Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(89)
“Fear of it? Who could possibly be afraid of the Thunderhead?”
“People who had the most to lose: Criminals. Politicians. Organizations that thrived on the oppression of others. The point was, the world was still changing, and I wanted to help it change faster. Both Scythe Faraday and I were of similar minds about that, which, I suppose, is why he took me on. We were both driven by a desire to use gleaning as a way of hacking through the thicket to open a better path for humanity.
“Oh, you should have seen him in those days, Citra. You’ve only seen him old. He likes to remain that way to keep himself from being too tempted by a younger man’s passions.” Scythe Curie smiled as she spoke about her former mentor. “I remember I would wait outside his door at night, listening to him as he slept. I was seventeen, remember. Childish in so many ways. I thought myself in love.”
“Wait—you were in love with him?”
“Infatuated. He was a rising star who took a wide-eyed girl under his wing. Even though in those days he only gleaned the wicked, he did it with such compassion, he melted my heart each time.” Then she sobered a bit, looking a bit sheepish, which was a strange expression for steely Scythe Curie. “I actually worked up the nerve to go into his room one night, determined to climb into his bed and be with him. But he caught me halfway across his bedroom floor. Oh, I made up some silly excuse as to why I was there. I was coming in to retrieve his empty glass, or something like that. He didn’t believe me for an instant. He knew I was up to something, and I couldn’t look him in the eye. I thought he knew. I thought he was wise and could see into my soul. But at twenty-two, he was just as inexperienced in such matters as I was. He had no clue what was really going on.”
Then Citra understood. “He thought you wanted to hurt him!”
“I think all young women are cursed with a streak of unrelenting foolishness, and all young men are cursed with a streak of absolute stupidity. He didn’t see my obsession with him as love, but thought I meant him bodily harm. It was, to say the least, a very painful comedy of errors. I suppose I can understand how my advances could be misunderstood in that way. I do admit that I was an odd girl. Intense to the point of being off-putting.”
“I think you’ve grown into your intensity,” Citra said.
“That I have. In any case, he wrote of his paranoid concerns about me in his scythe’s journal, then tore it out the next day, when I broke down and confessed my love with eyeball-rolling melodrama.” She sighed and shook her head. “I was hopeless. He, on the other hand, was a gentleman, told me that he was flattered—which is the last thing any teenage girl wants to hear—and let me down as easily as he could.
“I lived in his house, and remained his apprentice, for two more awkward months. Then, when I was ordained and became Honorable Scythe Marie Curie, we parted ways. We would nod and say hello to each other at conclave. Then, nearly fifty years later, when we both had turned our first corner and were seeing the world through youthful eyes once more—but this time with the wisdom of age on our side—we became lovers.”
Citra grinned. “You broke the ninth commandment.”
“We told ourselves we didn’t. We told ourselves we were never partners, just companions of convenience. Two like-minded people who shared a lifestyle that others simply couldn’t understand—the lifestyle of a scythe. Still, we knew enough to keep it secret. That was when he first showed me the page he had written and torn out in his youth. He had held on to that ridiculous journal entry like a poorly penned love letter never sent. We kept our relationship secret for seven years. Then Prometheus found out about it.”
“The first World Supreme Blade?”
“Oh, it wasn’t just a regional scandal—it had worldwide implications. We were brought before the Global Conclave. We thought we might be the first scythes to actually be stripped of our rings and hurled out of the Scythedom—perhaps even gleaned—but we had such stellar reputations, Supreme Blade Prometheus saw fit to give us a less severe punishment. We were sentenced to seven deaths—one for each year of our relationship. Then he forbade us to have contact with each other for the next seventy years.”
“I’m sorry,” said Citra.
“Don’t be. We deserved it—and we understood. We needed to be made an example for other scythes who now might think twice before allowing love to interfere with their duty. Seven deaths, and seventy years later, many things had changed. We remained old friends after that, but nothing more.”
Scythe Curie seemed a mix of many emotions, but she folded them all away, like clothes that no longer fit, and closed the drawer. Citra suspected she never spoke of this to anyone else, and would probably never speak of it again.
“I should have known he’d never throw that page away,” Scythe Curie said. “They must have found it when they cleaned out his things.”
“And Xenocrates thought he was writing about me!”
Scythe Curie considered that. “Perhaps, but probably not. Xenocrates is not a stupid man. He may have suspected the true nature of that page, but truth didn’t matter. He saw it as a means to an end. A way to discredit you in front of respected scythes like Scythe Mandela—who heads the bejeweling committee—and thereby ensure that Scythe Goddard’s apprentice would get the ring instead of you.”