Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  “Do you even know where we are right now? Do you even know why? You’re a figment of my imagination, Dad. You’re not even you; you’re my memory of you; you’re me.”

  “This is so typical of you. Trying to have control, trying to be the director.”

  My eyes filled again. “Dad, can we not do this? We’re both dead now; what does it matter?”

  “Both of us?”

  Why had I said that?

  “They’re going to execute me,” I explained to him. To myself. “We’re both ghosts now. Let’s not fight anymore. Can you just—will you play me another song? Can I just pretend I have some kind of closure here? The aria, from the Goldberg Variations. That’s what you played, after I gave in about the haircut.” I laid my braid back on the piano. “This is my mind, isn’t it? Can’t I make you play it?”

  My need to hear that song was so sharp, so strong, that I realized I’d lost. There was no victory to be had over my father here.

  He began to play the Goldberg aria, its notes so tender, so slow and speculative. My heart unfolded like a morning glory. I began to shrink again, into my childhood self.

  Sometimes he’d made milk shakes from scratch, in the kitchen, I remembered. Almost boozy tasting with vanilla extract. Sometimes he’d held my hand when we walked to the school bus together.

  “You’d have been hit by a car if I hadn’t,” he said calmly, as though I’d spoken aloud. “You were always lost in your own thoughts. As for milk shakes, I loved them, but the recipe I learned was meant for two people, and they don’t keep in the refrigerator or in the freezer.” As he spoke, he continued to grow, until I was looking up at him from a toddler’s height. “I’m sorry,” he went on, watching his hands and not me, “but I never really cared for you, even when you were small and appealing. And now? Look what you’ve made of yourself. How do you expect me to feel now?”

  I staggered away from him, through the suddenly huge room, my legs as wobbly as a two-year-old’s. This time, the door let me leave.

  I stepped out of it at my full height, blundered into Daystrike Forest, wintry and haunting. I shivered; the air felt so real, and it was uncomfortably cold. Even so, I had no desire to turn back as I heard the door close behind me.

  “What’s next?” I said, hearing my voice get lost in the soaring expanse of trees. “Caryl, right? This is where I find out she never loved me either?”

  “No,” said a voice behind me and to my left. A voice that was familiar in an intensely creepy way.

  I turned and saw not Caryl standing there—but myself.

  47

  “Oh, I know what this is,” I said, backing away slowly in the snow with awkward, jerky strides. It was cold, and I was exhausted, and I stubbornly clung to the idea of my prosthetic legs and the way I tended to lose my finesse with them when my mind was otherwise occupied.

  “Do you?” said Millie. The other Millie. Me. Face as smooth as a baby’s, not a scar in sight. She was wearing a sweater and jeans, a hooded jacket over them. Clothes I couldn’t remember ever owning.

  “You’re going to try to get me to admit that I love myself or some garbage like that, make me face Past Me and forgive her for what she did to me on that roof.”

  “No,” said Millie, continuing to advance toward me. From the way she moved, it was obvious that she had her natural legs. I realized there was no way I could outrun my able-bodied self, so I just stopped, let her come and stand in front of me.

  She reached for me, explored my scarred cheek with her fingertips, and there was something very alien, very not-me, about the careful way she touched me. I felt a sudden sense of deep revulsion, felt the urge to shove her away. To be contrary, and maybe to entertain Dawnrowan, to remind her that I knew I had an audience, I grabbed the illusory me by the collar of her sweater and kissed her. She didn’t resist.

  “So that’s what I taste like,” I said. “Always wondered. Or is it just what I think I taste like?”

  “Should we take a little break?” Millie said. Did my eyes really go all sultry like that when I was kissed? Were there really faint olive-green stars around the pupils? “Do you want to find somewhere warm,” she said, “and find out more about how you taste?”

  “Wow,” I said, letting her go with a slight shove away from me. “Past Me is a tramp.”

  “I’m not Past You,” she said. “I’m Future You.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I’m what you could be.”

