“My mother was the most brilliant woman I’ve ever known,” she says. “Smarter than all of the Wizards, with a mind that could solve any challenge, with more wit and wisdom than that entire school combined. She could have changed the world, and all she ever got to do, after a lifetime of service, was take notes at the faculty meetings.”
I linger on the past tense in her words. “Did… did the Wizards kill her?”
“The red fever took her life,” she replies. “But this place killed her spirit. I saw it die slowly, day after day, saw the light fade in her eyes, saw the crushing weight of the drudgery, of the cruelty, of the indifference wear her down until she broke.” She stares out at the night, her eyes wet, her breath tight in her chest. “I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want that to be me. I’m more than this place,” she says, and she’s whispering so loudly it’s almost a shout. “I could be so much godsdamned more!”
Gods. I know there’s nothing I can say. Despite everything I’ve lost, at least I’ve been free. At least I had a purpose. We sit in silence for a few minutes as her breathing slows. “You’ve really never been off this island?” I finally ask.
She smiles, the kind of smile that’s achingly sad. “Just once. When I was thirteen, Professor Barclay took me on a trip to the mainland with him, to help transcribe some papers. I saw the tall spires of the city, saw so many new and different people, got to do so much.” She shakes her head. “It was just for a week, though, and then I came right back here. But it was the best week of my life.” She looks up at me, right at me, her gaze burning. “I think about it every day.”
There is so much yearning in her voice, so much raw longing, that my heart hurts. I see her now, really see her, this girl who’s spent her whole life in a cage, this spirit so desperate to be free. I’ve spent so long focused on the violence and brutality of Wizards that I’ve forgotten about their everyday cruelty, how stifling and crushing this system is even when no one’s bleeding. Marlena deserves so much better. They all deserve so much better. “What would you do?” I ask her. “If you got off this island?”
“I’d do everything,” she laughs, even as she brushes aside a tear. “I would travel the world, see the blue mountains and the golden deserts and feel the ocean breeze. I’d visit every city I could get to, I’d drink new drinks and try new foods, I’d dance on rooftops and run through fields. And I would read, Gods, I would read so much.” She exhales sharply, her voice trembling. “I’d fight for what I believed in. I’d speak my mind. I’d do what I want to do.” Her eyes drop, not quite able to meet mine. “I’d love who I want to love.”
My breath is tight in my chest, my stomach fluttering, my knees trembling. I’m scared and excited and overwhelmed all at once, like I’m about to plunge into something great and unknown. “Marlena…” I whisper.
“That’s why I was drawn to you,” she says. “You do whatever you want, rules be damned. You fight for yourself. You stand up to your enemies. You don’t let anything break you or hold you back.” She reaches out and touches my cheek with the back of her hand, and her skin is so soft and warm, and it’s like her touch is electric, like she just sent lightning shooting through my veins, like I can barely breathe. “I want to be like you.”
I want to say something, anything, but I can’t find the words. Because I finally understand her, finally see the truth behind this girl who’s been such an enigma this whole time. From the moment I set foot on this island, we were drawn to each other, and now I see why. I see who she is, and she’s so much more than I could have imagined.
I take her hand, the one touching my cheek, and gently cradle it in my mine. It feels like magic, like the moment when I conjure flame and the heat flares through the Loci in my palm. And in that moment I know, with absolute certainty, that I’m not going to let her down. This isn’t just about being partners anymore, about helping her so she can help me. She deserves to be free, deserves it as much as anyone can deserve anything. She’s not a means to achieve my mission. She is my mission. “I’ll get you off this island,” I say.
She looks at me, and for the first time there’s a sense of uncertainty in her eyes, a nervousness, like when you can’t quite let yourself believe something’s real. “You promise?”
“I swear on my life.”
Something flutters down, something soft and white, landing on my shoulder. She gasps. “Alayne. Look. It’s snowing.”
