We never did get back to it.
But I want it on the record that it existed. That before he was a monster I built and a wolf they freed and a man with blood on his hands in a burning house, Lazarus Frost was a boy who wanted to build bridges, who cranked a dead woman’s gramophone so a stray girl wouldn’t be alone in the dark, who laughed once, rustily, and held out his hand and saidshe’d be insulted if nobody danced.
I sent that boy to prison too.
I keep finding new ones to grieve.
CHAPTER 20
WREN —Then
Seven years ago.
I should tell you about Silas, because by the end he matters as much as any of us, and because the version of him everyone met later, the lawyer’s smile, the patient planner, the man who’d arrange a wolf, didn’t come from nowhere. I watched it grow. I had a front-row seat to the manufacture of a monster, the way I had a front-row seat to the manufacture of a wall, in the same house, off the same father, and the difference between what Lazarus made of Augustus and what Silas made of him is the whole tragedy of that family in one sentence: Lazarus took his father’s patience and turned it into the strength tonottake. Silas took the same patience and turned it into the long game of getting everything.
He was the favored one. That was the open secret of Marrowfield, the thing the house was built around, AugustuslikedSilas, approved of him, groomed him, the way you groom an heir, and AugustuslovedLazarus, helplessly, furiously, the way you can’t help loving the one who fights you, and Silas spent his whole childhood watching his father withhold the warm thing from him and spend it on the brother who didn’t even want it. It made him into something. It would have made anyone into something. He learned that love was a finite resource hoarded by people who didn’t deserve it, and he decided, early, that theanswer was to stop wanting to be loved and start arranging to beowed.
He was seventeen when I was seventeen, no. He was older, twenty, sly and polished and already wearing the good coat in his head, and that was the winter he decided I was his.
Not the way Augustus thought of me. Augustus thought of me as Iris, as a replacement, as a thing to be grown and finished and slotted into a dead girl’s rooms. Silas thought of me asinheritance.He’d done the math his father never bothered to teach him out loud but taught him anyway in every line of that house: the girl is property, the property passes down, and Lazarus, the dog, the one who’d never play the long game, would self-destruct eventually, would do something violent and stupid in defense of something, and when he did, everything he’d been standing in front of would fall to the careful son. Including me.
He cornered me once, that winter, in the conservatory with the loose pane, where I’d gone to be alone because it was the one room nobody wanted. He didn’t touch me. Silas never needed to touch a thing to claim it; that was the whole difference between him and his father, and it made him worse, not better. He just stood in the doorway, they all loved a doorway, that family, and he looked at me with Augustus’s measuring eyes in a younger face, and he said, conversational, like he was discussing the weather on the pass:
“You know he can’t keep you. Lazarus. Whatever you two think you’re doing with that wall.” A smile. “He’s going to burn himself down. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, stand in front of things until something breaks him. And when he does, Father will be gone too, one way or another, men like Father alwaysare, and it’ll just be me. The house, the name, the money.” His eyes went over me, slow, proprietary, a man pricing a thing he’s already decided to buy on credit. “And you. You’ll still be here, little stray, because where would you go? You’ll need keeping. I’m the one who’ll still be standing to keep you. I’m patient. I can wait for my brother to do the work of losing you for me.”
I told him I’d rather die.
He laughed, genuinely, delighted, the first time I’d ever heard Silas Frost sound like a real person, and he said, “That’s what makes it perfect. You’ll choose the dog every time, right up until the dog’s gone. And then you won’t have a choice. I’ve never once in my life gotten the thing I wanted by being chosen, Wren. I get them by being the one who’sleft.” And he stepped out of the doorway, and let me pass, and I felt his eyes on my back the whole way down the hall like a hand I’d have to wash off.
I went straight to Lazarus. Of course I did. I climbed the stairs and I knocked our knock and I sat on the floor of his room and didn’t even have to say it; he read it off me, the way he read everything, and his jaw went hard and he said only, “I know what he is. I’ve always known. Stay out of the east wing and stay out of empty rooms with my brother, and when I get you out of this house, I’m getting you out so far he can’t inherit the air you breathe.” And I believed him, and I was right to, and that belief is the exact thing Silas spent six years in the dark turning into a weapon, because he heard about it, somehow, the way he heard about everything; he filed it away;she climbed over me to get to you;and he waited, patient, the last patient man in a patient family, for the day my wolf would burn himself down and leave me with no one standing but the brother I’d told I’d rather die than be kept by.
He waited six years.
I handed him the match myself, in a grey dress, on a witness stand.
I made Lazarus burn himself down. I lit it, I testified to it, I sent the dog to the pound and told the world he was rabid, and somewhere two counties away a patient man in a good coat read about it and smiled and began, very slowly, to plan the night he’d finally be the one left standing.
I didn’t know, at seventeen, in a cold conservatory, that I was being promised to two different monsters at once. The one who wanted to make me into the dead, and the one who wanted to inherit me off his brother’s corpse.
I only knew that the one who saidlittle lambwas the one I ran to.
I’ve never once been sorry about which monster I chose. I want that on the record too. Of all the terrible choices in this story, the running-to-Lazarus was never one of them.
It was the only thing my whole bought, measured, inherited life ever got completely right.
INTERLUDE
LAZARUS —Then
Fourteen years ago.
I need to tell you about my sister, because Wren can’t, she never met her, she only ever slept in her bed and wore her face and traced her warnings in the dark, and because if you don’t understand Iris you don’t understand the first thing about why I am the way I am, why I don’t sleep, why I built a whole self out of standing in doorways. Everyone thinks the wall started with Wren. It didn’t. The wall started in a room where my sister was dying, and the first knock I ever answered, I answered too late.
Iris was the youngest of us and the only warm thing the house ever made. Father got me and got Silas and got, I think, exactly the sons he deserved, one who fought him and one who studied him, and then, late, almost as an afterthought, he got a small bright laughing girl who looked at that cold enormous house like it was a place a person could be happy in, and who was, somehow, against all the evidence, happy in it. She had a gap in her teeth. She collected foreign coins she’d never spend. She drew horses, and a dog she wasn’t allowed to have. She called meLazbefore anyone else did, when she was three and couldn’t manage the rest of it, and it stuck, and every single time Wren says it now some part of me is fifteen again and being summoned down a cold hall to a little girl’s room to be shown a drawing.
I was fifteen the winter Iris got sick.
It started as nothing, things always start as nothing in that house, a cough, a fever, the doctor up the pass and then the pass closing the way it always closes when it matters most, snow shutting us in with it. Father did what Father did with anything that became inconvenient or imperfect: he withdrew from it. He did not sit with her. He hummed in the halls and stayed in his wing and let the fever be the staff’s problem, and then, when the staff couldn’t get back up the mountain through the snow, let it be mine. I think now he’d already decided she was a loss. I think he grieved her while she was still warm to the touch, the way you write a thing off before it’s gone so the going can’t take anything you hadn’t already surrendered. That’s a Frost for you. We surrender the people we love in advance and call it strength.
