled, and then something he saw in my face made him look less casual and more serious. “I want to help you,” he said. “I know you don’t have much reason to believe me, but I mean it. I want to.”

“All right.” I held out my arm, fingers pointing to the floor. I was in an even worse state than I had realized: I could not stop my arm from trembling.

Dark magicians in the clinic had, before now, held my arm steady. Carwyn did not. Instead he sank to his knees and used the metal claw to trace lightly up the vein in my arm until he reached the inside of my elbow. My back was against the window, my free hand gripping the windowsill behind me, my whole body straining away, but I knew he was being as gentle as he could.

I’d had people in the clinic take blood clumsily: my arm ached for days after. I’d known that Carwyn had to be good to have gotten a pass into the Light city. I watched his easy expertise and remembered that the Strykers had taken the pass from him, something he must have worked hard for, and he had not even seemed surprised.

When the metal claw sank in, the pain came fast but lasted only briefly. The blood that trailed down my arm had visible traces of Light in it, like mica sparkling in dark stone. I looked down at Carwyn and saw the sudden hunger in his face.

Dark magicians did not have to drink the blood. They could absorb blood spilled near them, as they did with the cages, feeding off the blood and death in the air. In the clinic, they kept it, and we did not have to watch what they did with it, even though we knew it was consumed or sold out of sight. My aunt and my grandfather, when he was alive, had drunk it in front of me, and I had been happy to see them do it, to give them power as they healed me.

Carwyn’s dark head hovered over my arm, but he held my gaze. He did not put his mouth to my skin. He kept looking at me, and kept his promise, while relief poured through me as if I was parched earth and his magic was rain after a drought.

Carwyn slid the metal claw out of my arm, knelt there for a moment longer with his face still tipped up to mine, then rose to his feet. He pulled off the claw tip from behind the metal point, extracting a vial that was about half the size of a thimble and now filled with my blood. I picked up a towel and wiped away the thin trail of blood smeared down my arm.

My blood cleansed and my head clear, I understood myself better: I’d asked Carwyn not to touch me because I had wanted to know that he would not do it if I asked. He had not.

“You can drink it,” I said.