Chapter 14
Fourteen
Alek
I’m kissing Ivy.
Ivy is kissing me.
I haven’t kissed anyone at all in a long time, but I think the moment would feel miraculous regardless.
So much about this woman is tough and unyielding, but her lips are perfectly soft against mine, sweet from the pastry she just ate. The heat of her floods me from the meeting of our lips and her hand at my neck all the way down my body.
I want to drown in the sensation.
My pulse races madly with the giddying thrill of the embrace. How is this even possible?
I don’t know, but all I can do is kiss her back and slide my arms around her slim frame. Pull her closer against me.
Through the heady rush, the memory rises up of seeing her emerging into the archive room with Casimir at her heels. Of the jolt of a different hot emotion that shot through me at the sight of their flushed faces and her rumpled dress.
A stab of jealousy, a searing impulse to protest that she was mine, and a dull burn beneath that tempered the other two reactions with the knowledge that of course she wouldn’t want me that way.
But she does. By some miracle, she came to me. For at least the space of this kiss, she’s mine after all.
Her fingers tease up my neck to my jaw, her thumb brushing the lower edge of my mask, and reality comes crashing in with a lurch of my gut.
She isn’t really mine, not in any way that counts. I can’t say she’s picked me when she doesn’t even know who I am.
Imagining the recrimination that would appear on her face makes me recoil. I pull back even though it feels like a piece of me breaks putting that distance between us.
Ivy stares at me, her cheeks flushed for me now, with the same ruddy tint that laces her hair. Her lips part, and then something shifts in her sky-blue eyes. Her body starts to tense.
As if she’s bracing herself. I’ve seen that reaction before.
I know her well enough now to recognize what it means. Buried deep inside the fierce, resourceful woman who captivates me is the girl whose mother starved and beat her, who fled to the streets of the outer wards rather than risk catching the attention of the gods.
And I’m catching a glimpse of that wounded girl in those doubtful eyes.
“No,” I say hastily, grasping her shoulder. Trying not to let the soft warmth of the skin at the edge of her neckline divert me from my purpose. “I’m not stopping because of you. Gods help me, there isn’t a single thing about you that I don’t want.”
She lets out a rough laugh. “Not a single thing? Somehow that’s a little hard to believe. There are at least a few things about me I don’t even want.”
I swallow thickly. I don’t know how to tell her in a way she’ll accept that her being riven has only made me more sure of how incredible she is.
Maybe once she knows what I really am, it’ll make sense to her. Even if that means she wants nothing at all to do with me.
I keep my voice as even as I can. “That might be so, but I know what those things are. I know what you’ve done and who you are. But you… you have no idea how much I have to be ashamed of.”
Ivy’s forehead furrows. “You don’t need to give me a list of all your wrongdoings. Everyone’s made mistakes.”
My chuckle sounds hollow even to me. “Not like mine. I—I can’t feel right about this unless we’re on level ground, aware of exactly who we’re both welcoming.” Whether she will still welcome my embrace afterward or not.
I pause. “Unless you’d rather end things here without—”
“No,” Ivy interrupts, soft but firm.
Her gaze searches mine. She lifts her hand to rest it over mine on her shoulder, giving my fingers a quick squeeze that just about unravels me. “If you feel like you have to tell me, you can tell me.”
All at once, my stomach is churning. But I asked for this—I practically demanded it.
I’ve tried so hard to only look forward. To plaster over every bit of my past failings so nothing matters but what I’ve done since.
But if there’s even the slightest chance she’d kiss me again even after she knows, dredging up my shame is worth it.
I glance over at the gilded table. “You might want to sit down. It’s a bit of a long story.”
As I let go of her shoulder, Ivy follows my gaze. She walks back to the table, but rather than take one of the chairs, she hops up to perch on the edge of the tabletop itself.
Somehow she looks more comfortable there with one leg tucked under her skirt and the other dangling casually, her hands set by her hips as she leans slightly back on them.
