“Please,” he adds stiffly, like the word takes a lot of work. “I know you’re mad, and you’re right to be. But can we please— Just please talk to me.”
I try to tell myself it’s silly to be angry with Jude, that I can’t feel any more betrayed by him than by myself. That we both accepted our roles, no matter how long ago it was.
But only one of us seems intent on seeing it through to the end.
And I am not just mad about that. I’m furious.
I breathe, look at him. “What, Jude?”
He watches me, suspicious as I climb back up the steps. “You helped the Playhouse evade a war tonight. I know you too well to think you did it out of the goodness of your heart.”
I sense the real question beneath his words, though.Can we go back to safely playing our roles now?
The torchlight flickers, then starts to dim. As it does, I catch a glimpse of him, an actual glimpse, of every face Jude has worn, every voice he has spoken to me with.
“I want to know why,” he says.
You may be my most resilient Player, Sil told me,but you had best believe Jude is my most loyal.
I hate that, in a sense, Sil has won. I don’t know if I’m looking at an ally or an enemy. Maybe some unholy combination of the two. But until I find out which, I do have a new part to play, and it will be a tricky one.
My mouth opens. It takes effort to form the words. Words that aren’t a line, that my tongue was never supposed to form. “Because I choose this,” I say. “I choose every life we will live after this. I choose our stage and this Playhouse. My home.”
The place where my mark once was twists with phantom pain at the lie.
But Jude doesn’t seem to notice me wince. Instead, he closes the space between us in two strides, throws his arms around me, and he weeps.
Act III: Scene XXIV
Hugging Jude feels like coming home and shutting the door after you. It feels like the peace and stillness that follows. In spite of how mad I am at him, my resolve softens, my anger briefly melting away into the warmth of his chest.
But my ribs feel like they’re about to crack, so I wheeze out, “Jude, would you please put me down—”
“Do you know what it is to miss a person for fifteen years?” He tucks his face into my hair. “I’ll put you down when I’m ready.”
The lights flicker again, so I guess Jude’s metaphorical curtain is already closing. Noticing this, he tenses, sets me on solid ground, hands finding my face. “Gods, it all went wrong.” His eyes are bright, restless. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it home.”
I exhale a laugh, but it comes out bitter as I press my palm to my throat. “Yeah, well. I almost didn’t.”
The corners of his smile fall. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I tried to—well,to stop it.”
He did, just with a different face. Almost dragged me back to the Playhouse and foiled Sil’s carefully laid plans. And in the end, left me with a warning.
Come with me or you will suffer.
“And then afterward,” he says, quiet, “I still listened for you, just in case.”
A blurry memory clicks into place. Nights I couldn’t sleep after the marking, exhausted from pain but alive with a rush of anger. I blamed it all on my so-calledcurse.
But deep in the quiet, during the longest nights, I heard singing. A soft, rich humming from the drawer of my nightstand, where my mother’s hand mirror hid. One night, I even opened the drawer, pressed my fingers to the glass. As years passed, I grew certain I must have dreamed the whole thing.
“I heard you,” I say, realizing. “It—”Made me feel like I wasn’t alone. “It helped.”
“You were so far away from home, with no idea who you were. And I thought maybe hearing—” Jude stops, shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought. You were getting weaker and weaker. Then, one night, everything just went silent.”
Galen was furious when he discovered the mirror. Tossed it right out the window.
Jude runs his fingers through his hair, staring off somewhere. “AndMichail—gods, he wasn’t supposed to die. I messed it all up, Riven.”
