They all exchanged mistrusting glances at that, though a small sensation of distaste was reserved for her specifically.
“I merely said it aloud,” Parisa told Reina. “Everyone would have come to the same conclusion eventually.”
“You think we’ll turn on each other?” asked Nico, disbelieving.
“We could be easily split into factions,” Parisa confirmed, “in which case it would become a race.”
That seemed to ring true without exception. Already, none of them trusted the others enough to believe they wouldn’t turn assassin once things got dire.
“Who would do it? If we actually chose someone.” Nico cleared his throat, clarifying, “If we were all in agreement on… him.”
“I will,” Parisa said, shrugging. “If that’s what’s necessary and I have your support, I’m perfectly capable of doing it.”
“No.”
Libby’s interruption both surprised Parisa and didn’t. The others turned, equally wary and braced for the argument to come—murder is wrong, morality and virtue, so on and so forth—but it never arrived.
At least, not the argument Parisa anticipated.
“It has to be sacrifice, not retribution,” Libby said. “Isn’t that the purpose of studying intent, unluck?”
There was no answer for a moment.
Then Reina said, “Yes.”
That, apparently, was enough to spur Libby onward. “The texts make it clear that spells cast in vengeance or retaliation will only corrupt over time. If this is for the purpose of moving forward in the library—if it’s even going to have any value at all,” she amended firmly, “then it can’t be someone who’d be happy to see him go, and certainly not someone indifferent to him. It can’t be someone whose soul won’t suffer from the cost of it. The arrow is most lethal only when it is most righteous, and that means one thing.”
She rose to her feet, turning to where Tristan sat alone at the table, eyes locked on his tea.
“It will have to be you,” Libby said.
It was clear at once that Reina agreed, and Nico, too. Parisa, out of habit, slid unobtrusively into Tristan’s thoughts, testing them.
Inside Tristan’s head were a meld of memories and visions, a monster of many parts. Callum’s voice, Parisa’s lips, Libby’s hands. They blurred together, inconstant, inarticulate. Libby was right about one thing, at least: It would be a sacrifice indeed from Tristan. There was love in him, too much and still insufficient, twisted and anguished and equal in consequence to fear. It was a type of love Parisa had seen before: easily corruptible. The love of something uncontrollable, invulnerable. A love enamored with its own isolation, too frail to love in return.
Tristan wasn’t thinking about anything, but was instead suffering it all acutely, intensely. Intensely enough that Callum would feel his distress soon.
Parisa threw the library doors open quickly, anticipating Callum’s appearance, when sharply the agony from Tristan broke, colliding with some internal ceiling. A little slip of parchment from his head ignited suddenly in flames; curling edges that fell to smoldering pieces, crumbling to ash.
“Fine,” he said.
One word for eventuality to surface.
AN INTERLUDE
“MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO STARVE,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people want naturally and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. You can learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and eventually it fades. But still you never forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After learning to starve, when someone finally gives you something you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn how to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.”