Chapter 22 Mance, Without Livid
Mance, Without Livid
I split and merge over and over and over, not even stopping to rest between, so by the time I’m back in the Cliff castle courtyard I am doubled over and gasping for breath. If there were anything left in my stomach, I’m sure it would be coming up now. My head is swimming, and everything hurts.
My heart most of all.
I struggle to rise, black spots in my vision, and stumble toward the palace, long before it all stops spinning. I don’t even know where I’m going until I get there, but some need drives me. And then I am standing, panting, in front of my sister’s room.
She tried to help me before. Tried to step into my mess. But she didn’t know how and I didn’t know how to let her and to be honest, I still don’t.
Even so, a deluge of memory floods my mind.
Sleeping in Mara’s room for a week after we came out of the Citadel.
Mara holding me while I cried over the animals I killed, their blood still on my clothes.
Or, once the fights got bad enough that they ended in unconsciousness, Mara waiting by my bedside for me to wake up.
My sister has always been the one who was there for me in the aftermath.
Just never during.
She wants to be, though. And maybe right now the wanting is more important than the knowing how.
So I knock.
“Come in,” she replies, and I swallow again, hard, before pushing through the door.
Only to come up short.
It’s been a few months since I’ve been in Mara’s room.
Last time I was here, there were full-color murals on the walls.
The Citadel, in shades of orange and vibrant green.
The magic on the horizon, against a cheery blue sky.
Only one of the walls was painted in the color of the Citadel’s core: a deep and layered black.
Now they all are. The other murals are gone, eaten up by that darkness. And not just the walls, but the ceiling, the floor, and the furniture, too. Her messy array of knickknacks. Even the sheets on her bed. Everything has been painted, dyed, or colored in black, black, black.
“What’s . . . all this?” I ask.
Mara looks up from where she sits in the center of the room, her face the only point of pale color in the midst of the darkness. “It helps me think,” she says, her voice oddly distant. “Something’s wrong. Can you feel it?”
It takes me a minute to will myself to step over the threshold, but I do. I join her in the darkness. Then I sit down facing her, right at its center. “Yes,” I say. “Only it isn’t something. It’s everything.”
At my words, or perhaps my tone, she seems to come out of whatever stupor she was in and focus. Her one eye fixes on me, and when she speaks her voice is sharp. “Are you hurt?”
“Not physically.”
“Are you married?”
“Fortunately, no.”
“Then what is it?”
My lip quivers, some part of me still wanting to hold it all inside. To keep my chin up and pretend it’s all perfect. But it’s not. I’m not. And when she puts a careful hand on my knee, it all comes out at once.
“Father’s dead,” I start. Mara stiffens but doesn’t speak, and I’m talking again before she has a chance to.
I fill her in on how the Forest Realm has declared war, how my relations with every other realm have worsened in the last week.
How Silver broke up with me, in the middle of a raging inferno that I started.
“I’m failing, Mara. At everything. I’m trying so hard and I care so much and I only ever seem to make it all worse.
Because the only example I have to follow is Father’s and I don’t want to be like him, but I don’t have a clue how to be anything else.
I don’t know how to be a leader. I don’t know how to make the other Primes understand.
I don’t even know how to have a normal relationship.
I mean, I love Silver, but no matter how I try to show it, somehow he always ends up hurt.
How can I be so bad at every single thing I do?
” My voice cracks on the last word. Tears are dripping down my chin, and I swipe at them harshly.
And now that it’s all out there, the silence that follows is heavy. The black walls feel like they’re pressing in.
Mara’s hand is still on my knee, but she doesn’t move to hug me. She doesn’t murmur placating assurances. Instead, she studies me, and it makes me feel as though she’s about to render a judgment. The longer the silence stretches, the tenser I get.
“Failure,” she says finally, “is one of the things Father never taught us how to do. I’m learning how to sit with it as well. And it’s . . . hard.”
I blink at her. “Do you fail?”
She barks out a startled and unladylike laugh.
“Me? How can you even ask that? You’re only doing any of the things you’re doing because I passed on ruling, remember?
At least you’re out there trying to fix things.
Meanwhile, I’m such a failure that I let my little sister take my rightful place on the throne because I legitimately couldn’t be bothered. ”
I sniff, surprised. I’d never really thought about it like that.
It felt right for me to take the throne when I did because it was the result of my own personal battle, but I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how it really should have been hers.
She seemed fine with it then, and so it didn’t occur to me to wonder whether her feelings about it ever got more complicated.
We sit in that knowledge together for a moment. The fact that neither of us really knows what we’re doing, no matter how we pretend.
“So how do you . . . handle that?” I ask finally.
“Not always well,” she admits. “But I try not to focus on what’s been done and turn my attention instead to the things I might still be able to make a difference in. Like . . . the magic.”
I shake my head, not following. “The magic?”
“Yes.” She fingers the floorboards, all covered in black paint, and when she raises her hand again, the skin is stained.
I realize suddenly that the paint on the floors is fresh, which means it’s all over my shoes, all over my dress.
I shift and, sure enough, the silk now looks shadowed.
“The magic is changing. Have you noticed it? It’s gotten so much . . . darker.”
I suck in a breath. Because as soon as she says it, I realize that I have noticed, I just chalked it up to other things.
But splitting and merging has started to hurt more and more.
Alect’s memories have begun to seal off.
My animals suddenly sprouted wounds that they never used to have. Heart’s bruises won’t fade.
There are even signs in the others. Mara’s necklace didn’t keep out Silver’s magic the way it was supposed to. Azele’s power is developing beyond her control. And Reltas seems closer and closer to giving in to the hands that want to pull him under.
“But why?” I wonder aloud. “Why would it change on us after all this time?”
“Why does darkness ever get worse?” she asks. Her gaze goes distant again. Absently, she runs her fingers across her lips, leaving sooty streaks behind. “Because someone is feeding it.”