Chapter 12 The Weight of Shame
The Weight of Shame
Sable
It’s been three days since Raisa learned what we are, and I haven’t cracked a single joke. Not once. Not even when Bran tripped over his own bootlaces and splashed boiling water down the front of his pants.
I watched him hop around, cursing in three different languages, but my mouth wouldn’t work. There was laughter in my chest, but it wouldn’t rise, like I’d swallowed a stone, and it was dragging everything else down with it.
Instead, I took my breakfast and vanished into the trees.
That’s how it’s been every day. I slip a little further from the center of the circle with each passing hour.
My brothers don’t chase me. Maybe they think I’m brooding for effect.
They’re used to my moods by now, and anyway, there’s a lot to be said for being the least predictable person in a cursed flock of birds.
But even I have to admit, this is a new low. I’m sitting on a rotten log at the edge of the world, turning my best knife over and over in my hands, scraping it against a river stone until the edge is sharper than my tongue.
It’s a pointless exercise.
I already sharpened it yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. But the repetition soothes me. There’s something nice about the drag and hiss, the perfect predictability of steel on stone.
When my arms get tired, I stop. For a moment, I think I’ll walk back to camp and join the others, maybe even try out a new joke on Shade. But then the memory comes back, as fresh and raw as ever.
The queen’s scream echoing down the stairwell, the bright spray of blood, the sound her body made when it hit the marble floor.
My hands start shaking.
I dig the tip of the knife into my thigh just to anchor myself.
The scar on my back throbs in time with my heartbeat, a reminder of the king’s arrow. Sometimes, I wonder if the curse left a little piece of that arrow inside me, just to make sure I never forget what I did. It aches most when I’m alone, when I can’t silence the guilt with laughter.
I try to breathe, but the air out here is too thin. I want to scream, but my mouth is still stuck.
I stare at the knife. I think about the way the queen’s eyes rolled back in her head, the little white crescents showing beneath her lashes. I think about how I was the one who sent her tumbling.
I can’t even look at Raisa without hating myself.
I freeze when I hear a twig crack. It’s not an animal. The sound is too quiet. Too deliberate.
I press the knife flat to my thigh and wait.
After a few seconds, Raisa emerges, still walking like she expects the trees to swallow her whole, her hands jammed deep into the pockets of Bran’s coat. Her hair is loose and wild, a black waterfall down her back. She doesn’t see me at first, or maybe she does and just doesn’t want to admit it.
She stops a few feet away, arms crossed, lips pressed together. There’s a weird energy about her today, like she’s been wound up so tight that if you touch her, she’ll snap.
For a second, neither of us speaks.
“Do you hate me?” she finally asks.
The question lands so hard that I almost drop the knife.
“I…” My voice comes out rusty, barely a sound. “What?”
She kicks at the ground, scattering dead leaves. “You won’t look at me. You won’t even sit near me. Last night, you wouldn’t even touch me. I thought…I thought maybe you decided that you hate me.”
I laugh, a raw, ugly sound. “I could never hate you.”
She meets my gaze, and her eyes are storm gray, darker than usual. “Then why are you avoiding me?”
I open my mouth, close it. I’m not sure how to answer. Not without telling her the real reason.
I stab the knife into the log, letting it quiver there. “I’m not avoiding you,” I lie. “I’m just…tired.”
“Liar,” she says. The word is soft, but it cuts.
I don’t look at her. Instead, I run my finger along the blade, testing the edge. It’s sharp enough to split hair, sharp enough to slice skin with no effort at all.
She waits. I can feel her watching me the same way a bird watches a snake.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” I finally say. “Shade will shit a brick if he finds you this far from camp.”
“Let him.” She takes a step closer. “I’m not scared of the forest. Not anymore.”
“Good,” I say. “Because the forest is the least of your worries.”
She frowns, but doesn’t back away. “Then what is?”
“Me,” I want to say. “It’s always me.”
Instead, I shake my head and yank the knife out of the wood, sliding it back into its sheath. My hands are still shaking. I press them together, hard, trying to still them.
She takes another step. “I miss your jokes,” she says.
That’s all it takes. My chest goes tight, my throat locking around the thousand things I want to tell her and can’t.
I stare at her, really stare, and for the first time, I see how tired she looks.
There are bruises under her eyes, the kind you get from not sleeping.
Her cheeks are hollow, her lips chewed raw.
