18. My Conscience Is Stained Red
DESDEMONA
I don’t know what I’m doing.
– DESDEMONA ALTHENIA’S PERSONAL WRITINGS
It’s been a week since I killed last, a week since Prince Lucian saw me for what I don’t want to be. Crying and murderous. Cowardly and manic. The only saving grace I have are my lies. In a way bigger than before.
Because the second he finds out who I am, my killing one of his soldiers will not end well for me.
Many times now I’ve thought back to the dream when Bernice told me I’m just like the Nepenthe. I think he’s right. I think I’m worse.
Wendy says that my shoulder is back in place, but even carrying my bag hurts. She says the wound will be entirely healed soon. I’ve seen the Eunoia heal wounds worse than mine after combat class in minutes with little to no problems.
I’m sure the burns around the wound are from my body trying to cauterize itself, but I don’t know what’s wrong with my hand. Wendy thinks it’s poison, which is good.
I’ve been pretending that I am not injured and do not have a dislocated shoulder just to get through my days. I could come up with a lie to tell, an explanation as to why I’m hurt, but if that body does resurface, the kingdom could easily figure out how long he’s been dead. I don’t want there to be any way of tracing this back to me. Wendy is already too big of a liability.
For some reason, when Calista walks down the hall with Fleur and Eleanora at her side and shoves her body into Aralia’s, I feel I’m about ready to burn her to bits. I realize that I’m facing Calista’s retreating form when Aralia grabs my arm.
“Eyes ahead of you, inferno,” she says, and she takes her hand from my arm fast. I put my eyes ahead of me.
Then I notice the heat flooding into my palms.
“Why wouldn’t you fight back?” I ask, genuinely shocked that she hadn’t. It doesn’t seem like Aralia.
“It’s a long story,” Aralia says, and I get her point: don’t push me.
I don’t say another word about it.
I’ve been going back to the coast every day to make sure the Lucent doesn’t resurface. Some things don’t add up, like how he had another blade on his person but didn’t stab me a second time, even when I had the knife and stabbed him in the neck. He didn’t even fight me. I’m not at all sure that he was even trying to kill me, and that scares me more than anything.
He wanted something else from me.
On a particularly emotional day, I went to Lucian. Well, first I went to his suite, then the Nepenthe in the blue beanie—Azaire—told me to look in the art room. I didn’t know Lucian was an artist, not until I stumbled in and found him in front of a canvas, paintbrush in hand.
I closed the door. “You don’t think we should’ve buried him, do you?”
He looked at me for a long moment, his eyebrows falling over his eyes while he took me in. It was like he saw the emotional weight of it all. I didn’t feel this bad after the Folk, I guess because I didn’t let myself. But now I’m feeling them both, and on top of them, there’s the dream. It’s more like I’ve killed two people in the last week, not just one.
Lucian said nothing when he walked across the room and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, his hands weaving up and through my hair. I didn’t have it in me to not grab onto him either. It felt good and it felt bad, good to be held and bad to be held by the one person who knows too much. The one person I don’t want to know anything.
When he finally finds out where I’m from, he won’t go out of his way to protect me anymore.
I’ll take care of it,he said, but he didn’t realize that those words are a contingency; they don’t mean anything to our future selves.
Whatever he feels about me is bound to change. So whatever I feel about him has to stay bound.
At the time in his arms, I didn’t know which was more worrisome to me—that the Lucent’s body would resurface, if what Lucian said was true, or that I killed a man and didn’t give him the proper burial. But the Lucents don’t bury their fallen like the Folk, they send them into water. Before I remembered that I realized I was more scared of being caught, which just made me feel worse in the end.
I killed someone and am worried about myself. I didn’t even think about his family until today.
I’m sitting at the coast, looking into the sea like his body is going to float to the surface. I killed someone’s best friend, or brother, or maybe father. And all I’m worried about is what’s gonna happen to me.
My conscience is stained red.
My notebook sits in front of me, opened to a new page, but I don’t think I have anything new to write. A girl named Nova started showing up in my dreams, blonde hair and a laugh like a gods, and I’ve already written about her. She’s the first person I’ve dreamt of who I didn’t know.
