15. Can’t Save Them All
LUCIAN
Lucents excel mentally. Not many find that they can wield shadows as the Aibeks do.
– LUCENT MAGIC AND THE NATURE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND BY CLEMENTINE PROTNUS
Fleur,” I say with a smile, one hand falling to her waist and the other clasping her hand. “You look brilliant, as always.”
“It’s appreciated, Lucian,” she says with a smile and a mock curtsy. “We missed you at the party.”
“Ah, yes, I had other plans.” I got droozed with Desdemona, who I’m watching watch me from across the room.
Yes, she dances with Jermoine, yet she is looking at Fleur and me as if it pains her. Which means I have a fraction of her feelings.
What scares me is that she has mine as well.
But fear is not enough of a reason to take my eyes off her. She’s a vision no matter what she wears—she’d still be the most beautiful in this room draped in silver or blue. But clad in gold she is more than captivating. She is truly and utterly devastating. Never have I glimpsed upon beauty so harrowing as hers.
Rarer even than the rarest ore that she dawns the color of tonight.
She looks like a burning ember in the sea. An impossibility. A phenomenon you could spend your entire life trying to explain.
The dagger at her thigh is an interesting touch. A reminder that she is dangerous. Dazzling. That the results will be dreadful if I allow myself to continue with these daring thoughts.
“With whom?” Fleur asks with an edge to her voice.
“You may know her. Does Desdemona ring a bell?”
Fleur laughs. “The Fire Folk?” I do not laugh. “You’re being serious? You know she can’t even pass Elemental Magic, don’t you? I mean, from the way Eleanora talks about her, she sounds truly pathetic.”
“Here I was, under the impression that she didn’t want to kill the lot of us.”
“You think she—” Fleur stops. “I don’t want to talk about the Fire Folk any longer.”
“That’s more than all right,” I say.
“I think we’re going to have a kickback in here, in a few weeks, after all these fundraisers are over. You should come.” She smiles.
“I believe I’m going to be busy that day as well.” I have much more important things to focus on these days. We take our last step before it’s time to switch partners, and I send her off while I say, “You will be missed.”
Before I see Desdemona, I know that I am dancing with her by the heat of her body intertwined with mine. The way her skin hums beneath my touch.
The gold of her dress accentuates the bits of orange in her brown eyes and up close she is more than an ember.
She’s a raging fire.
With her this close, I wonder how I’ll ever be able to walk away.
I find that I am entirely unable to take my eyes off of her as I say, “How was Kai?”
Desdemona raises an eyebrow. “How was Fleur?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I was too busy imagining she was you.”
For half of a second Desdemona looks shyer than I’ve ever seen her before. I wish she would allow me to glimpse her true faces. The ones she pulls back so quickly. The ones that betray her emotions.
She stiffens under my hold. “Well Kai was great. He’s… fun.”
I let out a short laugh. “Does he make your heart race?”
“What?”
“When I touch you,” I slide my hand down from hers, my thumb settling over her pulse, “your heart rattles. Does fun do that for you as well?”
Desdemona looks and sounds unbothered when she says, “Not the way infuriating does.”
But her pulse betrays her.
“Infuriating means you’re burning for me, does it not?”
Her hand that I hold becomes very hot. As if even her body cannot deny what her mind longs to.
“If you wonder if it’s reciprocated,” I say under my breath. “It’s been my nights greatest challenge to keep my eyes on anything but you.”
This time, I see it. My reward—the small amount of blush that softens her cheeks.
“Oh please I’d burn you before I burned for you?—”
She trips. I catch her before she reaches the ground, but not without a smile. Other than when droozed, she’s more sure-footed than the kids with a lifetime”s worth of training. This is almost a form of flattery.
“Are you sure about that? Because I couldn’t tell you the last time a girl tripped over herself because she couldn’t get enough of me.”
“Funny, because I could tell you the last time a boy did the same for me.” She gives me a pointed look.
I shrug and say, much more casually than I feel, “But falling for you is such an easy thing to do.”
How I wish it wasn’t.
Her eyebrows scrunch down. “What are you playing at here?”
“I can tell you what I’m playing for.” I pull her a little closer. Not at all as close as I would like. Only enough for her to know I want her with me. “You.”
She shakes her head and lets out a short, shallow laugh. But her body tenses beneath my hands when I glance at Lusia. I tense as well when I see Lusia watching us. I fear our interlude will be over before it’s ended. Do I look overly involved? Or do I appear as I did with Fleur?
I know it’s not the latter. I pray that it is.
“Who’s the woman?” When I don’t answer, Desdemona says, “I know you know. I’ve been watching you look at her all night.”
