Chapter 32 #2
“I couldn’t live with myself to be a Channeller like Senan or Uncle Huath now I’ve seen what it does to the Fodder,” he continued.
Seeing her shocked face, mistaking it for dismay, he hurried to reassure.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll still be lord. But I’ve become quite good at avoiding drawing on Fodder.
Like getting roaring drunk at all those parties so Senan and the others would give up on trying to get me to play those mindless games and I could avoid all that awful, wasteful channeling.
I spent weeks in here before lessons started, learning illusions so they’d think I was some prodigy and let me steer away from Fodder-heavy stuff like combat.
I know I have a gift, but there are ways… ”
“But you haven’t,” whispered éadha as the fragile tower of hope that Ionáin’s words had built for a few shining moments came crashing down, swept away like a grain of sand on the shore where Senan lay, bruised and bound by her rage.
“What do you mean?” asked Ionáin. “Of course I have to channel so we can hold on to the Keep.”
“I mean, you don’t have a gift.”
Ionáin stared at her.
éadha stared down at her hands, unable to look at him as she continued in a low monotone.
“It was me. At your Reckoning. You were about to fail. Master Dathin was about to drop his hands. I thought it’d break your heart to fail so publicly like that, so I sent my power into you.
That’s what Master Dathin saw when he raised your hand and called you gifted. My power, my gift. Not yours.”
Ionáin had dropped his hand and was staring at éadha in shock. “What?”
éadha held out her hand toward him and called up a small were-light in her outstretched palm, looking across it at Ionáin’s face as he took it in.
The incontrovertible proof of her gift. He stood up and took a step back, his eyes going from the little flame to her face and back again, and she watched as his world collapsed around him.
“I thought it was what you wanted.” Tears stood in her eyes.
“It’d been your dream ever since you were little, to be a Channeller and save the Keep.
After I’d done it once, I had to keep on doing it so you wouldn’t be found out.
I pretended to be a Keeper so I could come here with you and keep sending my power into you. ”
Ionáin had started to back away from her as she spoke, over to the other end of the enormous Hall of Illusions, as far away as he could get from éadha.
She called after him as an unspeakable fear began to squeeze at her heart, trying to pull him back to her with her words. “I thought I was helping you, helping your Family to stay in the Keep.”
Staring at her down the length of the hall, Ionáin said, “What have you done?”
“I thought it was what you wanted,” she stammered again.
Ionáin stared at the ground and spoke in a low voice. “You had no right. None. I am not your puppet, your avatar for you to manipulate.”
éadha was shaking her head, the tears streaming down her face now. “No, Ionáin, no. It wasn’t like that. I know it’s hard to hear you’ve no gift, but I thought…”
“You thought. Always what you thought. Just once would you actually listen to me, let me actually tell you what I’m thinking?
It seems you’ve been projecting all these thoughts onto me, assuming you know my every thought, but you really, really don’t.
All they are, are echoes, projections of your own hopes, your own fears.
If you wanted to know what I thought about failure back then before my Reckoning, why didn’t you ask me?
I would’ve told you. I would’ve always told you anything you asked. ”
He looked up at her, tears in his eyes too.
“Don’t you see what you’ve done to me? You’ve made a lie of my entire existence.
I’m here in this hellhole draining innocent people day after day because of you, and I didn’t even know it.
Because you didn’t think to tell me, because it didn’t occur to you that I deserved to make my own decisions over my own life. ”
He turned away again. “How could you do this? I thought you loved me.”
éadha cried wildly, “I do love you, I do!”
He sat on the edge of the stage, his head in his hands, rubbing his temples as if he could rub away the hurt if he just did it hard enough.
Still not looking at her, he said slowly, tiredly, “No, you don’t.
You don’t love me. You think you own me.
That you can make decisions for me, that you know my every thought better than I do, that you can fool me into believing I’m something I’m not.
Did you enjoy it? Did you laugh as your proxy Channeller struggled to hold on to some shred of humanity in this place?
Oh, get out. Just get out. I don’t want to even look at you. ”
éadha started to walk over to where Ionáin stood, thinking if she could just touch him, hold him again, she could make him understand.
And all the time her head hammered with the urgency to be gone as she thought of Senan lying unconscious on the stony shore.
He’d come to soon enough. There was no time for this, and yet it was the crisis of her life, and nothing would ever be more important than getting this boy in this room to look at her the way he had just a few minutes before.
“Ionáin, we can’t do this, here, now—it’s what I came to tell you. Something has happened, and you have to…”
He turned to look at her then, his eyes stone cold as he spoke carefully, levelly.
“Stop. Do not come one step closer. Hear this. I do not ‘have to’ do anything you tell me. You will never make a decision for me again. You will respect the decisions I make for my life. And right now, I want you gone. So if you love me…get out now.”
éadha stopped then as if he’d raised a wall of power in front of her, unable to take another step. She felt sick to the heart. It’d all gone so wrong, the thread between them, always so straight and true, grown so badly knotted and tangled she could no longer find the way along it to reach him.
But before she could say another word, she was lifted from behind and thrown against the wall so hard her head rebounded off the stone, and she crumpled in a heap to the ground.