Tell the Wind and Fire(78)

“Ethan,” I said. “I’m so happy. I’m so sorry.”

His face, uncovered now, was flushed, his eyes slightly dilated. He put a hand on my rib cage as if he had to steady himself, but then his hand moved down, slowly and with more confidence, until he had a sure hold on my waist.

“I’m sorry. I lied to you, I got my father killed, I did everything wrong. I’m the one who’s sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for,” he whispered, and his voice sounded as rusty as a prison door that had not been opened in a long, long time.

I clung to his shirt and kissed him again, pressing our foreheads together as much as our mouths. I wanted to be pressed up against him, anchored by him, sure of him.

“There is,” I said, and tasted tears on my lips, on his lips as I kissed him, and realized we were both crying. “I know everything now, Nadiya told me about the resistance. Carwyn told me about you going to find Jarvis. You meant it all for the best. You meant to save people. You’re a hero.”

“Well,” said Ethan, “that makes two of us.”

I smiled so hard that I thought my face would crack.

“I saw you down there, with your sword barring the way,” Ethan told me. “You looked like . . .” An angel, I thought. “Like a knight.”

I kissed him for that.

“I’m not a hero,” said Ethan. “I couldn’t let everything stay the way it was, I couldn’t let my family keep doing what they were doing. But this is no better. I ruined everything. My father and Jim and so many other people are dead, and it was all for nothing.”

“You wanted to help. You tried. I didn’t try.”

“You did better than try,” Ethan said. “You did it. You accomplished something.”

“So did you,” I said. “You saved Jarvis. You saved someone—you did what you did because you believed in change and goodness, and you inspired me.”

You were the light that showed me the way, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t wanted other people to see me that way. He was more than my light.

He’d lied to me, he said, and it was true. He’d done worse than that. He had sent in Carwyn as a replacement for himself and clearly had not realized that if Carwyn had fooled me, every touch I accepted from Carwyn would have been a violation of trust. He’d risked his life for me but had not considered what it would have done to me if he had died. He’d lied to me but meant it for the best.

I’d lied to him, too, and he knew it. We had each thought that we could replace ourselves with perfect facsimiles and fool the other. We had both been wrong. I was glad to be wrong.

I saw how hard he had tried, and it was so easy to forgive him that it felt possible to forgive myself.

“How are you here?” I asked him. “How did it happen?”

“They were letting in people from the Dark city to mock and spit at me. Carwyn came to visit me. He was wearing a doppelganger’s hood, but it wasn’t fastened by a Light magician. He could take it off. He took it off, once we were alone. I thought he was there to laugh at me. I thought . . . Everything I thought about him was wrong.”

Ethan swallowed.

“He . . . he must have just fed from a Light magician, maybe someone he took against their will—”

“No,” I said. “He’s not like that. It was me.”

Ethan looked puzzled to hear me come to Carwyn’s defense and, at the same time, sorry that he had insulted Carwyn.

“I didn’t know. Carwyn must have used Dark magic to confuse my mind. He came in, and I started to feel dizzy and strange. I could barely keep standing. He put the hood on me, and he whispered ‘I remember her’ and everything went black. I don’t remember anything else. I don’t even know who he meant.”

I remembered what Aunt Leila had said, about Carwyn being confused when he was sick and mistaking my mother for someone else. “I think he meant your mother.”

“Our mother?” asked Ethan, instinctively kind.

I smiled at him. “Yeah.”

“Did you two—did you plan this together?” Ethan sounded helpless.

I could never have planned this. It would never have occurred to me that Carwyn would ever do something like this.

“No,” I said again. “It was all him.”

Ethan shook his head, sounding even more helpless. “I came to in the street wearing this hood,” said Ethan. “I didn’t go back to him. I came to you.”

“Let’s take it off now,” I whispered.

I put my hand on the collar. I felt the dip and bob of his throat beneath my ringed fingers, just before Ethan was about to speak.

The door was open. We both heard the steps on the floor of the hall outside. Ethan reached for me but let his hand drop when I shook my head. I went for the kitchen counter, where I had left the sword.

It was my Aunt Leila. She had a furled paper in her hand that must have been the pardon. I did not dare even glance toward Ethan. I looked at the paper and her face, the severe black and white lines of both. Only the paper promised mercy.

I tensed again, my hand touching the edge of the counter but not the sword yet. But I saw Aunt Leila had tensed too. She had not expected anyone else to be there.

She looked at Ethan, and her eyes narrowed. She had seen Carwyn at the hotel, had seen he was not collared, and I did not want her thinking about why the same boy might be collared now. I could not speak. I could not risk her suspecting. I did not know what to do.