Resignation settles in me and I answer, “The queen.” Desdemona takes a deep breath and I realize that I am holding her hand tighter than I was before.
“Why is your mother looking at me like that?” Desdemona whispers.
“I don’t know.” I’m not prepared to tell her that the queen has been asking about her since before I knew her.
“Am I safe here?” Her long, dark eyelashes flutter down over her sharp eyes. Her real eyes that sit beneath the glamour I have to pull apart every time I glimpse her. “Because I’ll run. I’d be happy to leave, and if she’s going to do something?—”
“Where would you run to?” I ask. Running could be her best option. I could find her, wherever she goes, pick up this rendezvous again, work with her and her power, make it to the void when the time comes.
Prove to her that she’s safe with me. Define these fickle feelings. Count the freckles on her face. Memorize the shape of her lips with mine.
Gods.
If I keep this going it will not be me undoing her, it will be her undoing me. And that simply can”t be, not with what I have on the line.
But I couldn’t imagine a person that I’d want to pull my strings more.
“Truthfully, I don’t know.” She pauses, her grip around my neck loosening. “I mean, when I find my mom, she and I will go back home, but I don’t belong there without her.”
“You don’t belong in your home?” I ask.
Desdemona looks down at our feet. “No,” she whispers.
“Why is that?” I want to pull her gaze back to mine.
“I don’t know,” she shrugs, “a lot has happened since I got here.”
“You can talk to me,” I say selfishly. “You know that, don’t you?”
Her gaze finally comes back to mine. “Of course,” she says softly. Her grip tightens around my neck. Her left hand.
A lie.
Smart girl.
I can’t risk her running in the middle of the night and not telling me where. I can’t risk her disappearing.
Because of the void. Nothing more.
Confessions of endearment and wanting to know her will be left in the past as what they are.
Mistakes.
“You are. Safe here.”
I lie too.
* * *
The next day, Margaret and Olwen come to the school to escort me to Soma. They take me to the throne room, whisper that they’re sorry, and then disappear behind the closing door.
Lusia and Labyrinth sit on their thrones, the windows behind them shining white light into the blue room.
I always feel small before them, particularly so here. Tiny in a grandiose room. Nothing compared to the power of the tall columns, wider than me. The statues of Sulva, with their hair shaped like crescent moons, heavier than me. The steps that lead to their thrones, higher than me.
The eyes of Lusia and Labyrinth, stronger than me.
“Darling, come,” Lusia says, lifting her hand and summoning me with her fingers. I like the word better on my tongue, being said to Desdemona.
It’s less repugnant.
Labyrinth nods to me. “Son.”
I do the same, daring myself to walk closer. “Father.” Anytime I’m summoned here, I know the outcome will be dreadful. Another task to be followed through, regardless of what it means to me.
“We’re not going to waste any time,” Lusia says. “The girl in the gold at the Gerner, when did she enroll at Visnatus?”
It’s as I feared, as I knew—as Desdemona knew. Lusia could tell that Desdemona was the orphia she was looking for from one glance. I wonder if the gold dress was too telling.
“I don’t know,” I say nonchalantly.
“Hm,” Lusia says at the same time as Labyrinth says, “Bring her in.”
I twist my head to the entrance, scared of what Lusia has already done. Has my promise—my lie—to Desdemona already been broken?
Lilac is the one to walk in. With wide eyes, full of fear. She opens her mouth, and shadows wrap around the lower half of her face.
“Let her go!” I shout, my emotion overcoming me. Besting me.
“My apologies, Lilac,” Lusia says. “I was afraid that Azaire wouldn’t be enticing enough this time.”
My whole body is shaking with fury, with rage. My shadows wrap around my fingers, up my arm. I know I could never win, not against Lusia and the hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of orphia she’s killed and stolen the life force from.
I look to Labyrinth, a pleading look slipping into my eyes. Stop this madness. That’s your daughter.
All hope shatters as he looks away.
It hits me all at once. I’ll never be able to protect them all. Lilac, Azaire, and now Desdemona. Knowing me is a death sentence, or, at the very least, a sentence to torture.
“Let her go, please,” I say to Lusia. I say to her mother.
Then my arms are restricted, pinned to my sides. I look down to see shadows wrapping around my torso, and they aren’t my own.
This time it’s Labyrinth who speaks, his voice booming through the room with the crack of his staff pounding against the floor. “The girl, when did she arrive in Tenesia?”
I look at Lilac. She is frozen still, petrified. Then Lusia looks at her too. I know the look that washes over the top half of Lilac’s face all too well. Her power is being taken, her life force.
Lusia is killing her slowly, as she does me.
“Let her go and I’ll answer,” I dare say.
Five weeks. Desdemona has been here for five weeks. Is that incriminating? What could Lusia do with the information?
