Just like she wanted coffee with cream and sugar, even if she made herself say otherwise.
The Silver Council saw sweetness as an indulgence that was better curbed or avoided, but Keith had rarely known anyone to take it so far that they felt guilty about putting sugar in their coffee or tea. He had trouble imagining anyone having a huge problem with whipped cream, either. And the village had thankfully never been known for diet crazes. If Iris was keeping herself from having what she really wanted, she was doing it for her own reasons.
He didn’t want to pry, but he was trying to come up with a way to ask about it when Iris said suddenly, “It’s easier for you.”
“What’s easier for me?”
“Living up to all this. You’re a tribute. The Council’s already agreed that you’re the best, so you don’t have to prove yourself.”
He put the plate down in front of her. “Breakfast is served. And—it’s just luck, you know. Getting selected as tribute.”
“It’s not like it’s a lottery.”
“No, maybe not, but it’s also not fair. Not really. It’s all about who my parents are and what the Council had planned. They didn’t raise me normally and then decide I was the best person for the job, they tailor-made me for it from the start. I’m not any better than anybody else.”
“Yes, you are,” Iris said. There was a calm light in her golden-brown eyes. “Trust me.”
“I do trust you, but ....”
But even though Iris was relieved he wasn’t exactly as coldly perfect as the Council wanted him to be, she might not like knowing just how much he’d screwed things up and how hard he’d had to work to fix them.
She deserved to know what she was getting into, though. He just needed to find the words.
“When I start believing I’m better than other people, I turn into something so much worse.”
He drowned his own waffle in syrup and took a bite that he hardly tasted.
“When I first started with the Marshals, I was a trainwreck, and I didn’t even know it. I was rigid, self-righteous ... just a total pain in the ass.” He remembered, belatedly, that even the mildest profanities were frowned upon here. “Sorry.”
“I’ve said worse,” Iris said. The corners of her eyes crinkled. “Way fucking worse.”
Keith smiled. “That’s good to know. So I was a pain in the ass. I was so focused on living up to the Council’s expectations—never slipping up, never letting my guard down for even a second—that I didn’t really have any of the virtues I was supposed to be showing off. Honor? Courage? Duty? Compassion? Too hard to figure out how to handle all that in the outside world, where everything’s messier, so I just stuck to the rule-sheet. Everything just felt hard and sort of miserable, since I knew I was in over my head, but the more it felt like that, the more I held on to the rules.”
There was no judgment in Iris’s face, at least not yet.
“Something obviously changed,” she said. “You’re not the person anymore.”
He hoped not.
“I was transporting a prisoner. He’d been a Marshal too, once, but he’d been convicted of murdering his partner. I thought he was everything that was wrong with the world, and it drove me crazy that the woman I was working with—Gretchen, on my old team—didn’t want me to treat him with contempt.”
“But he was a murderer.”
“No matter who he was, he was our responsibility. If we’d been trying to take him down, maybe sneering at him could’ve done some good, but we weren’t. He was already down. We were just trying to get him from one place to the other. She said we didn’t have to coddle him, but as much as we could afford to, we should treat him like a person.”
Iris nodded. “I can see that.”
“Then you can see more than I could, back then. I just told her I’d think about it. I mean, how could my moral purity ever recover if I didn’t make sure everybody knew I was better than them?”
“That would be the worst,” she said solemnly.
“Right? Total catastrophe. Never mind that I was also being a dick to my partner by jumping all over her every time she dared to say anything to this guy that wasn’t, ‘Shut up.’ But there was something else, too. She told me that our chief had worked with this prisoner before his conviction, and he wasn’t sure the guy he’d known could do something like this. Gretchen trusted our chief’s judgment enough to try to get a read on the prisoner herself. I didn’t. So when the prisoner said he didn’t do it, I said, ‘Shut up, everybody says that.’”
“Do they?”
“Oh, yeah, all the time. Maybe noteverybody, technically, but almost everybody.”
“So you had good reason to doubt him. You can’t take every claim like that seriously.”
