Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)(122)
My eyes sting with salt and anger. “This isn’t something that you can understand.”
“Let me try.”
I shake my head and pull the cloak tighter over my head. “Your powers allow you to feel what others do and to give them comfort. Or push them to action. They don’t erase people’s lives. They don’t take and destroy.”
“You’re wrong. I could also give them pain,” she says. “Don’t forget that. We choose what we do with these gifts. That’s what we’ve always been taught. The same way the magicless can kill with their swords and poisons, with their bare hands if they choose to. I have seen you take away trauma from people so they can sleep better at night. Don’t you see? You decide who you’re going to be. You take someone else’s pain into yourself. Even when you’re taking, you’re leaving something good behind.”
“The Hollows outweigh any good I’ve done. You don’t know what I’ve seen—I tried to put everything in the darkest corners of my mind. But there is no escaping what is in here. I can’t dream. I can’t conjure Dez’s face without dragging another memory along for the ride. There are so many pasts in here that I don’t get to have my own. I shouldn’t get to have my own!”
She walks up to me, and this time I can’t fight against her sympathy, her warmth, which I hate and love all at once. She pushes back my cloak, and the sea breeze is cool against the wetness on my face.
“You were a child, Ren. You didn’t do anything wrong. I blame the damned Whispers. We should have treated you better. We should have been kinder to you.” She takes a deep breath to settle her anger. “What are you now?”
“A soldier.” The answer is instinctive. Something I feel like I should say.
“Yes, but you’re more than that. You’re not a child anymore. It’s time to stop letting the world define who or what you are. You are the girl who has always wanted to prove herself. To best everyone else. To show that she could carry her weight. You are the girl who saved me from a man who would have tortured me for days. You were willing to trade places with me. Why can’t you see that girl?”
“Because—” The words are on the tip of my tongue. I see it now. More clearly than I ever have before. I don’t know if it’s the fresh air, or the magics that Sayida weaves with just her presence. But I see myself. Not as a single person but as hundreds, thousands of fractures, like a mirror with so many cracks spreading from the center that it can’t reflect a whole image. “Because I have more stolen memories than ones of my own making. Because I have lived hundreds of stolen lives, and I’m afraid to live my own.”
Who is Renata Convida?
“I don’t know who I am, Sayida. Not truly. It’s like who I am is trapped beneath the tragedies that belong to everyone else. There’s only one way I’ll be free of this.”
She rests her hand on my face and in this moment, I am thankful I didn’t get far from this house. “Then maybe, before you can do anything else, you have to let her out.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can help you try again.” She holds her hand out for me to take.
When I take it, the warmth of her magics trail along my skin, and my own memories begin to flood in, bright and colorful, but the suffocation I usually feel is gone. The fear, the guilt, the darkness, at last, are cracking open, making space for me to breathe. I want to weep with the relief of it.
And so, tentatively, delicately, I wade forward, and the first memory that comes to mind is falling asleep in my father’s arms in front of the fireplace.
That’s quickly overpowered by the heat of a fire. All burning villages smell the same. Leonesse scream as the king’s men set fire to houses, trying to smoke out the Moria from their homes and into the streets to be captured. My lungs tighten.
“Focus,” Sayida whispers, and sends another push of magics through me.
I close my eyes, but my thoughts are jumbled. I see thousands of strangers. I walk hundreds of paths across the country, across the sea.
“Ren.” Her voice is a susurration, a kiss on my temples.
My head aches, as if I’m carving deeply into it, prying open bone to delve into the core of my mind. I remember being six years old, new to the palace. Justice Méndez handing out stellitas like they were gold pesos every time I told him a “story.” The stories always came after I stole the memory of captured Moria, prisoners who scared me with their tear-reddened eyes. But I knew, I knew that every memory came with a reward. The memory changes, and then I’m in my favorite place in the palace, in that library. There was a couch in front of the tallest window I’d ever seen. Deep in the distance, where I knew my home village was, there was a great fire that consumed every part of it.
Those memories are the things that define me. They made me into who I am.
You were born serious. Dez’s face comes to mind. His honey eyes linger on my lips, always. But no, I was not born serious. I was made that way.
The memories unfold faster now. Within the palace there was a long blue hallway. When the justice was too busy and my attendant fell asleep, I wandered around. Large statues decorated halls vaster than any home I’d ever been in. There was a study with a boy in clothes dirty from chores. He was always alone, playing with dice. He’d roll them onto the floor, and then they’d vanish. Then he’d cup his hands over them and make them reappear. It was the simplest magic. It was the first time I was around other Moria children who were not my family. I didn’t even know how many kinds of magics we possessed.