Tell the Wind and Fire(70)

My aunt’s hair streamed out like a black banner, and she spoke like a bard. I saw that everyone in the crowd believed her story as much as I, who had been the child running through the gate to her arms, who had lived it.

I had dreamed of a day when someone would tell the truth of what had happened to my mother. I had never thought it could really happen. I had never thought that, if it did happen, it would be anything but a triumph.

“My sister went down into the darkest part of the Dark city one night, and she tended to one of the doppelgangers. She often went to heal them. The Light magicians would not lay hands on them, and the way those creatures are treated and the disgusting way they live means they sicken often and die young. I do not know how many doppelgangers Josephine saved, but I know which one killed her.

“I remember she had talked about him to me. He was young, as young as her own daughter, and very sick. He was raving, repeating the same words over and over: his shadow, his mother, his city. He was so sick, he did not even know who she was. He called her ‘Mother,’ as if doppelgangers could have mothers. She thought he would die, and she was so happy when he lived.

“She did not tell me one thing. I could see she was troubled, see she was keeping a secret, but I did not know what it was until months later, when one of the sans-merci told me what they had seen down there in the darkest part of the Dark. My sister, Josephine, pushed the doppelganger’s hood back and saw his stolen face. She saw the face of Ethan Stryker, one of the Stryker heirs, a golden child marked to inherit the city and uphold the laws of the Light Council. The laws the Strykers all knew they had broken. The Strykers had everything, and they wanted Dark magic too. Their council killed us for the least infraction, but they could commit an abomination. No laws for them, only for us! Our children die, but theirs could not.”

I remembered my father reacting so violently to the mention of the Strykers, trying to warn me of what he knew. Josephine always said that. No matter what the danger is, no matter what you might find, you have to go, you have to heal. She had to heal him, Lucie. She told me she had to.

I’d thought I knew the truth, but I had not known anything.

Him was the doppelganger. My mother had gone into danger to heal Carwyn.

I had not understood. I could not tell if the roar in my ears was the crowd or my own blood rushing to my head. For a moment, I thought I was going to faint, and then I thought that the sheer iron strength of Aunt Leila’s grip would hold me up.

“When we broke their laws, we suffered for it, but when they broke their laws, we suffered for that too. Charles Stryker wanted to protect the doppelganger, and Mark Stryker wanted to control the creature. So the Strykers had spies set on the dirty little house where the doppelganger lived, spies who followed my sister home and worked out that she was secretly living with a Light magician. Mark Stryker knew that a woman linked to a Light citizen would recognize Ethan Stryker’s face. He realized Josephine knew the Stryker family secret, and so she had to be destroyed. Stryker sent his men to kill my sister. They did it one night as she left the doppelganger’s house. They buried her in a shallow grave in the earth beneath another lost soul’s window, as if her dead body was the seeds for a flower bed. When her Light magician husband went searching for her, Stryker’s power made certain he was taken and caged, in the cages we have torn down. When her daughter, our Golden One, spoke up against their cruelty and the people began to listen to her, Stryker’s power carried her and her father away into the captivity of the Light. She was too famous for them to kill, so they tried to force her to become one of their own, when she was always ours. This was the final wrong we had to avenge. This was why we had to sweep into the city and save the Golden One! Little did Stryker think we would come to him and strike him down. Little did Stryker’s hired assassins know, as they tossed black earth onto my sister’s cold face, that she would rise up. That all of us buried would rise up and take our vengeance.”

The hold on my wrist was all I could feel. Otherwise I was numb. I kept thinking of my mother, her always-worried, always-earnest living face, and of Ethan. Ethan was the only person in the world I had ever spoken to of my mother, and he had held me as I cried. I would never have dreamed there was any link between them but me.

I had never dreamed, when I had tried to help Carwyn and thought I was acting like my mother, how right I had been.

Leila shook me. “Speak!” she hissed.

“I . . .” I said. “I loved my mother. She was murdered. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t even tell the world she was my mother. But she is not the only person I love. I love—”

Ethan, I almost said, but then Leila’s hold tightened like a handcuff. It had almost been a relief to look out on a crowd and tell the truth about my mother, but I was not free now any more than I had been before. Neither in the Light nor in the Dark could I speak my whole heart.

“The Golden Thread in the Dark is my young niece, Lucie,” Aunt Leila cried, her voice ringing out. “Her tortured father was my sister’s husband. My father was exiled from the Light city for wielding Dark magic, and he died in the Dark. My sister was killed for wielding Light magic. Those dead are my dead. And their murderers are now at last summoned to answer for their crimes.”

My aunt took a few steps forward, dragging me with her to the edge of the platform. I stumbled and teetered for a moment, the whole world seeming off balance, the sinking in my stomach telling me that I would fall.