Tell the Wind and Fire

by Sarah Rees Brennan

  When he was done kissing me, my hands were against his chest. I would have put some force behind the gesture, I would have pushed him away, if I could have.

  “Forget you. What do you think I’m going to do next?” I whispered.

  He was smiling again, a small, private smile. I wondered if he thought he had won this round, if this was gloating. He murmured, “You’re going to kiss me back.”

  I spoke low, but as clearly as I was able, my voice all I could use to fight against the glitter of the ballroom and a boy who thought he knew better than me, cold and harsh to contrast with the soft, thrillingly romantic music.

  I said, “You’re wrong.”

  Then a cry broke through the bright air and silenced all the laughter and the whispers.

  As if I had caused it to happen by sheer force of will, the music stopped.

  We all turned to the sound of the scream and saw the waiter whose face I had thought I knew. At his feet was one of the Light guards, lying in a pool of his own blood. It spread as we watched, a dark blot on the shining floor in the bright room, and I thought for a moment that shadows had come to swallow us all.

  All the waiters drew weapons. Some of the members of the media put down their cameras and produced arms. New people poured in from the side doors. And the guests and guards who had not worn their swords, to show the city they had nothing to fear, found that this showcase of their power had become a trap. They drew together in a shining knot at the center of the room. Their exclusive, expensive group seemed suddenly so small.

  A call rose up, with the sound of knives behind it. “Free the Golden One!”

  “It’s the sans-merci!” a woman shouted. Another woman, the woman in the black dress with the red rings we had been talking to—a woman wearing the colors of the rebels, and how had I been so blind that I had not noticed?—turned and cut her down.

  The second scream of the night pierced the air. After that, the screaming did not stop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE PARTY HAD TRANSFORMED IN AN INSTANT into two packs: the hunters and the hunted.

  I could not think about escape, not immediately. Too many people, a seething mass of people, were already fighting to make their way out. They were so desperate, they were throwing themselves on swords in an attempt to live.

  I tried to move from Carwyn’s side and found I could not—he was holding me so tightly, I might as well have been chained. It did not matter what I did now. Nobody would notice.

  I kicked him viciously hard. I punched him in the chest and I set my nails into his face, raking the skin open. He let go of my waist and grabbed at one of my hands.

  I tried to twist away from that, too, but his grip was ferociously strong, as if he would rather break my hand or his own or both than allow the grip to be broken.

  “Let go!” I ordered. “Right now!”

  “No,” Carwyn said grimly.

  “Why not? What do you want with me?”

  “I want us to live, you idiot,” Carwyn snapped. “Together we can. I remember what you showed me at the club, even if you don’t.” He leaned in, his whisper as fierce as his grip on my hand. “You think anyone else has a Dark magician here in the heart of the Light? I’m your ticket out. Hold on to me.”

  “I don’t have to, do I?” I asked. “You won’t let go. You’re too keen to save your own skin.”

  Carwyn gave me a dark look, all doppelganger with nothing of Ethan in his face, and it was like seeing a white curtain lifted so a horror could grin out at you through the glass. He did not let go of my hand, and I did not let go either.

  “You can’t see us,” Carwyn murmured, and my rings blazed bright, reflected in his black eyes. I sent dazzling thoughts streaming through the room, around the rebels and the rich alike.

  I moved forward, and we almost walked into a woman holding a knife.

  “Has anyone seen the Golden One?” she called out, then squinted in my direction.

  They kept calling for the Golden One, but they didn’t want me. They didn’t even recognize me when they saw me. My name was nothing more than a rallying cry.

  Carwyn came nose to nose with her and whispered, “You can’t see us,” in her face. “You can’t see us,” he continued, voice soft but insistent. It seemed to wind, sinuous as a snake, around the senses. I reached out and touched her arm with my glowing hand.

  She blinked, hesitated, and lowered the knife. Her gaze refocused over Carwyn’s shoulder, on a different victim.

