Tell the Wind and Fire(51)

The taunting was sometimes hard to bear.

“How is school going?” Mark asked at dinner one day when he had finished talking about the glories of the upcoming ball. He spoke as if Carwyn had been going to school.

“Wow, actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Carwyn said. “I’m failing.”

Mark raised his eyebrows. “Which class?”

Carwyn waved his fork around in a big circle. “Oh, like, all of them.”

“Ethan!” Mark snapped.

“I know,” said Carwyn. “I am just not very bright. Well, you’ve seen the kind of clothes I choose to wear, with the entirety of New York men’s fashions at my disposal, right? This can’t come as that much of a surprise.”

“You always did more than adequately in your studies before,” Mark said.

“True,” said Carwyn. “But I was mostly coasting on my family name and my debatable good looks, you know? I mean, that’s me. Spoiled little rich boy. Vaguely good intentions, you know, but not much follow-through. Very little strength of character. Have you guys ever noticed that when you look at me from a certain angle, I have kind of a weak chin?”

“Looking at you right now,” I said, “I do see it. I’ve never noticed it before, though. Never.”

Carwyn reached for my hand, which was lying on the table, in plain view and beside my knife. I had to let him take it, because Mark and Jim were there watching. His dark eyes followed the line of my sight to the gleam of the knife. He gave me a smile that gleamed in about the same way, and his fingers curled warm around mine. He had calluses that Ethan didn’t have: touching him felt completely different.

I would so much rather have been touching the knife.

“Sorry to let you down there, my adorable little meerkat,” Carwyn told me. “I do think I’ve been getting more good-looking, though. The pain of my recent tragedy has given a deep, haunted look to my eyes.”

I put my hand up to touch my forehead, able to block the sight of his terribly familiar face for a moment, and looked out at the ocean of lights that was the city at night.

“Let’s not talk about your father,” Mark Stryker said.

“All right. Let’s talk about my basic weakness instead. I’ve been sitting in on the Light Council meetings for a while,” Carwyn said. “And my father was on the council before that, my father who supposedly loved me so very, very much.”

“Ethan, don’t doubt that,” Mark said, and I heard a note of real pain in his voice. He had loved his brother. It was a shock to recognize that, to realize something that I already knew but lost sometimes in how much I hated him: that he was a terrible person but he was human.

And he was letting Carwyn get away with outrageous behavior because he thought Carwyn was Ethan, that he was grieving, that he was human too.

Carwyn, who was not any of those things, grinned. “Okay, Uncle Mark. So I have fairly liberal views, right? Me and my girlfriend from the Dark town, me and my whining about fair treatment and justice and free tiny pink unicorns for all. This military ball is going forward, even though we have blood, broken cages, and whispers in the streets. I talk and talk, but I don’t really do a damn thing, do I? You’re the one in the family who gets things done.”

The dinner table at the Stryker household was glass, with jewels beneath it glowing with soft light. It cast odd shadows on people’s faces, made Mark’s face one of hollows and threats. His rings clinked sharply against the tabletop as he put his glass down.

“What are you saying?”

Carwyn gazed at Mark with limpid eyes. “Just trying to express how much I admire you, Uncle.”

“I do not know what’s got into you recently!” Mark announced. “You say crazy things on television, and now that your father is gone you are behaving like a wild thing. Are you on drugs? Ethan . . . do you need to speak to someone? I can arrange that, privately. Nobody has to know. I can make arrangements to help you.”

It was horrible to see Mark’s patience with him, to hold that nightmarish dichotomy in my mind. Mark had hit Ethan and threatened me, had ordered so many deaths, but he did love Ethan. I did not want to share a single feeling with Mark Stryker. I wanted to hate and fear him. It would have been so much simpler.

Carwyn snorted. “Nobody can help me.”

Given how reckless and thoughtless Carwyn was being, I had expected, at first, that Mark—who knew about Carwyn—would suspect that a switch had been made. But people hated doppelgangers so much, were so used to seeing them in dark hoods, that they never thought the hoods might be taken off. And Mark and Jim were blinded by their love and concern, as well as by their arrogance. Mark and Jim believed they could never be fooled for a minute, that they could not speak to or touch a doppelganger without knowing, that they could never sleep with a doppelganger’s cold presence in the house, and so they could be fooled for as long as Carwyn liked.

He could act however he wanted, and nobody but me would know.

“Sorry, my little mint and chocolate parfait,” Carwyn put in, baiting. “Am I bothering you?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Nothing you say could bother me.”

“I wonder,” said Carwyn, but then he checked himself and looked to Mark and Jim. “It’s because she really gets me, you know? Some people think that she’s nothing but a decoration for my arm, the girl who smiles on command, a blank screen that the Light and Dark citizens project all they want to see onto: the martyr, the heroine of the revolution, the eternal victim, the Golden Thread in the Dark. Some people would say that she never dares even to speak.”