I stare at him again after all. “You what?” And then my brain catches up, and I realize— “Your fire. You burned all the grime out of the temple? And—therewerebodies, then.”
Zan shakes his head. “No, mostly just bones. Teeth. They take a long time to decay.” He hesitates, and then adds more quietly, “Someone once told me that if you were ever to get a taste of freedom, the first thing you saw should be hopeful.”
The awfulness of my past cleansed in fire.
I wouldn’t have expected that to make a difference, but somehow it does.
Zan asks slowly, like he’s not sure how I’ll react, “Do you want to see? Your first view isn’t what I would have hoped, but we can try again.”
He means facing the priests.
But my first view of freedom was him shattering the walls around me.
“Can we?” I ask. “Try again.”
Seriously, Zan tells me, “I hope so.”
And suddenly, even though we don’t know each other, this moment has become intimate.
No one has ever seen me, truly, before. I both crave it with the intensity of all the wrath I’ve ever felt and also don’t know how to deal with it, so I get up.
Zan gathers the food back into his pack quickly and efficiently; a person who is used to having to flee at a moment’s notice.
To avoidbeing murdered and stripped for parts.
“Would no one have hidden you?” I blurt. “I know the Quiet was strongest up here, but it extended through the island, and there used to be a town—”
“There still is. Crystal Hollow. It’s bigger now, actually. And most people who live there do so to be freer from priest oversight, but not because they’re willing to take an actual stand against them. They mostly just keep their heads down and wait for problems to go away, but if a priest came to their door and pressed them...”
“Oh,” I say softly.
Zan glances up at me as he stands. “Therearepeople in Crystal Hollow who would have hidden me. But their neighbors might have sold them out, and then I’d have just gotten more people killed.”
I nod. “I understand. I’m extremely familiar with the concept of collateral damage.”
Zan also nods, more slowly. “Yes, I suppose you must be. But let me show you something thathasn’ttaken collateral damage.”
He starts to extend a hand to me, then appears to think better of it, his jaw tightening as he tucks his hand away.
I feel a pang in my chest.
I would have taken his hand.
But I also don’t feel like I can demand it.
We’re both very practiced at pretending to be what we’re not, though, that everything is fine, that there’s nothing worth noticing going on beneath the surface, so we stride easily toward the temple doors.
“How dramatic was my entrance?” I ask him lightly.
Zan’s lips quirk. “Extremely well-executed.”
Well, execution has always been a strength of mine, I think wryly.
Zan belatedly realizes his word choice too, a flicker of chagrin through his eyes which I wave off before he says anything.
Ihavekilled lots of people. Pretending otherwise won’t change that, and I have had five hundred years to accept the choices I made when my options were extremely limited.
The first time I had an opportunity that would mean saving more people than killing, that would actually change anything, even at the cost of my freedom, I took it.