  I pulled Carwyn through the crowd as we went whispering and burning and unseen. I did not go for the doors. I went for the walls where the Light guards had hung up their swords in a glittering array, as a symbol of how safe we all were.

  One of the guards had almost made it. He was lying in a heap by the wall, a human being turned into an obstacle. There was a sword in his hand he had never gotten to use. I knelt down and slid his sword from the lax curve of his fingers. I could only look at the man’s slack, surprised face, at his blank eyes with the party lights still glittering in them, for a moment. Then I turned my face away from him and closed my fingers tighter around the hilt of his weapon. The power from my rings sent bright sparks skittering down the blade.

  I got to my feet.

  The hem of my dress touched my ankles, and it was wet and warm with blood. I had not been able to rise unstained, but I had risen up with a way to fight.

  Some of the sans-merci might have known how Light and Dark practitioners could work together, so we had to get out of there, and fast. We had to get out of sight while our advantage lasted. I began to walk toward a door that did not lead out but I thought might lead away. I shoved into the next room and found more chaos. In the brightly lit room, there were people lying dead and others being herded like animals. I saw one woman cringing in front of a blade, her silk dress torn and bloodied, and her carefully made-up face stained with tears and twisted with terror. The glossy façade of the Light world had cracked, and beneath the gloss everyone was just as frightened and just as easily hurt as me.

  Carwyn held on to my hand so hard that it felt as though my rings were being pressed into the bone, the light of them burning through our locked fingers.

  “Give me that,” Carwyn demanded, taking a break from whispering, and he nodded toward my sword.

  I snorted. “Give me a break.”

  A brief look of anger crossed Carwyn’s face, and I braced myself in case he tried to seize the weapon. He did not. Instead he lifted his other hand, the one holding the champagne bottle, as we passed a flight of marble stairs. He hit the bottle sharply against one marble step, and it broke into jagged halves. He swung his new weapon from his hand, its glass teeth catching the light, and smiled.

  “Guess it’s lucky boys from the Dark know how to improvise.”

  There was no time to answer him or to question how effective his weapon might be. I certainly had no intention of giving up my own.

  “You can’t see us,” I murmured, and Carwyn chanted with me.

  “You can’t see us.”

  We were almost at the door.

  Someone knocked into me, heavily, and the light streaming from my rings died in my surprise. It was Jim Stryker, and there was blood on his white shirt. His eyes were so wide, they looked round, white showing all around the brown irises, and he looked like a terrified animal or a beseeching child.

  He did not look at me. He looked at Carwyn, reaching out a hand, and said, “Ethan.”

  He was Ethan’s cousin, and Ethan loved him.

  Carwyn’s hand did not relax its grip on mine. Carwyn did not react in any way. I glanced at his face and found it cold and unmoved. He looked back at me, and not at Jim at all.

  I ripped my eyes away from the doppelganger and back to Jim.

  “Come on, quickly,” I said. “You need to come with—”

  One of the party guests, a man with his suit jacket ripped off to reveal a rough knot of black and scarlet tied on his upper arm, turned and sank h
is knife savagely into Jim’s back. Jim never even saw him.

  Jim coughed, a brief, startled burst of blood. His eyes did not leave Carwyn. He died looking so surprised, and so scared.

  He fell forward onto his face, and my hands shook. For a moment, I could not move forward, and yet I could not let my hands drop the sword. I was not horrified enough, not humane enough, to try to help him. But I was not quite selfish enough to leave him. I stared down at Jim for a terrible, trembling moment.

  “Come on,” Carwyn ordered under his breath, and he used his hold on my hand to tug me forward. He resumed his chant: “You can’t see us.”

  I swallowed, lit my rings, and stepped over Jim’s body. Carwyn and I ran headlong through the door.

  The door led to a flight of marble stairs. I could not lift my skirts, not when Carwyn would not let go of my hand and I could not let go of my sword. I ran up the stairs anyway. Carwyn ran with me, and above the rioting crowd it was cooler, moonlight filtering onto the marble under our feet.

