Tell the Wind and Fire (32 page)

I held on to his hand pretty tight, I guess. He looked down at me, and he tried to kneel down beside me. He couldn’t quite do it, because of the chains.

“Don’t look at the cages,” he said. “Don’t look at them. Can you just look at me? Look at me, and don’t look at anything else.”

I looked at him. He looked like Ethan does, but he was thinner. He looked like Ethan would if Ethan had been sick, and people had been . . . had been not very kind to him. He had a sad mouth, but his eyes didn’t seem sad. His eyes looked afraid of me, as if I was an exam and he thought he was going to fail me. I looked at him, and maybe it was a silly thing to think, but I thought I liked him just as much as Ethan.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can do that.”

I don’t know how it was exactly, if I hugged him or he hugged me, but he was suddenly holding on to me. I put my head down on his shoulder and he put his arms around me, as much as he could when we were fastened to opposite sides of the car. I held on to his shirt as hard as I could. I was crying a lot by then, and I got his shirt all wet. I don’t think he minded, though. He held me, and I felt a little bit of wet on my neck. He was crying too, even though he was pretty big. Even though he was almost grown up.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m trying not to be scared. I won’t be scared. Just don’t let me go.”

“Hush, hush,” he said. I think he tried to stroke my hair, but he couldn’t properly because of the chains. “Don’t be scared. I promise, I won’t let you go.”

“Mom says I shouldn’t ever be scared,” I whispered. “She says help will always come to me if I believe it will. Were you sent to me?”

The next thing he said was a funny thing for him to say. He was so much bigger than me, and he didn’t seem scared, even though he had cried.

He said, “Maybe you were sent to me.”

I ran faster than I had ever run in my life. The wind rushed after me, the clouds rushed after me, the sun seemed to fling its rays out like a net, the whole fierce morning seemed to be pursuing me so it could swallow me whole, but nobody else chased me. Nobody stopped my wild dash to Times Square.

Once there, I had to fight my way through a thick crowd. Nobody was expecting me; nobody stood aside for the Golden Thread in the Dark. I elbowed and shouted and struggled like a swimmer caught in a current, until I finally burst free and into the empty space where the car was only now drawing to a halt.

The cages were suspended so high above the crowd that they seemed like blots on the sun. The platform was empty save for one man in black and scarlet. He looked hesitant. He looked as if he might be waiting for my aunt’s arrival, but the crowd’s anticipation was pulsing, the very air expanding and contracting around their desire to see savage justice. He would not wait long.

“Stop!” I shouted, and held the paper up high. “I have a pardon. Stop.”

People looked at me then: people recognized me, saw my sleep-rumpled dress and my hair snarled around my shoulders. I did not care. I did not even look at the member of the
sans-merci
who strode toward me and examined the paper in my hand.

I was looking for Carwyn.

They had put the prisoners in one of those open limousines that politicians were driven in so they could wave to the crowd, but its soft leather seats were torn out, the whole car gutted, and those being sent to the cages were chained to the metal bars that remained, bars and chains both glistening with inky streams of Dark magic so nobody could escape.

I did not see him at first, because he was bowed over in his chains. Then I did.

Then I knew why Penelope had come for me, why she had gone after Aunt Leila and sent me running down here. I understood Aunt Leila’s plan. She had set everything up so that even if I arrived in time, I could not save him.

She had known I would have to save someone else instead.

Marie was the girl I had been, whom nobody had come to rescue. Marie was so young and had so many people who loved her.

There was no choice. There would not have been a choice, even if it was Ethan.

Carwyn was leaning over Marie, his dark head bent over her black hair. He was talking to her, not looking at the crowd, and he did not even seem to hear their sharp utterances of “Stryker” as if it was a curse. Of course, it was not his name.

I pulled the pardon out of the guard’s hand and walked toward the car. My shadow was stretching eagerly out in front of me when he looked up.

The most vivid memory I have of that day, the moment that broke my heart, is how his face changed when he saw me.

