Tell the Wind and Fire(67)

“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.

“Thank you,” said Carwyn. “Perhaps I shall.” He stoppered the vial, and it disappeared into a pocket.

I did not thank him. There was too much between us that he had not apologized for. I could not find it in me to be grateful, but I did find myself concerned about him, feeling as though I had been right about him the first time, that he was the person I had thought he was and not the nightmare creature I had feared.

I put my back to him and faced the burning world outside the window.

“Where are you going to go?” I asked. “Nowhere’s safe.”

“If I could choose where to go . . .” Carwyn began, but stopped.

Ethan was gone, and Jarvis was gone, both where I could not find them. I did not have the patience for this.

“You can choose. That’s what giving you the collar meant. You’re free to go. You’re as free as I can make you. You can go anywhere you want to go in the world, and I hope you find somewhere safe. I can’t tell you what to do. You have to decide, and I have to go after Ethan.”

“If I could choose where to go,” Carwyn resumed, as if I had not spoken at all. “If I could go anywhere in the world, I’d want to go with you. I don’t want to be where it’s safe. I want to be where you are.”

I froze, still holding on to the windowsill. “What did you say?”

I turned away from the fire outside. Carwyn met my eyes with a level gaze. He looked different than I could have imagined anyone would while saying something like that. There was a look of fixed despair about his face, as if he was gazing at someone dead, as far away from him as that.

“They say that doppelgangers don’t dream,” said Carwyn. “That you have to have a soul to dream.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said, slowly. I had slept in the same bed as him, his head on a pillow beside mine, and he had not slept any differently than anyone else. “I don’t know whether doppelgangers dream or not. I have never known any doppelgangers but you.”

“I haven’t known many either. There aren’t many,” said Carwyn. “The hood is license for any cruelty. The faceless are as good as voiceless: nobody would listen if any one of us called for help. I told you this already. We look like those who would have died young without the Dark magic that saved them and made us. We die young instead of them.”

He almost never seemed or sounded serious. Even now, when he was talking about the death of his own kind, his lip was curled and there was an uncertain wicked flicker in his eyes that made me think he was about to make a joke. I felt wary, waiting for the twist, waiting for the doppelganger’s trick.

“I know as much about doppelgangers as you do,” said Carwyn. “All I know about doppelgangers is what I’ve been told. I never knew if I had a soul, and while I was buried I lived in a wild, degraded, disgusting way. I remember hating the way I lived sometimes when I was younger, but more and more I didn’t care. I thought I couldn’t care and that nothing mattered. And then I met you, and you tried so hard to make things right for Ethan and for your family and even for me. I could not figure out why you did what you did for me. I was a stranger. I thought . . . it might be because you liked me, but now I know you don’t. I’m glad you don’t. There have been a couple of people who were kind to me because they thought I was interesting or good-looking or useful. You were kind to someone you didn’t know and shouldn’t have trusted. That was what taught me who you are. You woke all the old shadows in me that wanted to be something like a person. I thought I would never want that again.”