  When I reached the second floor, I ran down the corridor of the hotel. It was empty, but there was a long, thick streak of blood painted across the saffron-colored carpet, a red road that passed under a door that was not quite closed. I crushed the impulse to push the door open. I could not afford to alert anyone to my presence, I could not help anyone, and I did not want to see what was in that room.

  I ran down the corridor instead, as if at the end of the bright stretch of carpet there would be a finish line.

  Instead there were large glass double doors, and I rushed to them, rushed into them, and they opened under the impact of my body.

  They led to a large balcony, the kind shaped like a huge china cup, attached to the wall. I ran outside, and the night air hit my hot face, the chill of the wind welcome, and I saw the elaborate gardens of the Plaza Hotel stretch before me. They were no longer lit by magic streamers; all I could see between the carefully tended hedges were shadows.

  I could jump and use magic to save myself, but I did not know what waited below. And I had used so much magic already. I drew in my first deep breath since I had seen Jim die, a desperate draft of cool night air, and tried to think. The sans-merci were not only within the walls of the Light city but within the walls of a stronghold. They had killed countless numbers of our most powerful leaders already. I did not know how I could get out of this alive.

  It was dark, dark as though it would never be bright again. This balcony should have been lit, but the only light was the pale, faltering rays coming from my own hands. I pulled my hand out of Carwyn’s. I tried to, at least, but he was still holding on.

  “Let go!” I said, patience snapping like a rope forced to bear a hundred times more weight than it could. “Do you think it’s funny to touch me without my permission, when you know I don’t want you to? Does it make you feel good about yourself?”

  Carwyn stared at me. “Nothing makes me feel good about myself.”

  He bit his lip after he had said that, as if he had not meant to say it or at least had not meant it to sound the way it did: like a confession.

  “Okay, here’s the thing,” I said after a startled moment. “I don’t care about your feelings because you don’t care about mine. And when you touch what you’re not meant to touch, it looks about as powerful and rebellious as someone walking on the grass when they’re not supposed to. It looks as stupid as a kid putting his sticky fingers on art. You look even stupider than that, because you’re treating a person like a piece of grass or a painting. But how stupid you are is not my main concern right now, because people are dying. Don’t waste my time by touching me or taunting me, or I’ll leave you to die as well.”

  The sans-merci were in the Light city. I had known that much. But I had never thought they could possibly lay waste to the Light magicians and the rich and the powerful. I had always thought their violent discontent would remain on the edges of my life.

  I remembered standing under the cages in Green-Wood Cemetery years ago, and felt as I had felt then: there would never be an escape from this, not really.

  I pulled my hand out of Carwyn’s, and he finally let me do it.

  Blood stained the back of my hand. I did not know whose it was—the first guard’s or Jim’s or some helpless stranger’s—but I covered my face with my newly freed hand and felt the cold press of rings against my closed eyelids, and for a moment I could not breathe.

  “So, since you seem to know everything,” Carwyn said, “what’s the plan?”

  I laughed. The laugh exploded from my lips, sick and sharp, the same way a sound of pain would have if I had been punched. I stepped in toward Carwyn and grabbed the too-tight collar of his shirt, twisting the material even tighter.

  “Going to do whatever I say, doppelganger?”

  The edges of his broken bottle rested against my bare arm, pricking against the flesh, uneven and promising pain. His smile looked just like the broken glass felt.

  “Sure.”

  I let go of his collar, pushing him with unnecessary force as I did so. He went backwards easily, leaning with one arm up against the marble balcony rail.

  I looked at my open hand, at my palms and my fingers, each circled and weighted with magic. I closed my fingers so tightly around the hilt of my sword that my rings cut into my hand. Metal on metal, and my flesh felt almost incidental, pressed between them and bound to be hurt.

  I lifted my sword, and Carwyn’s eyes widened briefly. It caused an abrupt and stunning sense of satisfaction within me. I was so scared, scaring someone else seemed like the only possible power in the world.

