The Hidden City (96 page)

And yet . . . she wanted to walk out on him. To leave him to Duster. To find, in the hollows of her imagination, a death for him that would linger, a death that he would greet, in the end, with relief. A death that she could set against the other memories that would not leave, her own bleeding, her bruises, her own loss.

She saw Duster clearly. Saw Duster, for a moment, in herself. Understood that what she had planned so clearly, and so easily was no small thing to ask.

But it had to be possible, to ask it.

And she
had
to be able to ask it.

Carver said, “We're not leaving without you.”

She could have ordered him to leave. She could have done that. But she had asked. And she had been rejected. And perhaps, in the end, that was for the best. She said, “I'm fine.” And sounded fine. To herself; perhaps to them.

Rath said nothing.

But when she turned to Duster, when she looked again at Lord Waverly, she asked a single question. “Duster, is that what I sounded like?”

And Duster's face contorted, as if the question itself had been asked in a language that she had heard so long ago she had to struggle with the memories to even understand it.

Jewel
hated
the question. But it was the right question, and something surrounding her snapped as it left her, breaking cleanly in the middle, and allowing her to emerge. Not unscathed, never that, but the shadows no longer engulfed her; she could reach out to either side and touch them; she could draw them back in and hold them in what she had idealistically called her heart, or she could deny them: but she could never again be unaware of them.

She said, again, with a slowly building revulsion, “Is that what I sounded like? Did you hear me?”

And Duster shook her head in confusion, although her knife hand did not waver, and her determination did not break.

“He
deserves
this,” she hissed. “After what he did—to me—to you—he deserves this. You must know that.”

Jewel beckoned Carver forward, and he came instantly, wordlessly. She held out her knife, and he understood what she asked of him; he took it. He was the sheath.

“He deserves this,” Jewel replied calmly, coolly now. “But you don't.”

Confusion, uncertainty. This, too, was Duster. It was the only way in which she showed vulnerability, and it was close to the edge.

“I kept my word,” Jewel said, as proudly as her Oma would have said it, and with just as much determination. “But this is not what
I
want.”

“And if it's what
I
want?”

“Then you'll take it,” Jewel replied. “Just as he did. You'll take what you want. But you'll be him, Duster. You'll
be him,
and I will not have you in my den if you make that choice.

“Kill him,” Jewel added. “But kill him quickly.”

“But
why
—”

And something broke again, and it was a good break, and Jewel looked at Duster, met her eyes, held them. “I'm not strong enough,” she said, soft voice now, almost a whisper although no one in the room could have missed it. “I'm not strong enough for this. I could kill him,” she added. “I want to kill Lord Waverly. I do want that. I'm not ashamed of it.

“But I
can't
kill this man. I could have killed him, when he was—” She shook her head. “But not like this.” And it was true. All of it.

Because Duster had not answered her question, Jewel did. “I did sound like that.” It was costly. To say it. To admit it. But more costly, in the end, to hide it. She would not always be strong. She was not her Oma. But
if
she could somehow manage to be strong at the right time, at the right minute, if that was all the grace that was allowed her—that would be enough. Had to be.

He tried to speak to her. He saw the weakness. He understood that, were he now in a room without Duster, he would be allowed to crawl out. And it would be wrong. He would recover, and he would have power again, and he would use it in the way that he had used it, time and again.

“Kill him,” Jewel said quietly. “But understand the difference between an execution and . . . what he does. What he did. Be an executioner,” she added. “Be my executioner. But only that.”

“That's—that's Rath talking!” Duster almost spit. But the knife did not cut again; she was held there, staring.

And Rath said, “No,” in a quiet voice. “I would leave him to you.”

Finch had turned away, and Teller was staring at his feet. Carver, by Jewel's side, had not moved an inch, but she could not see his face in the shadow of his hair. Arann, silent, was expressionless. Lefty could not be seen. But Lander? Lander, silent and voiceless, came out of the shadows. Lander moved across the room as if the invisible boundaries which split it into so many disparate pieces did not exist at all. As if Duster was beside him, beside them.

And he knelt, and Waverly
must
have recognized him.

But it was not to Waverly that he looked. Not to Waverly that he lifted his hands slowly. He did not touch Duster. No one did. But in the air between them, the movement of his fingers made his gestures spinnerets, and a web of simple words formed that even Jewel could read.

Do what she says
.

Duster could not answer in kind without losing her knife and her grip, without surrendering the power she had gained. She used words instead. “I promised you,” her voice was low now, “I promised.”

And because Lefty's slow labor was not yet up to the task of the discussion, because the den, in spite of their delight in their own secret tongue, did not yet have a signal for something as weighty and defining as
promise
or vow, he spoke.

“You promised you would kill him,” he told her. “Kill him. And come home.”

“But I—”

“Cleanly,” he told her. “Because Jay is right. You don't have to do this.”

“I
want
to do this.”

“Yes. But you don't have to. You are not Lord Waverly.”

So many things had broken this evening. So many silences. So many beliefs. “I
am
.”

There it was: the despair. The thread of it. Jewel wanted to catch it and hold it, because this was the only hope that she held for Duster, and she accepted it. She had not known whether or not Duster would come home with her at the evening's end; she hadn't
seen
it. She could not clearly see it now, and if she had called the sight a curse, she wanted to be cursed, truly, forever.

She hadn't known, until this moment, whether or not she wanted Duster. And she knew now, and this, too, she accepted.

So she said, in Torra, in a language she knew Duster would understand, “You aren't judged by what you want. If we were, you and I would be no different. It's only what you do, in the end, that counts.