I’ve started to treasure moments like this—glimpses of the real Ivy who isn’t pretending noble airs and manners. The way she should always get to be.
It was so obvious from my very first glance when it wasn’t her moving her body at all, when Julita was molding Ivy’s shorter and wirier figure to the flirty poise that came so naturally to her in her own frame.
It was like watching a contortionist manipulating someone else’s limbs, twisting them into shapes they weren’t meant to form, almost more horrifying for how subtle the shifts were.
Ivy let Julita’s ghost play with her body like it was a puppet for me. Because I bungled things so badly she thought I’d want that—that I cared more about getting time with Julita than having Ivy be Ivy.
It doesn’t matter whether she wants to kiss me again. If I can at least convince her of how much she matters to me—as she is, without needing to bend herself to anyone else’s whims—that will be more than enough.
I rest my hands on the top of one of the chairs. My fingers curl around the ornately carved wood, grounding me.
Where to start but at the beginning?
“I’ve told you a little about how I grew up,” I say.
Ivy nods. “Weapons merchant parents, brothers who joined the army, none of them appreciating how smart you are.”
The corner of my mouth kicks up at a bittersweet angle. “You might revise your opinion of my intelligence once I’m done.” I run one hand back through my hair, gathering myself. “I suppose you’re aware of the provincial schools some temples run?”
“You started your education at one of those?”
“Yes.” I suck in a breath. “There’s a temple of Estera that has a school a couple of towns over from where I grew up.
When I turned thirteen—that’s the youngest they’ll let you enroll—I convinced my parents to let me travel there to apply for entrance.
I think by that point they were glad to have me out of sight and out of mind.
When I was accepted and came back to gather my things, they barely bothered with good-byes. ”
“Better off without them,” Ivy mutters.
I can’t argue with her there.
“I thrived at the school,” I continue. “I quickly started earning top marks, and that only made me more eager to continue my success. The fact that I could achieve so much without any gift seemed to impress people even more. My teachers offered me exclusive opportunities, my classmates wanted to collaborate with me. I even had a few brief flirtations, as far as those ever go at that age.”
Ivy gives me a smile soft enough to tug at my heart. “You must have been pretty happy.”
I wish I could remember the happiness in all the vividness it must have had at the time. Every bright moment I think back on is soured by what came after.
I look down at the chair I’m still clutching.
“I was. But then, about a year and a half after I began my education, a boy and his twin sister enrolled. They were late arrivals, around the same age as me, but right from the start, the teachers started fawning over him—they graded his work even higher than mine, let him in on the same opportunities.”
“It makes sense that you’d find that hard,” Ivy says.
“In some ways, maybe, but…” I grimace. “A lot of my frustration was pure prejudice. They were from a lower-class family—pig farmers, I think. At least a few steps down from most of us there and several from me. He’d made a dedication sacrifice, and it rankled me that he might only be besting me because of his gift.
And he barely even seemed to try. He was always going off to play sports or cards or what have you rather than studying.
Over the course of a few months, I convinced myself more and more that it simply wasn’t fair. ”
Ivy is sharp enough to recognize where my story is going. Her voice comes out quiet. “What did you do?”
I push myself away from the chair, too restless in my discomfort to stand still.
But pacing to the bookshelves and back doesn’t make me feel any better.
It only reminds me of the long nights I spent poring over books on subjects that had nothing to do with my usual areas of scholarship, my eyes burning from concentration and my shoulders twinging from hours spent hunched.
“I told myself it was only right that I leveled the playing field. The strategy I came up with was to dose him with a botanical chemical that’s considered a ‘berserker’ drug—in a few countries in the past, it’s been used by warriors to fuel their ferocity and stamina in battle.
At the proper quantity, it lowers your inhibitions and sparks your aggressive urges for a few hours.
I thought he’d act out a little, insult some teachers and get in trouble, and people would stop seeing him as such a shining star. ”
“I’m guessing it didn’t work out that way.”
“No.” A lump clogs my throat. “Neither botany nor chemistry are areas I’ve spent much time delving into, and less so then than now.