  I said slowly, “Do you think that anyone will notice another body on the floor tonight, Carwyn? Remember what I said when we were dancing? You’re going to tell me what you know. And you’re going to do it now.”

  I stepped forward, the point of my blade touching Carwyn’s shirt. The moonlight shimmered, turning the sword into a shining path that led to his heart.

  I continued softly, “The only value your life has to me is that you might lead me to him.”

  Carwyn gave a short laugh. “Ethan, Ethan. Always Ethan. I am so sick of hearing about Ethan.”

  “Just a thought,” I said. “If that’s the case, you shouldn’t have placed yourself in a position where everyone calls you Ethan! But you did that for a reason, didn’t you?”

  Carwyn made a mocking bow, shallow, because to make it any deeper would have been to spit himself on my sword. “But of course it was to spend more time in your charming company, being threatened with large weapons. You did point out recently that people were dying in this building. Could we pay some attention to that trifling matter?”

  “Like you care,” I said, and my own words seemed to add another layer of frost to this new, chilling world. “Like you turning up and then this attack happening is a coincidence. Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that?”

  Carwyn moved sharply away from the balcony rail and the point of the sword. I lunged after him and his eyes went wild, traveling in all directions, as he realized how very trapped he was on that balcony. He hadn’t thought I was going to be any sort of threat.

  “Please keep wildly accusing me,” he spat. “I’ll decide on my opinion of your intelligence when you’re done.”

  “What have you done?” I demanded. “Did you arrange for all these people to die? Did you direct the sans-merci here?”

  “Direct them?” Carwyn demanded in his turn. “The whole building was lit up with Light magic! It was a beacon you can see from halfway across the world. I don’t know why you think the revolution needs to be directed to the great big shiny thing!”

  He said “the revolution” instead of “the rebellion.” A rebellion implied something tried, whereas a revolution implied something that had succeeded in turning the whole world upside down. I knew it was true, that our city, my two cities, had now been tipped over into chaos, turned into something entirely new. This was no minor upset that could be made right. This
was the ending of a world, and I blamed him for it.

  “You show up, you murder Ethan’s father, you take Ethan’s place, you steal his life and do Light knows what to him, and you expect me to believe you have nothing to do with it when disaster comes raining down on all our heads? If you were innocent, you would not be here!”

  “I’m very flattered that you think I’m a devious criminal mastermind who comes up with elaborate schemes to topple cities that none can defeat,” said Carwyn, “but you are seriously overestimating me. I’m not part of any revolution. Why would I kill Charles Stryker? He was the one who made sure the law protecting doppelgangers passed. He was protecting me from his brother. He was a lot more use to me alive than dead. The sans-merci killed Charles Stryker, and I am not one of them. Who would trust a doppelganger to be their comrade? I am entirely self-serving and I am entirely alone. I left the Dark city on my own because the place is a deathtrap. Nobody should know that better than you. Your mother died in the Dark, and now someone else you love is lost there.”

  We were both panting, and the new suspicion that came to me was just another blow. It did not even surprise me. Carwyn seemed like the avatar of all evil in this moment, as if he was responsible for every wrong that had ever been done to me and mine. My hand trembled, but my sword did not. I knew why people hated doppelgangers. I knew why they killed them.

  “Do you know anything about what happened to Jarvis?”

  “No! All I know is that he’s gone,” said Carwyn. “And that’s why your precious boyfriend came to find me. That’s why he hunted me down through the back streets of the Light city to offer me enough money to live on for the rest of my life. He wanted to go and save this Jarvis guy, because he’d sent him to the Dark city and he felt responsible, and because he thought you would never forgive him if he did not bring Jarvis back. He knew he couldn’t disappear at a time like this. He knew you and the whole Light city would panic. He knew an election was coming and a scandal would lose his uncle the leadership of the Light Council. He had to go and have nobody miss him. So he came to me and I took his money. I said that I wouldn’t tell anybody the truth, no matter what, and I didn’t, even when you came in and knew who I was right away. I’m not working with the sans-merci. I’m working for Ethan.”