I staggered out once I was sure he was sleeping. I did not look out the window to see if the city was burning or if Carwyn was outside, watching. I sat down on the sofa and thought that I would stay there for a little while, just until the others came home, so that I knew they were safe.
Sleep hit me like a grandmother’s purse that turned out to have a brick in it. I was out almost as soon as I sat down, and I slept heavily, determinedly, until the door opening pulled me up like a puppet and yanked me back into awareness. There had been too many disasters in too short a time: no sooner were my eyes open than I found myself shaking and sick with tension, as if I was held together with a wire pulled so taut that I could do nothing but shake and hope the wire would not snap.
It was not Penelope, Jarvis, or little Marie. I stared at the hooded figure in the shadows of the doorway. The hood and the shadows did their work—I could not see anything below the hood but a blank to be filled in by fear or hope. He did not move for a moment, and then he did. He took one step forward. I saw the line of his nose and the gleam of his eyes.
I flew into his arms and covered his face with kisses.
“Ethan, Ethan,” I said, pushing back the hood and pushing my fingers through his hair.
I had not doubted for a moment that it was him. I knew the diffident way he moved, never presuming he was welcome. The only thing I did not know was how this had happened.
“Ethan,” I said. “I’m so happy. I’m so sorry.”
His face, uncovered now, was flushed, his eyes slightly dilated. He put a hand on my rib cage as if he had to steady himself, but then his hand moved down, slowly and with more confidence, until he had a sure hold on my waist.
“I’m sorry. I lied to you, I got my father killed, I did everything wrong. I’m the one who’s sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for,” he whispered, and his voice sounded as rusty as a prison door that had not been opened in a long, long time.
I clung to his shirt and kissed him again, pressing our foreheads together as much as our mouths. I wanted to be pressed up against him, anchored by him, sure of him.
“There is,” I said, and tasted tears on my lips, on his lips as I kissed him, and realized we were both crying. “I know everything now, Nadiya told me about the resistance. Carwyn told me about you going to find Jarvis. You meant it all for the best. You meant to save people. You’re a hero.”
“Well,” said Ethan, “that makes two of us.”
I smiled so hard that I thought my face would crack.
“I saw you down there, with your sword barring the way,” Ethan told me. “You looked like . . .” An angel, I thought. “Like a knight.”
I kissed him for that.
“I’m not a hero,” said Ethan. “I couldn’t let everything stay the way it was, I couldn’t let my family keep doing what they were doing. But this is no better. I ruined everything. My father and Jim and so many other people are dead, and it was all for nothing.”
“You wanted to help. You tried. I didn’t try.”
“You did better than try,” Ethan said. “You did it. You accomplished something.”
“So did you,” I said. “You saved Jarvis. You saved someone—you did what you did because you believed in change and goodness, and you inspired me.”
You were the light that showed me the way, I wanted to say, but I hadn’t wanted other people to see me that way. He was more than my light.
He’d lied to me, he said, and it was true. He’d done worse than that. He had sent in Carwyn as a replacement for himself and clearly had not realized that if Carwyn had fooled me, every touch I accepted from Carwyn would have been a violation of trust. He’d risked his life for me but had not considered what it would have done to me if he had died. He’d lied to me but meant it for the best.
I’d lied to him, too, and he knew it. We had each thought that we could replace ourselves with perfect facsimiles and fool the other. We had both been wrong. I was glad to be wrong.
I saw how hard he had tried, and it was so easy to forgive him that it felt possible to forgive myself.
“How are you here?” I asked him. “How did it happen?”
“They were letting in people from the Dark city to mock and spit at me. Carwyn came to visit me. He was wearing a doppelganger’s hood, but it wasn’t fastened by a Light magician. He could take it off. He took it off, once we were alone. I thought he was there to laugh at me. I thought . . . Everything I thought about him was wrong.”
Ethan swallowed.
“He . . . he must have just fed from a Light magician, maybe someone he took against their will—”
“No,” I said. “He’s not like that. It was me.”
Ethan looked puzzled to hear me come to Carwyn’s defense and, at the same time, sorry that he had insulted Carwyn.