I glance at my bare shoulder, at the perfect little drop of white slowly dissolving against my skin. Another flutters down onto my nose, and another into Marlena’s hair, and then they’re all around us, hundreds of dazzling little snowflakes, enveloping us like a field of stars. She cranes her head up, beaming, as they settle onto her cheeks, melting on her skin. “Wow,” I whisper, because I’ve never actually seen snow. It might just be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
She looks at me with her eyes wide and awestruck. “My mother always said that sharing the first snowfall of the year with someone bound your souls together. But I suppose we’ve already crossed that bridge.” She squeezes my hand tightly, and in that moment, snow on her cheeks, the stars in her eyes, she might be the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. This feels impossible, magical, like we’re in the Null, like time has slowed down for us and this could last forever. We both exhale at the same time, our breath swirling together in the air between us like a gentle mist, and my heart thunders against my ribs, and my whole body tingles like a storm, and I want this, I want this so badly, to cross the distance between us, to feel her skin, her lips, to breathe her in and lose myself in her.
Then clarity strikes, like a dagger in the back, like a lance through the chest. Because I can’t. I can’t. For everything we have in common, for everything we share, we’re just too different. I’m a student and she’s a servant. I’m a Wizard and she’s a Humble. And for all her honesty, for all her yearning, she still has no idea who I really am. She doesn’t know the blood on my hands, the pain in my past, the dark and ugly road I’m going to walk. She sees what she wants to see, what she aspires to see, but she doesn’t see me.
She doesn’t see the danger.
I have to be guarded. I have to have walls. For my safety, and for hers. We can be allies and partners and friends, but it has to end there. I can’t get close. I can’t risk hurting her. So I pull away, even though it physically hurts. “Right,” I say as I rise to my feet and clear my throat. “We should head in.”
Disappointment flickers across her face for just one second, and then she nods, herself again. “Of course. You ought to get back before anyone notices.” Then she leaves, pacing inside, and I follow her back in, taking one last glance at the quad around me, at that first layer of perfect snow coating everything like a veil.
Inside the Order of Nethro, the party has wound down, by which I mean most of the students have wandered up to their beds or passed out in the common room. The lanterns are out, the room dark and still. Zigmund snores, splayed out shirtless on the floor. Desmond and Fyl are against the far wall, slumped together, her head on his shoulder, his arm draped around her. Opened bottles and half-drunk goblets rest on all the tables, and I debate having another drink, decide not to, reconsider that, then definitely decide no, not worth it. I need to sleep this off, and fast.
I’m up the stairs and halfway to my room when someone clears their throat to catch my attention. Professor Calfex rests in an alcove under a window, a glass of wine in her hand. I swallow deeply, trying to force myself sober, and she clearly notices because she snorts a barely suppressed laugh. “Relax. It’s a night of celebration. You don’t have to pretend.” She raises the glass to her lips, finishing it, and sets it aside. “I probably should have stopped the party hours ago, but, well, it’s my first time celebrating a victory in nearly two decades as Head of the Order of Nethro. Who knows when I’ll get to again?”
I relax a little, though there’s still something in her manner that makes me uneasy. “I’ll just have
to win the next two challenges and give you more opportunities.”
“Gods, you’re a cocky little thing, aren’t you?” Calfex rises to her feet, chuckling under her breath. “Do you even understand the significance of what you did out there?”
“I just did what you told me. I found Marius’s weakness and I exploited it.”
“Oh, you did more than that. You found a weakness in the game itself. You made a mockery of the Republic’s most celebrated pastime. You made many enemies today, Alayne Dewinter. You painted a target on yourself, on your friends, on this entire Order.” The edge of her lip twitches, betraying her look of severity. “And you made me proud.”
There is absolutely no good reason I should care what a Wizard professor at Blackwater thinks of me, but my heart still swells. “Is it really that bad out there?” I ask. “Are people really that angry?
“Some are. Wizards maintain their Order loyalties long after they graduate. There are many Vanguards out there who will be screaming that your play was illegal until their dying days. One of them happens to be the Grandmaster of the Senate.”
