Carwyn just laughed. “Oh, right. You’re the Golden Thread in the Dark, but it’s nothing to do with you. The buried ones use you as a rallying cry, but that doesn’t matter to you.”
It wasn’t that it didn’t matter, I wanted to say. It was just that he was attributing power to me that I didn’t have. All I’d done was follow the plan Aunt Leila had come up with: all I’d done was play a role to get what I wanted. Nothing they thought about me was true.
An icon didn’t do anything of its own volition. A symbol didn’t act of its own accord. Both cities projected what they wanted onto me, and wanted me to stay still as they did it.
We walked on through SoHo in silence, past a closed-up antique shop, a club with a sign that said SIZZLING, and into an alleyway that had a wall covered in intricate graffiti— the shadowy face and scared eyes of a girl lost in a psychedelic forest. Her eyes shone with Light magic, like a surprised animal’s in the night.
“I didn’t start it, and I can’t stop it,” I said at last. “I can’t even get us a lousy meal. You think that I’m responsible for a revolution? I managed to fool everyone long enough to get my dad out. That’s all. I’m not a hero. I saved one person. You saved one person last night. We’re even. We’re the same.”
“Are you starving?” Carwyn asked. “Because I’m starving.”
I walked into the alleyway with the lost-girl graffiti, then turned and stood opposite him. The hood obscured his face, so all I was looking at was featureless darkness.
“Put your hood down.”
He pulled it away from his face without a word.
All day, ever since I had woken to find the one person who meant love and safety to me in sudden danger, I had felt like I was back in the Dark. Like a rawly orphaned child, lying cold and exhausted and scared in Aunt Leila’s house, sure that I did not have enough Light in me to go on.
Carwyn looked like Ethan, but an Ethan shadowed and starved, bones standing out in high relief in his face and with the sweetness gone out of his eyes. He looked like an Ethan who had been through some of what I had. He looked as if he might, just possibly, be able to understand.
I said very quietly, “Do you think you might need to go to the bathroom at any point in the near future?”
“Uh,” said Carwyn, “what? No. What?” He paused. “I want you to know that was my first time,” he added. “Not knowing what to say to someone. I always have something to say.”
“Well, your first time didn’t last long, but I guess that’s always how it goes,” I said.
I concentrated on my left hand, the sinister hand, so the rings on it glowed: lapis lazuli, opal, vermarine, emerald, and diamond, the colors of green and blue and moonshine mingling pale and bright as light underwater. When my hand was glowing, I inscribed a circle onto the night sky and made a loop of brightness that turned solid, like water transforming into ice, and landed in my palm.
I pushed the link I had made over my hand, so it hung around my wrist like a bracelet.
Then I looked back at Carwyn.
“I have conditions,” I said. “This is only for one night. You’re not going to argue with me. You’re not allowed to beg or plead or try to make a bargain. You won’t leave my side all night. You have to do what I say.”
“You might be surprised at how often I’ve had conversations similar to this one,” Carwyn commented, but he spoke in as low and as quiet a voice as I did, as if speaking too loudly in this lonely alley might tip off the universe.
Outside the alley, the city went rushing heedlessly along, like a river made of light.
A doppelganger’s collar did not resemble any other collar in the world. It was a heavy strip of black leather, meant to last someone’s whole life, and it was inlaid with metallic fittings like studs turned inside out. Glittering spaces like the setting of a ring when the jewel had fallen out. The spaces waited for the jewels to return.
“This is serious,” I said.
I stepped toward him. Carwyn’s gaze was fixed on me with steady attention. He did not move, but I saw him take in all of my movements. He was so absorbed in looking at me that he did not even seem to breathe.
I turned my rings so each large jewel was palm-side. I lifted my hands and laid them gently against his throat.
He tipped his head back. Moonlight poured down his neck until it was halted by the dull weight of his collar, a band of black pressed against the pale skin. The gems on my rings fitted into the metal spaces in his collar as if they had been made to do it.
Carwyn swallowed, and I felt the movement beneath my fingers, reminding me of the vulnerable skin beneath the metal and leather. He felt human, felt as if he could be hurt.