  I shook my head, let out a weird, panicky laugh. “You’re trying to convince me that Seelie magic could heal me. That somehow, even though no other fey spell can touch my body, Queen Dawnrowan or someone can just . . . grow me some new legs. Fix my scars.”

  “No,” said Future Me. “Even without the iron in your bones . . . there is no magic ever known that can heal a wound the mind has already accepted. But with your blood, we could make another you. An unscarred you.”

  I tipped my head and squinted. Whatever the point was of this test, I was missing it. “And do what with it? How would that help me? What would be the point of it?”

  “It could replace you.”

  “Replace me where, at the Arcadia Project? I’m still not seeing what the point of this would be. What would that free me up to do, exactly?”

  “Are you ready to hear me?”

  “I . . . yes, what a weird-ass question.”

  “I have come to you with an offer. Not an illusion, but a true offer, binding in the real world.”

  “Which real world?”

  “Both. I have seen into your mind, Millie, and I know why, after you survived your fall, you have never again tried to take your own life.”

  “Because thanks to my damaged liver, I can’t get drunk enough anymore to think it’s a good idea?”

  “Humor will not deflect me.”

  “You thought that was funny?”

  “You don’t wish to leave a hole in the world, Millie, or cause pain to others. But what if there were no hole? What if a Seelie spirit were to access your mind, absorb your memory, your education, your experience, everything that makes you what you are? Then it could animate this body, return to your life, and do whatever you would wish.”

  I stared back at Future Me for a moment and started to shiver uncontrollably. The cold was only in my mind, though. This was all only in my mind.

  “You could work for the Arcadia Project,” Future Me said. “You could travel freely in Arcadia, just as other Project members do.”

  “I wouldn’t be useful against spellwork anymore, and wasn’t that the whole point of me?”

  “Not at all, Millie. That has long stopped being your primary value to the Project. They look to you for ideas, for leadership. In truth, your ‘gift’ has done more harm than good. You destroyed Countess Feverwax, mobilizing her wraiths. You released Shiverlash, leading to the need for a Third Accord, and now, with her help, you’ve destroyed the White Rose. How much more damage do you want to do?”

  “This isn’t—but it wouldn’t be—”

  “The new you could step in, take all your knowledge, fill your role. And the new you would be functionally immortal. You could continue to accumulate knowledge and experience, apply your unique mindset in service to the Arcadia Project, and end your life only when you choose. You could live long enough to become director of the entire project, ushering in a new era of prosperity for humanity, and still have time to retire and make films.”

  “But it won’t be me experiencing any of that.”

  “That is the most beautiful thing of all, isn’t it? An end to experience. You could stop carrying the weight of all your failures. You know that weight is what keeps you from joy; that is why you long for death, to forget. This way you can rest.”

  “But if the new me has my brain, wouldn’t it just be the same fucked-up mess?”

  “The Seelie spirit would be drawn toward the joy in life, not the pain. It would forgive your mistakes in a way you cannot, and so this new Millie
would be you at your best. You could have the relief you desire from your pain, without abandoning your responsibilities.”

  Tears started to my eyes, warm against the chill. “I’m more than my responsibilities,” I said, but my voice sounded faint, uncertain. “I’m not so down on myself as to think that people wouldn’t miss me.”

  “They wouldn’t have to miss you. You’d still be here. You’d have the same opinions, the same memories, the same wit; you would react to everything the same way. Claybriar could finally touch you, fully realize his desire for you.”

  With a pang, I thought of all of the times he’d looked at me longingly, the guilt I’d felt at not being able to give him what we both wanted, what he, in a sense, needed. And the new body could be healthier, less scarred, more able to wrap its limbs around him as he stayed safely inside the human facade that most appealed to it . . .

  “Wait,” I said, snapping out of my daydream. “It wouldn’t be my exact body. And it also wouldn’t be my exact . . . soul or whatever. Animated by a different force. So, would touching me even help him anymore? Would I even still be his Echo?”

  Future Me was silent, looking down at the snow.

  “I wouldn’t be. He’d be losing his Echo.”