“You’re here,” he said, and smiled. My stomach sank, and I was suddenly sick with horror at the thought of what I was going to do. He said eagerly, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

I was about to speak, but then realized I could not. My lips shaped his real name, silently.

“Quick,” Carwyn continued. “Take her.”

That was what truly broke my heart. He saw that there was no choice, and no chance for him, and he still smiled.

If I had not known better, I thought even I might have been convinced that this was Ethan. He looked more like Ethan than he ever had before. He was taking it seriously now. The masquerade meant something to him.

“You heard him,” I snapped at the guard. “Set her free now.”

Marie was secured by only one cuff, not chained like Carwyn. It was easy to release her, and in one movement Carwyn picked her up and leaned out of the car, placing her in my arms.

Marie clung to him. “You said you wouldn’t let go.”

“Not until the end,” he said. “But it’s the end now. It’s all over. You’re safe now.”

He had to pull away from her, and then she was in my arms, a heavy but welcome weight. She was crying.

“I’ve got you,” I told Marie. And I told Carwyn, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I have never done a really good thing before,” he said, and the wry quirk to his mouth was all him for a moment, any trace of Ethan disappearing. “I’m told we should try new experiences.”

I thought, for a brief panicked moment, of telling everyone the truth. But Aunt Leila had almost sent a child to the cages and nobody had protested. The truth would only have condemned Ethan and me as well as Carwyn, would have ruined everything Carwyn was doing and thrown it back in his face.

What Carwyn was doing. It made me feel again the way I had on the balcony, hearing the truth about Ethan, the way I had at the foot of Ethan’s tower. I’d had it all wrong once again, but now I saw.

I’d thought I was marked forever because I’d lied, but Ethan had lied, and Carwyn was lying now. We were all doing the best we could.

We were all heroes if we chose to be. The rich, naïve boy who had tried. The girl who had lied. The boy made out of darkness making himself into something else. There was no sin that could not be wiped away, nobody who was only what other people thought them. I hadn’t understood until it was almost too late.

“May I?” asked Carwyn, and I nodded.

He had never asked before, but he was going to die, and it would make the pretense seem more real. It could comfort him and convince everyone in the crowd, but it was more than that: in that moment, I wanted to.

He leaned out of the car, and I turned up my face and kissed him. He kissed me. He was not trembling. Neither of us was.

“Don’t cry,” he told me. “It’s worth it, to know I can. To know that I want to.”

“You’re worth crying for,” I said.

He smiled at me, and I saw the traces of tears on his own cheeks. “Well,” he said, “don’t cry long.”

I did not cry long, but I cried then, holding Marie, who was crying too. I cried as they led Carwyn and the other victims to their cages, cried for the wickedness, cried for the waste. I thought that Carwyn was dying for a cupcake, for a kind word, for so very little.

Then I saw him climb the steps to the platform with a sure, firm step, and I changed my mind.

The city is ours now, the
sans-merci
said when it was done.

I knew better than that. The city is no one’s; the city is everyone’s. The city could fall into ruin, and I would still have everything I need. We could go half the world away and build a city to be ours. The city is the dark and light halves of my heart.

Time seemed to move slowly as the crowd surged toward the platform and the sound of his steady steps echoed through the air. His head was thrown back, his hair in Ethan’s usual wavy disarray, the early-morning sunlight making the almost-lost gold in it shine. His grip on the cage as he climbed in, without the guards to help him, was firm. This was an expression I had never seen on him. He looked bright and sweet and new to the world. He lifted his face up to the sky and his face was soft—soft and young and peaceful. He looked like no one but himself, like a self he had never been before.

Even as the dark cage contracted and he cried out, a ray of light struck one of the tall glass towers and the glass threw back the light even brighter than it had been before. The sunlight became a bright sword that pierced the bars of his cage.

