“There is a great deal to be done here, and you will not be needed on this bloody night. You can go, if you must,” Aunt Leila said slowly, and I saw the others fall back at her words.
I should have realized it from the first moment, when she had spoken and the others obeyed. I looked at her, and the strange, painful thing was not that I felt like I didn’t recognize her but that I did. It made perfect sense: my Aunt Leila, brilliant with a blade and better with words, able to kill as she had always been able to do everything. Not only one of the revolutionaries, but one of their leaders.
Tell the wind and fire where to stop, but don’t tell me.
Nothing stopped my Aunt Leila. I had always known that.
“You can go, but you must return when you are summoned,” she said. “Our new city will have need of you.”
I wanted to ask why, ask what I could possibly do, but I did not want to risk displeasing her. I did not think she would hurt me, but I was sure she would not want to spare Carwyn. I knew she was letting me go home because she had other plans for what she had called “this bloody night”: she did not need the spectacle of the Golden Thread in the Dark when she would have the spectacle of death.
Aunt Leila glanced at Carwyn, and her glance was not the look that anyone gave a person. She looked at him as if he was a mysterious object and she was wondering about his provenance.
Even staying long enough for her to pay attention to him, rather than me, was dangerous.
“I promise, Aunt Leila,” I said loudly, to force her gaze back to me. “I will return.”
Aunt Leila made a grand gesture, as if a single night and too many deaths had made her a queen. “Then you may go.”
We walked outside, under the golden ovals that were the stained-glass windows, through the golden doors.
Down the avenues, I could see the lights of burning fires, the outlines of walls and buildings changed into ruin and rubble. The sans-merci had moved in a devastating tide from their city to ours, and now the city was theirs. Now the city was burning.
The very streetlamps were swathed in red and black, some lights extinguished and others turned red. Red light reflected off the sheen of rainwater on the black surface of the road, so it looked as though the streets of the city were running blood.
We walked home. It was a cold, weary walk in the rain, which was falling in a thin, continuous drizzle, settling over us in a chilly mist. Carwyn’s hand felt as icy in mine as the sword hilt in my grasp, but nobody bothered us. The few people walking the nighttime streets let the boy in evening dress with the bloody bottle and the girl in the glittering gown with the sword pass. We were too obviously survivors of something they did not want to know about.
They would all know soon.
When Penelope looked through the eyehole in her door and saw us, with our weapons and the bloodstains, she opened the door with shaking hands as fast as she could, made tea, and made us drink it while she ran between rooms, pushing a blanket and a bed on wheels.
“Tea is essential medicine for a shock,” she assured us. “Trust me—I’m a doctor.”
I clung to the warmth of the mug in my hands, a welcome change from Carwyn’s touch or steel. I assumed that she would want Carwyn to sleep on the couch, though I did not think about it much, did not think about anything now that I was safe and allowed to be exhausted.
Danger meant being resourceful. There was peace in not needing to keep pushing forward, in being able to admit that you were utterly drained.
“You both need comfort,” said Penelope. “I’m going to sleep in Lucie’s bed, and I already moved Marie’s bed to the other room. You two can take mine.” She patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t mind,” she added quietly in my ear. “This isn’t the normal world anymore, and we aren’t working by the normal rules. You two love each other. Love is what counts, no matter what world we’re in.”
I didn’t know how to protest. Even in a new world, I did not know how to tell her what I had done.
Carwyn listened to what was happening and did not offer up a protest either. Of course, he had been very quiet since we had entered Penelope’s apartment and she had welcomed us both with open arms, touched his hair and his face, and said, “Ethan, I’m so glad you’re safe.”
I could not even tell if he was mocking me with his silence, still finding my pain the best joke he knew, or if he might be as tired as I was.
I went into the bedroom with Carwyn and determined that if he said or tried anything, I would hit him. I wanted to hit someone.
I looked at him, coldly, and for a wonder he decided that this was one trespass he would not commit.