“It was easy for me. That's what you want to say. It was
easy
. Let me say it for you. It was. It's
not
easy now. And maybe . . . Kalliaris' frown, maybe I had to
learn
what it is that you—what
hard
means.

“And it
doesn't matter
whether it's easy or not.” Breath was cleaner, clearer. “That's your trap. You think it's only about what you want. You think you only want one thing. You can only
have
one, but that's not the same.” She turned to look over her shoulder. “We don't have much time. Decide.”

Rath closed his eyes. It was brief, this momentary denial; it could have been a long, slow blink. But for just a moment—for less than a moment—he could not look at Jewel. He could meet her eyes; he could force himself to do that much, could mime neutrality and distance. He could pretend to be unmoved, for the moment, by what held him fast: the sight of her, the words that she had just spoken.

For as long as he lived, he would remember them clearly, not because she had spoken them—but because of when, because the context itself made them almost incandescent to a man of his age, to a man who had made the choices he had made in angry ignorance. He wanted to apologize to her, but apology itself was a thin and pale thing, and it felt hollow enough that he could not bring himself to say the words.

Or perhaps, he thought bitterly, he had
never
been capable of speaking the words. Apology and pride were at opposite ends of a long life, and having chosen the one, he could not now lower himself to the other. Or, in this one moment, elevate himself, rise above himself. Become, he could see this clearly, like
her
. Like Jewel.

Like Amarais.

Duster was silent, as silent as Rath. Rath understood all the nuances of that silence, and he thought—although he could not be certain—that Jewel
did not
. That Jewel did not understand how much of what had passed here had passed
because
of Duster, her choice, and her bitter, ugly envy, her hatred, her scarred and twisted thoughts.

If you understood her, if you truly understood her,
he thought,
would you offer her this much? Would you take her in?

And looking at Duster's face, which now concealed
nothing
, he knew that word for word, it was her thought, and her fear. But it was also her hope, who deserved none. He wanted to kill her.

And knew, even as the desire was mastered, that it was misplaced; that it was not Duster, in the end, who had failed, but Rath himself. He had laid out a clever and sophisticated trap; it was a simple one. But he had not seen clearly enough, and if in the end, the trap had closed, it had closed in ways that only the foolish or the sadistic would be glad of. Rath was neither.

He would have killed Lord Waverly himself. He would have given him the death he deserved. He saw, for just a moment, that Duster was like a mirror; something he could look into. Liking what he saw was not even in question. He had always understood her.

And yet.

“Jewel is correct,” he heard himself say quietly. Every word measured, because it had to be, for Jewel's sake. Perhaps for his own. “You have little time. I think the boy—” He shrugged. “If you are here when the magisterial guards arrive, it will go ill with you.”

The death of Patris AMatie would never be traced, if it was even discovered at all; what did fine ash mean, to the magisterians? Fire, perhaps, or something equally inexplicable. They might summon their mages, or even those who could bespeak the Lord of Judgment, but in the end, he thought they would do no such thing. Lord Waverly was not a man well-loved or well-respected.

But he was a lord.

What will you do, Duster?

 

Duster was afraid.

She could not—at this moment—remember a time in her life when she had not been afraid. Afraid of pain, yes. Of loss. Of starvation, which in the end made everything else look so much more appealing. You could force yourself to do almost anything to stop the hunger.

But there wasn't very much you could do to stop the pain. Pain was something that other people caused. And pain was something that other people—like Duster—could learn from. Like a lesson, like the most valuable of lessons, the right pain taught you everything about life you needed to know.

Everything about power.

Power was supposed to be the guarantee. When you had power, the fear belonged to someone else. Fear existed like that; it was always there. Somebody had to bear it. She knew this. She had
won
. Waverly was here, and he was hers.

But the triumph she had felt—and she
had
felt it, and she tried to cling to it as it burned to ash—was crumbling. She knew she'd won; it wasn't her blood on her hands. Or her face. It wasn't her who was whimpering, pleading, it wasn't her who—

She had suffered. He deserved to suffer.

And Jay understood that, now.

But she stood there, still stood there, holier than thou, offering with one hand and demanding with the other. She
understood
what Duster had suffered, and she had
let it go
.

Duster should have hated her for it. She
wanted
to hate her. She almost ignored her; she could do that, here. She understood Jay, or thought she did, and she knew that if she made the choice, Jay would just walk away, same as she had just walked in.

And the bad part was: Duster didn't want her to leave. She had, she had told herself she was quit of Jewel once she'd gotten what she wanted. And here it was, but she wasn't certain that it
was
what she wanted. No, she was certain she wanted it.

But there was something else here that she couldn't—didn't dare—put into words, not even in the privacy of thought, where no one but the gods, curse them all, could hear her if they bothered to listen at all.

Jewel had seen, and understood, and Jewel was waiting. She was waiting for Duster. She was offering her something that Duster had never had and had always said she never wanted: a home. A place.

“What—what do you want from me?” she managed to say.

“I want you to kill him quickly and come home,” Jewel replied.

“No,” Duster said. “Not that. I don't mean that. If I—if I come home, what then? I'm not going to work in your kitchen. I'm not going to cut your vegetables. I'm not going to run your errands. I'm
not good at that
.” She looked at Jewel, the words heated and angry.

“You don't have to be,” Jewel replied steadily.

“Then
what?
What am I good
for?
”

“I don't know,” Jewel told her softly, still quiet in the face of her flash of anger, her teeter across despair's edge. “But I don't know what I'm good for either. I know that I'm not good for this. I know that I don't want you to die here, or to die in a jail, or in the shadow of the gallows. I know that you can do things that I can't.”