Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
Isolde
“I don’t expect forgiveness,” Mark says. “I want to start there.”
He’s leading us to the end of the balcony’s horseshoe, angling to one of the small bar areas closest to the door.
When he gets there, he leans over the counter and starts digging around.
After some clanking and cursing, he emerges with a bottle of scotch.
He’s drinking for real then. This feels ominous.
“And before I say anything else, it’s important to understand that Ys isn’t entirely finished just because your uncle is dead. There are the various war profiteers waiting in the wings and the diplomats and the captains of industry and whoever else still counting themselves as members.”
“And the saints?” Tristan asks, forehead wrinkled. “Will they still count themselves as members?”
“I don’t think so, but that’s an educated guess more than anything else.
The saints are the Church’s, and Ys is a thing apart from the Church, even if churchmen have occasionally been recruited for its ranks.
Cashel hadn’t yet fully grafted the two together before he died, and that makes us lucky, because I don’t think he invested much into the structure of Ys, knowing he’d eventually be using the Church’s.
This is the trouble with crime, actually: administration.
You wind up needing secretaries and accountants and interns just the same as you do anywhere else, and this is doubly true if your chief interests lie in starting and sustaining wars.
Evil takes a lot more emails than you think.
In this respect, Ys has been a thin and wobbly thing, since your uncle was the chief fulcrum on which it turned, but that also makes it a convenient tool to scoop up and turn to your own uses if you have the vision and the access.
And there is one person in the Church Cashel did trust enough to give the keys to the kingdom. ”
“The Scales,” I realize.
Mark pauses at the railing to unstop the bottle. The hall is always empty during the day, but there is something about how empty Lyonesse is right now that unsettles me. I’ve grown used to the constancy of guests and staff, to never being truly alone even when I felt lonely.
“The Scales,” confirms Mark. “A role indelible to the saints, and I think Cashel made the role indelible to Ys too toward the end. If the Scales is ambitious enough, then this is their chance to seize everything and finish what your uncle started. Fusing Ys and the Church together for good.”
Mark starts walking again, taking a drink while he moves and pushing through the double doors that lead to a hallway of playrooms. Tristan and I follow after exchanging another quick glance, each of us verifying the other’s uncertainty. I have no idea where Mark is going with this.
“Sir…” Tristan starts, but Mark just shakes his head.
“I know, this isn’t really new information, but I just wanted to be clear before my confession that Ys is still dangerous while the Scales is alive.
For a very long time, I planned on keeping things as they were until I knew for a fact that the Scales was dead—but after Nemi, my appetite for secrets seems to have vanished. ”
“Are there more secrets than me being the person to kill Eliot?” Tristan asks, and I’m surprised at the weariness in his voice, the defeat.
He’s been so steady today, so quick to offer a soft smile or an arm around the shoulders.
But of course, he has to be as exhausted as I am, as twisted into knots by all this.
“More than having once planned to kill us?”
We pass the vacant playrooms on our way to the elevator, all of them with doors propped open, the faint scent of leather cleaner filling the corridor.
“This is a small thing compared to those,” says Mark.
He glances once at Tristan’s hands and then away again as he stabs at the elevator button.
The doors open immediately and we step inside.
“At least I thought so. I thought of all my secrets, it might be the easiest. I thought it was not so bad a thing for me to…borrow…the two of you for a while. Especially if I planned on leaving you alive at the end. What was the harm in a little detour of your lives? Lives that were already being detoured by unworthy masters like the Army or Cashel?”
Mark pushes the button on the panel and turns to look at us while the doors close and we float up to our floor.
“It’s Isolde’s fault, this last secret. Because my plan for revenge, the one that seemed so clear in the beginning, started unraveling the first time Isolde crawled to me in the loft.
Unraveled into looping piles during our first kiss, and the first time I made her come just from spanking her, and the night I found the holy card from her uncle.
It became clearer and clearer that not only could I not kill her but that I needed to keep her shielded from the fallout.