Certainly something if she wants it.
“That’s not how our game works,” Lusia drawls.
“Prove it to me,” I spit. “Kill your future queen!” I am treading thin ice. “Kill your daughter.”
I exhale when Lusia drops her shadows.
“Make sure Lilac stays conscious,” Lusia instructs Labyrinth and gets up from her throne. Then I am moving behind her, being carried by her shadows against my will. I’ve truly lost all autonomy over my body, and she’s breaking the very little I have left over my will.
She takes me to the dungeon, something she hasn’t done since I was a child, back when she would force me to watch her kill the prisoners when I didn’t follow instructions. It’s why I’m so compliant.
If this is the worst she can do for my lies, then I will be fine. I learned to put up a mental shield of steel years ago. I can handle this.
Lusia pulls me to the back of the dark dungeon. The deeper in we go, the more it reeks of iron and other bodily fluids.
It would be an understatement to say that I did not miss this wretched room.
Then Lusia sets her talons into my subconscious. It’s something I’ve experienced before, albeit not very much. When she starts to tug, it feels like someone is taking their claws to my brain, drawing blood, butchering my mind. I can’t help but pant, even though I long to scream.
“What’s her name?” Lusia demands.
“What are you going to do with it?” I struggle to get the words out.
“That’s none of your concern,” she sings to me. “Not unless you’ve grown an attachment.” I feel her moving through my mind like it’s a file cabinet. “She’s septic, Lucian. Whatever you feel is to be dropped, immediately.”
How would Lusia know this?
I assumed Desdemona was middle class, from a family who worked in livestock or some other medium-level job, though certainly not from Utul. It never crossed my mind that she could be septic.
I am taken over by people, places, and thoughts I’ve never seen before. I’m in my body, but I’m barely in my head. “What are you doing to me?” my voice is gravely, a weak mess.
“A new little trick,” she says like she wants a laugh to follow the words.
It feels as if my brain is being split down the middle, hacked at with a sword. I see Lusia taking the life force from a prisoner while I feel it. Then my eyes land on the man, falling to the floor, dying, and I fall to the floor like I’m dying. My entire body, my entire being is being torn to shreds, and yet I’m perfectly intact.
“Her name and this will be over.”
Does she not know that I cannot even fathom speaking?
I can’t suppress the scream that tears from my lips. Can’t stop myself from crying out, from begging to be spared. Exactly as the prisoner is doing.
Until I’m no longer in my body at all.
Then every feeling stops. I’m a husk on the floor. A shell of myself. The memories of the dead prisoner are gone, but the feeling of death is not.
I can’t move.
“Your safety only goes as far as your usefulness, as does those who rely on you.” My head splits over and over again. My cheek lies against the cold, smelly floor.
I open my mouth, but only a groan comes out. Then I watch her legs walk from the dungeon.
* * *
The first thing I do when I’m able to stand is look for Lilac. I slam into wall after wall, I even fall to my knees at some points, but I’ll be damned if I don’t make sure she is alright.
I kept Desdemona’s name to myself. I’m not sure what good that will do her; Lusia can be persuasive, and she is surely persistent.
Perhaps Desdemona should leave. Maybe we both could.
I stop the delusions before they grow.
“Lilac!” I start screaming as I struggle to walk down the hall. “Lilac!” At least my voice is strong enough to make an echo.
It’s Margaret who meets me, putting an arm around me and lifting me straight. “She went back to Visnatus,” she whispers to me.
“She’s alright?” I feel the relief wash over me. It would subdue my entire body if I could allow it. If there wasn’t another girl I had to get to.
“She’s okay,” Margaret says.
“Would you open a portal for me?” I ask, and she looks at me with a silent question. What did she do? I don’t have to tell her that I can’t tell her. Margaret knows I’d never put that target on her back.
She opens the portal, and I stagger through the halls of Visnatus as I did the halls of Soma. I make it to Desdemona’s suite, and Calista is the one who opens the door.
“What do you want?” she asks, eyeing me up and down.
I walk past her, wobbling on my feet and into the suite. “I need to see Marquees.”
“Desdemona?” she says. “Are you serious?”
“Marquees?” I call her last name. I don’t know which room is hers and I don’t stop calling for her until she walks out. It is truly treacherous how relieved I feel to see her unharmed.
“You’re alright,” I whisper. Lusia didn’t get to her yet.
“Are you?” she says. The look in her eye is in stark contradiction to Calista’s. Desdemona runs to me, sits next to me, and my head is in her hands in more ways than one.
Now that I know that she’s alright, there’s nothing to keep me from reliving what I’ve just lived. Someone’s death, and with it, the death of any hope I once had to be free of Lusia and Labyrinth. Forever their puppet, like it’s written in the stars.