  Future Me looked up again, meeting my eyes solemnly. “All fey do, in the end. Is it really worth continuing to suffer, to tear yourself apart every day for who knows how many decades, just to delay that inevitable separation?”

  I shifted my weight. The logic wasn’t unreasonable, but something was nagging at me. “If he loses his Echo, he’ll lose his memory, his reason. How is he supposed to rule the Seelie Court if he— Wait just a goddamned minute here.”

  Future Me was looking down at the snow again. I advanced on her, grabbing her by the collar of her sweater again.

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”

  “No.” Future Me shook her head, meeting my eyes again with panicked earnestness. “It’s about you, Millie. Your pain is a scar on this world. I’m offering you what you wanted when you climbed onto that roof. I’m offering to take your pain away and carry forward everything that’s valuable about you.”

  “Meanwhile Claybriar loses his throne, his Echo, his memories, everything. No. Fuck that. Get thee behind me, Dawnrowan. For you to use my own fucking personality disorder against me, just to try and get yourself a less problematic king? That’s downright Unseelie of you. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Future Me lowered her eyes and this time did not raise them again.

  “I’m done with this sham of a trial,” I said. “Get me out of here, and confront me face to face, you fucking coward.”

  • • •

  As though waking from a dream, I found myself sitting once again in the oaken cage beneath the ruin of the White Rose. Queen Dawnrowan sat before me in the unfinished wooden chair from the guard’s station, emanating a soft radiance that revealed the bleakness of the prison surrounding us.

  “You have my congratulations,” she said, “on passing your trial.”

  I heaved myself awkwardly to my feet. “Bullshit,” I said, wrapping my hands around two of the branches that formed the walls of my cage. “This wasn’t some test of my inner strength or honor or resolve or any of that garbage. You were trying to fuck things up for Claybriar so he couldn’t be king. So you could make him your leashed pet again.”

  “Cannot a girl do two things?” Dawnrowan said. Echoing me from earlier, the little diva. I hadn’t realized she had any capacity for sass. Under other circumstances, she might have been starting to grow on me.

  “You’re nothing but a scheming bitch.”

  “A scheming bitch who is now, as promised, your ally.”

  “I still don’t get it,” I said. “How was what I just did a victory? I fucked up at every possible turn.”

  Dawnrowan shook her head, gazing at me tranquilly. “I underestimated you,” she said. “I designed the trial to play on what I thought were your weaknesses: your selfishness, your rage, your self-pity. I wanted to prove how tainted you had become by your experiences, to justify removing you humanely from your and others’ misery.”

  “You were literally trying to kill me.”

  “You know that the crimes of which you were accused were subject to a sentence of death. Why does it shock you that a trial might end in your execution?”

  “But it didn’t. I changed your mind somehow. I still don’t know why.”

  “What did all three of your tests have in common?”

  “That I folded like a cheap table? Except I didn’t, the last time.”

  “Beneath your pain, the foundation of you is love, has always been. Even when people are unworthy of it, you give love with your whole heart. Even if it tears you to pieces. You have hidden this fact so well, even from yourself, that I nearly missed it—only the greatest stress brought it to the surface. And the last test!”

  She stood, approached the cage, wrapped her hands gently around mine where they gripped the bars. There was something so sure, so tenderly maternal in the gesture that it quieted the objections I’d been lining up in my head.

  “Millie,” she said warmly. “You refused my offer not out of desire to keep living. You never argued that life’s joys were worth enduring pain. Because you do not yet fully believe that. But despite your desire to die, you chose life simply because you couldn’t bear to cause pain to your Echo . . . to my Claybriar.”

  “Your Claybriar?” I said, drawing my hands from beneath hers. “The man you love so much you won’t let him rule unless he agrees to do everything you say?”

  “That isn’t why I fight him as king,” she said.

  “Then why?”

  “Because in days past, when there was a Seelie King and Queen, they were true mates, not simply equals in rule. They were bonded together in love.”