When I saw it, I saw everything that I believed laid out in front of me like a shining map of the future. That the new destroyers would be destroyed as surely as the old ones had been. That a brilliant city, all the brighter for its shadows, would rise out of this abyss. That Ethan and I would spend our lives working toward that in both cities, not hiding anything from each other again, not pretending to be perfect anymore, just trying our best. I knew that one day we would be able to tell this story—Carwyn’s story, Ethan’s story, my story, the story of all we sacrificed and all we saved.

I felt I learned the value of every small, flawed thing we do in the darkness, trying to scramble our way into the light. People will come up with a hundred thousand reasons why other people do not count as human, but that does not mean anyone has to listen.

Nobody can ever tell me any different.

I know he did have a soul.

A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE

Lucie, Ethan, and Carwyn’s story started as a riff on my favorite Charles Dickens novel,
A Tale of Two Cities,
and readers familiar with both books will recognize similarities and parallels.

But whereas
A Tale of Two Cities
is set during the French Revolution of 1789, my novel takes place in a New York that never was and never will be. I transformed a few of Dickens’s characters, making a self-determined heroine out of Lucie and using the curious physical similarity between the two male leads to create a doppelganger and thus a world of magic and shadow selves. Fantasy is a tool for talking about the real world, and that is how I used it in
Tell the Wind and Fire
: as a torch held up to illuminate the divisions and misunderstandings between people, a way to give strange power to both my heroine and her enemies, and a device to underline how the heart can be torn between twin feelings of hope and fear.

Once Light and Dark magic were introduced, I had to ask myself what revolution looks like in a world with that kind of magic—perhaps scarily similar to revolution in the 1700s, or in 2016, because the shocking cruelty and astonishing grace in human beings stays the same. 

I pulled at Dickens’s themes and played with his characters and gradually turned them into my own.
Tell the Wind and Fire
stands as its own story, and you don’t have to know anything about
A Tale of Two Cities
to enjoy it. But I hope that if you have enjoyed my book, you might find yourself drawn to read Charles Dickens’s famous novel.

More than that, I hope this story of divided cities and divided human hearts inspires you to create something, to forgive yourself for something you blamed yourself for, or simply to whisper to yourself, like a secret the world will learn, that you have a great heart and can accomplish great things.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The very first thanks in these acknowledgments have to go to my editor, Anne Hoppe. From the very first day, when we were on the phone and I stared at the wicker bookcase in my frighteningly cold house in Ireland and tentatively said, “Maybe a retelling of . . . ?” and she said, “Tell me what that would look like to you.” From before that, when she assured me she wanted another book from me, and showed me she wanted this book throughout, every step of the way. She believed in me when I did not believe in me, and believed in this book when I did not believe in this book. Thank you so much, Anne.

Everyone at Clarion, who have been so welcoming, and let me graffiti their walls and tell them all my strange marketing ideas. Thank you to Dinah Stevenson for the doppel-edit, Amy Carlisle, Alison Kerr Miller, the whole staff in marketing and publicity—including Lisa DiSarro, Anne Dye, Ruth Homberg, Merideth Wilson, and my publicist, Rachel Wasdyke—as well as my designer, Lisa Vega.

Thank you to Kristin Nelson and thank you to Ginger Clark.

Thank you to my copyeditor, Lara Stelmaszyk.

My writer friends know that I love them and their support is more valuable than oxygen, but here are some standouts: Holly Black, who sat with me and went, “No, really, explain this world to me, explain it now,” and stopped me when I suggested that maybe shadow creatures ate Poughkeepsie. That was a real suggestion I actually put on the table for this book. Obviously, Holly Black is my savior and hero.

Robin Wasserman, who edited a whole other book of mine while I was desperate and editing this one and saved me so much time and had brilliant thoughts I would never have had. Robin Wasserman can do anything.

R. J. Anderson and Karen Healey and Kelly Link, who read the book at various stages and reassured me when I was badly in need of reassurance! Such sweets.

And to anyone out there who loved Sydney Carton at age eleven, because you’re me, and I am you.