At least not until it was too late. And then it had been a wild scramble to correct what I’d done, ordering him by name not to think of his loss, of his pain, or his misery. It took days to carefully craft the layers of commands needed to maintain his sanity without being so cruel as to eliminate Pénélope from his thoughts entirely. Orders that had remained in place until I’d relinquished control over the names of him and the half-bloods. And now all that remained was that ill-thought promise that could not be undone by anything but death and a mind once again at war with itself.
“I do not know myself.” He flung his sword against the ground and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, squeezing hard. “Two years I’ve lived under your control. Two years I’ve been not who I am, but who you wanted me to be. I should have died with her. I should have died with her.” He kept repeating himself, and his words made me shake with sudden fury.
Heedless of the spikes skewering my wrists, I swung hard, catching him in the jaw. He stumbled back, and I bent double, swearing as blood splattered the floor. “Why should you have died?” I shouted through the pain. “To prove that you loved her? Because you thought you’d betray her by living? Because you thought that was what she wanted?” I straightened slowly, the stench of blood and iron thick in the air. “She wanted you to survive her death – I know that, because she told me herself!”
“I have no reason to live without her.”
I spat on the floor. “Nothing to live for? What of your family? Your friends? Your cause? Does none of that matter to you anymore?” I stormed forward until we were eye to eye, inches apart. “Before Ana?s. Before the twins. Before the half-bloods, there existed an idea between you and me about how we could change our world for the better. This has always been as much your cause as mine.”
He looked away first. “Don’t stand there and pretend you’d be any better if Cécile died. I watched you throw away everything to save her.”
“Because she could be saved! I’ll not claim that what I did was right, but at least it had purpose. Your death has none. It won’t bring Pénélope back. And if Cécile were to die and I survived long enough to listen, I’d hope you’d say the same thing to me.”
I balled my fists until my wrists screamed and forced me to relax them. “There is more to my life than just her. There are other people I care for. Causes that matter.” I drew in a deep breath. “She walks as close to the line of death as Pénélope ever did, and there are times I question why we do this to ourselves. Why we tie our fate so closely to one person that everything we are, everything we do, hangs upon them. It seems a cruel thing that we lose not only the one we love most, but also the opportunity to endure. To finish the things we’ve started.”
My anger fled, and I suddenly felt bone-weary. “I do not know what her death would do to me, whether I’d have the will to carry on.” I concentrated on the pain in my wrists, trying to focus my thoughts. “I cannot imagine life without her, but at the same time, I hate the thought that what we’ve started in Trollus might go unfinished. It seems such a wretched waste.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time, the activity of the mines the only sound to break the silence.
“I’m sorry for the pain my choices caused you,” I said. “But I cannot seem to regret them.” Pushing past him, I started toward the lift.
“That’s it?” he shouted after me. “You’re just going to wash your hands of what you’ve done and leave my mind to turn as twisted and broken as the rest of me?”
I stopped, but I didn’t turn around. I was afraid that if I looked at him, I’d lose my nerve, the fragile confidence I had in the truth my own fears had revealed to me.
“It’s not up to me anymore, Marc,” I said. “If you find reason inside yourself to live, your will and your word might cease to be at odds and your mind once again be whole. Or you can pine away for death and let the madness grow until my father orders you put down. The choice is yours.”
My feet didn’t want to move, but I made them. Step after step until the stone slab of the lift lay beneath them. And as it started to rise, I prayed to fate and the stars that I hadn’t made another choice that I’d have cause to regret.
Fourteen
Cécile
The carriage jerked and bounced over the ruts in the road, bruising my bottom and making my teeth clack together. Winter was approaching, the ground hard with frost and the air laced with the scent of coming snow. I pulled my cloak tighter around my body as I watched the faces of those we passed, wishing my eyes would light upon the one I sought, even as I knew that I would never be so lucky.