That I wanted her to have a future where she was safe, where she had someone to care for her with as much vigilance and affection as I would myself. ”
The elevator bobs to a stop, and the doors open. We step out, and rather than ask any questions or take his words apart for details, I wordlessly reach for the scotch, and Mark hands it to me.
We walk through Mark’s office and into our home, the tall windows giving us a view of a silver sky outside and the huddled gray city underneath.
I remember Lady Anguish’s snowdrop brooch, though, and think about how spring is already stretching its arms underground, stirring and sighing into the smallest exhales of hope and warmth.
Mark takes the bottle back from me and wanders over to the window, next to a table holding a chess set missing its queen.
I suddenly miss Petitcrieu with a fierce, irrational ache, a child missing a favorite blanket or stuffed animal. I know it’s for the best that Petitcrieu has been with Cara and Goran and Nat, but it just seems like playing with her giant paws would fix everything right now.
“It’s funny,” Mark murmurs, the words distant in the kind of way that makes me think he’s talking to himself more than us. “That the remedy for one revenge was inside another.”
I join Mark near the window, but I don’t stand. I sit at the table with the chessboard. Tristan stops near the bookshelves, framed by war poetry and yellowing paperback mysteries as he watches us with vulnerable green eyes.
“Tristan once told an interviewer that he was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice.
” Mark turns to look at Tristan, who gives him an uncertain look in return.
“The interviewer wrote that he was a romantic at heart. Something I didn’t think about much when I first read the interview, other than to be annoyed by it.
Who was this handsome baby murderer whose biggest problem was falling in love too fast?
Why should anyone care when Eliot could never fall in love again?
But it mattered after I realized I couldn’t bear to kill Isolde.
It mattered after I realized that Isolde would need someone to keep her safe and well cared for after”—he gestures vaguely with the bottle—“me.”
I am several steps behind his words now, my mind unable to put the pieces together. “Are you saying that you hired Tristan to take care of me?”
My husband turns those complicated eyes toward me. “I hired Tristan to fuck you,” he says. “I thought I was making that obvious.”
Tristan has frozen in place, only his chest moving now. “I’m sorry?”
Mark sighs at us, his stolid and unlettered students.
“I never planned on living past destroying Ys, but I knew that even if I managed to survive, Isolde didn’t deserve to be welded to me afterward.
Even loving her as I did— because I loved her as I did—I knew it was better for her to be free after it was over, either by my death or by legal decree, and be watched over and loved by someone else.
And then here was this soldier I’d been following for years, this soldier who was apparently an incurable romantic, who was infuriatingly, horribly good , a talented fighter and a kind friend and a certified hero.
Here was someone who could keep Isolde safe and doted on if she’d let him.
And then the irony being once I met you, sweet Tristan, I realized she could keep you safe as well.
But you were both so fucking stubborn in your own particular ways, and it wasn’t as if I could sit you both down and rationally explain that I knew Isolde was a saint and that Tristan had killed my husband and also that there was a secret organization called Ys that might kill all three of us, or why it would be in your best interest to link together after I either died or granted Isolde a divorce, or that actually it would be better for everyone if you two went ahead and fell in love while you were at it.
Yes, Isolde was safe from me , but I still needed her to get closer to Cashel, and if I still needed her, then I wanted to make sure she could leave me—or my graveside—with someone who could keep her safe. ”
My nervous system is burned out over the last week—my adrenal reserves gone, my ability to respond to this with any semblance of dignity or pride gone. I simply stare at Mark with a dry throat and a heart that has no blood left to bleed for him.
“You wanted us to fall in love,” I say dully.
He takes a drink and then sets the bottle on the table, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I wouldn’t use the word wanted with that much precision,” he finally replies.
“I wanted it like I wanted to cut out my own liver, but the alternative, leaving you alone after what I’d dragged you into…
I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone. Much less to a bride I treasured.
” His eyes meet mine, and his voice is quiet when he adds, “A bride I loved.”
Some blood spills from my bloodless heart, wrung out with great force. I duck my head.