When we break to eat, Taryn and I climb up a tree to eat cheese and oatcakes slathered with chokecherry jelly. Fand calls up to me, wanting to know why I didn’t attend the rehearsal for the mock war.
“I forgot,” I call back to her, which is not particularly believable, but I don’t care.
“But you’re going to fight tomorrow?” she asks. If I pull out, Fand will have to rearrange teams.
Taryn gives me a hopeful look, as though I may come to my senses.
“I’ll be there,” I say. My pride compels me.
Lessons are almost over when I notice Taryn, standing beside Cardan, near a circle of thorn trees, weeping. I must not have been paying attention, must have gotten too involved in packing up our books and things. I didn’t even see Cardan take my sister aside. I know she would have gone, though, no matter the excuse. She still believes that if we do what they want, they’ll get bored and leave us alone. Maybe she’s right, but I don’t care.
Tears spill over her cheeks.
There is such a deep well of rage inside me.
You’re no killer.
I leave my books and cross the grass toward them. Cardan half-turns, and I shove him so hard that his back hits one of the trees. His eyes go wide.
“I don’t know what you said to her, but don’t you ever go near my sister again,” I tell him, my hand still on the front of his velvet doublet. “You gave her your word.”
I can feel the eyes of all the other students on me. Everyone’s breath is drawn.
For a moment, Cardan just stares at me with stupid, crow-black eyes. Then one corner of his mouth curls. “Oh,” he says. “You’re going to regret doing that.”
I don’t think he realizes just how angry I am or how good it feels, for once, to give up on regrets.
Taryn won’t tell me what Prince Cardan said to her. She insists that it had nothing to do with me, that he wasn’t actually breaking his promise not to hold her accountable for my bad behavior, that I should forget about her and worry about myself.
“Jude, give it up.” She sits in front of the fire in her bedroom, drinking a cup of nettle tea from a clay mug shaped like a snake, its tail coiling to make the handle. She has on her dressing gown, scarlet to match the flames in the grate. Sometimes when I look at her, it seems impossible that her face is also mine. She looks soft, pretty, like a girl in a painting. Like a girl who fits inside her own skin.
“Just tell me what he said,” I press.
“There’s nothing to tell,” Taryn says. “I know what I’m doing.”
“And what’s that?” I ask her, my eyebrows lifting, but she only sighs.
We’ve gone three rounds like this already. I keep thinking of the lazy blink of Cardan’s lashes over his coal-bright eyes. He looked gleeful, gloating, as though my fist tightening on his shirt was exactly what he would have wished. As though, if I struck him, it would be because he had made me do it.
“I can annoy you in the hills and also the dales,” I say, poking her in the arm. “I will chase you from crag to crag across all three islands until you tell me something.”
“I think we could both bear it better if no one else had to see,” she says, then takes a long pull of her tea.
“What?” I am surprised into not knowing what to say in return. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I think I could stand being teased and being made to cry if you didn’t know about it.” She gives me a steady look, as though evaluating how much truth I can handle. “I can’t just pretend my day was fine with you as a witness to what really happened. Sometimes it makes me not like you.”