“Must I tell you that if your blade had struck true and you’d hurt Taryn, you would have regretted it all your days? Of all the lessons I imparted to you, I would have thought that was the one I taught you best.” His gaze is steady on mine. He’s talking about my mother. He’s talking about murdering my mother.
I can say nothing to that.
“It is a shame you didn’t take out that anger on someone more deserving. In times like these, the Folk go missing.” He gives me a significant look.
Is he telling me it’s okay to kill Locke? I wonder what he’d say if he knew I’d already killed one of the Gentry. If I showed him the body. Apparently, maybe, congratulations.
“How do you sleep at night?” I ask him. It’s a crappy thing to say, and I am only saying it, I know, because he has shown me just how close I am to being everything I have despised in him.
His eyebrows furrow, and he looks at me as though he’s evaluating what sort of answer to give. I imagine myself as he must see me, a sullen girl sitting in judgment of him. “Some are good with pipes or paint. Some have skill in love,” he says finally. “My talent is in making war. The only thing that has ever kept me awake was denying it.”
I nod slowly.
He gets up. “Think about what I’ve said, and then think about where your own talents lie.”
We both know what that means. We both know what I am good at, what I am—I just chased my sister around the downstairs with a sword. But what to do with that talent is the question.
As I exit the game room, I realize that Balekin must have arrived with his retainers. Knights with his livery—three laughing birds emblazoned on their tabards—stand at attention in the hall. I slink past them and up the stairs, dragging my sword behind me, too exhausted to do anything else.
I am hungry, I realize, but I feel too sick to eat. Is this what it is to be brokenhearted? I am not sure it is Locke I am sick over, so much as the world the way it was before the coronation began. But if I could undo the passing of the days, why not unwind them to before I killed Valerian, why not unwind them until my parents are alive, why not unwind them all the way to the beginning?
There’s a knock on my door, and then it opens without my signaling anything. Vivi comes in, carrying a wooden plate with a sandwich on it, along with a stoppered bottle of amber glass.
“I’m a jerk. I’m an idiot,” I say. “I admit it. You don’t have to lecture me.”
“I thought you were going to give me a hard time about the glamour,” she says. “You know, the one you resisted.”
“You shouldn’t magic your sisters.” I draw the cork on the bottle and take a long swig of water. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was. I guzzle more, nearly draining the whole container in one continuous gulping swallow.
“And you shouldn’t try to chop yours in half.” She settles back against my pillows, against my worn stuffed animals. Idly, she picks up the snake and flicks the forks of its felt tongue. “I thought all of it—swordplay, knighthood—I thought it was a game.”
I remember how angry she was when Taryn and I gave in to Faerie and started having fun. Crowns of flowers on our heads, shooting bows and arrows at the sky. Eating candied violets and falling asleep with our heads pillowed on logs. We were children. Children can laugh all day and still cry themselves to sleep at night. But to hold a blade in my hand, a blade like the one that killed our parents, and think it was a toy, she’d have to believe I was heartless.
“It’s not,” I say finally.
“No,” Vivi says, wrapping the stuffed snake around the stuffed cat.
“Did she tell you about him?” I ask, climbing onto my bed next to her. It feels good to lie down, maybe a little too good. I am instantly drowsy.