Tell the Wind and Fire(29)

I didn’t think that Carwyn was going to run off somewhere, live a blameless life, and stay safe. I thought he was coming back. I knew he held our lives in the palm of his hand.

I knew I should tell somebody. But, like always, I was afraid to tell the truth. I knew it would condemn me.

I didn’t tell Penelope, and I didn’t tell Ethan. I didn’t tell anybody at all.



Above the Strykers’ apartment was a private gym, where all four of the Strykers had sessions with a personal trainer several times a week. I had only been there before to sit on the weight bench and read while Ethan finished up.

I had not expected this to be Ethan’s special reason for asking me over. I had not expected my boyfriend to stand before me, in socked feet on the polished wood floor, with a sword glowing with Light magic in either hand.

“You scared me to death when you jumped onto the platform and leaped at those guys with swords,” Ethan said simply. “I don’t know what might happen in the future. I want to protect you—and I figure the best way to protect you is to teach you to protect yourself.”

It was a sweet idea, but I hated to think of Ethan being scared and doubtful about the future.

“You’re going to teach me?” I asked, keeping my voice light. I reached over and took one of the swords from him. I felt its magic crackling satisfactorily up my arm. “Since when do you know about sword fighting?”

“I don’t have any Light magic, so Uncle Mark wanted to be sure I could always protect myself,” Ethan went on. “He also thought it might be good PR if I joined the Light Guard for a year or so after college. I don’t know. I’m pretty good.”

He sounded shy, and a little proud.

“Are you?” I said, and I forced myself to smile at him.

“Yeah, and I’m willing to teach you everything I know.”

“Lucky me.”

We crossed swords, the blades flickering as they rang together, my blade glowing with a faint flare of Light each time I parried Ethan’s thrust. It was like lightning and thunder, the gleam and then the peal, and it felt good. It felt familiar.

I had made so many mistakes. I had been so stupid. I lay awake nights thinking of all I feared and how I had failed. I could do nothing to fix any of it, but I could do this.

I parried again and sent power from my free hand to make Light burn too strongly in Ethan’s sword. He almost dropped it. I pressed home my advantage and came at him with a flurry of ringing strokes, making him stumble back. He stared at me, awe and Light magic shining on his face, as if I had lit a huge match between us.

“You can fight!” Ethan exclaimed.

“I can win,” I said, and forced Ethan’s sword down.

Ethan did not even look at the sword points touching the floor, did not care that he had been beaten. He looked at me, frowning, and as my frantic heartbeat slowed, I began to realize I had made another mistake. “Why did you never tell me you knew the sword?” he asked.

What could I say? That my aunt the Dark magician had taught me in the little garden outside her house? That I had learned how to stand and move and fight for years, learned how to practice magic against a Dark magician as few Light magicians had the chance to—how to fight anyone, how to cheat, how to win? Was I supposed to tell him that my aunt used to say I could use these skills against a Light guard, and I had never dreamed I would, but years later, on a train platform, Aunt Leila had been proved right? That when I used too much Light magic and it poisoned my blood, my aunt would drain the poison away and drink my blood at her kitchen table, and then we would make cookies?

I’d told Ethan about my mother: that she had existed, that I’d known her, that she’d died. It wasn’t much, but he was the only person in the Light city I had told about her at all.

I had not told Ethan anything about my Aunt Leila. I did not think he would like the sound of her, somehow, any more than she would have liked him. They were impossibly different people, from impossibly different worlds, and it would have made Ethan think differently of me.

Besides, Aunt Leila was safe, as safe as a Dark magician in the Dark city could be. I did not want to bring her to the attention of any Strykers, even the one I loved.

“It never came up,” I said unsteadily.

Until the train platform, with Ethan kneeling and a guard drawing his sword. I had known the risk when I flung myself at the guard. I had known what to do. Ethan had just assumed I did not . . . because I had never told him anything else. I didn’t want him to think of me as someone who could deal with these kind of situations, who belonged in that kind of world: Aunt Leila’s world, in the Dark.

“I want you to tell me things, even if they don’t come up,” Ethan said. “Just as long as they’re about you. I only want to know more about you.”

It should have been a strange thing for a boy to say to his girlfriend of two years. I found myself looking away, as if I, not he, had been beaten.

“If you knew me more, you’d like me less.”

“I don’t think so,” Ethan murmured.

I made myself smile, even though I was scared. “Come on—let a girl keep her mystique.”

It was a weak ploy.

Ethan opened his mouth, and I knew it was to argue with me. I stared at him, mutely imploring him not to.

I thought it wouldn’t work, but after a moment he lowered his eyes and put down his sword. “Asking you to spar was a mistake, huh?” he said, stepping forward and wrapping his arms around me. “I’m sorry.”