“If my strategy is so controversial and humiliating, why didn’t the judges just rule it an illegal play?”
“Because it was objectively legal,” Calfex says. “Headmaster Aberdeen is the Great Unifier, the voice of reason and neutrality. If he and the judges were to rule against you today, he would be signaling his loyalty to Madison, to Vanguard. He’d be shattering his meticulously constructed role as the Republic’s impartial arbiter. So no matter how much he personally disliked your play, no matter how much trouble it’s causing him, he had to allow it. You forced him into a position where he had no choice.” Calfex shakes her head. “Which brings me to the reason I’m up here. The headmaster has relayed a message. He would like to meet with you in his office, first thing tomorrow morning.”
My blood runs cold, all the pleasant warmth of the drinking vanishing instantly. “What? Why?”
“Aberdeen is a man obsessed with control, a man who must know everything and who absolutely despises surprises,” Calfex says, and maybe she’s had a little too much, too, because she can barely hide her contempt. “I imagine he’ll want to know exactly who you are.”
Her words cut like a dagger, and I can feel the small grasp of panic tickling red at the corner of my vision, a hitch growing in my breath. What was I thinking, getting drunk and relaxing? “Tomorrow morning” is just hours away. “Am I in trouble?”
“That depends on what you say to him,” Calfex says. “My advice? Don’t lie.”
I swallow hard. “Right. I’ll do my best.”
Calfex brushes past me, walking to the stairs, but right as she reaches them, she stops. “One more thing you ought to know,” she says, her back turned to me so I can’t see her face. When she speaks, her voice is flat, distant, cold as an Ice Glyph.
“Dean Veyle died an hour ago.”
CHAPTER 24
Then
I am thirteen when I learn to lie.
We sit together on the upper loft of the barn, cross-legged opposite each other on hay-strewn beams. It’s a beautiful day, a clear blue sky, and Sera’s long curls are dazzling in the sun’s warm light. She’s wearing a red sundress, freshly acquired from the pirates of Midgar Bay, and even I’ve got a pair of new breeches on. Revenants practice all around us in the early morning light, sharpening new blades and sparring in the dirt. Spirits are high in the camp.
You wouldn’t know it from Sera’s stern expression. “All right, from the beginning,” she says. “Lie to me.”
I roll my eyes. “Come on, Sera. This is dumb. I know how to lie.”
“Not according to Whispers you don’t.” She folds her arms across her chest. “This is serious. This mission is really important, and Whispers tasked me with making sure you can handle it.”
I let out a weary moan. She’s not wrong; the mission is important, maybe the most important one I’ve ever been on. After almost a year in Hellsum, we’re finally going after our target, Reginald Von Clair, a powerful senator. We’re going to break into his manor, take out his staff, and steal his prized red ledger, which contains all kinds of Republic secrets. I think we’re also going to kill him, but Whispers hasn’t been entirely clear. Either way, the plan relies on Whispers and me getting into the mansion by pretending to be a visiting merchant and her daughter, which is where the lying comes in. If he sees through us, we’re both dead, Whispers insisted, so you better make damn sure you can be convincing.
I understand the importance. But I still resent being cooped up here on such a beautiful day. “What am I supposed to lie about?”
“If I tell you, dummy, you can’t lie about it,” Sera laughs. “How about this? We’ll play that drinking game the soldiers play. Tell me two truths and one lie.”
“Not a fun drinking game if we’re not drinking,” I grumble, though honestly, my head still hurts from our misadventure with the sherry. “Fine. How’s this? I’m scared of spiders. I like jasmine tea. I—”
“Lie.”
“What?”
“That last one. About the jasmine tea. That was a lie.”
“You’re cheating. You just already knew that! This game’s no fun since we already know everything about each other!”
“Oh, do we now?” Sera says, and I realize I’ve run right into her trap. “I dream of falling all the time. I don’t like Carlita anymore. That night we drank the sherry was the best night of my life.” I blink at her, and she just stares back with a smug little grin, cheeks dimpled, eyes sparkling with satisfaction. “Well?”