  “And this gryphon? Arrowface? That guy, you think you could love?”

  “No. But with Claybriar I would be acting out a loveless mockery with someone to whom my heart was unrequitedly bound. That is more torment than I could bear.” She closed her hands around the cage as though it were she who were trapped, trying to get out. Her golden eyes filled with tears.

  Despite myself, I felt a sudden wrenching sympathy for her. “Stop it,” I said. “Don’t cry; it makes me nuts.”

  “You will never know the love that the sidhe feel,” she said, a single picturesque tear slipping free down her cheek. “We are made to pair with only one for eternity, but cruel fate bound my heart to a faun, whose loves are as many as the stars.”

  “Wow,” I said softly. “Does that happen a lot? A sidhe falling for someone who isn’t sidhe?”

  “Only rarely, and the tales are always tragic. You will never know what it costs me to share the one true desire of my heart with so many. With a human! But what choice do I have? He cannot be other than he is, and I cannot be other than I am. And I cannot love another, any more than he can love only me.”

  She drew back from the bars, seemed to collect herself a moment. Then she withdrew the wooden key and unlocked my cage. As the door opened, a full realization of my victory fell on me like a rain shower. I had the Seelie High Court at my command. Dame Belinda had nothing left to her at all.

  Realizing this, I felt a sudden surge of generosity toward everyone in both worlds. I stepped out of my cage and looked at Dawnrowan, really saw her, not as an intimidating monarch or a too-beautiful rival but as a woman with a crack in her heart that I was better positioned than anyone to help put back together.

  “It might not be as bad as you think,” I said, “to rule at his side. I think you mean more to him than you realize.”

  “He has spoken of this to you?” Her glance was furtive, hopeful, like a child’s.

  “He has. But you need to speak to each other. I’m not going to play translator, and we’re not in the eighth grade, either. Show him the truth of your heart, and he will show you the truth of his. If he doesn’t, I’ll p
ersonally kick his ass.”

  Dawnrowan tipped her head. “I will never understand you, Iron Child,” she said, “but I begin at least to understand what Claybriar sees in you.”

  I knelt to her as I had once before, at our very first meeting, just as stiffly and painfully. This time, though, I meant it sincerely. I pressed my forehead to the stone floor of that cavern, showed her that for all my venom and quills, at heart I was Seelie; at heart I was hers. There was no magic in the gesture other than the meaning I brought to it, but it was enough to light her face with a radiant smile.

  “Your Majesty,” I said, “you will never regret our agreement. We will build a new Seelie palace and a new Arcadia Project, and this time it will be built from love, not from fear, and not from slavery.”

  “So be it,” she said. “I have much to learn about these spirits that hide at the heart of a magic I thought I understood. But I have pledged to you that I shall learn, and the fey are bound by their words. Together, the leaders of your world and the leaders of mine will bring into being a Third Accord.”

  48

  The dominoes fell so fast after that it was hard to keep track for a little while. Dame Belinda got through about a day and a half of denial before it became evident that she had lost both High Courts, the Medial Vessel, and every vial of blood the Project had been storing since the Renaissance.

  Also, said the grapevine, if you wanted to deal with either Seelie monarch, you now had to go through Alvin Lamb in New Orleans. And neither of the Unseelie monarchs, apparently, were even taking calls anymore. Since most of the world’s Project offices hadn’t even been fully informed as to Alvin’s reasons for rebelling, panic spread like a pandemic. Poor Alvin was fielding calls day and night trying to calm everyone down.

  New York redeclared its loyalty to Alvin pretty much immediately. Within a week, Dame Belinda agreed to meet with us in Los Angeles to negotiate the terms of her surrender, which threw the London offices into absolute chaos. Besides Dame Belinda and her predecessors, there had never been a “UK Head” of the Arcadia Project; it had never been assumed that such a position would ever differ from Head of the Whole Shebang. It was a huge mess, but, luckily, none of it was my responsibility to mop up; Alvin was reaching out to other national heads and trying arrange a summit to decide the Project’s next steps.