“I miss laughing,” she says, her voice cracking on the last word.
I want to hug her. I want to run.
Instead, I force my hands to stillness. “I’ll try to do better.”
She shakes her head. “That’s not what I want.”
I don’t understand, and maybe she sees that on my face, because she drops her arms and lets them hang at her sides.
“I want to know why you’re sad,” she says.
This time, I really do drop the knife. It clatters against the log, bouncing once before settling in the dirt. I stare at it like it might sprout wings and fly away.
“I’m not sad.” The lie tastes like poison.
She doesn’t call me out. Instead, she sits down on the log beside me, leaving only a few inches between us. She smells like smoke and cold air, and something softer, the sweet honeysuckle from the palace garden.
“You can tell me,” she finally says.
I can’t.
But I want to.
The words bunch up behind my teeth, fighting to get out. I clench my jaw, fighting the urge to break.
After a long, silent minute, I sigh. “I’m sorry.”
She blinks. “For what?”
“For everything.” My voice is barely there. “For the way I am. For the way I make you feel.”
She shakes her head, confused. “You don’t make me feel bad. You make me feel…” She trails off, her cheeks darkening. “Alive.”
For a second, I almost laugh again. Alive is the last thing I feel right now.
I pick up the knife, turning it in my hands. “Do you know what it feels like to break something so completely that it can never be fixed?” I ask, my voice low.
She doesn’t answer right away.
Then, softly, “Yes.”
I look at her, startled. She’s not lying. I see it in her eyes, the memory of her own guilt, the weight of her own grief, as if it claws through her every moment of the day.
“Do you hate me for it?” she asks again. This time her voice is smaller, almost a whisper.
My heart threatens to break for the weight she carries, the one that isn’t hers and never has been.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Gods, no.”
She looks at me, waiting.
I want to tell her everything. I want to say, “I love you.” I want to say, “I’d tear out my own heart if it would make yours lighter.” I want to say, “I’m so fucking sorry for what I did, for what I am, for what I turned you into.”
But I don’t.
Neither of us talks for a long time. The wind whistles through the trees, filling the silence with noise that isn’t quite enough to drown out the screaming in my head.
I’m the one who cracks first. Of course I am.
“I’m not who you think I am,” I say.
She looks at me, blinking. “No one is.”
I laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
I pick at the ragged edge of my thumbnail. “You think I’m just another cursed idiot, running from the king.”
She shrugs. “Isn’t that what we all are?”
I shake my head. “Not me. I’m the reason for all of it.”
She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move. “What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath, the kind that makes your ribs ache. “It was me,” I say. “Not my brothers. Just me.”
She doesn’t react. Just waits.
I press the heels of my hands to my eyes, seeing the memory play out on the inside of my eyelids, frame by frame.
“I crashed right into her,” I say. “She just wanted to see us, but we were running, shouting, knocking over everything in our path. I wasn’t watching where I was going. I slammed into her side, and she…” My voice cracks. “She fell.”
I expect her to recoil. To scream at me, or slap me, or call her magic to end my miserable life.
She does none of those things.
Instead, she scoots closer. Her thigh touches mine. I can feel the heat of her body, even through the layers of fabric.
“The king blamed us all. But it was me.” I force myself to look at her, to meet her eyes. “I’m the reason you lost your mother. I’m the reason you feel like a monster, Raisa.”
She reaches out. Her hand is small, but strong. She brushes strands of hair off my forehead, her fingers trembling only a little.
“I don’t blame you,” she says.
I jerk back, like she burned me. “Why not?”
She smiles, the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Because you were just a child, Sable. You were an innocent little boy who tripped wrong. You didn’t push her. You didn’t set out to hurt her. You loved her. That’s why it still hurts so much.”
I stare at her, searching for the lie, the trick, the hook in the words. There’s nothing there but the truth.
I start to shake. I try to hide it, but she sees.
She leans in, her face inches from mine. “You don’t have to hate yourself forever,” she whispers. “You can let it go.”
I want to argue. I want to list all the reasons I should hate myself, all the reasons she should hate me. But her lips are so close, her breath is warm in the cold, and the ache in my chest gets worse every second.
She kisses me.
It’s not a gentle kiss. It’s not careful, or hesitant, or sweet. It’s a collision, a desperate meeting of mouths and teeth and tongue. She grabs the back of my neck, pulling me in, and I let her, because I can’t do anything else.