“It’s not stealing if I agreed to give it away, Ari, and would you please stop yelling? My head is pounding from the drain.”
“I’m sorry, youagreedto that?” I gape at Saleen—and glare at Chase until he has the good sense to look embarrassed. “But we heard you from the porch; you were in pain.”
“Yeah, well, it’s never the most enjoyable experience,” she mutters, in a way that strongly suggests this exchanging of power wasn’t her first.
Because it wasn’t.All at once, Ezzo’s unlikely escape from the court chamber starts to make sense. The sheer amount of magic Chase would have needed to glamour an entire room full of Shades was always more than could have reasonably come from one Red, never mind one Gold. But add another Red into the mix—specifically, the most promising Red the Academy has seen in years—and suddenly, the deed becomes far more conceivable.
Saleen must have helped them get in and out of the castle.
And ludicrous as that might seem, I believe it from Saleen; the Shade who’s made it plenty clear how she feels about the Council’s justice, who’s made public her disdain for the trackers—despite her parents’ occupations—and who was in that hall when she’d usually have spurned such a summons, perfectly placed to indulge her lust for rebellion.
“The glamour at the execution, that was you. Your power,” I say, and it isn’t a question.
“Huh. You worked that out faster than I expected.” Saleen shrugs, entirely devoid of shame. Then to Chase, she says, “You should blink back and join the others, this may take a minute.”
A little more than a minute, I’d venture, judging by the storm brewing in Akari’s veins.
“Colors help me, Sal—are youinsane?” she hisses the moment he’s phased. “Helping a half breed escape is treason. The Council could kill you for that!”
“They kill Hues for absolutely nothing, so why should I be any different?” The bitterness in Saleen’s reply is bewildering. She’s outspoken, yes, but I’ve never heard her express any kind of opinion about Hues before, let alone show them sympathy. Then again, most of our interactions have been colored by her dislike of me—“she’s like a dog with separation anxiety”—and my anger towards the way she ended things with Akari—“what kind of coward leaves a fucking note? After three years!”. I have no earthly idea what goes on in that self-important head of hers, though even in my wildest dreams, I wouldn’t have imagined this.
“What are you two doing out of the castle, anyway?” Saleen asks, dropping down to the couch before she loses her feet. “How did you even know I was here?”
“No. Uh-uh. You don’t get to change the subject,” Akari spits. “What are you playing at, Sal, harboring a half breed? Giving him your color?”
“You know what, fine, you want to do this, we’ll do this. But for the love of all three Gods, Akari, would you please stop yelling and come sit? I’m not going to explain while you’re both glowering over me.” Saleen crosses her arms in challenge until, with a huff, Akari rolls her eyes and folds down next to her, leaving me to take the armchair.
“This had better be good,” she grumbles, staring daggers at her ex.
“That’s really going to depend on your definition.” Saleen nervously tugs at her braid, steeling herself with a breath before starting. “You’re already well aware that I have no love for the Council, and I know that’s never sat right with you given what my parents do, but the truth is, they have no love for the Council, either. For the past decade, they’ve been working against the guild from the inside.”
“What do you mean,working against the guild?” Akari repeats the words like they’re of another language. “You told me they were out on a hunt this week, how is that working against anything?”
“They can get more done from the inside,” Saleen says it simply. “Warn rogues, hide evidence, help steer their colleagues away from suspected Hues. It’s a tricky balance, but they’ve done a lot of good over the years.”
“So, you consider saving half breeds a good thing, now?”
“Hues, Ari,” Saleen corrects with a sigh. “And they’re not what you think. The Council’s been lying about their kind for centuries. We have the books to prove it.”
“To prove what, exactly? That all three of you have lost your minds?”
“No . . . to prove that four hundred years ago, a Hue was born with the power to steal magic from the Gray. Just a single Hue, Ari—an exceedingly rare dilution of Yellow. But the Church found that Amber and they used his power to try and collapse the shadows. Came pretty close to it, by all accounts, which freaked the elders out enough to eradicate the rest. They’ve been feeding us lies ever since.”
“You can’t actually believe that.” Akari scrubs a hand over her face. “I mean, come on, Sal, how would the Council even orchestrate such a conspiracy?”
“By disseminating misinformation,” Saleen answers the question as though it was asked of her in good faith. “By burning records and having them altered. We have a whole library in this house of the true texts—and even if they didn’t believe the books, my parents saw the truth for themselves last year, when they were called to Isitar to help track another Amber. But by the time they got there, someone had already put an end to the threat—just in time, too, though it sure wasn’t the Council,” she says, inadvertently confirming Ezzo’s tale.
I was there when we stopped the Amber.
Somehow, he and his friends managed to succeed where the trackers failed.
“Okay, but if anything, doesn’t that prove the opposite?” Akari’s voice turns imploring. “That Huesaredangerous?”
“I can see why it might seem that way, but just . . . think about it for a second. Forget everything we’ve been taught and think about it logically,” Saleen says. “If the Council has purged all the Hues—if instead of the thousands that had existed for centuries, there are only a handful left—then how could they still be destabilizing the Gray? How could the same thing that happened four hundred years ago have happened again last year? Doesn’t that feel more like deliberate malice to you than some quirk of fate?”
Her point hits me square in the chest. A handful of Hues shouldn’t affect the Gray the same way thousands do; if they did, the shadows would constantly be in dire straits.
Which is exactly what Ezzo said.My gut squirms with the realization. When he first told me this story, I dismissed it as a self-serving tale, yet here I am, considering its merits now that it’s coming from another Shade. Hells, now that it’s coming from Saleen, even Akari’s resolve is beginning to wane.