Your safety only goes as far as your usefulness.
Desdemona’s gentle thumb brushes over my face, once, twice, until she pulls away. I look for her eyes, but she doesn’t look for mine. “Can you take me to Lilac?” I manage to get the words out of my mouth.
“Lilac?” Calista asks instantly. “What happened to Lilac?”
“I don’t know where her suite is,” Desdemona says.
“I’ll take you.” Then Calista is standing over us and Desdemona is looking at her instead of me.
“Will you come with me?” I ask Desdemona meekly.
Her gaze finally meets mine. It’s farther from me than I’ve grown used to. “Yeah,” she whispers.
“Let’s go,” Calista says, already on her feet, and Desdemona wraps my arm around her shoulders and her arm around my waist. I stand with her. We walk past three suites, and Calista knocks on Lilac’s.
Fleur opens the door, and I instantly hear Lilac’s violin. “Oh, Zola,” she says while looking over me. But her eyes slide to Desdemona and stop for a moment. Then she calls, “Lilac?”
Li exits her room and looks at Calista.
“Lucian needed you,” Calista whispers.
Then Lilac finally looks at me. “Oh, Sulva.” She’s rushing to me and taking me from Desdemona’s arms. It isn’t until we’re in her room and I’m lying on her bed that Lilac asks, “What did she do?” while sitting at the edge.
I mumble, my voice sounding far from what I am used to, “She killed me.” The shock of it all vibrates through me. The back of Lilac’s hand is pressed to my forehead, then she’s pulling the blanket over me.
“She killed me,” I say again. I felt it all, as if some sort of flip switched in my brain and I was outside of my body. Only I wasn’t looking down at myself, I was looking down at him. The prisoner she really killed.
I saw it all, his childhood in the septic of Soma and all of the things that happened that led him to choose to steal from his station. He did it for his wife, his daughter, for the hope of a better life. I felt his love, his desperation, then I felt his death.
“I’m tired, Li,” I whisper. I can’t stop the tears from filling my eyes.
“Sleep,” she says softly, brushing my hair out of my face and back behind the pillow.
“I can’t,” I say.
It’s the last thing I remember saying.
* * *
I wake up in a cold sweat from a dream of the dead prisoner desperately trying to sell his last furs to feed his family. I crash over myself and attempt to breathe, telling myself it was only a dream.
It was not simply a dream. It was his life. I feel that I will forever be inexorably tied to this man. As though his DNA is now written in my soul.
“Shit, Lucian,” Azaire whispers from the other side of the room.
I’m in Lilac’s room. I am not in Soma’s septic.
I groan, running a weak hand over my cold and damp face.
“Where’s Li?”
“Getting dinner,” he says softly.
I lay back down and mumble something that, even though I want it to sound like okay, sounds nothing of the sort. I stare at the ceiling, and it quickly morphs into the image of the man’s life.
Everlasting torture.
Tears fall from the corner of my eyes, onto the pillow, as my chest becomes restricted. As if I am dying all over again.
Azaire says, “What is it?” and I think he is walking to me.
“I died,” I choke out. “She put my subconscious inside a prisoner, and then she killed him.” I catch my breath. “I can’t—I can’t continue living this way.” I am frozen to this bed, unable to move, just as I am unable to cut these strings that tie me to them.
“You won’t have to,” Azaire says. “Soon you’ll be king, and they will have no say.”
The weak laugh that comes from me sounds foreign. “I appreciate your perspective.”
“I’ll believe it enough for us both. No surrender?” he sounds unsure, but he grabs my hand.
“No surrender.”
The door opens, and Lilac sets down a wooden tray of food and runs the three steps to me. She hugs me as if she wasn’t sure I’d survive my slumber.
Gently cupping my cheeks, she examines my face in a way I’d think a mother would, but she’s only an older sister. “Oh, Lucy.” She hugs me again, her hands on the back of my head. “I was so worried.”
“I’m alright,” I tell her, though I am not.
“What happened?” she asks quickly.
I meet Azaire’s eyes and shake my head ever so slightly. “Lusia and her antics. I’ll be fine.”
Lilac pulls away from our hug, shakes her head, and wipes a tear from the side of my face. “Alright,” she whispers and walks to the other side of the room, bringing the tray to the bed. “I got Eudora to make your favorite.” She hands me a ceramic bowl with cheesecake and red berry reduction.
I smile at her. “A better remedy than any.”
She smiles back and walks across the room to where her violin sits and picks it up. “Would you like a song?”
“Always.”
Azaire jumps over me, sitting on the free side of the bed while we listen to Lilac’s mini-concert.