I don’t know… Either there was something about him that altered the effect, an extra sensitivity, or I gave him too high a dose.
He went on a violent rampage, stabbed a classmate, punched a few teachers who tried to subdue him…
and he never fully recovered. His temper remained frayed; he couldn’t concentrate on schoolwork.
They had to expel him. I ruined his entire life. ”
My voice has gotten rough by the end. Ivy sits silently, absorbing my words.
I keep going before she feels the need to comment.
“Obviously I felt horrible. But not horrible enough to confess what I’d done, because I felt even more horrible about the idea of getting expelled myself.
Still so fucking selfish… But my rival’s sister did have an interest in chemistry and suspected what I’d done.
She brewed a potion meant to test my guilt—it would only burn a person’s skin if they were guilty of whatever the person applying it accused them of. ”
Somehow, after everything I’ve told her, Ivy still winces in apparent sympathy as the implications must sink in. “She threw it in your face?”
At the memory of the searing pain and the acrid smell that flooded my lungs, I have to suppress a shudder.
“Yes. In the middle of the dining hall at lunch time, yelling what she thought I’d done so everyone would see and hear.
And the proof showed plainly. I’m lucky I flinched to the side and jerked up my arm, or the stuff would have splattered my eyes and every bit of my face. ”
“Couldn’t the medics do anything about it?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “The staff had the one on staff look at me, but I’m not sure how inclined they were to absolve me of my crime. She claimed the damage was set too deep for her gift to alter.”
Ivy’s jaw tightens. “So you were expelled after all.”
I incline my head. “The temple school obviously didn’t want to keep me.
The only reason I’m here at the college is because one of the teachers saw particular value in my work.
I’ve been most interested in finding traces of the parts of the continent’s history that the Darium empire tried to destroy during their reign, piecing together fragments from journals and asides from treatises on other subjects…
I’d managed to uncover quite a bit even back then.
He took me under his wing privately and oversaw my continued work, and he recommended me to the scholarship division when I was old enough. ”
“It’s been several years since your expulsion, then?” Ivy asks gently.
I can’t bear the compassion in her voice. “Six. But that’s no excuse. I was nearly fifteen. You knew better than to risk harming someone for personal gain by the time you were that age, even though you could have done it so much more easily.”
Ivy’s stance tenses. “I just made my mistakes earlier.”
I sweep my hand through the air dismissively.
“Because you were trying to save your mother’s life and then your own.
That’s the most defensible excuse there is.
I destroyed a classmate’s entire future because of wretched jealousy.
If either of us is a monster, it’s obviously me. I even look the part.”
“Alek…” Ivy scoots along the table, closer to me.
“You’re not a monster. You acted badly, but you saw how wrong it was, and you’ve made up for it.
You’ve dedicated yourself to your work; you’ve been helping expose the scourge sorcerers.
And I assume you’ve never been tempted to repeat the same mistake—you’re not spending every day holding yourself back from making another spiteful attack. ”
“I’m not. But that doesn’t change who you are. You can’t help having the magic, but you’ve refused it, over and over.”
“All right. Maybe I can believe that you don’t think I’m a monster. Can you believe that I don’t see you as one?”
My throat constricts even tighter. I make myself meet her gaze. “You’ve never really seen me.”
The words hang between us for a few seconds. Then Ivy reaches out with a beckoning gesture. “Then let me see. Take off the mask, and you’ll know for sure what I make of you.”
Every particle of my body resists the idea. I haven’t let anyone see my scars in years.
The last was one of the college medics when I first arrived. Her shiver of revulsion told me plenty.
But if I say no, then what? What has this whole confession been for if I’m going to refuse to expose the clearest evidence of my transgressions?
My shoulders have stiffened. I inhale sharply, and Ivy’s eyes widen.
“You don’t have to. I shouldn’t have asked—”
“No,” I break in. “You’re right. We may as well settle this.”
And let the cards fall as they may.
I take a step toward the table and reach for my mask.