His voice, when it came, was an elegy for innocence. “You screamed at me to hunt down people just like Pierre—boys and girls sucked in by zealotry—andkillthem. Not catch them. Not even interrogate them. Just kill them.”
“One of them shot that arrow.”
“One of them. The rest? Their greatest crime is searching for something to believe in. And Ihavekilled them. Their blood is on my hands. But it was you who smeared it there.”
“You never showed me you cared.” I hated myself for all the excuses climbing my throat. “I mean, isn’t it—?”
“Isn’t it what I do?” Irony made a knife of his mouth. “Isn’t that who I am? Perhaps it is. But I thought you, at least, might pretend to hesitate before using me like the tool—like the weapon—I am.”
“I just thought—” I grasped for something to shield me against the cold fingers of self-loathing creeping quiet around my heart. “I thought, after everything you’d already done—”
“—That I would be immune to the horror of killing? That I could be inured to the feeling of a life bleeding away between my fingertips, just by doing it often enough? Then you truly must think me a monster.”
“Idon’t.”
“Then you’d be the only one.”
“I never meant to be your pain,” I said, around the tears choking me. “You must know that.”
“I do,” he said. “But it only makes it worse that you used me thoughtlessly. You couldn’t be bothered to think about my wants, my feelings, because you knew I would do whatever you wanted, whatever you asked. Because of the way I feel about you.”
“Forgive me,” I pleaded. “I only asked you to be my commandant because I thought you wanted it—because I thought you wanted to protect me.”
“I did,” he growled. “I do. But I don’t think I can dothistoo. I cannot be both your consort and your commandant. I cannot be both your knight and your lover. And it only makes sense for me to sacrifice one.”
I shuddered around a sob. “Sunder, no.”
“I know you have never felt comfortable in my arms—not that I blame you.” His eyes held a yawning abyss of longing stark as blood on a new-forged sword. “Isn’t this what you want?”
I reached for him, forlorn. “Of course it’s not.”
“Then give me something.” He caught my outstretched arm and drew me close—too close, his mouth a hairsbreadth from mine. “Give me something other than illusion, demoiselle.”
I sipped at our shared breath and measured the weight behind his words. I knew what he wanted me to say. But I couldn’t—not here, not now. Not after the accusations he’d laid on my head. Not when it felt like the only thing that might save us.
I wouldn’t be his pain.
We were cut from different cloth and sewn together by conflict—how long until we came apart at the seams anyway?
I shook my head, roughly. He released me, turned toward the door. His shoulders stooped, then straightened.
“Do you know what they’re calling me, in the lower city?”
Misery made me mute. He half turned, the light from the ambric glow-globes turning his profile to hammered metal.
“The Butcher of Belsyre.”A coil of decaying humor lifted his cold mouth. “They used to call meSeverine’s Dog. But she never had the audacity to name her leashlove.”
The next Matin, I took my time getting dressed, struggling against emotions violent as bloodstained shards of mirror glass. How had everything gotten so mixed up, sowrong? The impossible world I’d reached for had turned to ash in my hands; the beauty I’d longed for had smeared away, like tarnished gilt on rotten wood. I’d thought I was fighting for something perfect, but all I’d done was alienate friends, make new enemies, and lose some bright part of myself that I stupidly thought would keep shining forever.
I cast my mind back—back as far as I could remember, to the dusk where I’d grown up. The Temple of the Scion, lit by cheap stinking tapers, heavy with the dust of hundreds of tides, echoing with the prayers of a thousand generations of sanctimonious Sisters. I’d barely had the chance to be a child, but Scion help me, I’d tried. I remembered dancing through the drafty halls, humming songs I’d overheard the villagers singing, working songs and drinking songs and songs long as stories—songs about amber cities and dristic mountains and impossible diamond skies over kembric sands. But Sister Cathe had caught me. Her bony fingers closed over my elbow and she dragged me into the fane, where icons of the Scion stared at me with heavy, glittering eyes.
Dreaming does not belong in these halls, she’d snapped. Such sins only breed misfortune. Think on that while you pray.
And so I’d thought on it. I’d traced out the shapes of mountains in the dust and murmured half-familiar names to myself, andthought. I’d closed my eyes and dreamed of impossible, incandescent colors, andthought.
And finally, I knew—if dreams did not belong in that Temple, then neither did I.
I’d spent the last tide of my life searching for an eloquent, radiant world where I would finally belong. I thought I’d found it here, in Coeur d’Or, until a forgotten family and a bitter destiny came hurtling out of the dusk of my past. And then I thought perhaps—perhaps—if I could break that world apart, and replace it with a world I dreamed of,thatwould be where I belonged. So I broke it. But I was beginning to see I had only broken myself and those around me.