“The first one? No, the third one. No, none of them, they’re all true, that’s the trick,” I try. “No?”
“Exactly,” she says. “You have no idea. Because I actually know how to lie.”
I groan. I mean, she’s not wrong, but she’s only so good because she’s had help. While I was sparring in the yard and mastering Glyphs with Pavel, Sera was studying with Whispers, learning all the tricks of her trade: espionage, deception, strategy. I’m Whispers’s secret weapon, but Sera is going to be her successor. “Fine. Teach me, oh, wise one.”
“How I’ve longed to hear those words,” she beams. “All right, listen closely. The secret to telling a lie is to find the truth in it. If you know you’re lying, then other people will too. So the trick is to convince yourself in the moment that the words you’re saying are true, by saying one thing and feeling another. If you’re going to lie about liking jasmine tea, you can’t think about jasmine tea. You need to think about something you do like, to picture that as vividly as you can, and convince yourself that’s what you’re talking about. Like those cream puffs we had at the market in Brisbane.”
“Oh, those cream puffs…”
“Right. Think of them, feel how you feel about them. Tell the truth about them, even while you talk about jasmine tea.”
I’m just thinking about the cream puffs now. “That seems hard.”
“It’s not.” Sera shrugs. “Words are air, nothing more. Your mouth can say whatever it wants. What matters is what your body, your mind, what your heart, believes. ” She pauses. “It’s your heart that’ll betray you.”
I snort. “Are you a poet now?”
“Maybe I am,” she says. “Maybe when you’re asleep, I sneak out into the moonlight and write stanzas and stanzas of beautiful poetry.”
I stare at her. “That’s a lie. Right? That one’s a lie?”
Now she laughs. “Try again. Do what I told you. Think of one thing, and say another. Find the truth behind the lie.”
“All right.” I take a deep breath and try it. I imagine, as clearly as I can, the face of a spider, its creepy twitchy legs, the way my skin crawls just imagining one running over me. I feel, as deeply as I can, that visceral, stomach-churning disgust. “I hate sharks. I love dancing. The day after we drank the sherry, I threw up six times.”
Sera nods. “That was better. Genuinely. You improved a lot.”
“But?”
“But it was obviously the sharks, right?”
I slam my face into my palms. “This shit is hopeless!”
“Don’t swear,” Sera says, and gently squeezes my shoulder. “You’ll get it, Alka. I know you will. But you might not master it in a week.”
“Well, that’s when the mission is.…”
I can actually feel Sera tense up, and when I look at her face she’s biting her lip with apprehension. “What if… what if I went on the mission, then? I can pull it off, easily.”
“What? No.” I shake my head. “You don’t go on missions. It’s too dangerous, remember?”
“Oh, but it’s not too dangerous for you?” She jerks back, and she actually looks angry, which is rare; Sera can be melancholy and distant, but she’s rarely outright mad. “I’m twelve already. I’m never going to learn anything if I’m stuck back here while you’re all out there in the field! It’s not fair!”
“Sera…”
“No, I’m serious,” she insists. Has she really felt this way all this time? Has she just been bottling this frustration and anger up, and I had no idea? She really is a good liar. “You’re a better thief, fine. You’re a better fighter, I accept that. You’re a Wizard, nothing I can do there. But this is what I’ve trained for. This is my whole purpose here. Why can’t it just be me?”
“You could get hurt.”
“So could you!” She practically yells back. “But I live with that! Every time you go out, I sit here by myself, worrying, pacing, trembling, wondering if this is it, if this is the time you don’t come home, if this is the day I lose you. It’s awful, Alka. It’s unbearable. But I’ve learned to live with it. And you and Whispers should, too.”
A long silence lingers over us as I struggle to find words. I want to argue with her, but I can’t. Every word she’s said is absolutely true, and we both know it. And as badly as I want to just tell her no, to make sure she stays here safe and sound and alive, I know I can’t. This is important. This means so much to her. I have to let her have it.
It Ends in Fire Page 19