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I turn to Mar, who’s glaring at me stubbornly. She pushed me tonight, and she might have been right to do so, but she was also cruel. “Redo my shields.”
I don’t ask, I tell her.
She nods tightly. “I’ll do what I can.”
CHAPTERSIXTEEN
THE MURDERER
Iswim. I swim as if my life depends on it, though it doesn’t. Everyone else’s does instead.
I was eleven when I killed one of my best friends.
Eldan wasn’t the first thing I killed, but he was the last. I made sure of it.
Estelle was patient. When my handmaiden, a wild hag with woven vines for hair, burst into pieces of flesh and blood for brushing my hair too hard, they told me it was normal. That accidents would happen as I was growing up.
I believed them.
When the palace guard kept me to the grounds though I wanted to leave to play with the imps in the wood, and I seared his flesh off his bones, they told me he shouldn’t have denied me. He should have known better. It was all his fault.
But it wasn’t. Deep inside me, I knew it wasn’t. I hadn’t meant to do anything to him. I’d just been frustrated and wanted to go out like any child told to stay in on the equinox.
I’d been out of control. But my family soothed me. Me, the murderer. I suppose they didn’t care much how much blood I spilled because all of them had killed, over and over.
I should have gotten better as I grew older. More in control. I should have begun to understand my abilities, and while accidents were expected, they were supposed to be less fatal after a while.
I kept killing. Animals, servants, strangers no one would miss. Not accounting for the bodies I left in my wake in my few short years, anyone who displeased me suffered in some way. Losing their voices, their sight, their magik. Losing parts of themselves.
By the time I murdered Eldan, I was already a monster twenty times over.
I let go of all thoughts and worldly concerns, and swim harder.
It’s the middle of the night. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to be in the undercity assisting at the clinic, and the next day is Lughnasadh. I’ll be exhausted, but that’s the point. I need my body to be too weak to perform major spells.
I trust that Marline did her very best to rebuild the shields keeping the monster at bay, though she doesn’t approve of my locking my powers in. She will have done it well because she knows Valina would be pissed if she found out that she’d sabotaged me.
Valina doesn’t approve of my path either, but she allows me to make my own decisions. She built the original shields separating my conscious self from my abilities. After I blew them open, Mar mended them. Unfortunately, powerful as my cousin is, she’s not Valina. I need to get to the Darklands and ensure that the shields are in place this weekend. Now more than ever, I know I shouldn’t attend Reiks’s party, but he’s not giving me a choice, so I’ll leave right after. I can syphon away the bulk of my power and reconstruct all the spells around my mind.
I elect to skip the clinic and catch up on sleep. I send them a raven message to warn that I’m sick, and go to sleep as the sun comes up. When I wake, sooner than I would have liked, I stay in my room with a good book and a cup of cocoa, opting for a me-day.
The sun’s going down again when someone knocks on my door and enters without invitation. Callan wordlessly joins me on top of the bed where I’m sitting up to read. He puts his head on my lap and breathes out. “It made me think about him. About what happened eleven years ago.”
He still can’t say the simple truth: I killed his twin.
“He would have been proud of you, you know.”
I look away from my book, frowning down at Cal.
“Not the whole giving up on your magik thing. He would have hated that. I’m fairly certain he’d haunt your ass if he knew. But saving Gil. I know it must have been scary for you, but you still did it. You were selfless.”
I can’t manage a smile. He’s kinder than Mar, but he’s nonetheless saying he believes I’m selfish for not using the abilities I was born with.
“I get it, you know. I could have killed Gil yesterday. If it weren’t for you, I would have. I love the idiot, and I would have murdered him. I’m not even eleven, like you were back then. I’m twice that age. I’m supposed to have my shit together by now.”
“You and me both,” I chuckle.
I keep reading, and Callan falls asleep like a kitten on my lap, vulnerable as ever.