I wonder when I’ll kill her too. That’s what happens with the dreams, right? I just keep killing these people.
My thoughts spin in circles, all the way back to the blade on the man’s hip. He aimed for my shoulder and didn’t aim again. He wasn’t going to kill me. That becomes more and more obvious with each day.
The whispering comes again. It’s been coming every time I come to the coast, as steadily as the wind. I’ve almost gotten used to it, like the dreams. But this time it’s different; it’s loud and debilitating, infiltrating my mind and subsequently the only place I have left to be honest. So, let me be honest, I am losing my mind.
Aren’t I?
The whispering goes and I’m left hunched over myself, regaining my sanity. That was the worst attack by far, and if the dreams are any consolation, it’s only going to get worse. It will get worse, and I will get used to it.
When I catch movement from the corner of my eye, I turn my head as quickly as I can. If someone sees me here and then the body resurfaces…
There’s no one there.
But when I turn my head back in front of me, that’s when I see it. A corenth, with gray fur and a blue glow coming from beneath it. Several pairs of furry antlers poke out around its head, and its eyes are the color of snow. Not that I’ve seen snow before, I just know that it is pure white thanks to my mom.
I reach for the dagger at my waist, but the corenth makes no move to harm me, and I don’t think I’d be able to take down one this big with something as measly as a six-inch bedazzled blade.
The corenth looks at me while I look at it. I swear there is pain in its eyes, which doesn’t make sense. Corenths don’t feel emotions like orphias, they’re lesser creatures that don’t even have their own souls. And yet, its eyes look like any of our own.
Causer… act… us…
For a brief second, the whispering wind becomes audible. But it doesn’t stop me from bringing my hand to the hilt of my dagger.
Act… Never…
“Marquees! Run!”
The corenth scurries away and I let go of my dagger, putting my hand on my pen. And then I fall into my default mode.
A liar.
“Run from what?” I ask. I don’t even really know why I’m lying, all I know is that I can’t let the boy who knows too much know more. Admitting to the corenth feels like admitting to something. Corenths don’t approach orphia, and orphia don’t hear whispering in their heads.
But he’s also the only one who looks at me the way he is looking at me now. With wonder, like I’m some great work of art he wants to devour every stroke of and learn every color. I feel like a fraud when he looks at me like this, but I don’t want him to look away.
“The moonaro,” he says, but the corenth is gone.
“I didn’t see anything.” I stick my notebook in my waistband.
He nods. “Perhaps I am mistaken.”
Maybe he is the one I could tell the truth to. The one who would understand. I think I could tell him. It wouldn’t take much work to say the words.
But it’s not just words. It’s the dreams, the septic, and the truth of when the whispering—which he thinks are migraines—started. It’s not just the Lucent I killed either. It’s the Folk.
It would be telling him: hey! I’m a liar and an even bigger murderer than you thought, and the cherry on top is, I’m from the septic too!
So when he says, “I need to tell you something,” I have the horrific hope that it will be something I can use against him when the time arises. Something to keep the boy who knows too much from divulging my secrets. I follow him into the mastick. His voice is a whisper when he says, “The day we tracked your mom, corenths started attacking the orphia unprovoked.”
I think of Damien and Janice and how they thought a corenth had killed my mom, days before we tracked her.
“Are you sure you didn’t see anything?” he asks again.
“Positive,” I say, maintaining eye contact and forcing myself not to flinch.
“Alright,” he says, looking down and then past me. “We should get back within the barrier.”
Is following him an act of admittance? I’m not sure and I’m tied for words so I do just that.
“What were you doing at the coast?” he asks me.
For some reason, despite everything, telling him that I was watching for a dead man to float to the surface doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.
“Just journaling. What were you doing?”
“Something similar,” he answers. “The coast is quiet.” But the way he is looking at me is different than usual.
We walk back to the school in utter and unusual silence. When we’re within the walls, he says, “I have a matter to attend to. I’ll see you soon?”
“Yeah,” I say gently with a smile. I hope it reaches my eyes. “See you soon.”